I recently finished reading Noel Carroll's remarkable book Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, and the result was a newfound appreciation for aesthetics and art, and it even caused me to change my mind regarding some of the untested assumptions I had regarding art. For example, I regularly meet with a writing group and we workshop short stories. The other guys in the writing group have published their short fiction; I haven't. One of the members' way of writing irked me for a long time because I couldn't see enough of the author in the work. I secretly resented some of his stories because he didn't explore a topic that would present him as an author as vulnerable or embarrassed: no admissions of loneliness or depression, nothing of making a fool of himself in public. It wasn't until I read Carroll's book that I realized I was operating under a tacit assumption: Art ought to express something of the author's emotions. But of course this is a Romantic view, and surely not found in all works of art. In fact, if I really thought this were true, it would exclude whole swaths of art I very much love, art that seems to say very little about the author's own vulnerabilities or emotions. What in The Odyssey, for instance, lets the reader know what gave Homer the blues?
Carroll's book is very good at setting up various theories of art and examining their strengths and weaknesses before moving on to the next. When I began reading the book, I thought this was a futile enterprise. It seemed an odd exercise of typical analytic philosophy, to set up a book that tries to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for what makes a work of art what it is, just to knock it down and maybe ultimately reveal in the end that nobody can give any necessary and sufficient conditions. That is not what this book did. Carroll takes seriously the theories he explores, and one of his values seems to be that there is something that can be learned from these theories of art.
Take the theory that is as old as Plato and Aristotle that says that art is just an imitation of reality. Even if we ultimately dismiss this theory as insufficient (e.g., how to account for non-representational art), we can discover from those philosophers who proposed art as representation some important facts about the nature of representational art. For instance, we might gain a newfound appreciation for the design of a representational work of art, how difficult it is to make the formal properties and their relations cohere to actually make, say, a painting of a woman in a kimono resemble a real life woman in a kimono. (Of course in the picture below, the photograph came later.)
Carroll's book can be awfully opinionated as well, as with the concept of disinterestedness and aesthetic experience. He never mentions Immanuel Kant by name but his presence looms large over the chapter on aesthetics. As you may remember from the Kant episode, disinterestedness toward art would involve approaching a work of art without ulterior purposes—impartially, in other words. According to Kant, we ought to attend only to the formal organization of the work.
Objections immediately arise to this view of disinterestedness. Perhaps the most important objection is what to do about artwork produced with religious, political or ulterior purposes in mind. How else to appreciate, for instance, what the image of Rosie the Riveter is doing unless we consider it in context, that is, as an attempt to encourage people, especially women, to contribute to the war effort in WWII? The art theorist or philosopher who would still encourage us to only attend to the work of art in terms of beauty by looking at its formal organization would seem to be asking us to miss the point of the work, Carroll wants to say. And this is not the only example of artwork created with personal or larger social interests at the core of its creation. The history of the art world has been replete with examples of art that contain representational and expressive properties, in addition to formal properties, that we're supposed to pay attention to.
In Carroll's view, that's what is really at the heart of Kant's concerns and the other people who espouse disinterest toward art and other manifestations of beauty: attention and concentration. According to Carroll, the problem is that our attention and concentration in view of beauty can come in degrees--we can be more or less attentive or concentrated. But we can never have disinterested attention in view of what is beautiful. By paying attention or failing to, we necessarily are not impartial to what we're taking to be beautiful.
Kant held in The Critique of Judgment that "taste is still barbaric which needs a mixture of charms and emotions in order that there may be satisfaction, and still more so if it makes these the measures of its assent." As much as some of us may have misgivings about consumer society, it would be difficult to find someone whose taste does not include a love for charms or at least some art that doesn't possess emotional properties. Call this objection of Carroll's "the way aesthetic experience actually works." This, coupled with the claim that at least some art is made to provoke partiality, should make us doubt Kant's view, Carroll thinks.
The central topics of Noel Carroll's book are indicated by its chapters: the book deals with representation, expression, form, aesthetics, and defining and identifying art. Instead of moving through each chapter, however, I would like to propose some questions that might provoke some of your intuitions regarding aesthetics and art. I'd be curious to see what your opinions would be regarding these questions before and after reading the book.
