Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)
[10]
The Aesthetic Point of View
MONROE C. BEARDSLEY
[orig. 1970]
There has been a persistent effort to discover the uniquely aesthetic component, aspect, or ingredient in whatever is or is experienced. Unlike some other philosophical quarries, the object of this chase has not proved as elusive as the snark, the Holy Grail, or Judge Crater—the hunters have returned not empty-handed, but overburdened. For they have found a rich array of candidates for the basically and essentially aesthetic:
aesthetic experience aesthetic objects aesthetic value aesthetic concepts aesthetic enjoyment aesthetic situations aesthetic satisfaction Confronted with such trophies, we cannot easily doubt that there is something peculiarly aesthetic to be found in our world or our experience; yet its exact location and its categorial status remain in question. ...
I
When the conservationist and the attorney for Con Edison argue their conflicting cases before a state commission that is deciding whether a nuclear power plant shall be built beside the Hudson River, we can say they do not merely disagree; they regard that power plant from different points of view. When the head of the Histadrut Publishing House refused
[11]
to publish the novel Exodus in Israel, he said: "If it is to be read as history, it is inaccurate. If it is to be read as literature, it is vulgar." And Maxim Gorky reports a remark that Lenin once made to him:
'I know nothing that is greater than [Beethoven's] Appassionata. I would like to listen to it every day. A marvelous, superhuman music. I always say with pride—a naive pride perhaps: What miracles human beings can perform!' Then screwing his eyes [Lenin] added, smiling sadly, 'But I can't listen to music too often; it affects your nerves. One wants to say stupid nice things and stroke on the head the people who can create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you must not stroke anyone on the head: you'll have your hands beaten off. You have to hit them on the head without mercy, though our ideal is not to use violence against anyone. Hmm, hmm,—an infernally cruel job we have.'In each of these examples, it seems plausible to say that one of the conflicting points of view is a peculiarly aesthetic one:...
... To understand a particular point of view, we must envision its alternatives. Unless there can be more than one point of view toward something the concept breaks down. Consider, for example, the case of architecture. The classic criteria of Vitruvius were stated tersely by Sir Henry Wotton in these words: "Well-building hath three conditions: Commodity, Firmness, and Delight." ...we would find that the characteristics vary independently over a wide range; that some extremely solid old bank buildings have Firmness (they are knocked down at great cost) without much Commodity or Delight, that some highly delightful buildings are functionally hopeless, that some convenient bridges collapse.
Now suppose we are faced with one of these mixed structures, and invited to say whether it is a good building, or how good it is. ...
[12]
...
Such disputes may well make us wonder ... whether these "conditions" belong in the same discussion. Scott says that to lump them together is confusing: it is to "force on architecture an unreal unity of aim ," since they are "incommensurable virtues." For clarity in architectual discussion, then, we might separate the three criteria, and say that they arise in connection with three different points of view—the practical, the engineering, and the aesthetic. In this way, the notion of a point of view is introduced to break up a dispute into segments that seem likely to be more manageable . Instead of asking one question—whether this is a good building—we divide it into three. ...
Do we
ever
get to ask
"who's asking?"
And "why?"
I don't mean (this time) to take the deconstructionist or Foucauldian lines toward bringing power relations into the mix. Rather, I am scarred by a well-conditioned association of questions such as whether this is a good building with the worst excesses of Ivory Tower art criticism. We can all answer such questions for ourselves quite well enough without any critical interventions. But that, I fear, is not "who's asking." The aim seems to be, rather, that the critic is asking on behalf of the public-to-whom-the-artwork-belongs, thereby taking two things a bit too much for granted: the solidity of their critical mandate, and the possibility of reducing the public to a monolith.
It's not easy, though, to formulate a philosophically responsible version of the "Who's asking?" line. This tends to descend into armchair psychoanalysis and innuendo, since you can't assume (certainly not prove) that just because someone asks, e.g., whether this is a good building , that they necessarily share some/all of the other traits of some intellectual syndrome. And that is one of the really insidious things about twentieth century criticism which seems to have prevented anyone who was not a brand-name deconstructionist from grasping what was really going on.
Thus one way of clarifying the notion of a point of view would be in terms of the notion of being good of a kind . ... Of course, when an object belongs to one obvious and notable kind, and we judge it in relation to that kind, the "point of view" terminology is unnecessary. We wouldn't ordinarily speak of considering music from a musical point of view, because it wouldn't occur to us that someone might regard it from a political point of view.
Uhh...
In the same way, it would be natural to speak of considering whiskey from a medical point of view but not of considering penicillin from a medical point of view. This shows that the "point of view" terminology is implicitly rejective : it is a device for setting aside considerations advanced by others... in order to focus attention on the set of considerations that we wish to emphasize...
