WHAT IS WRONG WITH AESTHETICS?

METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1987 0026-1068 $2.00

WHAT IS WRONG WITH AESTHETICS?

S. J. WILSMORE

The word ‘aesthetics’ has often been thought suspect. (Baumgarten, 1735) I. A. Richards was perhaps the first but not the last (Dickie, 1971) to deny that there was any such thing as an ‘aesthetical’ experience:

All modern aesthetics rests upon the assumption which has been distinctly little discussed, the assumption that there is a distinct kind of mental activity present in what are called aesthetic experiences. Ever since the first rational word concerning beauty was spoken by Kant, the attempt to define the ‘judgement of taste’ as concerning pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual, and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense has continued. Thus arises the phantom problem of the aesthetic mood or aesthetic state, a legacy from the days of abstract investigation into the Good, the beautiful and the true. (1 976, p. 6)

Like Richards, I too hold that that many of our problems in aesthetics can be traced to the meaning given to the term ‘aesthetics’ by Kant. The keynote of Kant’s view of the aesthetic experience was its disinterestedness. So he alloted ‘pure reason’ to the cognitive realm, (Kant, 1781) restricted to what it is that can be known, and what can be known was narrowly conceived; the ‘pure’ distinguishes it from the empirical uses of reason. Practical reason was alloted to the moral realm, the realm of action and of ‘interest’. ‘Prac- tical’ is contrasted with ‘spectulative’ (our ‘theoretical’) reasoning. This left the aesthetic judgement quite interest free, and so autonomous. This is just what is wrong with it to explain our response to works of art. For that response is not interest free, but often engaged both intellectually and prac- tically. However, unlike Richards, I do not want to argue that there is no use for the term ‘aesthetics’ or that there is not something which we might call an aesthetic response which is important to our understanding of art.

What I am against is what is common ground between both those aestheticians who have accepted this neo-Kantian account of ‘aesthetic’ for works of art and, from very different premisses, the new sceptics, such as the modern deconstructionists, who imply that the work of art does not exist as an independent object. In their view it is not the subject of our responses and aesthetic judgement, about which we can say things that are either true or false. Because the premisses of their arguments differed so did what this conclusion meant to their different positions. On the one hand, in the case of the new sceptics, the work of art collapsed into ‘writing’ and so shared all the political, social and cultural attributes of any writing. This implied the non-existence of the

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work of art as an independent entity. On the other hand, for the neo-Kantians, the implied nonexistence of the independent work of art, as such, insured that the work of art was an autonomous shared aesthetic experience constituting an ‘appearance’ - a state of mind having a peculiar value in the intrinsic pleasure it provided.

Another source of conflict between the two - radical and more restricted kinds of scepticism - can be found by looking back into the historical origins of art. About the time the word ‘aesthetics’ was given its modern meaning in the mid-eighteenth century, it came to have elitist associations. Then were built the first museums for the housing of works of art. Secular art had arrived, and so had the new places of secular ‘worship’ in which were to be housed its mysteriously autonomous objects that occasioned experiences of special ‘aesthetic’ value in their self-sufficiently causing pleasure, that freed the spectator from desire for the object. Today this is consistent with neo-Kantianism but not with the new view of art which contemporary sceptics advance.

The new sceptics have often voiced their views as if opposed to those whom they talk of as ‘traditional’ theorists of criticism. But in fact an even older tradition would have disowned a view of art as autonomous. Before the neo-Kantian theory the theories of ‘art for its own sake’ had become popular, art had been at the service of such obvious interests as religion. As a hand- maiden, autonomy could hardly have been claimed for it. There was its obvious usefulness for the illustrating of the divine stories, and its still vital connection with the crafts, from which art was yet to be fully distinguished.

Although there is then a natural antipathy between the new sceptics and neo-Kantian aestheticians, these two factors - the questionable meaning of the term ‘aesthetics’ and the questionable social and cultural role that the word ‘aesthetics’ has been used to carry out - have meant that aestheticians have been more taken up with internal difficulties about the meaning of ‘aesthetics’ than they have been in investigating the new cultural scene which radical scepticism is in the process of engulfing. As we have it from Kant, the notion of disinterestness which is so central to the meaning of ‘aesthetics’ has shielded Aesthetics as a subject from a central engagement with the social and political implications of art and so discouraged many theorists from contribut- ing more widely to an understanding of the relationships between art and our present cultural situation.

