A History of Modern Aesthethics 3 Volume Set

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

This work offers a history of philosophical aesthetics from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. In the eighteenth century, I examine developments in Britain, France, and the German-speaking lands, not yet a unified country. At the end of the eighteenth century, the field of aesthetics was intensively cultivated in Germany, and throughout the nineteenth century that land retained its prominence in the discipline. This is reflected in the prominence of German aesthetics in my account of this period, although I consider British developments as well, and the emergence of the first serious American aesthetic theory at the very end of the century; I touch only fleetingly on some moments in French aesthetics in this period. I continue the story of German aesthetics into the twentieth century, indeed to the start of the twenty-first, but give much more space to American as well as British aesthetics in the last century (with one indispensable Italian adopted into British aesthetics). I do not discuss twentieth-century French aesthetics at all, although that subject would dominate many a discussion of twentieth-century aesthetics, especially if written by a literary theorist instead of by a philosopher, in part because I want to give adequate space to the rediscovery of many first-rate British and American aestheticians in the first part of the century who have been unjustly neglected since the enormous impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein on British and American philosophy, and in part because I believe that the emphasis on linguistic models and textuality that have dominated French aesthetics in the period of structuralism and poststructuralism has distracted attention from what I take to be the core subject matter of the discipline of aesthetics since its inception in the eighteenth century, namely, the study of the nature and value of aspects of the human experience of art and (sometimes) nature. Some 1

Š in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

2

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1

of the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century German philosophers who will be discussed here have also received little attention in recent years, and I want to give them room to breathe as well. That I do include some unusual figures as well as exclude some of the usual suspects is part of why I call this work, large as it is, only a, not the history of modern aesthetics.

That said, this opening sketch still raises all sorts of questions. What do I mean by philosophical aesthetics – is that a contrast to some other kind, or is it just redundant? What do I mean by dividing the field up into three different national traditions, although different ones in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries? And for that matter, what do I mean by dividing the work up into volumes on three centuries – aren’t the years on the calendar that end with “00” utterly arbitrary dividing lines? I can suggest answers to some of these questions immediately. As for my second and third questions, I can say that sometimes there have been separate national traditions and sometimes there have not been – for example, eighteenth-century German aesthetics fully absorbed what was happening in France and Britain, but the reverse was not the case, and while in the first part of the twentieth century there was not much interaction between British and American aesthetics, in the second part there was, and some of the leading figures even divided their careers between the two countries. So sometimes my national boundaries are important, sometimes not. And this intersects with the question of the calendar – sometimes major changes in the field have come closer to a year ending in “00” in one place than in another. We will deal with these questions in due course.

The harder question is what I mean by “philosophical aesthetics.”

In one way, the answer to this question is relatively clear: By philosophical aesthetics, I mean works and discussions that are in some way continuous with the topics of aesthetics as it is currently pursued in philosophy departments, whether written by people who in their own lifetimes taught philosophy or otherwise conceived of themselves as philosophers or not. Some figures whom we would more readily identify as critics or art theorists or even practicing artists, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the eighteenth century, John Ruskin in the nineteenth, and Walter Benjamin in the twentieth, come into my story when they either reflected recent developments in philosophy or triggered them, but in general my history of philosophical aesthetics

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

3

is not a history of art or literary criticism or theory.1 However, I would hardly pretend that the dividing line between philosophical aesthetics and criticism is always clear, and there are surely critics whom I could have included in my narrative but have not. They or their shades may take comfort in the fact that there are also philosophers I could have included in my account but have not.

But even with this caveat, I have not really given much of an answer to our question, for philosophers themselves have not always been clear about what the subject of aesthetics is, and even those who have attempted to be clear have not always agreed with each other, that is, with other philosophers at the same time or at different times. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, German philosophers used the term “aesthetics” and British and French writers did not, although they were practicing the same subject; and in the nineteenth century Germans and others using the term did not always mean the same by it as those who used it in the eighteenth century had. Some of the later philosophers equated aesthetics with the philosophy of art while some of the earlier philosophers had conceived the field more broadly, as dealing with a kind of experience we can have of nature as well as art – as a few philosophers have again begun to do. As I suggested a moment ago, I do think the core of the subject is a concern with a certain kind of experience, and that an exclusive focus on a special kind of language or discourse is too narrow a conception of the field – that is not only part of the reason I do not discuss recent French aesthetics, but, as I argue in Volume III, such a conception of the field was also a problem with the initial influence of Wittgenstein in Anglo-American aesthetics. But beyond this, I think there is little value in attempting to stipulate a clear definition of the field in advance: How philosophers have conceived of the boundaries of the field has been part of its history, and we will simply have to see how that history goes. The history will have to define the field for us rather than the other way around. I might even suggest that this situation is not unusual in philosophy: While certain approaches to philosophy, such as those of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, or the eighteenth-century German rationalists led by Christian Wolff, might raise the expectation that works of philosophy above all should be able to begin with a clear statement of 1

Such as René Wellek’s classical History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–92) or the multiauthored volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism from antiquity to the present (nine volumes thus far, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989–).

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

4

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1

their subject matter and central issues, other philosophers, such as the young Kant, have argued that in philosophy definitions come not at the beginning but at the end, if at all. In any case, the proper subject matter of aesthetics and the proper questions for it to ask have themselves been problematic and contested issues since the very word “aesthetics” was first introduced.

For example, since the 1820s, when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave influential lectures in Berlin on the “Philosophy of Art or Aesthetics,”2 many have assumed that the term “aesthetics” just means the philosophy of art or, more specifically, fine art; and if it is assumed that art is a distinctive and cohesive set of human practices and products including imaginative literature such as poetry, fiction, and drama, the sister arts of music and dance; and the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture and possibly garden design and landscape architecture as well, then it would seem to follow that the topic of the field of aesthetics as the philosophy of art would also be well defined. So even if it were true that in antiquity or the Middle Ages there was no conception of any essential connection between, say, literature and the visual arts, thus that the idea of the unity of these various pursuits is itself a modern invention, as some have argued,3 it would still be the case that for much of the period to be covered here, that is, for most of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth centuries, the topic of aesthetics would be clear: the philosophy of art.