To play fair, I'll give you my answers, without any presumption on my part that the answers I have provided are adequate, let alone definitive.
1. What is your favorite work of art? How would you describe your relationship with it?
My favorite work of pictorial art these days is Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893), and I am especially partial to the 1895 lithograph because I had the privilege of seeing it in person recently, on display in Seoul's Museum of Modern Art in Korea. I have a copy of it hanging on my wall in my apartment. Munch described his inspiration for the work in an 1892 diary entry:
One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.
The expression on the screaming man's face in the work looks almost comical to millennials like me who first saw this grab-your-face-and-yell gesture on the VHS box cover of the 1990 film Home Alone. Even though my love for the piece sits uncomfortably alongside my love for other art (I prefer Renaissance and Baroque pictography), it is not an ironic appreciation; it is just that I and my millennial friends come to it with more cultural baggage than its early 20th century audience would have carried to it—with baggage heavy enough to make us appreciate the work more if we're careful about it. The absurd associations we could make with the work highlight the absurdity of the action and in turn the absurdity of the sentiment that the work is trying to express. Imagine yourself walking along the bridge, a well-dressed couple, cheerily predisposed, passing you by, the sun setting to your left, when all of a sudden you are hit with the thought you and all the people you love are going to die. You know it would be strange to grab your face and scream out in horror, yet somehow you think it would be appropriate in a moment when you realize your own mortality, and you wonder why everybody isn't showing their horror of death more often. This thought hits me like a punch to the gut. And that's why I love it.
2. Does the appreciation of beauty make us better (perhaps more moral?) human beings?
I think an aesthetic approach to art or to people and objects in the world is essential to being a human being but it's fundamentally different from approaching the world ethically—or logically, scientifically, spiritually, or mythically for that matter. Experiencing the world aesthetically is a matter of paying attention to the form and particular qualities of something. It's possible to do this with a work of art but it can just as easily be done when viewing an oak, a person's face, or a dog's paw. The kinds of qualities that are particularly aesthetic qualities are qualities of expression, as when something appears somber or serious; qualities of taste, as when something looks kitschy or cheap; or qualities of unity, diversity, motion, and so on, which are often called Gestalt qualities, and are a matter of playing on the ways in which we're psychologically constituted and things appear to us.
Consider George Cooke's "Tallulah Falls," and the way its rows of trees really do appear like a mountain side, and the way the river really looks like it's flowing and how the man who is reaching out toward the tree looks precariously close to the edge. Nothing about the appreciation of this beautiful work entails a moral-ethical approach. A moral-ethical approach means looking at the world as being consistent with a good life, or promoting or preserving positive relations with others, including those regarding care, fairness, freedom, group loyalty, legitimate authority, and purity. There is overlap between viewing the world aesthetically and ethically, to be sure, but one approach does not entail the other.
3. In what sense is art an imitation of reality?
Art is clearly not always an imitation of reality, and so art imitates reality only if an artist designs an artwork such that its form, relation, and properties create the illusion that what appears in the artwork approximates people, objects, and events in the world. If you consider non-representational art, however, like Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space," it doesn't look as though the artist is trying to represent something. A clever viewer might say that Brancusi captured the swoop of a bird in flight but even if that's so it's stretching it to regard Brancusi, therefore, as creating a work of art that is imitative or representational art. In fact, U.S. Customs officials set off a legal battle regarding this piece in 1926 about whether the piece should even be regarded as a work of art.
4. Is a copy of a great work of art itself a work of art?
I think so, although I have no idea how I'd go about checking whether or not this is the kind of proposition that can be true or false. Any reader feedback regarding this would be helpful.
5. What is it that makes some things art while others are not art?
A work of art has some special formal relations and properties but outside of that I don't know of a surefire way to determine what art is. The subject is a matter of great debate and is often determined by an ongoing dialogue, not only within the art-world but also among groups of ordinary people, and sometimes the issue even makes it to the courts, where for legal expediency a decision has to be made. Just to delight your fancy, think of the work of art below by Michael Craig-Martin titled "An Oak Tree." Just in case you can't see, it's a glass of water sitting in the near-middle of a transparent shelf attached to the art wall. Your grandmother might not have thought it art, but the art-world does today.