To some extent this is recognised by many major aestheticians today. Richard Wollheim, Nelson Goodman (Goodman 1969), George Dickie, (Dickie 1971) Arthur Danto, (Danto 1981 j to name but a few -donot accept the framework that has been imposed on the subject-matter of Aesthetics by its being conceptualised in terms of the neo-Kantian concept of the ‘aesthetic’. Let us call such philosophers anti- neo-Kantians because of their various attempts to throw off this neo-Kantian framework and provide another. Not all of them recognise, as does Wollheim, that it is inherent in spectator- aesthetics to neglect the vital role of the artist in our understanding the objects of art:

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This is so just because what would properly account for a differential attitude on the part of the spectator to works of art - that is to say, a recognition of the aims or intentions of the artist - cannot be conceded without compromising the primacy of the spectator. Indeed, in responding to the work of art the spectator is held to be unconstrained by any respect for these aims and intentions. In other words, once the artist is not accorded at least equality with the spectator, he ends up by dropping out of the picture altogether. (Wollheim 1980, p. 2 2 8 )

As one such form of spectator-aesthetics, neo-Kantianism likewise, neglects the constraints imposed on the work of art by the intentions and aims of the artist, and the wider context of the history of production of the work which is both included in the content of those intentions and enters the description of those intentions as their context. Instead of facing the broader issues, the subject in its present form has remained organised around those topics which accept or reject the main premisses that are implied by the neo-Kantian use of the term ‘aesthetics’. The result is a prevailing widespread spectator-aesthetics (Pole 1983) which splits our understanding of the work of art from its origin in the artistic activity that informs the product; isolates the work from its cultural context, which is made to appear irrelevant; puts into doubt its wider significance, as something irrelevant to what is called ‘the work itself‘. This, ‘the work itself‘, is then thought to exist in a subjective, if shared response, to an appearance. We can now summarise why most aestheticians have so little to wear in the way of armour to do battle against the new wave of scepticism across our culture:

(i) They agree with the conclusion implied by scepticism that the work of art does not exist as an independent entity, covered by its own substance concept ‘work of art’. (that which provides it with its category term as ‘a work of art’) In discourse about art and its objects, neo-Kantians present a position which is itself a form of ‘restricted scepticism’. (as opposed to a general scepticism about a knowledge of the existence of any independent object .)

(ii) given the nature of their premisses, and because of their belief in the autonomous nature of the work and the disinterested nature of the aesthetic experience, these neo-Kantian theorists are precluded from seeing the work of art in the context of those practices which are necessary to an understanding of the conditions of its existence as a persisting thing, which can be altered, interfered with, damaged, or destroyed.

(iii) In explaining the nature of the ‘aesthetic’ experience as subjective, and as of an appearance, they exclude an understanding of the wider social and political nature of the work of art as relevant to its aesthetic nature.

This is a pity. For though it is true that philosophers who accept this particular framework for aesthetics (Wilkerson, 1978) can’t consistently admit of the existence of the independent work of art as something that admits of pro-

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perties about which we can say what is true and false, even so, they are not in general sceptics about the justified application of the concepts of ‘knowledge’, ‘belief, ‘rationality’, ‘meaning’ etc. (Scruton, 1974) It is just that they believe that none of these concepts are properly applicable in the artistic ‘domain’ - ie; what they insist is that it is just here there are no criteria for the application of such concepts as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘meaning’ etc. The contrast is made by them between the use of these terms in so-called ‘scientific’ contexts and their inapplicability in aesthetic contexts; (Wilkerson 1978) - between on the one hand those cases which they think to be of ordinary perception and the reports of such perception in sentences that have a literal meaning and on the other hand, aesthetic contexts, where ‘descrip- tions’ are said to be metaphorical, secondary uses, borrowed, as it were, from their primary application in descriptive contexts. In their view criteria for literal descriptive statements are to be found in their truth conditions, the conditions being ostensible reference, or to verification by scientific methods. (Scruton, 1974) But such conditions or methods are thought inapplicable in the context of our appreciation of works of art or our ‘aesthetic’ responses to nature.

Utterances in aesthetic contexts are said to have more the character of expressions of our feelings or imaginative experiences than to be ‘descriptive’ of anything. For how can we describe an object that cannot independently exist? And how can a work of art exist, if it has no properties as is suggested by these neo-Kantians? Of course it has properties in the sense that we can see paint or hear noises. On the one hand, the ‘seeing’ and the ‘hearing’ of works of art is thought to be internally related to the experience, not to anything in reality, while on the other, the sensory experience of perception, of things that do exist, is said to be internally related to a belief in the existence of what is there. At this stage of their argument such philosophers are fond of using the “seeing-as” idiom. (Wittgenstein, 1958 Part 11). We don’t really hear the niusic, but only ‘hear it as’ a melody, or see the picture but ‘see it as’ a picture of flowers.