But this restriction of aesthetics to the philosophy of fine art has also been contested. In the eighteenth century, many philosophers, whether they used the name “aesthetics” yet or not, held that aesthetics deals not only with philosophical problems about the fine arts, including what 2

3

See, for example, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik. Nach Hegel. Im Sommer 1826, Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004). Until recently, Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics were known in the form of a posthumous compilation edited by Heinrich Gustav Hotho and first published in 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, then revised in 1842. Hotho’s version was the basis for the standard English version, G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 496–527 and 13 (1952): 17–46, reprinted in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 163–227, and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). But for criticism of Kristeller’s claim, see James I. Porter, “Is Art Modern?

Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009): 1–24, and Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 26–40.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

5

differentiates them from other characteristic human practices and products and also what unites them into a distinctive class, but also with certain responses we may have to nature as well, paradigmatically, to borrow a common way of putting it, our “ideas” or “feeling of the beautiful and the sublime.”4 Indeed, when he first coined the name of the discipline in his 1735 master’s thesis, Philosophical Meditations concerning some Matters pertaining to Poetry, the twenty-one-year-old German Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had used his new term to connote a novel field of inquiry, parallel to ordinary logic, that would have as its subject not pure ideas (νοητα) but sensory objects (αισθητα) in general, including both things present to the senses (sensualibus) and things imagined in the absence of present sensation (phantasmata), and which would “direct the inferior faculty of cognition” as a “science of how something is to be sensitively cognized.”5 This definition does not contain any explicit reference to art at all or to a distinctive kind of experience that we might have in response to nature as well as art, but instead suggests that aesthetics concerns the contribution of sensory experience to knowledge in general.

Yet the inclusion of this definition at the end of a book about poetry makes it clear the intended discipline includes at least this particular fine art, and in the definition that Baumgarten provided fifteen years later, in his massive although incomplete Aesthetica, the first work on aesthetics to be entitled simply “Aesthetics,” he does make explicit reference to art. In this work, he writes that aesthetics, although it is still the “the science of sensory cognition” in general, is also the “theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason.”6 What Baumgarten meant by “the logic of the inferior faculty of cognition” and “the art of 4

5

6

See Edmund Burke’s famous work of 1757, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and Sublime; modern edition ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), and Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. Paul Guyer, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 18–62, and in Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 11–62. The latter edition includes Kant’s extensive notes in his own copy of the Observations.

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, ed. Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), §§CXV, CXVII. Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750–58), §1; in Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Ästhetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der ‘Aesthetica’ A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabe des lateinischen Textes und deutscher Übersetzung (Basel and Stutgart: Schwabe & Co., 1973), pp. 106–7.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

6

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1

the analogue of reason” may still go well beyond our present-day conception of aesthetics, but his expressions “the theory of the liberal arts” and the “art of thinking beautifully” certainly point toward our present conception, for by the term “liberal arts” he would have meant, in medieval fashion, at least the arts of grammar and rhetoric, pointing toward what we call literature, and music, if not the arts that centrally involve physical media and the techniques to work them, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture.7 But the point to be drawn for now from Baumgarten’s own indeterminacy about the proper subject of his new discipline is just that whether or not the concept of the fine arts is a modern construct, the question of the proper subject matter of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics has itself been contested during the past three centuries and is therefore a question that can be addressed only over the course of the following narrative rather than one that can be settled at the outset.

The present work began as part of an attempt to answer the question of how philosophy got from the situation that John Locke described at the end of his Essay concerning Human Understanding in 1690, when all knowledge could be divided into physics or natural philosophy, ethics, and semiotics or logic, the “doctrine of signs,”8 to the contemporary practice of philosophy, where we recognize as distinct subfields of philosophy not just ethics and logic, but philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, and so on, in some quarters even philosophy of sport, of love, of sex, and, of course, philosophy of art.9 But my narrative does not begin in 1690 or any other date in the late seventeenth century, because, although there were earlier rumblings, notably the French “Quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,”10 the debate that I present as central to the modern discipline 7

8

9

10

See H.M. Klinkenberg, “Artes liberales/artes mechanicae,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by Joachim Ritter, 13 vols. (Basel: Schwaber & Co., 1971–2007), vol. 1, pp. 531–3, and Wolfgang Ullrich, “Kunst/Künste/System der Künste,” in Karlheinz Barck, Martin Frontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, editors, Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, 7 vols. (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2000– 5), vol. 3, pp. 556–616, at p. 571.

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Bk. IV, ch. xxi, §§1–4, p. 720.

That is, the present work was originally intended to be one volume in the Cambridge series The Evolution of Modern Philosophy, edited by Gary Hatfield and myself. As a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, so perhaps does an editor who edits himself.

See Rémy G. Saisselin, The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart: A Philosophical Dictionary of Classical French Criticism, Critics, and Aesthetic Issues (Cleveland: The Press of

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

7

of aesthetics did not really begin until after 1700.11 Yet neither does the narrative begin with Baumgarten’s baptism of the discipline in 1735, because that was an adult baptism. By the time Baumgarten coined that name the field of aesthetics was already a thriving subject in academia and indeed a thriving business in the republic of letters at large, not only in Germany but in France and Britain as well, with numerous and extensive contributions from academic philosophers but also from other men of letters, focusing on the question that I do regard as being at the heart of modern aesthetics: whether aesthetic experience, whether unique to art or common to both art and nature, is best considered a distinctive form of knowledge, an emotional experience, or an exercise of the imagination that is more like play than it is like knowledge or emotion – or whether it can only be understood through a combination of all three of these approaches. As already suggested by my epigraphs, my own conclusion from my study of the history of aesthetics is that a pluralistic approach will provide us with more insight into the nature and value of our experience of art and nature and with a more satisfying basis for our engagement with the works of art and nature than any reductionist or monistic approach can do.

11

Case Western Reserve University, 1970), “Ancients and Moderns,” pp. 5–14. The classical work by Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, 2nd ed., (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1961), as its title suggests, concerns debates in natural science and touches upon the debate about the arts only in passing (e.g., pp. 33–4). For a general work that does address late seventeenth-century aesthetics more extensively, see Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Thus the present history begins precisely where the History of Aesthetics by Władysław Tatarkiewicz ends; the only overlap between his history and mine is in the discussion of three early eighteenth-century French and Swiss writers: Du Bos, Crousaz, and André.

Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 3, Modern Aesthetics, ed. D. Petsch, trans.

Chester A. Kisiel and John F. Besemeres (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1974; reprinted Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), pp. 429–37. Apart from the basic fact that by “modern” Tartakiewicz meant the Renaissance through the end of the seventeenth century while I mean by the same term the eighteenth century to the present, there are differences in approach between his work and mine as well: He discusses art theory and criticism more than what I call philosophical aesthetics; his work is divided between brief commentary and extracts from his authors, while although I will let my authors speak in their own voices as much as possible, my quotations will be woven into my interpretations; and precisely because he ends his history at the beginning of the eighteenth century, aesthetics in English and German, which blossomed in that century, are not heavily represented in his work. The aesthetic theories of the German- and English-speaking lands from the beginning of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century will be the heart of the present work.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

8

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1

I argue that this debate emerged in the second decade of the eighteenth century, the years from 1709 to 1720 (the decade straddling the birth of Baumgarten himself in 1714), with seminal contributions being made during this decade by the English nobleman Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose education had been overseen by none other than John Locke, who during his variegated career had been the secretary, political adviser, and personal physician of the great Whig magnate the first Earl of Shaftesbury, the philosopher’s grandfather; by the English parliamentarian, playwright, and essayist Joseph Addison; by the French diplomat, historian, antiquarian, and critic the Abbé JeanBaptiste Du Bos;12 and by the German philosophy professor Christian Wolff. Shaftesbury first published his treatise The Moralists, which contains an influential discussion of the relation between beauty and value in general (and which also rejects much of the philosophy of his onetime mentor), in 1709, and included it in his collection Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in 1711; in 1712 he wrote A Letter concerning the Art, or Science of Design and a treatise entitled Plastics or the Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art. In June and July of 1712, Addison published a series of essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in the widely read periodical The Spectator that he co-edited with Richard Steele, although these essays were solely his. In 1719, Du Bos published his Critical Reflections on Painting, Poetry, and Music, a work that was read throughout Europe including Britain well before its English translation in 1748. In 1720, Wolff included some remarks about pleasure and beauty in his Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, his “German Metaphysics,” that would found the school of German thought from which Baumgarten and others whom we will consider emerged, and although Wolff subsequently devoted much of his own boundless energy to the philosophy of natural science and to moral and political philosophy, his voluminous works even include a treatise on architecture as part of his textbook on mathematics. For purposes of this book, the modern discipline of aesthetics is regarded as having commenced with these works of the second decade of the eighteenth century, and as having continued unabated since that time, although certainly with upheavals from time to time.

12

The name of this writer is often printed as “Dubos,” but I follow the form used on the title page of the 1748 English translation of his work, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, 3 vols. trans. Thomas Nugent (London: John Nourse, 1748), and used by such a modern authority as Baldine Saint Girons, in Esthétiques du XVIIIe siècle: Le Modèle Français (Paris: Philippe Sers éditeur, 1990), pp. 17–42.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

9

But despite this burst of activity, or Baumgarten’s baptism of the field a decade and a half later, or the definition of the “fine arts” as a group

by Charles Batteux another dozen years on, it nevertheless would be misleading to suggest that the discipline of aesthetics commenced ab novo at any point in modernity. Aesthetics has always been part of philosophy.

Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of philosophy could be regarded as a series of “footnotes to Plato.”13 This may be an exaggeration when it comes to some areas of modern philosophy, but it could be said about aesthetics with much justice. The discipline of aesthetics can be thought of as the collective response to Plato’s criticisms of many forms of art in his Republic as worthless for the purposes of knowledge and dangerous to morality because of their uncontrolled effect on our emotions.

The response to these criticisms began with Aristotle, perhaps even with other works of Plato himself. In any case, it is the central claim of this book that aesthetics since the beginning of the eighteenth century has also been in the business of responding to Plato, often tacitly although sometimes explicitly, sometimes defending the cognitive value of aesthetic experience and with that its moral value, but sometimes replacing the assumption that aesthetic experience must have cognitive value with two new ideas – the idea that a full range of emotional responses to art or nature is a good thing, not a bad thing, whether it has any immediate moral value or not, and the idea that the free exercise of our human capacities of mind and even of body is an intrinsically pleasurable and for that reason good thing, without regard to further cognitive or moral utility at all. As we will see, each of these ideas – of the cognitive value of aesthetic experience, of the emotional impact of aesthetic experience, of the free play of our distinctively human capacities – has taken many different forms, and they have sometimes entered into different combinations with each other, sometimes not. Tracing out the different forms and combinations of these ideas – and suggesting that greater value lies in their synthesis than in their separation – is the task of this work. That I have organized my narrative around these three ideas is another reason this work is called only a history of modern aesthetics – there are no doubt other ways to do it.14 13

14

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 39.

I have discussed some other approaches to the history of modern aesthetics in “History of Modern Aesthetics,” in Jerrold Levinson, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 25–60 (an article that might better have been called

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03803-5 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

10

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1

Since these ideas have taken so many different forms, it would be as hopeless to begin by attempting precise definitions of any of them as I argued it would be hopeless to begin with a precise definition of aesthetics itself. Instead I introduce the history of modern aesthetics with a brief look at Plato’s criticism of the arts and some of the traditional responses to it, and then say something more about the varieties of response to Plato that entered into aesthetics at the beginning of the eighteenth century and have been developed in many ways since then. The classicist James Porter has argued that Plato’s philosophy, which finds value in art only to the limited extent that some art can be seen as leading to knowledge of the eternal forms that are for Plato the ultimate reality, is itself a response to earlier ways of thinking about art that emphasized the sensory experience of matter or the physical, such as paint, stone, and sound.15 Porter’s argument is powerful and richly detailed, and restoring the importance of our sensory experience of the physical world, something already hinted at by Baumgarten’s emphasis on the sensory, became a

