CHAPTER 10

Aesthetics

The philosophical field of aesthetics includes a number of closely related concerns: our appreciation of nature, our appreciation of art, what makes an artwork a great work (or alternately, crap), the structure and logic of art, and what “progress” in art history means. As with every other chapter, there’s much more going on in this area of philosophy than we can possibly explore. We’ll get a nice sampling of issues, though, which will showcase the diversity of questions and concerns we might have with aesthetic experiences.

A quick note before we get going: just as the philosophy of science has focused on physics, perhaps too much, so too has aesthetic theory focused perhaps too much on visual art. I’ve made sure to address music in particular in these entries, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that I have a personal background in music theory and performance, so I’ve looked more into aesthetic theories of music than I might have otherwise. The other reason—and by far the more important one—is that music is part of our everyday lives, and even those who don’t ever go out of their way to enjoy other forms of art are very likely to listen to music regularly, if not constantly. With MP3 players and muzak, music has become a constant element in our lives, arguably in a way and to an extent that no other form of art has ever before been infused throughout a society.

On the Standard of Taste

How does something get to be judged a great work of art?

Can anything be a great work of art, if enough people say it is?

What if you—or what if everybody—no longer finds a work of art, traditionally recognized as a great work, compelling? Is it still a great work of art?

The Philosophy

It is said that “de gustibus non est disputandum”—or, in the slightly different English idiom, there’s no accounting for taste. If someone doesn’t care for lobster or pâté, there’s not much that can be said to change her opinion. Are we right, though, to say that she is in some sense “wrong” in thinking they are not delicious? Surely those with refined palates appreciate these foods, and we would not be likely to choose someone who didn’t to be a food critic, so there seems to be some basis for thinking that someone who doesn’t appreciate fine foods isn’t as good a judge of food, even though this puts us in the awkward position of saying sometimes that a dish is excellent even though we might not enjoy it.

We are in the same position with judgments of taste in art. David Hume’s take on this strange situation starts with the observation that, while aesthetic judgment is a matter of personal feeling, our feelings are generally connected in some way to an objective state of affairs. When you burn your hand, for example, it is not because you are touching some pain that is there in the fire—the pain is in you, not the fire—and yet pain is surely a feeling connected in some way to the fire, and if someone else does not similarly feel pain when her hand is in the fire, you’re inclined to say that there’s something wrong with her.

Now, there’s obviously more disagreement about which works of art are great than there is about whether fire will hurt your hand. In Hume’s view this isn’t a fundamental difference, but just a reflection of the fact that aesthetic appreciation is a subtle thing, and subject to influences by culture, religion, and our aesthetic training. We gain refined taste in art through long experience with great art, and through this process we can develop our aesthetic sense and become “true critics.” And, circular though it may be, we identify great works as those that the true critics agree are great.

The Sublime in Nature

We don’t usually find water or dirt terribly impressive. Why do we find ourselves enthralled by the Grand Canyon or the ocean?

I’m guessing you might have said that size matters. But is that enough to explain it? Do we find large numbers—the number “one million” for example—similarly enthralling? Why not?

We are in awe, also, of the forces of nature. Why do we find it thrilling to stand at the bottom of a powerful waterfall?

The Philosophy

Immanuel Kant considered aesthetic experiences, along with the other topics we’ve already heard about from him. Kant addressed at least something in almost every area of philosophy—and, amazingly, he did all of his important writing quite late in his career, publishing his first great work when he was in his fifties.

We don’t talk much about the experience of the sublime anymore, but we’re certainly familiar with the feeling: an overwhelming feeling of awe that we have standing before the ocean, or a towering cliff, or near the thunder of a waterfall, or in the midst of a near-terrifying violent storm.