For example, take a position to be found in early sections of Art and Imagination (though not in Part 111 of that book) by Roger Scruton:

In aesthetics you have to see for yourself precisely because what you have to ‘see’ is not a property: your knowledge that an aesthetic feature is ‘in’ the object is given by the same criteria that show that you ‘see’ it. To ‘see’ the sadness in the music and to know that the music is sad are one and the same thing. To agree in the judgement that the music is sad is not to agree in a belief, but in something more like a response in an experience; in a mental state that is - unlike belief - logically tied to the immediate circumstances of its arousal. (Scruton 1974, p. 54)

The main argument seems to be:

First, that the properties of an object must be perceptible in that they can be distinguished by the person whether or not he has been trained tosee


them. All men with normal abilities can agree, given normal conditions, about what is there, i.e., what exists.

Second, related to the first, its properties must belong to it. Its perception by the person must not determine what is seen, in that his will is involved.

Let us call these:

(i) The agreement condition and (ii) independence condition.

(i) The agreement condition is thought to be lacking for the ‘properties’ of a work of art. Many people claim that they are not deaf, but that they cannot hear melodies or see the space and volumn in a picture. (ii) The independence condition is thought not satisfied by aesthetic ‘properties’. Aesthetic ‘properties’ are only ‘perceived’ by those who lean to ‘hear’, ‘see’ etc. in a particularly rewarding way. This means that the will - the effort - of the spectator is required in creating the experience of ‘seeing’ the space and volume in pictures, the expression and movement of a sculptured figure like David by Michelangelo or the majesty of a batherdal. So it is con- cluded, the ‘properties’ of works of art are not really properties of a work of art which independently exists as such, but are instead the result of the spectator’s own imaginative creation, where what he ‘sees’ he ‘sees’ as ‘unreal’:

. . . it will be my concern to distinguish what I shall call ‘imaginative perception’ - exemplified in the understanding of a picture, where the object of perception is seen as unreal - from ‘literal’ perception. (Scruton 1978, p. 78)

On the one hand it is argued that there are the arts which are expressions of feeling or imaginative experience, and on the other, statements of ordinary language and science, which are concerned with how the world is, and what exists. The positivist empiricist, I . A. Richards had already developed the first line of thought in the Principles of Literary Criticism and Scruton develops the second line of thought in Art as Imagination. If ordinary language refuses to reflect this dichotomy then ordinary language is dismissed, and a special vocabulary invented that will. We have an example of this when Scruton lays down part of the theoretical foundations for his work:

In order to avoid confusion I shall distinguish features from properties, By ‘feature’ I mean whatever is, or seems to be, attributed by a predicate. In other words, is X is Y makes sense, then, whenever X is Y, X possesses the feature of Y-ness. But it does not follow from this that Y-ness is also a property; it is only a property if the sentence ‘X is Y’ has realistic truth conditions. (truth conditions in the strong sense explained in Chapter one.) In other words, the idea of a feature is grammatical, whereas that of a property has an epistemological content (Scruton 1974)

But in this paragraph Scruton makes it true by definition that we really are not seeing paintings or hearing music. For when we refer to what we believe

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to be their aesthetic properties, by definition these are simply their ‘features’. So the grammatical form of what we say is allowed, but the implication that we have made a claim about what we know or believe about the work of art has been removed. As this is established at the beginning of the book everything else then follows as a consequence. These ‘features’ are then said to be no more than the ‘intentional’ object of our experiences - a description, not of an independent object which is a work of art, but of our experiences. (Anscombe, 1965) Such a description is all that is said to be ‘meant’ by ‘a description’ of ‘a work of art’.

Aesthetics is then thought to be a study of such aesthetical experiences that originate in the viewer and which could have been occasioned by the natural world as easily as by those objects constructed for the purpose by the artist. But, we might ask, is this account really necessary? Could the aesthetic ‘properties’ of a work of art not also satisfy conditions (i) and (ii) so that we can talk of really seeing, hearing them etc., and so show the neo-Kantians to be mistaken? This would be to hurry on ahead. For first we must ask whether these questions need be asked. Do these conditions really have to be satisfied? Let us begin by asking:

Is condition (i) a necessary condition? How many people can see certain forms of bacteria without training in order for us to say that it exists? The question obviously makes no sense, for we know that the perception of bacteria is a skilled acquirement, as is the perception of other organisms seen under a microscope. Nor can it be said that most people agree in the perceptions of such phenomena. All that can be said is that some people who are trained in certain ways agree in their perceptions. Only some people can con- duct these experiments - those who have learnt how to wield the concept ‘bacteria’ and who, in the ‘appropriate’ context of these experiments, find a use for it. (And who ‘judges’ when this context is appropriate?)