15

“Historiography of Modern Aesthetics”). In particular, I discussed there the approaches of three works: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Luc Ferry, Home aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Randall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). I will not repeat my arguments from that article here, nor will I in general engage in overt polemics with other scholars in this work; there is too much ground to be covered to allow that indulgence. It will have to suffice to say here that I find Ferry’s argument that the development of modern aesthetics, especially with its emphasis on the universal validity of taste, went hand in hand with the developing idea of an open and democratic public sphere far more convincing than Eagleton’s contention that aesthetic theory was just one more instrument for domination by elites, while I agree with Schaeffer that the turn to a “speculative theory of art” in post-Kantian figures such as Hegel and Martin Heidegger was problematic, but my argument will be that the problem was as much with the reductionist as with the metaphysical character of this turn. Here I might also mention the great work by Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), who divides the history of aesthetics into the “classical” line, which includes both “arts of disengaged communication,” which in turn subsumes “imaginative play,” and “arts of beauty,” and the “expressive line” (pp. xi–xii); this division certainly makes room for the complexity of approaches to aesthetics but does not in my view recognize the dominance of the cognitivist approach to aesthetics throughout its history, and suggests that expression is an alternative concept to beauty, when, as we shall see, for many it has been meant as an explanation of beauty.

Finally, I would also mention Einführung in die Ästhetik by the Hegel scholar Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995), who distinguishes between two paradigms in aesthetics, those of “intuitable truth” and “beautiful action” (p. 9); this division comes close to my division between the aesthetic theories of truth and play, but it does not recognize the aesthetics of emotional impact as a distinct line of thought that may or may not be combined with one or both of the others.

See Porter, The Origins of Aesthetics in Ancient Greece, chs. 2 and 3, pp. 70–176.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

Periodization is always one of the great challenges for historiography.

Deciding how to define the nineteenth century in the history of aesthetics is no exception. For some purposes, such as political and diplomatic history, a “long nineteenth century,” running from 1789 to 1914, that is, from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I, might make sense, although if the Revolution is considered well within the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic era considered a continuation of that era, then the nineteenth century might only run from 1815 to 1914, which is in any case exactly one hundred years. In aesthetics, there are many if not more possibilities, due to different developments in different national traditions or even within single national traditions. Thus, in the case of Britain, the eighteenth-century flourishing of the field was largely completed with Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man of 1785 and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste of 1790, but it made sense to include Dugald Stewart in the eighteenth century, even though some of his relevant work was published only as late as 1810, because of his proximity to the intellectual world of those authors. In Germany, the situation is even more complicated.

It would be perfectly natural to think of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790 as the culmination of the developments that began in Germany with Wolff and of the developments that began in Britain with Hutcheson and Hume, as well as conceiving of it as a conclusive rejection of a tradition that began in France with Du Bos, and then to think of everything coming after Kant as part of a new epoch. Thus, in German aesthetics, the nineteenth century might begin after 1790. But we have already treated several prominent authors whose main works in aesthetics were published later in the 1790s, or even the first decade of the 1800s, namely Schiller, Goethe, von Humboldt, and even Herbart, in the 1

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

2

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 2

last chapter of the previous book, because of their intellectual proximity to Kant; and Herder’s Kalligone, published in 1800, which some might regard as the last year of the eighteenth century and others as the first year of the nineteenth century, certainly had to be treated there because it is so explicitly a critique of Kant. However, a new school of philosophy, still conceiving of itself in relation to Kant but breaking more radically with his thought, namely the era of German Idealism, while it would become the dominant school of thought in Germany in the first half of the calendar’s nineteenth century, and reverberate in Anglo-American thought for much of the second half of the century, began as early as 1794, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s first Wissenschaftslehre (“Theory of Science”), before Schiller had even published his main essays in aesthetics; and Fichte’s precocious colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was also well-embarked on his publishing career before the end of the 1790s. In addition, the broader German artistic and intellectual movement known as Romanticism, although that is generally considered a nineteenth-century movement, was also well under way before the end of the decade, and that movement had reverberations within academic philosophy. So, in the end, perhaps we can only say that in German aesthetics the eighteenth century continued into the 1790s and the nineteenth century began in the same decade, depending upon what figures and movements we are considering. And that is how I have proceeded and will continue to proceed, with some of the figures I have already discussed as part of the eighteenth century, such as Schiller, Goethe, and Herbart, nevertheless having remained active in the 1790s or well beyond, while others who are now to be discussed, such as the two Friedrichs, Hölderlin and Schlegel, representing the Romantics, and Schelling, the first representative of German Idealism, having at least begun their careers in the 1790s as well.

As we will see, the question where to begin the nineteenth century in the history of aesthetics is largely a question about where to begin it in Germany, since while in the eighteenth century there was great activity in the field in Britain and France as well as in Germany, although German aesthetics in that period was more affected by British and French developments than the other way around, in the first part of the nineteenth century Germany was definitely the center of new developments in aesthetics while the subject largely disappeared from the British or indeed the Anglo-American academy. Moreover, such extra-academic authors in Britain and America who did make significant contributions to the field, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

3

John Stuart Mill, to some considerable extent worked in the penumbra of the German philosophers, particularly Schelling. We will return to a truly independent British tradition in aesthetics only when we turn to the work of John Ruskin beginning in the 1840s, a figure who might seem to be more of an art (and social) critic than a philosophical aesthetician, but who was both so strongly influenced by the previous British tradition in aesthetics and had such an impact on the subsequent development of more philosophical aesthetics in Britain that he cannot be left out of our story. German aesthetics rather than its own eighteenthcentury tradition was largely dominant in France in the first part of the nineteenth century too, as we will see when we comment on the work of Victor Cousin (although France will play a smaller role in the remainder of this work than it did in the eighteenth century).

When we try to find an end for the nineteenth century, developments in Britain and America will become as important as developments in Germany, and we will find that in all three national traditions we will again have to allow the end of the nineteenth century to overlap with the beginning of the twentieth century. In Germany, we can use 1914 as the dividing line between the centuries, because the two movements that still were dominant up until that date, namely Neo-Kantianism and the “empathy” schools, had their origins as early as the 1870s, and radically different movements, such as the aesthetics of Heidegger and his followers, did not begin until after the Great War – although Heidegger’s unique form of realism began as a critique of Neo-Kantianism, thus the dividing line of 1914 may be sharp but is hardly an impermeable barrier.