Okay, I fibbed. One more question:
6. Do you think Carroll characterized Kant's position on disinterest fairly?
What do you think?
I think Carroll seriously misstates Kant’s aesthetics, although it is a common mistake. Kant never really speaks of “art” in the first half of the Critique of Judgment, but is instead thinking of “aesthetic judgment.” There is a wonderful passage early on in the book when he discusses looking at different things – some art, some not – and describing different ways of looking at them. One example that sticks with me is his description of a palace and admiring it or hating it for its political content. All well and good, he says. But that’s not aesthetic judgment. That’s a different sort of judgment.
This sort of distinction between art – which Kant doesn’t seem to particularly care about – and aesthetic judgment is impossible to miss for anyone who has read the Critique of Judgment with moderate sensitivity. His favorite example of beauty is the flower. His example of sublimity is the stars. For Kant, the ability to judge something as better or worse, beautiful or not, with no ground whatsoever, and to really never be able to communicate that love of the object to anyone in a convincing or rational way (he calls this :universal subjectivity” or something like that – I don’t have the text in front of me) – THAT experience, THAT faculty of judgment is the epitome of humankind’s freedom, and is a central faculty of the human mind which presupposes its freedom. Form is a bit under-theorized in the work, in my opinion, but it’s more-or-less, I think, a remainder after taking away rational interests – the sorts of things we can argue convincingly about. Form is what we can point out to someone, can communicate to someone, that helps explain the beautiful (to me only), that does not require assent to some other interest. What it clearly ISN’T is a cudgel that requires formalism in artistic production – it isn’t what it was made to be in the writings of late Clement Greenberg, for example.
(On that last point, it’s fun to remember that Greenberg initially loved Pollock for his paintings’ allegedly socialistic implications.)
With Kant’s palace example, I don’t know how someone would be able to subdue their prejudices completely. Is it enough to be in the neighborhood of an aesthetic judgement? Would the first step be an awareness that you aren’t thinking aesthetically?
Thanks for the reply, Chad. I don’t think it’s so much about getting rid of “prejudice” for Kant. I think it’s more the idea that when you say, “I like this work of art because it supports socialism,” what you’re really saying is “I like anything that supports socialism,” and so you’re ignoring the art piece as something distinct from yourself. Honestly, I think the idea of form in Kant is just his way of trying to get around the tautology of “I like this because it’s beautiful,” but I think he’s just saying that the aesthetic faculty is a real faculty that people can use and exercise, and it’s qualitatively different from the teleological faculty (“I like this because it furthers/supports x goal/position”). I think a person asking themselves whether they were exercising their aesthetic faculty should say to themselves, “Do I like this because I like something else that is external to this thing but that references that external idea or reminds me of it, or do I like this thing in itself, because it exists as it is?”
Also, I thought I’d go ahead and answer the other questions that Billie posed:
1) My favorite work is still Manet’s Olympia. When I finally had the chance to see it in person, I think I spent an hour staring at it. (“Dejeuner sur L’herbe” comes in second with a thirty minute glance.) I, along with everyone else in the world, love the defiance of the reclining woman’s gaze, the mixture of flatness and depth in the tones of the white and black skin, the brilliant display of color in the floral bouquet, and that damned cat. The composition is perfect, allowing your eye to constantly move, but to do so slowly and linger, and each of the parts flows into the next, until you’re lost in an endless circle. It’s erotic and unerotic, seductive and distancing, brilliant and matter-of-fact all at the same time, and purely unique. It’s a painting that is an individual. And the impossible anatomy of the nude woman, along with the screech of the cat, and the explosion of the bouquet, remind you of the unreality of it all, and the unreality of desire. It’s the very definition of the viewer’s relationship to the painting, without assailing or judging the viewer (at least, not too harshly) for it.
2) I’m a fan of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, but I don’t think an appreciation of beauty is necessary or sufficient to make someone good. There has to be an extra element – the self-willed cultivation of taste – and it can’t overwhelm the reality of the world. Plenty of aesthetes with great taste have been bad people. Plenty of philistines have lived good lives. But I think the cultivation of taste can lead a person to view art and beauty as uniquely themselves, and capable of being good in themselves (it’s a pseudo-Aristotelianism), and thus lead to an expanded view of and appreciation of empathy. I think it’s one of the best tools to get there.