If (ii) were a necessary condition for something to be a property, then ‘bacteria’ must again fail to have properties. For they cannot be seen independently of a particular context and learnt ability in a laboratory. In that context it will be necessary for the will of the perceiver to be involved, first in trying to, and eventually - perhaps - succeeding in seeing them. Whether or not he will be said to succeed will depend on whether his account of what he ‘perceives’ satisfies certain conditions which are determined by the experts in the field for perception. So neither condition need be essential to any objectivity test; i.e. to the perception of some phenomena. In place of the satisfaction of conditions (i) and (ii) what is actually required for existence, and so for the perception of that which exists, is the identification of individuals which satisfy the necessary criteria of identity and principles of individuation for being individuals of that kind.

The sadness of a piece of music cannot be logically tied to the immediate circumstances of its arousal as it belongs to the work of art as one of its necessary intentional properties, which are individuating of it and establish the identity of that piece of music, to be the piece of music that it is. If the


artist intended the sadness to be ascribable to his work, then if his creative activity is successful, it possesses ‘sadness’ in virtue of his intentional activity in giving to his work the property of ‘sadness’, and this is logically prior to the response of individuals to his music as one of sadness. So we can be said to really perceive works of art, to hear or see them.

A notion of imagination as explanatory of our aesthetic response to art that is divorced from, and contrasted with belief, is unsatisfactory from the start. Don’t we often believe that we see the properties of space, movement, expressiveness, profundity, etc. of works of art? This is explained if we consider that beliefs are incorporated into our imaginative experience, and moti- vate them. The content of our aesthetic responses differs, according to the beliefs we hold, while the direction that our imaginative experiences take is motivated by the beliefs we have about what we perceive within the work. If I imagine an intruder’s footsteps, the content of my imaginative experience is determined by my beliefs about intruders, and the direction these experiences take will be determined by my beliefs about the possible kinds of intruders. If I believe 1 am looking at a 16th century play by William Shakespeare, the content of my experience will differ from looking at the ‘same’(?) scenes believing them written last year by a playwrite imitating him.

Furthermore, an analysis of aesthetic experience in terms of imaginative experiences supposes that there is a necessary relationship between the two, so that to be an aesthetic experience, it is necessary that it is imaginative. But this is unacceptable. In the event we don’t normally think that our enjoyment of a sunset, a conventional picture, or a rose, requires imagination, so much as a relationship between ourselves and the object in which we find a non- transferable satisfaction in its aesthetic properties; such that nothing else would give us the ‘same’ satisfaction in the sense that it would do just as well. If such an account of ‘aesthetic experience’ suffices in some cases, then no general theory of such experience as imaginative will do. What is required is to show how and when imagination is important to some such experiences independently defined.

Philosophy of art before the 1970s was largely taken up with exploring what the special aesthetic experience of the neo-Kantian was like. (Pole, 1983) Not taught these basic ‘truths’ upon which so much aesthetics was based and taught, literary theorists started to become interested in the fundamental questions about the arts through a renewed interest in the theory ofliterature. This had been held at bay for over two decades by the anti-theoretical bias of the New Critics - the so-called ‘New Criticism’ - and the equally anti- theoretical views of R. F. Leavis, one of the best known of the English critics, who held sway into the 1970s in the teaching of English Literature in many University departments throughout England and abroad.

Despite aestheticians having little time for such new theorists as the structuralists, deconstructions and post-deconstructionists, they, to the contrary, regarded aestheticians as among their most important opponents. Many of them believed that aestheticians were typical of the ‘humanists’ who had so

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far dominated the arts and literary criticism. ‘Humanism’ had become term that seemed to them to summarise the political and cultural individualist - the enemy - who was now to be written out of existence:

Common sense proposes a humanism based on an empiricist-idealist interpretation of the world. In other words, common sense urges that ‘man’ is the origin and source of meaning, of action, and of history. (humanism) (Belsey 1980, p. 7)

What new theorists like Belsey looked for was an opponent who believed that the artist provided the meaning of the work in his intention, where this is thought to be a transparent mental image, or ‘idea’. But, like other new sceptics, she was unfortunate in her choice, in attributing such a view to those holding an “ ‘empiricist-idealist’ interpretation of the world”. For neither the positivist empiricists nor the neo-Kantians need hold this position. Even Richards, who sometimes perhaps comes close to doing so, believed more centrally that the experience that is the work of art is of the reader, and so he shared a reader orientation with Belsey. For was it not Richards who wrote-:

If we say we see a picture we may mean either that we see a pigment- covered surface, or that we see the image on the retina cast by this surface, or that we see certain planes or volumes in what is called the ‘picture-space’. These senses are completely distinct. In the first case we are speaking of the source of the stimulus, in the second of the immediate effect of the stimulus on the retina, in the third we are referring to a complex response made up of perceivings and imaginings due to the intervention of mental structures left behind by past experiences, and excited by stimulus (Richards 1976, p. 114)

We can see here then that for Richards the work of art - the picture - is the third: - a mixture of perception and imagination, and imagination is not derived from the immediate experience alone. And, we must to be fair to Scruton too. In his book Art and Imagination his theory of art as an imaginative experience (couched in the Wittgenstein terminology of ‘seeing-as’) is reminiscent of Richards’ above, but he is even more concerned to deny that these experiences are not necessarily private, transparent to the person concerned, and insists that they are publicly accessible in our shared responses.