The "point of view" terminology, however, is more elastic than the "good of its kind" terminology. To consider a bridge or music or sculpture as an aesthetic object is to consider it from the aesthetic point of view, but what about a mountain, a sea shell, or a tiger? These are neither musical compositions, paintings, poems nor sculptures. A sea shell cannot be good sculpture if it is not sculpture at all. But evidently we can adopt
[13]
the aesthetic point of view toward these things. In fact, some aesthetic athletes (or athletic aesthetes) have claimed the ability to adopt the aesthetic point of view toward anything at all—
This is better inverted:
Some thick-skulled utilitarians (or useful idiots) have claimed the ability to suspend the aesthetic point of view as they please.
But evidently they have defined aesthetics too narrowly for their own good, or else they have simply deceived themselves.
...
The second philosophical use of the notion of the aesthetic point of view is to provide a broad concept of art that might be helpful for certain purposes. We might say:
A work of art (in the broad sense) is any perceptual or intentional object that is deliberately regarded from the aesthetic point of view.Here, "regarding" would have to include looking, listening, reading, and similar acts of attention, and also what I call "exhibiting"—picking up an object and placing it where it readily permits such attention, or presenting the object to persons acting as spectators.
II
What, then, is the aesthetic point of view? I propose the following:
To adopt the aesthetic point of view with regard to X is to take an interest in whatever aesthetic value X may possess.I ask myself what I am doing in adopting a particular point of view, and acting toward an object in a way that is appropriate to that point of view;[14]
and, so far as I can see, it consists in searching out a corresponding value in the object, to discover whether any of it is present. Sometimes it is to go farther: to cash in on that value, to realize it, to avail myself of it. All this searching, seeking and, if possible, realizing, I subsume under the general phrase "taking an interest in." ...
This proposed definition of "aesthetic point of view" will not, as it stands, fit all of the ordinary uses of this phrase. There is a further complication. I am thinking of a remark by John Hightower, executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts, about the council's aim to "encourage some sort of aesthetic standards." He said, "There are lots of laws that unconsciously inhibit the arts. Architecture is the most dramatic example. Nobody has looked at the laws from an aesthetic point of view." And I am thinking of a statement in the Yale Alumni Magazine that the Yale City Planning Department was undertaking "a pioneering two-year research project to study highway environment from an aesthetic point of view." I suppose the attention in these cases was not on the supposed aesthetic value of the laws or of the present "highway environment," but rather in the aesthetic value that might be achieved by changes in these things. Perhaps that is why these examples speak of "an aesthetic point of view," rather than "the aesthetic point of view." And we could, if we wish, make use of this verbal distinction in our broadened definition:
To adopt an aesthetic point of view with regard to X is to take an interest in whatever aesthetic value that X may possess or that is obtainable by means of X.I have allowed the phrase "adopting the aesthetic point of view" to cover a variety of activities. One of them is judging:
To judge X from the aesthetic point of view is to estimate the aesthetic value of X.
All of this points to "aesthetics" per se as an artifact of Kahneman's System 2, the slow brain, rather than System 1, the fast brain. That distinction feels too facile here, but it must figure somehow.
The very notions of cultivation and contemplation practically ooze connotations of slow-ness. But System 1 actually is very much a product of our experience. I take this to mean that the broad and deep experience of the aesthete bears as heavily upon snap judgments as upon reasoned ones.
What's frustrating, then, about so much of this Formal Philosophical Discourse on "aesthetics" is that even in absence of these two dreaded c-words, the slow-ness is still very strongly connoted:
take an interest ;
obtainable ;
adopting a particular point of view,
and acting toward an object in a way
that is appropriate to that point of view .
Groping toward verbalization of the ineffable is always going to be a bumpy ride. It can also be a long ride, and that problem, trifling though it may ultimately be, is nowhere more inconvenient than here.
Against all of this, there is the fast language of something that "grabs" us; something that takes our interest and tells us where that interest will be directed until future notice. Or perhaps it tells us to take our interest and shove it. Is that not the way all of this really works the vast majority of the time? Isn't the time of slow, distanced, contemplative thinking actually a time in the past? Isn't it really an accretion of past snap judgments that only become woven together into a continuous narrative of "cultivation" by the slow revisionism of the self-concept and the memory? And doesn't this condemn the machinations of the postmodern antiaesthetes even more decisively than those of the neo-Romantics around whom they have built their critique?
I personally find slow-ness of "aesthetic" experience all but nonsensical. It seems to me quite axiomatically to betoken overthinking of the worst kind, something which neo-Romantics in fact are almost never guilty of. Very few -ics or -ists are guilty of it, actually. It seems mainly a scourge of professors, politicians, and dilettantes.
As I see it, the aesthetic point of view is what our fast brain makes of sensory input before we've had a chance to overthink. Paul Goodman uses the word "preconceptual," which seems right to me. Everything subsequent to that is much easier to account for if it is not clamoring for inclusion under the rubric of "aesthetics." There are innumerable good reasons that we might decide to churn over an experience after the fact. A total neglect of reflection-upon-experience would be truly pathological. But I would contend that by the time we are able to reflect we have exited the "aesthetic" realm.
Clearly enough, here in article #1 of this doorstop anthology, this is decisively not the way "aesthetics" is being construed. Not even close.
[15]
...