So our discussions of the aesthetics of Neo-Kantianism and empathy will continue past 1900, and indeed our discussion of the empathy school will include consideration of several American and British texts, deeply influenced by the German leaders of the school, published between 1905 and as late as 1913. In Britain and America, however, things are more complicated. The leading aesthetician in Britain at the turn of the century was Bernard Bosanquet and the leading aesthetician in America at that time was George Santayana; their first books in aesthetics respectively, Bosanquet’s History of Æsthetic and Santayana’s Sense of Beauty, were published just four years apart, in 1892 and 1896, and both authors could easily be treated as nineteenth-century figures. But even though Bosanquet published another important work in aesthetics as late as 1915, Santayana remained productive throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and thus, while I will treat Bosanquet’s work as the culmination of nineteenth-century aesthetics in Britain, I will treat

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

4

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 2

Santayana as founding twentieth-century aesthetics in America. This means that Clive Bell’s widely discussed Art of 1914, although it could easily be treated as a late document of the nineteenth-century “art for art’s sake” movement, will be treated as part of twentieth-century British aesthetics, and that makes sense too, because Bell’s work was so closely associated with the literary and artistic circle known as “Bloomsbury,” focused around the two Stephens sisters, Virginia Wolff and Vanessa Bell (Clive’s wife), and that is very much a movement of the twentieth century.

Another decision that has to be made here is where, both chronologically and nationally, to discuss the Italian Benedetto Croce. Italian aesthetics as such has not been and will not be part of the story told here, although a case could certainly be made that our discussion of eighteenth-century aesthetics should have made room for Giambattista Vico; but Croce was such an influential figure in British aesthetics into the 1930s and even beyond that British aesthetics in that period cannot be understood without him, and therefore his work will be discussed as part of the history of British aesthetics. And likewise, while the publication date of his first main work in aesthetics in 1902 and even his second main contribution in 1913 might allow for his inclusion in the nineteenth century, his impact on twentieth-century British aesthetics clearly calls for his inclusion there. So, in this work the history of nineteenthcentury British aesthetics will conclude with Bernard Bosanquet, and, strange as it might seem, the history of twentieth-century British aesthetics will begin with Benedetto Croce.

So much for the chronology of this and the next volume. Now for a few words on the substance of the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics to be presented in this volume. As we saw in Volume 1, Kant’s philosophy of fine art synthesized his version of the theory that the intrinsically pleasurable free play of our mental powers is the essence of aesthetic experience that was developed in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland and Germany with a version of the theory that aesthetic experience is a distinctive form of the apprehension of truth that had been the core of aesthetic theory since the time of Aristotle. Kant brought these two strands of aesthetic theory together in his conception of “aesthetic ideas” as the source of “spirit” in fine art and of genius as the uniquely artistic capacity for the creation and communication of aesthetic ideas, for, by means of this concept, he postulated that in both the production and the reception of fine art the imagination freely plays with and around the intellectual content furnished by ideas of reason. A natural response to Kant’s

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

5

twofold synthesis would have been to add to it the third main line of thought in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the emphasis on the emotional impact of art by such figures as Du Bos and Kames that Kant had held at arm’s length, indeed explicitly rejected, and that a few in the 1790s, such as Heydenreich and Herder, had attempted to preserve. But that is not what happened. Instead, even Kant’s twofold synthesis was quickly sundered by the next generation, and Kant’s combination of the aesthetics of play with the aesthetics of truth as well as the aesthetics of emotional impact were rejected in favor of a purely cognitivist aesthetics. This is particularly evident in the three great aesthetic theories to take the stage after Kant, those of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. While each preserved some of the outward trappings of Kant’s aesthetics, they each transformed Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas as a form of free play with truth back into a more traditional conception of an apprehension of truth that is certainly different from other forms of cognition but does not really involve an element of free play. Schelling and Schopenhauer in particular both rejected Kant’s idea that aesthetic experience is intrinsically pleasurable because it is a free play of our mental powers, replacing that theory with the view that for the most part aesthetic experience is pleasurable only because it releases us from the pain of some otherwise inescapable contradiction in the human condition. To borrow terms used by Edmund Burke a half-century earlier, they replace Kant’s conception of aesthetic response as a “positive pleasure” with a conception of it as “the removal of pain” or “delight” as a merely “negative” or “relative” form of pleasure.1 In particular, even though Schopenhauer recognizes that there is some pleasure in aesthetic response that goes beyond mere relief at the removal of pain, he explicitly identifies the pleasure of aesthetic experience with relief from all other emotions, thus clearly rejecting that the arousal of emotions in any form is an essential or characteristic aim of art. Thus both he and Schelling nevertheless maintain that all of the pleasure in aesthetic experience comes through cognition alone rather than from a free play of our cognitive powers. In the case of Hegel, while his thesis that artistic beauty is the sensible appearance of what he calls “the Idea” can be taken as his version of Kant’s own theory of aesthetic ideas as the spirit of fine art, both the theories that aesthetic experience is a form of play and the theory that art aims at the arousal of emotions – which Hegel associates with Mendelssohn – are explicitly 1

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Part One, sections III–V.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

6

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 2

rejected. All three thus transmute Kant’s aesthetics back into a version of cognitivism.

Before we turn to Schelling, we will begin this part with a brief discussion of the aesthetics of German Romanticism, to be represented here primarily by the work of Friedrich Schlegel although with a briefer comment on the work of Friedrich Hölderlin as well. From a philosophical point of view, the aesthetics of Romanticism might be regarded as a new version of the Neo-Platonism of Shaftesbury of a century earlier, thus presenting a potential for seeing art as offering the possibility of a three-way synthesis of our responses to the true, the good, and the beautiful; but Romanticism was a short-lived movement, at least in philosophy, shoved off the stage by Idealism precisely because its theory of art was not exclusively cognitivist; this is explicit in Hegel. And, pausing to look at a broader range of cultural figures in Germany, Britain, and America before we turn from Schelling to Schopenhauer, we will see that it was the philosophy of Schelling and not of Schlegel that was the dominant influence; thus, Jean Paul, Coleridge, and Emerson were all strongly influenced by Schelling. Meanwhile, within more professional philosophy, it was Hegel who dominated the scene in the decade before his death in 1831 and for several decades afterward, in spite of some resistance even in Berlin, such as from the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who defended something closer to Kant’s earlier theory of play. But Schleiermacher’s lectures on aesthetics, which began shortly after Hegel joined him at the university in Berlin, did not have the same influence as Hegel’s.