It looks as if Belsey missed her target. If these thinkers are mistaken, as I believe they are, then other arguments will be needed to show it. Nor does there seem to be any reason to consider these men typical humanists - cer- tainly not on account of their empiricist-idealist views. Humanism began with the Greeks, long before the current empiricism-idealist tradition.

Though challenged, most aestheticians have not picked up the gauntlet. They were faced with the question of whether or not the matters raised by the new sceptics - which inevitably involved political and social issues -were of legitimate interest to them. The form of the question became: were they


to include within the orbit of Aesthetics, a branch of traditionally taught philosophy, the theoretical questions about the arts which literary theory raised? They had thought it appropriate to do so only when that theory touched upon the questions which they Look to be proper to Aesthetics such as: was the work of art autonomous? was the work of art an aesthetic object? what kind of pleasure was central to the aesthetic experience? etc.

It is true that there was a precedent for an affirmative answer: that aestheticians should consider in their domain those questions at present of interest to literary critics. After all they had always had an interest in the critical dispute among anti-intentionalists and intentionalists - the dispute about whether or not the meaning of the work of art was or was not to be found in the artist’s intentions. But the reason this had been possible was partly because both critical theoreticians and aestheticians had shared for some time the same basic assumptions. The New Critics were as much amoured of the autonomous work of art as were the neo-Kantians. The problem for aesthet. icians has arisen with the disappearance of those shared assumptions. Without them their interest in literary theory flagged. There are reasons why it is un- likely to be resurrected unless the already perceptible general trend in philosophy towards an interest in wider issues changes the direction of Aesthetics. For instance, there are problems which confront Aesthetics that prevent its members from turning their attention to the present scepticism. These are to be found both without and within what it takes to be its borders.

From without:

First. It is clear that the common ground Aesthetics had shared with critical theory has largely disappeared as the New Criticism has relinquished its hold on the study of English Literature. The new critical theories of the structuralists and deconstructionists belong to a very different tradition of philosophy. To understand what they are saying requires an understanding of a different tradition, which looks back to Heidigger, Husserl and Nietzsche and to the linguistic schools of thought which have influ- enced it. This would be a difficult task in itself.

Second. As we have seen, these new theories of literary criticism are anti- pathetic to the neo-Kantian tradition which has provided the framework of Aesthetics. They deny the autonomy of the work of art; they naturally conceive of the work of art as the outcome of political and social forces; and they have no time or place in their theories for the aesthetic experience.

Third. Aestheticians have usually assumed that their chief task is the exploration of and justification for just such experiences as are said to be enjoyed for ‘their own sake’ alone, while the appreciation of art has been thought t o be analysable in terms of them. To take issue with the new theorists would be to discuss topics which presuppose that this task is pointless.

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From within. There are the corresponding problems for aestheticians brought up to consider that philosophical problems of interest are those provided within the neo-Kantian framework. Even those who reject some aspects of the analyses offered of such problem are likely to have accepted that framework as determining what is to count as a question in aesthetics.

Lastly: there has been a certain contempt among some philosophers within the analytic tradition for what is supposed to be the lack of Anglo- Saxon analytic rigour in some of the arguments put forward by the new theorists:

It is apparently very zongenial for some people who are professional concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice, and it seems positively exhilarating to be told that what we call ‘reality’ is just more textuality. Furthermore, the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don’t have to worry about an author’s intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. (Searle 1983, p. 79).

The contempt of one or another reputable philosopher becomes an excusc for others to share such feelings without devoting to the problem the same effort or time. This situation has had some odd consequences for those participating in the learning experience in our institutions of learning across the Anglo- Saxon academic world.

So students of English literature may well wonder when they take a philosophy option in Aesthetics and find that many of the current philosophical issues in literary criticism which are also of central importance to all the other arts, are more likely-to be found in their theory of literary criticism course than in their philosophy course. Philosophers have usually turned their heads in other directions or refused to do justice to the positions that are being put forward. If the same issue is discussed in both philosophy and literature departments as might be the case, then students might well find the philosophers talking as if nothing has happend in literary criticism for 20 years.