I define "aesthetic point of view" in terms of "aesthetic value." And while I think this step is by no means a trivial one, it is not very enlightening unless it is accompanied by some account of aesthetic value. ...
The aesthetic value of an object is the value it possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification.There are three points about this definition that require some attention.
First, it will be noted that this is not a definition of "value." It purports to distinguish aesthetic value from other kinds of value in terms of a particular capacity. ...
The second point concerns "aesthetic gratification." My earliest version of this capacity-definition of "aesthetic value" employed the concept of aesthetic experience. I am still not persuaded that this concept must be abandoned as hopeless, but it needs further elaboration...
[16]
...
... It seems clear that one kind of gratification can be distinguished from another only in terms of its intentional object: that is, of the properties that the pleasure is taken in, or the enjoyment is enjoyment of. To discriminate aesthetic gratification—and consequently aesthetic value and the aesthetic point of view—we must specify what it is obtained from. I offer the following:
Gratification is aesthetic when it is obtained primarily from attention to the formal unity and/ or the regional qualities of a complex whole, and when its magnitude is a function of the degree of formal unity and/or the intensity of regional quality.The defense of such a proposal would have to answer two questions. First, is there such a type of gratification? ... Second, what is the justification for calling this type of gratification "aesthetic"? The answer to this question would be more complicated. Essentially, I would argue that there are certain clearcut exemplary cases of works of art—that is, poems, plays, musical compositions, etc.—that must be counted as works of art if anything is. There is a type of gratification characteristically and preeminently provided by such works, and this type of gratification is the type I have distinguished above.
This opens the door for the differences among the experience of poems, plays, musical compositions, etc. to demand an accounting; as well they should. These differences are nothing if not clearcut !
Rank's point cannot be overemphasized: in terms of creation, The Arts indeed belong together, but they belong also with any number of other social phenomena; whereas ~"psychological aesthetic is obtained from the standpoint of reception"~ and indicates difference not only between art and other social phenomena but also (I am of course filling this part in) among The Arts themselves.
Finally, this type of gratification (once distinguished) has a paramount claim to be denominated "aesthetic" even though there are many other things that works of art can do to you, such as inspire you, startle you, or give you a headache.
I thought the real question was the obverse: among all that can startle or inspire , what further distinguishes art?
If this line of argument can be made convincing, we find ourselves with what might be called primary marks of the aesthetic: It is the presence in the object of some notable degree of unity and/or the presence of some notable intensity of regional quality
Unity is a very troublesome term despite its appropriateness to certain well-known cases. "Unity" presupposes the discernment of some isolable unifying quality, failing which the audience just won't get it. And that is not very nice.
I enjoyed music a lot more before I had an ear for "unity," and that is what goads my skepticism in such matters.
that indicates that the enjoyments or satisfactions it affords are aesthetic—insofar as those enjoyments or satisfactions are afforded by these properties. ...
III
But before we come to that, we must consider the third point about the capacity-definition of "aesthetic value"—and this is the most troublesome of them all.
[17]
The term "capacity" has been chosen with care. My view is that the aesthetic value of an object is not a function of the actual degree of gratification obtained from it. It is not an average, or the mean degree of gratification obtained from it by various perceivers. It is not a sum, or the total gratification obtained from it in the course of its existence. All these depend in part on external considerations,... I am thinking in terms of particular exposures to the work—a particular experience of the music, of the poem, of the painting—and of the degree of aesthetic gratification obtained on each occasion. Aesthetic value depends on the highest degree obtainable under optimal circumstances. Thus my last definition should be supplemented by another one:
The amount of aesthetic value possessed by an object is a function of the degree of aesthetic gratification it is capable of providing in a particular experience of it.My reason for holding this view is that I want to say that a critical evaluation is a judgment of aesthetic value, and it seems clear to me that estimating capacities is both the least and the most we can ask of the critical evaluator. I take it that when a literary critic, for example, judges the goodness of a poem (from the aesthetic point of view), and is prepared to back up his judgment with reasons, he must be saying something about the relationship of the poem to the experiences of actual or potential readers. The question is, What is this relationship? When a critic says that a poem is good, he is hardly ever in a position to predict the gratification that particular readers or groups of readers will receive from it. Moreover, he is usually not in a position to generalize about tendencies , to say, for instance, that readers of such-and-such propensities, preferences, or preparations will probably be delighted by the poem. If the critic has at his disposal the information required to support such statements, he is of course at liberty to say such things... But when he simply says, "This is a good poem," we must interpret him as saying something weaker (though still significant) about the capacity of the work to provide a notable degree of aesthetic gratification. For that is a judgment he should be able to support, if he understands the poem.
The question, however, is whether the capacity-definition of "aesthetic value" is too weak, as a report of what actually happens in art criticism.
Well,
perhaps such a
report
cannot be weak enough
when
so little
actually happens
.
I can think of three difficulties that have been or could be raised. They[18]
might be called (1) the unrecognized masterpiece problem, (2) the LSD problem, and (3) the Edgar Rice Burroughs problem. Or, to give them more abstract names, they are (1) the problem of falsification, (2) the problem of illusion, and (3) the problem of devaluation.