In the experience of very large things (the “mathematically sublime”), we have a concept of the whole as a single thing, but we also know that it is made of individual bits. We can comprehend each individual bit, and understand what it is in normal terms, by imagining interacting with it, for example—but the whole thing is incomprehensibly large. So, for example, we can understand a bucket of ocean water—how large it is, what could be in it, and so on. When we look at the ocean, we try to extrapolate from that normal understanding of an amount of water to the incomprehensible and overwhelming multitude of bucketfuls of water. We are awed because although we cannot understand how much water there is before us, we are still able to see it and conceptualize it as a whole. It is the way that our conceptual ability outstrips our understanding that produces this feeling of wonder within us.

In experiences of the great force of nature in violent storms or waterfalls (the “dynamically sublime”), we are aware of how unimaginably powerful it is compared to us, and we feel awe in our ability to observe it without fleeing or being destroyed. As with the mathematically sublime, we stand in amazement of our own ability to deal with something on such a massive and overwhelming scale.

On the Judgment of Beauty

Is the experience of beauty just a personal feeling or a judgment about the beautiful thing?

If it is a feeling, why do we expect others to agree with us? On the other hand, if it is a judgment, why can’t we provide criteria and arguments to convince others to agree with us, or provide necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be beautiful?

The Philosophy

Immanuel Kant began his theory of beauty by observing this very unusual dual character of aesthetic judgment: The experience of beauty is a feeling, but it is also a judgment about an object. And yet we can’t simply define what it is based on, such that we can prove that it’s there in the object. But we still claim that others are wrong if they disagree with our judgment of beauty!

Kant says that the enjoyment that we call “beauty” is found in the free play of our cognitive abilities. The thing that we call “beautiful”—I think it’s easiest to understand this if you think of a painting or a symphony—has a rule-like structure but does not actually follow any strict and definable rules. No matter how complicated and intricate, no recipe can be given for how to make a work of art. The process of experiencing possible patterns emerge and depart, the play of order and meaning within something not determined by order or meaning, is what gives us the pleasure we call beauty. We might say today that beauty appears at the border of structure and chaos.

So, while the experience of beauty is just a feeling, it is based on an interaction between the beautiful object and the basic structures of human thought and understanding. Because those structures of the mind are universal, it makes some sense to claim that others ought to agree with us. This also explains how it can be both that beauty is a personal feeling and that the judgment that an object is beautiful really does identify something about the object, not just our merely personal reaction to it.

It’s a surprisingly tidy solution to this apparent conceptual contradiction, but can it account for modern art? But then, maybe our reaction to and appreciation of modernist compositions is more complicated than just finding them “beautiful” …

Calm and Conflict

There’s a story that Mozart once refused to get out of bed to receive a visitor. The man who had come calling went to the piano and loudly played a chord progression, ending on the dominant chord. Mozart, as predicted, couldn’t stand it, and had to get up to play the tonic chord and resolve the tension by completing the chord progression. What is it like to experience dissonance as “tension,” and why do we enjoy the movement from dissonance to consonance?

What is “harmonious” about musical harmony?

The Philosophy

Do you remember Arthur Schopenhauer, the guy we discussed at the end of Chapter 7: Aspects of the Self, whose theory was that the world is a manifestation of will that survives death? Schopenhauer played the flute. This has been a point of contention among some commentators, most notably, Friedrich Nietzsche. How can a man play the flute every evening, and yet claim that life is suffering and that all the evidence suggests that humanity is some sort of mistake? It’s not an unreasonable question, but Schopenhauer’s account of music helps us see why he, at least, didn’t see any conflict between his beliefs and his practice.

Art, in Schopenhauer’s view, is a way to express the human will so that it becomes external and available for contemplation. When we are able to observe the will in the artwork, separate from us, we are given a momentary rest from being driven by our own will and desires, and this rest is the pleasure that we take in art. By going through the movement of the will in the proxy of the artwork, our own wills are quieted, and we supplant the futile strivings and petty dramas of our own wills with a peaceful contemplation of the will, bare and separated from our own desires, in the work of art.