Let us turn to the anti-intentionalist-intentionalist controversy to illu- strate this point. (Molina, 1976) Aestheticians were not shy of entering the theoretical foray with literary critics some 38 years ago when this particular issue first raised its head. It wasin 1946 that an aesthetician, Monroe Beardsley, and a literary critic, W. K . Wimsatt, collaborated in writing the seminal paper ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ condemning those ‘foolish’ enough to think that the meaning of a work of art could be established by using the artist’s intention as a criterion of meaning. (Wimsatt, 1954) The intentionalists maintained that the artist’s intention was a criterion of the meaning of a work of art; the anti- intentionalists denied it. This same issue is still being discussed within the


same framework as it was then in the many pages of the journals of aesthetics. (Lyas, 1983) Yet it is clear that such a framework is ‘old hat’ as far as criticism goes. This seminal paper was primarily directed at clearing the theoretical ground for the particular literary movement, the ‘New Criticism’ which is now on the wane or under attack in most major institutions of learning in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Propounded by the New Critics, the ‘New Criticism’ once provided both the established theory and practice of criticism, but it could hardly be said to do so now. Why is it then that, as far as most aestheticians are concerned, nothing seems to have changed, though it is obvious that the anti-intentionalists who have to be answered today are such new theorists as the structuralists and deconstructionists? The answer for their reluctance to accept as their opponents the new theorists lies in the reasons just examined. Yet obviously it would be damaging for both philosophy and our present culture if Aesthe- ticians neglected to use modern analytic tools to help clarify these issues as they are now being posed. The post-structuralist criticism and the theoretical problems it brings with it have already saturated the syllabuses of many of the departments of English Literature and linguistics. Only those syllabuses in philosophy departments lack mention of the new theories which as much challenge the traditional idea of philosophy as a search for truth as they do the traditional ideas of the arts and literary criticism.

But how is this scepticism to be met? In many different ways. The follow- ing are but some suggestions:

(i) to show the inadequacy of that present framework within which we, as aestheticians, are working.

(ii) to demonstrate that the conditions for independent existence of works of art already lie in our present practices where they are individu- ated to be what they are, given their complex history of production, which pivotally includes the artist’s own creative activity and is part of the complex culture which goes to make up a valued part of our civilization.

(iii) to show the value of works of art within the context of such practices that partly make up our culture, which are themselves a part of our humanist tradition.

(iv) to give a different account of the concept of the ‘aesthetic’ upon which to build this structure.

I will leave the task indicated by (i) to (iii) but I would like to comment briefly upon (iv).

The kind of notion of the ‘aesthetic’ which we require is to be found in Dewey’s work Art QS Experience, (1938) By adopting something like it we would thereby be able to avoid the dichotomies that have riven our culture apart, as this is implicit in such positions as empiricism and neo-Kantianism,

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between art that is expressive and science which provides knowledge, between metaphor and literal truth, imagination and belief, value and fact. Dewey offers us a notion of the aesthetic as the perfection of experience that is in some ways reminiscent of the original idea’ of the aesthetic of Baumgarten’s. For Baumgarten:

Aesthetics is to be the science which will investigate perfection for the purpose of describing the kind of perfection which is proper to it. It will have its counterpart in the science of logic which will perform the same office for thought. Baumgarten, like Wolff and other rationalists, takes cognition to comprise a higher and lower part, thought and perception. His originality cansists in the effort to confer a certain autonomy upon the lower faculty and to formulate the principles of a science proper to it. (Baumgarten 1958, Intro.)

Baumgarten hoped to find the ‘logic’ of the imagination, and the kind of perfection proper to the application of aesthetic concepts. Writing of Baumgarten’s project, Mary Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby write:

What he wanted to investigate was neither mere taste - individual likes and dislikes - nor mere sensations - the feelings registered in response to a stimulus - but a mode of knowledge. (Wilkinson 1982, p. xx)

The idea that the ‘aesthetic’ could be understood as the perfection of experience had not found favour with Kant. (1911 p. 69) This perhaps partly ex- plains why Dewey’s understanding of aesthetic experience plays an insignifi- cant role in what is taught as Aesthetics today. For it too begins with the kind of perfection that is appropriate to aesthetic experience in that it is a distillation of ordinary experience in that it is both “unified and total”:

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phrase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and ten- sion He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. (Dewey 1958, p. 15)

Neo-Kantians have a natural antipathy to any such account of aesthetic experience, as it brings together a knowledge of its object through an experience of it. For this unified and total experience that Dewey talks of, is judged so in the context of its object, the concept of which guides that experience towards its ‘perfection’:

An aesthetic product results only when ideas cease to float and are embodied in an object, and the one who experiences the work of art loses himself in irrelevant reverie unless his images and emotions are also tied to the object in the sense of being fused with the matter of the object. (Dewey 1958, p. 276)


But if, to the contrary, aesthetic experience is thought of in the neo-Kantian way, as distinct from its object (the work of art) then what has it to do with works of art? It is not simply that nature can equally be the object of such an experience - for this is true for both Dewey and for Kant; it is that nature is counted to be a more approptiate object of the aesthetic experience in the neo-Kantian framework, and this is not acceptable, Imagining the different aspects of cloud formation may seem a more legitimate activity than imagining whatever one can think up about a work of art - unless what are thought up are, of course, ‘genuine’ aspects of the work in their being its properties. But then this is to suppose that what is ‘imagined’ is what is seen to be in the work of art - what is actually there, to be understood by using one’s imagination. That requires judgement, and the judgement requires guidance as to what will count as being there.