(1) Some people are troubled by one consequence of the capacity-definition—that objects can possess aesthetic value that never has been and never will be realized,... This ought not to trouble us, I think. It is no real paradox that many objects worth looking at can never be looked at. But there is another kind of aesthetic inaccessibility in the highly complicated and obscure work that no critic can find substantial value in, though it may still be there. In Balzac's short story, "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu," the master painter works in solitude for years,... When his fellow artists finally see the painting, they are appalled by it. But how can they be sure that the painting doesn't have aesthetic value, merely because they have not found any? The capacity to provide aesthetic gratification of a high order may still be there, though they are not sharp or sensitive enough to take advantage of it.
Well, there is precious little certainty available to us here on Earth, in this as in so many other matters. This can be quite inconvenient. How inconvenient is it in this case? What sorts of considerations could mean that we have a real, legitimate problem on our hands in not being able to say with certainty what the aesthetic value of a particular artwork is?
Surely we can list a few such scenarios. Can we list any that do not belong the the debased, instrumentalized worlds of grades, grants and status-seeking? And if art criticism is not similarly instrumentalized, then what is its raison d'etre?
In any case, laying all of this burden-of-proof sort of stuff on the audience rather on the work solves a few different problems. And I don't mean applying "judgment" to the audience rather than the work; rather, I mean that what is really at issue here is the audience's capacity rather than the work's. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
If it may be granted in the present context that (1) works are fixed artifacts of the external world, and (2) the aesthetic value of works can (in plenty of noncontroversial cases has) come and gone (and/or come/gone again) with the passage of time, then clearly the variance arises in the reception of works rather than in their creation. One need not deny the fixedness of works to see that there is little fixedness of audience capacity .
It's hard to imagine nowadays how anyone living in the twentienth century ever managed to convince themselves that even the more rigid good of a kind and point of view ways of approaching all of this could not also, just maybe, be prone to a bit of historical/perspectival drift. Obviously people crave certainty here as in so many other areas. Among this certainty-seeking cohort, professional critics seem to have the most damnable motivations and the flimsiest excuses for succumbing to them. Otherwise, the endemic, non-professional version of certainty-seeking is very understandable; in theory it is just as hazardous, but in reality it is less hazardous the less power and influence one wields. I suspect almost everyone has felt it welling up in them sometime, somewhere.
The reason that aesthetic certainty-seeking can be "hazardous" has, I think, also drifted a bit over time. The language of the postmodern academic Left applies in full here, and literally for once, if we can bear to suspend its codedness for long enough to get the message: this search for anchor points of aesthetic value serves power and little else; it is useful to those with power and a wash for everyone else; it preempts any and all esoteric reception, and it is "esoteric reception" which keeps the mere possibility of "art" alive against so much (almost everything) that is pushing in the opposite direction. Sure, ultimate subjectivity is chaotic and unsatisfying. Welcome to life. Ultimate codification of value is deadly to the mere possibility of art. That's my position. If it is possible, then we're as good as dead.
For audience capacity to become uniform is truly a terrifying thought. Ditto the capacity of works: do we really want to live in a world where the value of a work and the value of a stock are equally well codified?
If my proposed definition entailed that negative judgments of aesthetic value cannot even in principle be justified, then we would naturally mistrust it. But of course this consequence is not necessary. What does follow is that there is a certain asymmetry between negative and affirmative judgments, with respect to their degree of confirmation ; but this is so between negative and affirmative existential statements in general.
My note says:
p. 18—Taleb's Law meets aesthetics!
The experienced critic may have good reason in many cases not only for confessing that he finds little value in a painting, but for adding that very probably no one ever will find great value in it.(2) It aesthetic value involves a capacity, then its presence can no doubt be sufficiently attested by a single realization. What a work does provide, it clearly can provide. And if my definition simply refers to the capacity, without qualification, then it makes no difference under what conditions that realization occurs. ... But suppose someone whose consciousness is rapidly expanding under the influence of LSD or some other hallucinogenic drug happens to look at this heap and it gives him exquisite aesthetic gratification. Then it has the capacity to do so, and so it has high aesthetic value. But then perhaps every visual object has high aesthetic value, and all to about the same degree—if the reports may be trusted.
[19]
I cannot speak authoritatively of the LSD experience, but I gather that when a trip is successful, the object, however humble, may glow with unwonted intensity of color and its shapes assume an unexpected order and harmony. In short, the experience is illusory. ...
This example suggests a modification of the definition given earlier:
The aesthetic value of X is the value that X possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification when correctly experienced.
I see the problem this poses for the Ivory Tower philosopher, but I don't see the problem for anyone else.
In short, the experience is illusory.
Doesn't that settle it?
Again,
what are some circumstances
that
make this a real problem
for non-professors?
The problem, if it is to be one, is one of misattribution. The concrete, incontrovertible attribution of given "aesthetic" properties to a given work, as opposed to physical surroundings, social setting, or us ourselves and all of our vicissitudes, this is what strikes me, very specifically, as a problem the rest of us don't normally have.
e.g.