Hegel’s influence would remain strong in Germany at least until about 1860, when Neo-Kantianism began, as much as a form of resistance to Hegelianism as a genuine revival of Kantianism. Thus leading aestheticians of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, such as Christian Hermann Weisse, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Rudolf Lotze, all worked within recognizably Hegelian frameworks, although we will see that some of these thinkers, especially Vischer, began to make room for the Kantian idea of free play and for the recognition of the emotional impact of art as well within the confines of their Hegelian framework.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s son Robert Vischer would emphasize the idea of “empathy,” the reading of our own emotions back into inanimate objects, as one way of making room for an emotional response to art, and that would generate a whole school of German empathy theorists that had influence in Britain and the United States as well, lasting beyond 1900. At the same time, the Neo-Kantians, in both their Marburg

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

7

and Southwestern schools, would make room for the emotional impact of art within a framework that is not particularly Kantian at all, by seeing art as a vehicle for the cognition of our own emotions. This approach will still be visible in Britain half a century later, in the aesthetics of R.G. Collingwood, although he was more overtly influenced by Benedetto Croce’s idiosyncratic mixture of Kantianism and Hegelianism. That, however, will be addressed in Volume 3.

Meanwhile, Schopenhauer, although he had published his main work on aesthetics – the third book of The World as Will and Representation – the same year that Hegel merely began lecturing on the subject at Berlin (and when Schleiermacher gave his less influential lectures as well) was eclipsed by the fame of Hegel, and his star began to rise only later, especially during the years of pessimism that followed the failed liberal revolutions of 1848 across Europe. But once Schopenhauer’s star did rise, he had enormous influence, on the practice of the arts, especially literature and music, but also within philosophy, if not exactly academic philosophy, through Nietzsche and the now less known Eduard von Hartmann (Nietzsche was an academic for a decade, but a classical philologist, not a philosopher). In the case of Nietzsche in particular, we will see that while his first book and his only book devoted exclusively to aesthetics, The Birth of Tragedy, was very much influenced by Schopenhauer, in some passages in later work he began to revive the Kantian idea of free play.

We shall also see that the famous “art for art’s sake” movement, identified more with literary figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde than with professional philosophers, and certainly not overtly influenced by Schopenhauer, can nevertheless be associated with the Schopenhauerian idea of art as an instrument for detachment from concerns of ordinary life. That attitude in turn can be seen as carrying over into some twentieth-century movements, such as the Bloomsbury aesthetics of Clive Bell and Roger Fry, although again that will be a matter for Volume 3. At the same time, these British movements, both the later stages of the art for art’s sake movement or aestheticism, as it is also called, as well as the Bloomsbury aesthetics of the early twentieth century – can also be seen as rejecting the underlying cognitivism of the main home-grown form of aesthetics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, namely the aesthetics of John Ruskin, so Ruskin will also be considered in the present volume. I shall conclude this part by looking at two other fin-de-siècle theorists, namely Bernard Bosanquet and Leo Tolstoy, who, though very different in almost every way, nevertheless shared a reductive rather than expansive approach to aesthetic theory.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03804-2 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

8

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 2

Bosanquet, part of the British Hegelianism that flourished in the late nineteenth century while Neo-Kantianism was replacing Hegelianism in German itself, maintained a basically cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience. Tolstoy, on the contrary, promulgated an aesthetics of emotional arousal, but one of such narrow scope – for him, the sole function of art is the communication of religiously beneficial emotions – that he set back the cause of recognizing the emotional impact of art as much as the Idealism of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel had done at the beginning of the century. Collingwood’s argument that only the clarification of emotions and not the arousal of emotions can be a legitimate aim of art, to be considered in Volume 3, can be understood as a rejection of Tolstoy’s view, even forty years later.

Around the same time as Nietzsche was taking some steps toward reviving the theory of play, the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, a much less orthodox Neo-Kantian than either his Marburg or Southwest contemporaries, developed a “poetics” that came as close as anything in the nineteenth century did to reestablishing a threefold synthesis of the aesthetics of truth, feeling, and play that had been hinted at by a few of Kant’s immediate predecessors or successors but that had been rejected by Kant himself. However, Dilthey’s version of a threefold synthesis would remain an isolated example of aesthetic nonreductivism in the nineteenth century.

These are some of the figures and themes to be considered in the present volume. Let us now turn to them.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

In Volume 1, we saw how two alternatives were developed during the course of the eighteenth century to the traditional approach to aesthetic experience as a form of cognition or insight into truth, what has been called here the aesthetics of truth, namely, the idea that aesthetic experience is a free play of our cognitive or more broadly mental powers, the aesthetics of play, and the recognition of the emotional impact of aesthetic experience, especially the experience of art, the aesthetics of emotional impact. A few thinkers, including Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Georg Sulzer in Germany and Lord Kames in Britain, at least suggested a comprehensive attitude to aesthetic experience synthesizing all three of these, but Immanuel Kant rejected the importance of emotional response in aesthetic experience and in his theory of fine art combined only the traditional aesthetics of truth with the novel aesthetics of play. Among Kant’s immediate contemporaries and successors, a few made gestures toward adding emotional impact into Kant’s mix.

But as we saw in Volume 2, the predominant response among Kant’s most prominent successors in the early nineteenth century was not to add emotional impact back into a comprehensive aesthetic theory; rather, they accepted Kant’s exclusion of emotional impact but also rejected his theory of play, thus reverting to an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetics, although with a decidedly metaphysical twist.

This was certainly true in the cases of Friedrich Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, although their contemporary Friedrich Schleiermacher sketched an aesthetic theory comprehending all three approaches, and some of the figures to whom the influence of Schelling was communicated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, such as William Wordworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Stuart Mill, also sought to recognize the emotional impact as well as 1

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

2

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 3

cognitive significance of art, particularly poetry, even if they stopped short of recognizing the element of sheer play in aesthetic experience.