Dewey’s concept of ‘aesthetic experience’ helps both to explain what is necessary to works of art in their possession of properties that are aesthetic, and the continuity of our experience and valuing of works of art with ordinary experience. He thus offers us the theory of art we require today, which defends art both against scepticism and against elitism. Aesthetic experience by itself cannot demarcate for us the proper realm of art. There are only aesthetic experiences which enter our lives as a part of our various activities, where they provide some of the guiding values which help organise those activities and make them worth doing. It is as much a part of a mathematician’s experience of mathematics that it be aesthetic as it is of our participation in nature of art. Nor could the scientist do without an aesthetic truth requires it; for unless a theory has some of the virtues of elegance, simplicity and comprehensiveness the scientist does not count a scientific theory ‘true’. If the subject Aesthetics then is to begin its brief with the study of the aesthetic experience it will have to compare the sources of these very different kinds of satisfactions, and explain their connection with art.

As Dewey realised, much of the strength of the neo-Kantian position in Aesthetics can be understood as the result of our present social and historical circumstances which encourage such dichotomies as those between knowledge and experience, ordinary and aesthetic experience:

Because of changes in industrial conditions the artist has been pushed to one side from the main streams of active interest. Industry has been mech- anished and an artist cannot work mechanically for mass production. He is less integrated than formerly in the normal flow of social services. A peculiar aesthetic ‘individualism’ results. Artists find it incumbent upon them to betake themselves to their work as an isolated means of ‘self- expression’. In order not to cater to the trend of economic forces, they often feel obliged to exaggerate their separateness to the point of eccentri- city. Consequently artistic products take on to a still greater degree the air of something independent and esoteric.

Put the action of all such forces together, and the conditions that create the gulf which exists generally between producer and consumer in modern

68 S. J. WILSMORE

society operate to create also a chasm between ordinary and esthetic experience. Finally we have, as the record of this chasm, accepted as if it were normal, the philosophies of art that locate it in a region inhabited by no other creature, and that emphasise beyond all reason the merely comtempla- tive character of the aesthetic , . . (Dewey 1958, pp 9, 10)

We began this paper by suggesting that what was wrong with Aesthetics is the neo-Kantian framework which has hemmed it in and hampered its develop- ment. It is time for aestheticians to look away from their usual philosophical pursuits and look to where the action is. They will find it now in the issues raised in critical theory and linguistics. As many of the new theoreticians have mistakenly considered neo-Kantian aestheticians to be the typical humanists to whom they were opposed, it is time for them to distinguish their real opponents. We too must distinguish between neo-Kantianism and humanism. Neo-Kantianism underlies - together with positivist empiricism - many of the dichotomies of our culture which humanists will want to over- come in an effort to understand what are today some of their social, political and artistic consequences. Briefly, we must recover a consistent line of human- istic thought about the humanities and the arts within them which will not be confused with neo-Kantianism.

Sceptics have pointed to, by expressing, a malaise in Western culture; but it need not be fatal.

Hatfieid Polytechnic

References

Anscombe G. E. M. To understand the distinction between intentional and material object it is essential to read her, ‘The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature’, in Butler R. J. (1965) ed. Analytic Philosophy, Second Series, Oxford.

Baumgarten, A. G. The term ‘aesthetics’ has entered ‘ordinary’ parlance from philosophy rather than vice versa. Its modern history began, not with Kant, but with Baumgarten, whose work Aesthetica (1735) has not been translated into English. He thought of Aesthetics as a new science, a systematic study of imagination and intuition and of their products, art and poetry. A good discussion of Baumgarten can be found in the introduction to Schiller, F. (reprint 1982, from p. xxi) On the Aesthetic Education ofMan written by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Clar endon Press .

Baumgarten A. G . (1954, from ed’s Introduction) Reflections on Poetry trans with original text, an introduction and notes by Aschenbrenner and Holther, University of California Press. First published 1786.

Belsey, Catherine (1980) k’tical Practice Methuen.


Danto Arthur C. See (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Harvar d University Press .

Dewey John, (reprint 1958) Art as Experience. Capricorn Books, New York. First published 1938.