Most people seem to think jazz is just a terrible racket. I do not think this. We can think differently. It's okay. Not much is at stake here. Now, if jazz is made proxy for America, or for Black People, or for Instrumental Music, or for Modernism, then we have ninety-nine problems and jazz is suddenly all of them at once. But the (one) real problem is that the proxy maneuvers are usually specious. At best they may have some very limited validity which, nonetheless, has run amok by the time we are attributing any of these associations to the properly aesthetic aspects of an artwork. By that time, the discussion about "aesthetics" now encompasses a few loudmouth's rationalizations of their own and/or others' tastes; in other words, they claim to know something that is almost impossible to know, and they claim that it is relevant to "aesthetics" even though it is definitionally not an "aesthetic" question in any conventional sense.
If hearing jazz makes you think of America or of Black People, then (1) it is easy to speculate about why this might be, yet all-but-impossible to prove it; (2) it is very unclear why anyone else would or should give any flying fucks about what jazz makes you think about. Why/how would/could we ever need to know, just to get through the day, how you developed mental associations between a music and a people or a country? Who are you and what are you going to go out and do such that anyone besides you really needs to know about any of this just to get through the day?
The point is: someone would have to care an awful lot about you yourself in order to care at all about what jazz makes you think about. But if you do in fact have people who care just that much about you yourself, then good for you! May the seeds of attachment bloom to the fullest in the walled garden of particularism! On the other hand, out here in the universalistic universe of impersonal public discourse, you and your jazz-baggage are both unremarkable and inadmissable.
(3) The problem of devaluation can perhaps be regarded as a generalization of the LSD problem. When I was young I was for a time an avid reader of the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Recently when I bought the Dover paperback edition and looked at them again, I found that I could hardly read them. ...
The problem is this: if on Monday I enjoy a novel very much, and thus know that it has the capacity to provide gratification, then how can I ever reverse the judgment and say the novel lacks that capacity? If the judgment that the novel is a good one is a capacity-judgment, it would seem that downward reevaluations (that is, devaluations) are always false—...
Some cases of devaluation can no doubt be taken care of without modifying the definition of "aesthetic value." The devaluation may be due to a shift in our value grades caused by enlargement of our range of experience. I might think that Gone with the Wind is a great novel, because it is the best I have read, but later I might take away that encomium and give it to War and Peace. Or the devaluation may be due
[20]
to the belated recognition that my previous satisfaction in the work was a response to extra-aesthetic features .
This phenomenon is endemic to the Global Village, no? We've never had more extra-aesthetic features parasitic upon our previous satisfaction .
This is a real problem and worthy of attention, but it is oblique to the question of value.
...
... there remain cases where on perfectly sound and legitimate grounds I decide that the work, though it has provided a certain level of aesthetic gratification, is in fact not really that good. I have overestimated it. Evidently the definition of "aesthetic value" must be modified again. One thing we might do is insert a stipulation that the work be a reliable or dependable source of gratification: flukes don't count.
So we are already doing away with the stricture that
What a work does provide, it clearly can provide
?
We need not change the judgment into a straight tendency-statement. But we might insist that the enjoyment of the novel must at least be a repeatable experience. Something like this notion seems to underlie the frequent claim that our first reactions to a new work of art are not wholly to be trusted, that we should wait awhile and try it again; that we should see whether we can find at least one other person to corroborate our judgment; or that only posterity will be in a position to know whether the work is great.I grant that all these precautions are helpful—indeed, they enable us to avoid the two sources of error mentioned a moment ago: having an inadequately formulated set of grading terms, and confusing aesthetic with nonaesthetic gratification. But I think it ought to be possible for a person, after a single experience of a work, to have excellent grounds for thinking it good and for commending it to others .
Well...
Show of hands, who really, dearly wants to receive more such commendations than they already receive?
And, who less?
I know we all would just love to dispense these commendations at the slightest whim.
I am asking:
who
would really like to
receive
more of them?
Who none?
Who any?
Aren't these the better questions?
Let's think this through consequentialistically as best we can:
imagine a world where it is simply impossible
(1) for one person
(2) to have valid grounds
for
(3) aesthetic commendation to another person.
What is still possible, then,
even in this admittedly extreme scenario,
is
to avow
an aesthetic experience.
The author's dis-avowal of his younger self under the auspices of the Edgar Rice Burroughs problem strikes me as a singularly unfortunate ritual sacrifice paid to the dead-and-dying nineteenth-century canons of art criticism . He is willing to sacrifice a part of himself in order to save this dead-and-dying corpus of pretense and pomposity. But the first experience did happen! Disavowing it does not make it go away! What is really accomplished by putting forth the more recent experience? Why go to such trouble to rationalize its priority in meaning out of synch with its priority in time?