3) I think art is only an imitation in the sense that it is an attempt – sort of like the mad scientist’s – to create a new living thing, one that stands apart and is only itself. It is not an imitation in the sense that it hopes to contribute to the world by adding another element of reality to it. I think of art as somewhere between an object and an individual. This is why I’m fond of the many famous quotes that describe good books as like good friends.
4) It depends on what is meant by “copy.” I think a pure copy, like you see in some postmodern art, is nonsense, and does nothing except promote the artist. It relies on theory to justify itself, and contributes nothing in itself. It’s hollow. But I think that a “copy” in the sense of a parody (in the original meaning) or a copy that allows some freedom in the style – think of Renaissance training in painting – both interprets the original and produces something new and different – similarly to how people often find themselves developing new beliefs and approaches to life and new personalities merely by reading and ruminating on older authors and thinkers.
5) For me, things that are art are things whose primary purpose is understood as creating an aesthetic experience – or rather, creating the room for aesthetic experience. (I totally admit that I’ve bought into Kant hook, line, and sinker.) So old religious art does not become art until a viewer understands its power as lying primarily in its aesthetic qualities, rather than in its urging one to pray. Some action movies are art, and some aren’t. The difference is that one can hold interest aesthetically, and the other only holds interest in the sensory effects it might induce on the body. The same with sentimental novels, or mystery novels. Here’s a good test for the latter – if the experience is ruined when you know the ending (or when the suspense is over), it’s not art. All that mystery novel is doing is inducing your preference for suspense. But if you can understand how the suspense is created, allow yourself appreciate the elements apart from the suspense, even – and yet the suspense remains – well, then you’ve hit upon a nice piece of artistic literature.
By the way, Sean:
I’m glad you mentioned the two Manet paintings, “Olympia” and “Luncheon on the Grass.” If you hadn’t, I probably would have never known about them. They really are beautiful artworks.
And thank you for your thoughtful responses.
Sean, regarding #5, I think you are describing your taste rather than proposing a universal standard for what is art. Certainly medieval art and bad action films complicate our understanding of what is and isn’t art but…
Is art solely something to be enjoyed? It would seem so, since medieval art was not apparently designed to be enjoyed, acc. to your criteria (if I decide to pray to a Rothko painting, does it cease to become art?). This would mean that if I enjoy Die Hard 17, it will be art? Or won’t it?
What I like about Billy’s post is that he sticks mostly to visual art, specifically recent visual art. Maybe Billy would agree that action movies, mystery novels, medieval frescos (and cave paintings for that matter, and the final season of Dexter) are all to be grouped under the same category. My guess is Billy might be hesitant to say so (not to put words in his mouth), and I would say that they are almost definitely not the same type of thing—just as a soccer match and playing with dolls is not really the same type of “play,” despite the fact that we use the same word. As easy as it might seem on the face of things to pick out the similarities between these pursuits, a closer look reveals that they are two very, very different things.
Hello, David:
I don’t know whether I regard Munch’s paintings and Dexter as the same kind of thing; I think it depends on what you mean by same kind of thing. I definitely do think they’re both artforms. I’m actually kind of vulgar about what I’d be willing to call art. Anywhere from children’s finger paintings to the Pieta. You mentioned the examples of soccer and playing with dolls as not being the same kind of ‘play.’ But I think a better analogy might be sports. I think art is like sports, in the sense that words like ‘art’ and ‘sports’ are honorific. They can be used in almost whatever sense a person would like, and sometimes reflect as much about a person’s own values and worldview as they do anything else. Like pool, say. Maybe somebody’d say that pool isn’t much of a sport, or maybe not a paradigmatic example. I’m tempted to say, though, that regarding honorifics like ‘art’ and ‘sports,’ people do have certain kinds of implicit assumptions about the sort of properties that something ought to have if we’re to consider it a work of art or a sport. Outside of a few properties, I’d bet they’re by no means universal. Maybe some of the categories are universal? I haven’t made up my mind about this.
I’m also on the fence about whether Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” is any help in understanding a work of art or something we’d view aesthetically. I’ve read the first half of the “Critique of Judgment” and I plan to go back over it and then read it all the way through in order to see what I can extract from it. I really want to engage with that text and see if I’m missing something.