In the generation that followed Hegel, Friedrich Theodor Vischer especially tried to make room for both the Kantian aspect of play and the non-Kantian aspect of emotion in aesthetic experience, the latter under the term “empathy” that was developed into an approach to aesthetics by his son Robert, Theodor Lipps, and others. Friedrich Nietzsche, after his early work under the influence of Schopenhauer, also sought room for the idea of play, and some of the critics associated with the aestheticist movement, namely, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, suggested comprehensive rather than reductive approaches to aesthetics. Among the Neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Dilthey, a student of Schleiermacher as well as of Kant, recognized the compatibility and equal importance of cognition, imagination, and emotion in his poetics.

But as we now turn to the twentieth century, we will see that this comprehensive approach to aesthetics was not immediately pursued.

In Germany, very different thinkers such as the Marxists Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno, on the one hand, and the existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, on the other, adopted purely cognitivist approaches to aesthetics, thus reprising the history of German aesthetics a century earlier, although eventually Herbert Marcuse on the Marxist side and Hans-Georg Gadamer on the Heideggerian side tried to make room for free play in their conceptions of aesthetic experience.

In Britain, two major influences at the outset of the twentieth century were the cognitivist theory of Benedetto Croce and the formalist theory of the Bloomsbury writer Clive Bell, both reductive theories, and British aestheticians then struggled to broaden those conceptions of aesthetic experience and the aesthetically significant aspects of art. In the United States, twentieth-century aesthetics, indeed aesthetics as a branch of academic philosophy at all, can be regarded as beginning with the 1896 work of George Santayana and reaching a characteristically American form in the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey. The examples of Santayana and Dewey encouraged a more comprehensive approach to aesthetics in the United States than elsewhere, as will be seen from our examination of some now-less-well-known aestheticians from the first half of the century who deserve to be remembered, foremost among them DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene, and D.W. Gotshalk.

At midcentury, however, the enormous impact of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the field of aesthetics, resisted at first perhaps only by Monroe Beardsley, steeped as he was in the thought of Kant and Dewey,

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

3

once again produced a narrowing of approach in aesthetics, and only the efforts of some of the most creative philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, such as Richard Wollheim and Stanley Cavell, suggested ways to restore a broad rather than narrow approach to aesthetics. In an Epilogue, we will consider how the relations among the three main modern approaches to aesthetics have continued to play out among a small sample of recent contributors to the field.

As mentioned in the General Introduction to this work, the present volume will, with very few exceptions, omit discussion of French aesthetic theory in the twentieth century. There are multiple reasons for this. For one, the reception of recent French aesthetic theory in the United States and Britain has been far greater in the fields of literary and cultural studies than in academic philosophy, at least in philosophy with an “analytic” orientation, and the present work reflects the latter orientation, indeed could perhaps fairly be said to tell the history of aesthetics insofar as it leads up to philosophical aesthetics as practiced in analytically oriented departments in the United States, Britain, and Germany at the present time. And this fact about the reception of recent French aesthetics is not an accident. Much recent French thought, paradigmatically that of the late Jacques Derrida but of many others as well, has been a “poststructuralist” response to the “structuralism” of the linguist Ferdinand DeSaussure and the anthropologist Claude-Levi Strauss. The structuralists approached various forms of human thought and activity on the model of a language with fixed syntactical and semantical categories (the “structure”), and the poststructuralist response has been to argue, in myriad ways befitting the thesis, that language is not like that, but instead consists of an indeterminate and indeed effectively infinite possibility of internal relations, with meaning always “deferred” from one term to another and never fixed by either a unified subject or a unified world of objects. Common to both structuralism and poststructuralism has been the assumption that the object of investigation – whether language literally, human social relations, or works of art – is always a “text” that stands on its own, either allowing or defeating interpretation. This approach may have its merits, but it is fundamentally different from the underlying assumption of aesthetic theory in Britain, the United States, and Germany throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and certainly in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well, namely, that works of art do not exist on their own, but are products of as well as triggers of human experience of an objective world, an experience of which aesthetic experience may be one distinctive form

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

4

A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 3

but one that still is part of a genuine interaction between real subjects and real objects. For this reason, it seems to me that poststructuralism is difficult to integrate into the history of mainstream modern aesthetics as it has developed from the eighteenth century onward, and I have chosen to tell the latter. A second reason is a matter not merely of space and time but also of justice: To tell the story of French aesthetic theory in the twentieth century not only would have added years to the already lengthy gestation of this work, but would either have required either an additional volume of its own or else the elimination of a great deal of the material included in the present volume. But the latter option would no doubt have meant the elimination of a great deal of my discussion of the now-little-known accomplishments of American and British aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century, and that is not a price I would have been willing to pay; on the contrary, the retrieval of the work of such figures as Samuel Alexander, DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene, and many more, and even the rescue of the work of the never completely forgotten R.G. Collingwood from its customary simplification or even caricature, have, as it turned out, become one of the primary ambitions of this volume.

Meanwhile, there has been no dearth of expository work on the recent French thinkers whom I will not be discussing.1 For reasons of space, I will also be omitting discussion of the treatment of aesthetics within the phenomenological approach to philosophy initiated by Edmund Husserl, with the notable exception of Martin Heidegger, without whom no history of twentieth-century aesthetics or twentieth-century philosophy more generally could make any pretense to completeness. There are certainly figures within the phenomenological movement who continue to be read and continue to be worthy of being read, and who could be discussed among the heirs to Heidegger, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the latter’s several essays on perception in the visual arts, especially his famous essay “Cezanne’s Doubts,” are gems.2 The Polish literary theorist Roman

1

2

See, for example, Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader, second edition (London: Routledge, 2011); numerous works by Frederic Jameson beginning with The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); numerous works

by Jean-Michel Rabaté, e.g., The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Post-Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), Part III; and Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

This essay and several others are conveniently collected, along with commentaries, in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Introduction

5

Ingarden,3 influenced more by Husserl than by Heidegger, would also be worthy of inclusion, along with other Polish aestheticians such as Stefan Morawski4 and the historian Władysław Tatarkiewicz, author of a threevolume History of Aesthetics 5 that stops at the end of the seventeenth century, just where the present one begins. Much of this work, as Ingarden’s titles in particular suggest, could readily be assimilated to what I have called in this book the cognitivist tradition in modern aesthetics, and the discussion of it would show that the interest of this approach was far from being exhausted in the twentieth century. But as my interest in this volume lies more in describing the way leading aestheticians in the twentieth century attempted to break out from a purely cognitivist approach rather than just adding more detail to it, and as, again, in the course of my work on this volume I arrived at the ambition of conducting an exercise of retrieval on behalf of pre-Wittgensteinian Anglophone aesthetics, I am going to have to exclude discussion of all this material. As is evident, the present volume is large enough already.