I would like to get to a place where aesthetic experience is just something that happens to us, something on the order of finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk, oversleeping our alarm, discovering a new-and-better brand of pet food; i.e. something that happens all the time. What is rare is sublime aesthetic experience; but that is not the only kind. The basis for the expansion of our construal of "aesthetic experience" from something that happens only under the guise of "contemplation" to something that is happening all the time, the basis for that expansion is, I suspect, in just what we make of the fast-slow distinction (Kahneman's System 1 and System 2). What I make of it is: System 1 is informed by experience, and it happens first; System 2 is informed by experience and it happens later and over time, which allows the self-styling, narrativizing brain to get involved; hence System 1 is more honest; and as qualities of aesthetic judgment go, I am really only interested in honesty; all the rest, at least vis-a-vis those peculiar sorts of judgments which can reasonably be called aesthetic , the rest can go to hell.
As long as only we ourselves are affected, we are at liberty to make what we will of these various experiences. But the moment other people become implicated, the rules of the game change. There are billions-with-a-bee people in the world. Each of us has aesthetic experience all the time. No one need or ought to care too much about ours unless they have a good reason. There are plenty of good reasons! But these reasons are not unlimited. Above all, we ourselves don't decide what a good reason is; other people can decide that on their own behalves. We should let them. Vis-a-vis us ourselves, they're liable to be better at this than we are.
And I think he would be justified in pointing out that he has found a potential source of aesthetic gratification that lies ready to be taken advantage of—even though he does not yet know how readily, how easily, how conveniently, or how frequently recourse may be had to it. Thus my escape from the difficulty is to revise the definition of "aesthetic value" again so as to stipulate that it is the value of the whole work that is in question:
The aesthetic value of X is the value that X possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification when correctly and completely experienced....
[21]
IV
We saw earlier that the notion of a point of view plays a particular role in focusing or forwarding certain disputes by limiting the range of relevant considerations. We invoke the aesthetic point of view when we want to set aside certain considerations that others have advanced as that a poem is pornographic, or that a painting is a forgery or that (as Jacques Maritain remarks) "A splendid house without a door is not a good work of architecture."
...or that jazz expresses the democratic spirit, or that the novel is a lie that tells the truth, or that...
But the person whose considerations are thus rejected may feel that the decision is arbitrary, and enter an appeal, in the hope that a higher philosophical tribunal will rule that the lower court erred in its exclusions. How do we know whether being pornographic, or being a forgery, or lacking a door, is irrelevant from the aesthetic point of view? I propose this answer:
A consideration about an object is relevant to the aesthetic point of view if and only if it is a fact about the object that affects the degree to which the marks of aesthetic gratification (formal unity and intensity of regional quality) are present in the object.... Is the biography of the composer relevant? According to a writer in The Music Review:
It is a well-known fact that knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the composition of a work enhances the audience's appreciation. . . . It is because of this that programme notes, radio comments, and music appreciation courses are in such demand. To secure such knowledge is one of the important tasks of musical research.Now, I'm not sure that this "well-known fact" is really a fact,
Me neither.
but let us assume that it is. Does it follow that information about the circumstances of composition is relevant to consideration of the work from an aesthetic point of view? We can imagine this sort of thing:
It was a cold rainy day in Vienna, and Schubert was down to his last crust of bread. ...[22]
Now even if everyone, or nearly everyone, who reads this program note finds that it increases his appreciation of the song, a condition of appreciation is not necessarily a condition of value . ...
Here is one more example. In a very interesting article "On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art," Meyer Schapiro has argued that:
Contrary to the general belief that in the Middle Ages the work of art was considered mainly as a vehicle of religious teaching or as a piece of craftsmanship serving a useful end, and that beauty of form and color was no object of contemplation in itself, these texts abound in aesthetic judgments and in statements about the qualities and structure of the work. They speak of the fascination of the image, its marvelous likeness to physical reality, and the artist's wonderful skill, often in complete abstraction from the content of the object of art.Shapiro is inquiring whether medieval people were capable of taking the aesthetic point of view in some independence of the religious and technological points of view. He studies various texts in which aesthetic objects are described and praised, to elicit the grounds on which this admiration is based, and to discover whether these grounds are relevant to the aesthetic point of view. Form and color, for example, are clearly relevant, and so to praise a work for its form or color is to adopt the aesthetic point of view. And I should think the same can be said for "the fascination of the image"—... These centaurs, chimeras, two-headed animals, creatures with feet and the tail of a serpent, etc., are the images deplored by Saint Bernard with an ambivalence like that in Lenin's remark about Beethoven:
In the cloister, under the eyes of the brethren who read there, what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvelous and deformed beauty, in that beautiful deformity?But what of Schapiro's other points—the image's "marvelous likeness to physical reality, and the artist's wonderful skill"?
If a person admires skill in depiction, he is certainly not taking a religious point of view—but is he taking the aesthetic point of view? I should think not. ...
[23]
...this contributes to the conditions of the experience; it does not enter into the experience directly,...
V
There is one final problem... although it is not at all clear to me how the problem should even be formulated. It concerns the justification of adopting the aesthetic point of view, and its potential conflicts with other points of view. On one hand,... The conservationists are trying to arouse us to concern for the preservation of natural beauties,... ...those who are concerned with "education of the eye," or "visual education," are always developing new methods of teaching the theory and practice of good design,...