By the way, David, let me know if I represented what you were trying to say correctly, and if my response makes sense in view of it.
And a note to Sean, whom you, David, were replying to:
Apologies for the three independent responses. In retrospect, I should have just posted one big response instead of three separate ones. I think I was a little too distracted when I was writing and not paying enough attention to the fact that I was replying to the same person across three different posts.
Hi David and Billie,
I’m going to try to respond to both of you in this post; for some reason, the website is not letting me respond to each of you individually; and I, for some odd reason, have not received email notices about responses, so hence my tardy replies. To Billie: I’ve responded to your various responses to me, which I really appreciate. One of the reasons this is one of my favorite blogs, even tho I haven’t commented on it until now, is because of the high degree of dialogue presented in the comments and the willingness of the bloggers to respond.
To David: I actually don’t believe that one can separate one’s taste from a “universal” statement of aesthetics. I think that is the key lesson from Kant. But I do think there is a universal principle is my statements about what art is – that art is “contextual” in the sense that there must be social “space” for a person to view a piece of art “aesthically” (by Kant’s definition – also see Ranciere’s definition of the “3 stages of art,” which is just about the only thing from Ranciere that I agree with). I agree with Billie insofar as I think the definition of “art” is defined by a social context. But I tend to think that the idea of “art” as an autonomous subject started around the period of Pseudo-Longinus’s “On the Sublime” and that recently, such an idea of art has been challenged by many in the art world and in popular culture. This is something I genuinely feel regret over, because I do believe in Kant’s idea (even if only implied) that the aesthetic faculty is the great example of humankind’s freedom. For me, the increasing inability of people to view art aesthetically, rather than politically or such (which is also increasingly evident in academia), is a shame, and a reduction in people’s moral imagination.
To Billie: No apologies necessary, and I want to thank you for your engagement with your commenters, and your astuteness and sincerity in considering Carroll’s views.
One last comment to David:
I’ve had some recent conversations with my girlfriend about the difference between football and soccer, and between the American view of sports, and the European (or really global) view. And it seems to me to boil down to an aesthetic point: that Americans prefer the “spectacular”: the well set-up play, the framing, the “setting,” the ability to understand at each point of viewing the sport what is occurring. Soccer is antithetical to this; instead, what one might see as “aesthetic” in soccer is its organic form; its endless possibilities from the simplest mechanisms; and its ability to allow the viewer to construct a narrative out of the seemingly random, chance encounters that the ball has with the players’ feet. I feel that – and this is entirely subjective – this is replicated in modern tastes of literature and art; that American art and literature seems to be captured by genre, and is intended to best work with familiar narrative “elements,” and to pull them off in unique ways; while European literature still engages with the Romantic idea of organic form, and still privileges the freedom of both the author and the reader to make of the work what they will.
Chad:
You seem to be suggesting that nobody could be sufficiently impartial as Kant suggests.
Do you think this is still worthy as an ideal? What’s your take?
Thanks.
Sean:
Do you mean to say that on Kant’s view aesthetic judgment has nothing to do with the judgment of art? I read the first half of Critique of Judgment, and this doesn’t seem to be the case. Seems to me aesthetic judgment is broad, covering not only views toward nature but also views toward art. Please let me know if I’ve misconstrued what you said and help me clarify.
Also, there at the end, you mentioned something about political implications of an artwork. What I wonder is if Kant really means to say that judgments of politics and ethics and so on really have no bearing on aesthetic judgments, and if so, if that’s a deficiency. I mean, just think of art that’s designed to be propaganda. Is it really possible to set aside the issue of whether the work is a compelling piece of propaganda? Isn’t that, for instance, an aesthetic judgment?
Hi Billie, and thank you for the reply,
As to your first point, I think Kant’s values can be applied to both the natural world and to artistic creations; I just don’t think that Kant has “art” proper in mind when he’s discussing aesthetic judgment. I think that his great failing – and “great” in the most respectful sense I can use – is that his view of aesthetics is almost purely a visual one, and so that makes it difficult to apply his ideas to literature, for the most prominent example. What does “form” even mean in literature? Isn’t it something we invent, something to just make sense of a random collection of words? It can’t purely mean grammar, can it? Kant isn’t a linguist. So what exactly is it?