3

4

5

See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and the Theory of Literature, trans. George C. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); and Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, Painting, Architecture, the Film, trans. Raymond Meyer with John T. Goldthwait (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989).

Stefan Morawski, Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics, foreword by Monroe C. Beardsley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974).

Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1970–4). This work is more of a sourcebook than a work of interpretation, although it remains of value precisely for that reason. Tatarkiewicz’s more interpretative work is History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics, trans. Christopher Kasparek (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980).

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

Part One

GERMAN AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

G

erman writers dominated the field of aesthetics in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, and their prominence in the preceding narrative, in the last part of Volume 1 and through much of Volume 2, has reflected that fact. German intellectual life, indeed German life in general, was repeatedly disrupted in the twentieth century, by the First World War, by the rise of National Socialism and the Second World War and the enforced emigration or destruction of many professors and writers, largely but not exclusively Jewish, that accompanied those events, and then by the division of the nation and the Cold War that followed; and German philosophy including aesthetics was not excepted from all these upheavals. But in spite of and to some extent because of all these disruptions, as well as because of the tradition of German aesthetics over the preceding two centuries, debate over the nature and value of the arts and of experience of them remained lively throughout the twentieth century. In order to make room for the extensive development of aesthetics in twentieth-century Britain and the United States, our survey of twentieth-century German aesthetics will have to be even more selective than were our surveys of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury German aesthetics. But we will nevertheless consider a number of the most important German (or German-writing) aestheticians of the twentieth century, including Georg Lukács and Martin Heidegger (although not others in Germany, France, or Poland who hewed more closely to the original phenomenology of Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl), whose views were formed in the period between the two world wars, and who may to some extent be taken as representing left- and right-wing thought during those years, and then Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, who although they to some extent carried on the interwar debates, published their most important 7

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

8

German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

works after the Second World War, and, at least in the case of Gadamer and Marcuse, in spite of both having begun as students of Heidegger, introduced a new theme, or reintroduced an old one, into twentiethcentury German aesthetics, namely, the idea of play. We will also briefly consider several more contemporary German figures, including Dieter Henrich, in turn the foremost student of Gadamer.

Š in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

1 German Aesthetics between the Wars Lukács and Heidegger

It might seem strange to take György Lukács (1885–1971) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) as the main examples of German aesthetics between the two world wars. Not only were there other important philosophers who wrote on aesthetics (such as Ernst Cassirer, whom however we will consider as part of the history of twentieth-century aesthetics in the United States, where at least until recently his influence was much greater than in Germany); not only was Lukács not German at all, but Hungarian (although, like many other urban Hungarian Jews, he was of German descent, and throughout his life wrote his main works in German); above all, they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Lukács known as a Marxist for most of his life and even flourishing in the Stalinist Soviet Union while Heidegger was permanently tainted by his affiliation with the Nazis in the 1930s even if he withdrew from any official position other than his professorship after his year as the Nazi-appointed rector of his university in 1933–4 (he retained his membership in the party until the end of the war). But in spite of all their differences, Lukács and Heidegger shared one trait that binds them together and makes them representative of German aesthetics in their time: a focus on art and aesthetic experience as a vehicle of important truth, truth about human society in the case of Lukács and about human being itself, as something even more fundamental than society, in the case of Heidegger. For that reason they will be considered together in this chapter. Ernst Cassirer, who might also be considered a major contributor to aesthetics during the interwar period, had his major influence in the United States after World War II and for that reason will be considered in our discussion of American rather than German aesthetics.

9

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03805-9 - A History of Modern Aesthetics: Volume 3: The Twentieth Century Paul Guyer Excerpt More information

10

German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

1. Lukács The extraordinary devastation of World War I marked a caesura throughout European culture, academic philosophy by no means excluded, but above all in Germany: While some individuals who had made their mark before 1914 made further contributions after 1918 (for example, Volkelt and Groos) and a few who had just begun to work before 1914 reached the height of their powers after 1918, it is natural to divide German intellectual history, including German philosophy, into the period before 1914, still essentially part of the nineteenth century, and the period after 1918, which can itself be divided into the period before the Second World War and the period after. The first of these periods will concern us in this chapter, and the second in the next.

One figure who started his career before the war and even continued it during the war but who wrote his most substantial works after the war, indeed for fifty years after the war, was György Lukács. Lukács was born in Hungary and spent some fateful periods of his life there, but he studied and worked in Germany and Austria and then, when as both a Communist and a Jew, he became unwelcome there, he spent the years of the Third Reich in the Soviet Union. But his work in aesthetics, with which he began and ended his career, was not only deeply rooted in the history of German aesthetics but also written largely in German, so it can be discussed as part of the history of German aesthetics. In German Lukács published under the name “Georg” rather than “György,” and so we can henceforth refer to him.

Lukács was born in 1885, the son of a Jewish bank director in Budapest (originally named “Löwinger”), who would often support his son financially even after the latter became an active Communist and thus attacked the class that made his own existence possible. After an early attempt at a career as a dramatist, Lukács studied law and economy and received a degree in public administration in 1906. But he would put that expertise to work only briefly in a stint as minister of education in the short-lived Hungarian Republic of 1919; otherwise, he devoted himself to literature and philosophy. He received another degree in 1909 for the first chapters of what would be published as A History of the Development of the Modern Drama in Hungarian in 1911; in that same year Lukács published his first work in German, a collection of essays entitled The Soul and the Forms.1 His Jewish background blocked him from an academic 1

György Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

© in this web service Cambridge University Press

www.cambridge.org