Dickie George, A suspicion of the term ‘aesthetics’ was one of the motivating factors behind the so-called institutional theory of art, which becomes clear in the work of institutionalist George Dickie, see (1 971) Aesthetics, Chapter 5. Pegasus. Indianapolis.

Goodman, Nelson (1949) Languages of Art His cognitive account of art is clearest in section VI: ‘Art and the Understanding’. Oxford University Press, London.

Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason first published 1781 and, for practical reason The Critique of Practical Reason first published in 1788. Easily available in different editions.

Kant, Immanuel (191 1) Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement trans. Meredith, James. ‘Analytic of the Beautiful, Third Moment. In section 15 ‘The judgement of taste’ is entirely independent of the concept of ‘perfection’. Kant repudiates, by implication, Baumgarten’s notion of ‘the aesthetic’ which he had initiated. However, in dependent beauty, perfection i s an aspect of the experience.

Lyas, Colin ‘Anything Goes: The Intentional Fallacy Revisited’. The British Journal of Aestlietics Vo. 23 No 4. Autumn 1983. This is not a criticism of the paper, which is an excellent one. I could have chosen from many papers which have ‘revisited’ the controversy within the Wimsatt and Beardsley framework in this and other journals over the years,

Molina, Newton-de, David (1976) On Literary Intention Edinburgh Uni- versity Press. A good example of papers on both sides on the controversy over the supposed ‘intentional fallacy’ is to be found here. For an account of the notion of intention itself see Anscombe, G. E. B. (1957)Intention Basil Blackwell.

Pole, David. An example of a neo-Kantian view of the aesthetic experience is the paper by J. 0. Urmson ‘What Makes a Situation Aesthetic and an excellent early objection to it, by Pole David, in his first chapter of that title, in his book (1983) Aesthetics and Emotion edited by George Roberts. Duckworth. These two papers were first published in Philosophy, vol 30, 1955. Pole’s paper makes it clear what he was up against during those years.

Richards, I . A. (1961) Principles of Literary Criticism; Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published 1924. Richards was a positivist - someone who believed that the meaning of a statement was given in its verification. This empiricist philosophy was introduced tq England in the 1930s from Vienna by the publication of Language, m t h and Logic by A. J. Ayer in 1938. Gollancz. He argued, as did Ayer, that such utterances as those of literature were emotive and expressive, and could not be said to be either true or false.

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Scruton, R. (1974, p. 54.) Art and Imagination Dethuen. Scruton does his best t o bring back ‘judgement’ - in inverted commas, into aesthetic judgements as not related t o belief, and in this way, together with a notion of ‘appropriate’, lbring back some kind of objectivity into aesthetic discourse. This is argued in his two chapters 7. and 8. on the imagination. There is not space here t o show the inadequacy of his arguments a t this crucial point, but the notion has become so broad in his use of it by his second book (1979) The Aesthetics of Architecture Methuen, that it clearly won’t d o the work that needs to be done once aesthetic perception is dismissed.

Scruton argues that terms used aesthetically are secondary uses of terms, and to not descriptive, but literal, but more like metaphors. Nelson Goddman also gives a metaphorical account of expression terms used of works of ar t , but believes they are used cognitively of what is actual.

Searle John, review of Culler, Jonathan’s book (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism ,after Structuralism Cornell University Press in the New York Review of Books October 27. 1983. See also Scruton’s dis- missal of structuralism in ‘Public Text and Common Reader’in his (1983) The Aesthetic Understanding Methuen.

Wilkerson Terence, ‘Representation, Illusion and Aspects’ British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 18, No 1 Winter 1978 and Rader, Melvin ‘Imaginative Mode of Awareness’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol XXX I11 No 2, are examples of what I call neo-Kantian aesthetics.

Eds. Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and Willoughby L. in their ‘Introduction’ t o their edited edition of Schiller F. (1982,) On the Aesthetic Education of Man Clarendon Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The popularity of explaining aesthetic experience as related to perception in the way in which seeing-as is supposed t o be related to perception where this is thought t o be a contrasting with it finds its inspiration, but surely not its source, in Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958), Philosophical Investigations Part 11. Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein was attempting t o make us understand the complexity of our concepts and their inter-relations, particularly, the complexity of the concept of ‘perception’. For him there is often no definite answer as t o whether, in some cases, what we are doing is having an experience, thinking of , or seeing something - or all. Some philosophers have used him to put forward a theory about perception, t o support an empiricist view of perception and Knowledge. This is an anti-Wittgenstein project and viewpoint. See Scruton’s claim in his perface t o p. vii. Art and Imagination that “I have derived great benefit from several authors, in particular from Wittgenstein, whose influence is everywhere apparent, and from Kant . . . ”

Wollheim, Richard (1 980) Art and Its Objects Cambridge University Press.

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WHAT IS WRONG WITH AESTHETICS?