As to your second point: I think Kant precisely means that political views are interested views, and thus not aesthetical. To borrow your example: think of how many people are fascinated by, and genuinely love, Soviet and Communist propaganda posters, or the aesthetics of Triumph of the Will, while at the same time abhorring Nazism or Fascism; they couldn’t do that, I think, unless they had a disinterested aesthetic faculty that could separate form from political use. While I DO think people often like things that agree with their politics, and for political rather than aesthetic reasons, I also think that a lot of people like, even love, artworks that are antithetical to their politics; and personally, THAT for me is a great test of what great art is – do I still love it, even if I think its “intended” politics are antithetical to mine? And what I love about that approach to artworks, is that it opens the space of: “If I love this thing, even if I fundamentally disagree with it, doesn’t that mean that I could learn something from it?” That is my basic view as to why art (in the broad sense) encourages empathy in the best sense.
1. What is your favorite work of art? How would you describe your relationship with it?
I dislike favorites. Favorites, especially in art, rank fundamentally unlike things. How can I say whether Frankenstein or Gödel, Escher, Bach or How to Kill a Mockingbird are better? As such, I’ll go with a piece of art that’s been a fascination to me, before, and likely will be in the future: Tales of Symphonia. It’s an epic video game which starts out as a small group defending a Chosen One on her journey to save the world, but soon the story twists and the themes twist away from what normally would happen in such a story with hopping between two worlds that are cut off from each other, questioning issues of faith, religion, and how to keep such things in the face of terrible things, and an exploration into racism and the responses to it by the oppressed. How I relate to it is one of immersion, fascination, and obsession. This is how I tend to relate to good things. I find the themes in it fascinating and I get truly invested in the characters and care about what will happen to them. Will they succeed, who will end up with who, and how they will cope with what they’ve been through. As such, I have come back to this game again and again and again, gaining something new from it each and every time.
2. Does the appreciation of beauty make us better (perhaps more moral?) human beings?
Maybe. It allows us to enhance our lives, find meaning and purpose, and change our minds. If this is what you think will improve yourself, then it does make us better. If not, it does not.
3. In what sense is art an imitation of reality?
None at all. Art is the creation of a reality. It isn’t the imitation of truths, but an access to truths that we wouldn’t otherwise have access to. It’s a means to connect to people we can never talk to and places we can never go to. But these people and places aren’t imitations. They are existent, but transcendent and unreachable. It is only through art that we can access these realities. Claiming that art is just an imitation of reality diminishes it and makes it false, an experience in a lie. But art isn’t false and isn’t a lie.
4. Is a copy of a great work of art itself a work of art?
Yes. It is creating a new thing by infusing the particulars of its creation, form, and creator into it, creating a new reality to be accessed.
5. What is it that makes some things art while others are not art?
How people view them. If it is viewed as art, then it is art. If it isn’t viewed as art, then it isn’t art.
6. Do you think Carroll characterized Kant’s position on disinterest fairly?
No. Kant isn’t saying anything about attentiveness and concentration. Kant is speaking of investment. Kant thinks that we should view art without any investment in the art, not that we should view art inattentively or without concentrating on it. So Carroll isn’t really addressing the position of disinterest by talking about degrees of attentiveness and concentration.
Thank you for your answers, Viktor.
On one note, though, regarding Carroll and aesthetic judgment: Carroll doesn’t say that Kant and other aesthetes want us to view a work of art inattentively. No, he’s saying that Kant et al. want us to view a work of art impartially. But Carroll believes that’s the wrong focus for aesthetic judgment. We should instead, Carroll argues, think of aesthetic judgments as being not about impartiality but attention and concentration toward a work of art or maybe even something in nature.
One important subset of attention and concentration is what Carroll calls “design appreciation.” This is when we take into account the formal elements and the relations between these elements in a work. Without being attentive enough to these elements and relations, then we fail to fully appreciate the work, according to Carroll.
No problem. Answering the questions was fun!