But the effort to broaden the adoption of the aesthetic point of view sometimes takes another form. According to its leading theoretician, the "Camp sensibility" is characterized by the great range of material to which it can respond: "Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world,"...
Well, I have always taken it for granted that we do in fact consistently experience the world "aesthetically." It's clear by now that I have thereby construed the word in a rather different fashion from how it is being construed here.
And, uh...is anyone (including leading theoreticians of such matters) still buying that "camp" was about pan-aestheticism? Wasn't (isn't) it more about taking seriously aesthetic objects that High Culture sees as trivial? Wasn't (isn't) the idea that other people will see you taking seriously that which was (is) not to be taken seriously by High Culture? Isn't "camp" equal parts performance and reception? (Certainly much High Culture is subject to the same criticism.)
Here is an extreme consequence of trying to increase the amount of aesthetic value of which we can take advantage. But it also gives rise to an interesting problem, which might be called "the dilemma of aesthetic education." ...
[24]
The central task of aesthetic education, as traditionally conceived, is the improvement of taste, involving the development of two dispositions: (1) the capacity to obtain aesthetic gratification from increasingly subtle and complex aesthetic objects that are characterized by various forms of unity—in short, the response to beauty in one main sense; and (2) an increasing dependence on objects beautiful in this way (having harmony, order, balance, proportion) as sources of aesthetic satisfaction. ... As long as the individual's aesthetic development in this sense is accompanied by increasing access to beautiful sights and sounds, it is all to the good. ... On the other hand, suppose he finds that his environment grows uglier,... Second, suppose he comes to enjoy another kind of aesthetic value, one that derives from intensity of regional quality more than formal fitness.
i.e. Suppose he is not himself an artist or a philosophy professor.
And third, suppose he comes to realize that his aesthetic gratification is affected by the demands he makes upon an object—especially because the intensity of its regional qualities partly depends on its symbolic import. ... The automobile graveyard and the weed-filled garden are seen to have their own wild and grotesque expressiveness as well as symbolic import. The kewpie doll, the Christmas card, the Tiffany lampshade, can be enjoyed aesthetically, not for their beauty but for their bizarre qualities and their implicit reflection of social attitudes. This is a way of transfiguring reality, and though not everything can be transfigured, perhaps, it turns out that much can.
What I mean by the dilemma of aesthetic education is this: that we are torn between conflicting ways of redirecting taste . One is the way of love of beauty, which is limited in its range of enjoyment, but is reformist by implication , since it seeks a world that conforms to its ideal.
Good point. But reform begins at home, and certain varieties of it need not spread beyond there.
Redirecting one's own taste is one thing, redirecting that of others is something else.
The example of civic beautification via formal political processes is useful rhetorically here, but practically it is misleading, e.g. in the suggestion that aesthetically-educated citizens may be moved to eliminate ugliness by labor or by law . Perhaps this is indeed the aim of much so-called aesthetic education , but if so then it is (as I must imagine many battle-scarred "reformers" can attest) assuming a bit too much, i.e. it is consequentialist. It isn't always going to work. And as the author lays all of this out, I find myself thankful that such initiatives aren't always going to work.
It seems that what the author is really getting at here in positing two conflicting ways of redirecting taste is something like alloplastic vs. autoplastic adaptation, i.e. changing the world vs. changing yourself.
This seems as good a reminder as any that "aesthetics" usually are and ought to remain a private matter. Further, the fact that an irreducible minority of people are relatively unattuned to their own "aesthetic" capacities is indeed the cause of some well-known social problems, but it may also be one of those things that allows groups of people to live together without constantly erupting into skirmishes. (Perhaps this merely restates the author's point more cynically.)
The other is the way of aestheticizing everything —of taking the aesthetic point of view wherever possible—and this widens enjoyment, but is defeatist, since instead of eliminating the junkyard and the slum it tries to see them as expressive and symbolic.
Again...is that really what "camp," etc. are trying for?
The conflict here is analogous to that between the social gospel and personal salvation in some of our churches—though no doubt its consequences are not equally momentous. I don't suppose this dilemma is ultimately unresolvable, though I cannot consider it further at the
[25]
moment. I point it out as one of the implications of the tendency (which have been briefly exploring) to extend the aesthetic point of view as widely as possible.
I mean, I would say it's the author here who evinces a tendency to unduly restrict the range of aesthetics; but in fairness that is just 50 years of hindsight talking.
The metaphor of social gospel as against personal salvation is an apt one here. So too, I think, is the metaphor of "Catholic" as against "Evangelical" conceptions of "aesthetics." (Hint: the critics are the Popes.)
But there is another weighty tradition opposed to this expansion. Lenin and Saint Bernard stand witness to the possibility that there may be situations in which it is morally objectionable to adopt the aesthetic point of view. A man who had escaped from Auschwitz commented on Rolf Hochmuth's play: "The Deputy should not be considered as a historical work or even as a work of art, but as a moral lesson." Perhaps he only meant that looking for historical truth or artistic merit in The Deputy is a waste of time. But he may also have meant that there is something blameworthy about anyone who is capable of contemplating those terrible events from a purely historical or purely aesthetic point of view.