I end up both agreeing, to an extent, with the critique of Kant while disagreeing with Carroll’s positive account of things. I don’t think impartiality is important, but it’s for much the same reason I don’t think “design appreciation” is very important either. To me, beauty must come from the individual. I’m far too radically individualistic to ever accept an account of beauty that abstracts it or universalizes it. To me, if there is a universal element to beauty, it’s not in beauty actually being a universal thing, but in much the same way that Stevenson’s account of morality as emotivist deals with the universal element of morality, we call something beautiful to convince others to find it beautiful, too, not because it is objectively and universally beautiful. As such, it isn’t the formal elements of a work of art or how we will feel as impartial observers that makes something beautiful. Indeed, I take quite the opposite tack of the impartiality requirement. Beauty is that which makes you not impartial and makes you biased. It is what draws you in and captures your thoughts so you can’t view it impartially. This might happen because of existing biases, but it is rarely ever only because of existing biases. So, for something actually beautiful, being a disinterested observer simply isn’t possible.
Regarding the issue of aesthetic judgment and Kant’s formulation of aesthetic judgment as disinterested or impartial pleasure, consider this piece from Slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/12/09/in_no_regrets_women_writers_talk_about_what_it_was_like_to_read_literature.html. It’s about female writers who have a distaste for a certain kind of male writing style. How should we situate these sorts of issues of taste about writing in view of what aesthetic judgment is according to Kant? On Kant’s account, would these women in the article (careful, now) be making bad aesthetic judgments by definition? How could Kant be defended here? Or could he?
I agree with the author and women quoted in the essay in the sense that I think the male mid-century writers mentioned are rather significantly overrated. I think the women do hit on something that could be considered an aesthetic objection, and one that I would assent to – that the viewpoints of these male mid-century writers are too narrow, and lack much of a generosity of interest about the world – that what is beautiful and attractive in a work of literature is the ability to expand beyond the self, and that these writers are too obsessive about their mere (male) selves. The writers come off as masturbatory, and don’t even seem to have much fun with their ideas, or weigh the gravity of them, as some of the Decadents did (Joris-Karl Huysmans and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch come to mind as better and more creative writers and thinkers.)
What I would object to in the piece is some of the moralizing – bad men (and bad women) have frequently created great art – and the sense that what the author and some of the women want is also rather narrow – to have the work of literature reflect their own experiences, rather than to be expansively capacious in its appreciation of the world and of humanity. That spirit is why Tristram Shandy is my favorite novel.
Sean:
So do you think judging some piece of writing as onanistic (“masturbatory” is the adjective you used) is making an aesthetic judgment? If so, do you think Kant can account for this kind of judgment in the capacity as an aesthetic judgment?
What I’m really curious about is whether Kant’s account is robust enough to account for the kinds of aesthetic judgments we actually make.
Hi Billie,
I have to reference my above post – that I don’t think Kant has literature in mind when he thinks of aesthetic experience, that that’s a failing, and that a person hoping to apply Kant’s idea of “forms” to literature has to make an imaginative leap. As to my use of “masturbatory,” I meant it in two ways: 1) as a pejorative term, and 2) to show what I consider a “formal” quality, but one that also includes by implication a moral quality – selfishness versus expansiveness. I think of this as “formal” because I could imagine an immoral author writing about the entire world, and genuinely trying to grapple with the diversity and chaos of it, in unique ways; and similarly I could imagine a “good” and “moral” author writing in a horribly selfish way, where nothing existed outside of the author but his or her own sensory perceptions. It’s the second, limiting view of humanity that I object to, and partially it is for aesthetic purposes (that this limits what art can examine, and thus becomes boring and inaccessible, except in a sociological sense), and partially for its moral purpose (that art has a responsibility to represent Truth with a capital T, and that that duty requires an expansive view).
So in the end I don’t think Kant can encompass my ENTIRE view of the 60’s male writers, but only because I judge them for multiple reasons, and not entirely aesthetic ones. That DOESN’T mean, tho, that I think my moral judgment of their writings is an AESTHETIC judgment, nor does it mean that I don’t think my aesthetic judgment of their writings is enough to condemn them to mediocrity. I think even purely by my aesthetic account of “selfishness” vs. “expansiveness,” they fall short, especially as compared to other male writers who thought deeply about sexuality.