Consequentialism again, or perhaps simple projection.
A sacrilegious thought: perhaps the truly aesthetic point of view is an autistic point of view and that this is the real reason for such contortions as Beardsley is writhing in by this point in the essay. The "point of view" tack is an effort to reclaim aesthetics for normies; but it won't quite work. Normies have a lot of trouble ignoring "context," even when it ought, rationally or even ethically speaking, to be ignored. It takes a constutional ignorance of "context" to be an aesthete.
Renata Adler, reporting in The New Yorker on the New Politics Convention that took place in Chicago on Labor Day weekend, 1967, listed various types of self-styled "revolutionaries" who attended, including "the aesthetic-analogy revolutionaries, who discussed riots as though they were folk songs or pieces of local theatre, subject to appraisal in literary terms ('authentic,' 'beautiful)." That is carrying the aesthetic point of view pretty far.
Hmm. It may not be carrying it all that far, actually. It may merely be the belated application of literary terms to all non-book phenomena to which they rightfully apply. The absurdity is not in the semantics; rather, it is in the various pretensions of literature, pretensions which professors somehow find it very easy to accept when a book is at issue but less so when it is a riot or a junkyard .
This possibility has not gone unnoticed by imaginative writers—notably Henry James and Henrik Ibsen. The tragedy of Mrs. Gereth, in The Spoils of Poynton, is that of a woman who could not escape the aesthetic point of view. She had a "passion for the exquisite" that made her prone "to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful [and] she was condemned to wince wherever she turned." In fact, the things that troubled her most—and she encountered them everywhere, but nowhere in more abundance than the country house known as Waterbath—were just the campy items featured by Miss Sontag: "trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants [and even] a souvenir from some centennial or other Exhibition." The tragedy of the sculptor, Professor Rubek, in When We Dead Awaken, is that he so utterly aestheticized the woman who loved him and who was his model that she was not a person to him. As she says, "The work of art first—then the human being." ...
As far as I can tell, this skepticism about an aesthetic "takeover of reality" is entirely justified. My whole case above is that aesthetics are always "working in the background" of the psyche, and that there is more that can go wrong than right when they work too far in the foreground.
What I just don't get, as always, is the reliance on fictional literary works when mundane experience and middlebrow journalism are (for once) perfectly well up to the task.
[26]
...
... there are occasions on which it would be wrong to adopt the aesthetic point of view, because there is a conflict of values and the values that are in peril are, in that particular case, clearly higher. Once in a while you see a striking photograph or film sequence in which someone is (for example) lying in the street after an accident, in need of immediate attention. And it is a shock to think suddenly that the photographer must have been on hand. I don't want to argue ethics of news photography, but if someone, out of the highest aesthetic motives, withheld first aid to a bleeding victim in order to record the scene, with careful attention to lighting and camera speed, then it is doubtful that that picture could be so splendid a work of art as to justify neglecting so stringent a moral obligation.
Sure. But at that point, are these really aesthetic motives ? Would you believe any photog who claimed they were?
The second conclusion is that there is nothing—no object or event—that is per se wrong to consider from the aesthetic point of view. This, I think, is part of the truth in the art-for-art's-sake doctrine.
Amen.
To adopt the aesthetic point of view is simply to seek out a source of value.
...or to have that value "jump off the page" at you like a grizzly bear and force you to pay attention to it...
In other words, let's take due note of the activity of Beardsley's audience and its incessant seeking of a source of value . "Seeking" could be general or specific; it could mean a general openness to experience, an admirable risk-aversion, attendance at shows by hitherto unknown artists with no guarantee of comfort or familiarity for oneself; or "seeking" could mean grasping gainfulness and poseurism, it could mean adopting the "aesthetic point of view" upon a "junkyard" as a signalling maneuver rather than an experience in and of itself.
One thing about so-called passivity is that it betokens receptivity. It has at least this going for it!
I'm not inclined to grant true aesthete status to anyone who "seeks" in the grasping way. The "seeking" happens at the level of willingly exposing oneself to the outside world. (I say this, of course, because this is my own weakness as an "aesthete." Any readers of this blog over the years might be surprised at my relatively wide "openness to experience." But I do have a parallel tendency to hide in my apartment and draft long annotations of obscure journal articles; this forecloses much which "openness" would otherwise enable.)
And it can never be a moral error to realize value—barring conflict with other values. Some people seem to fear that a serious and persistent aesthetic interest will become an enervating hyperaestheticism, a paralysis of will like that reported in advanced cases of psychedelic dependence. But the objects of aesthetic interest—such as harmonious design, good proportions, intense expressiveness—are not drugs, but part of the breath of life. Their cumulative effect is increased sensitization, fuller awareness, a closer touch with the environment and concern for what it is and might be. It seems to me very doubtful that we could have too much of these good things, or that they have inherent defects that prevent them from being an integral part of a good life.
Notes
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