Music, Schopenhauer thought, was the purest art form, representing the will most directly. Other art forms are cluttered up by words, concepts, symbols, and images, but music is nothing but the movements of the will expressed in sound. While the proper goal in life is a negation of the will and a destruction of desire, music is able to give us temporary distance from the will and take us out, for a moment at least, from the vain striving and meaningless hustle and bustle that constitutes life.

Melodies, How Do They Work?

What are we hearing when we hear a melody? At each moment, we hear only one note or another.…

Can any series of notes be a melody? If not, why not?

Head over to YouTube and listen to a twelve-tone composition, like Arnold Schoenberg’s (1874–1951) Piano Concerto op. 42. What do you think—do you still agree with your previous view about what makes a melody?

The Philosophy

Phenomenologists—roughly speaking, philosophers of the what-it’s-like of experience—have addressed musical listening, and brought fascinating insights to what seems to us to be a very simple thing, but which is really anything but.

In hearing a melody we are, it is true, hearing isolated notes in succession, but we experience the melody rather than the notes. The French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), compared the melody to a film. In the film we see only isolated pictures, each of which is gone before the next arrives, and yet we experience the movement and change, not any of the images as an image. In the same way, in listening, we experience the gestalt, or the system of elements as a system, and experience the elements within it only as parts of what appears to us essentially as a whole.

Each note, then, as we experience it, is experienced in the context of the notes that come before—but this context is not produced through memory. As Merleau-Ponty pointed out, if we remembered the previous notes, we would be recalling something; instead we continue to feel the previous notes even though we are no longer (literally) hearing them. Another phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), called this retention. The experience of the previous note is retained in our current experience of the current note, and the note we hear is set against the background of those notes we retain—those notes that we no longer hear, but which we continue to feel rather than merely remember.

There is a similar process of protension, wherein we “feel” the notes that we have not yet heard, but which are implied in the note we currently hear—this is what got Mozart out of bed in that story. The melody emerges from the notes we hear placed against the notes we retain, and containing the notes we protain, even when, as in Schoenberg, the notes that actually follow are different from the ones we “heard” before we heard them. The melody, like all experience, is a blurred mix of past, present, and possible futures.

Listening under Late Capitalism

You almost certainly believe that pop music reached its high point when you were seventeen. Almost everyone believes this, no matter when they were seventeen and no matter what sort of tacky nonsense they were listening to that year. (I still have an unjustifiable love of third-wave ska, for example.) What does this say about what our judgment of quality in music is based on?

We’d be likely to judge someone who, today, listens pretty much exclusively to ’70s disco, ’80s New Wave, or ’90s Neo-Swing. What does it say about our relationship with music that music can become embarrassing?

The Philosophy

German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) wrote deep and complex analyses of popular culture, focusing most of all on music. In an influential essay, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” he claimed that our engagement with music is characterized, on the one hand, by encountering music as a commodity, and on the other hand as an element of personal identity and comfort (regression and repetition in the Freudian sense, where, like children, we demand the same thing over and over again). Notably missing in both these elements is the actual aesthetic experience of the music.

The commodity character of music is revealed in a number of ways. In Classical music, orchestras perform only particular famous pieces, because they are the ones that everyone knows—because they are the ones that orchestras perform—and a great many works at least as valuable are almost entirely ignored. The consumer displays the tickets proudly and whistles the catchiest motif in the subway car, showing that his concern is having acquired the cachet and social meaning of having had the experience, not the experience itself.

In popular music, style and fashion form the basis of our experience. Adorno writes that our rage against music that isn’t up-to-date, that has become “corny,” shows that our previous “enjoyment” of this music was only a pseudopleasure of consumption and amusement rather than a real aesthetic pleasure.

Adorno doesn’t discuss our attachment to the musical styles of our youth, but it fits in perfectly with his analysis—he might have said that we form a lasting attachment to this music because it has become bound up with our self-identity and serves as a safe memory to which we can retreat at moments of uncertainty, freeing ourselves from the burden of experiencing change and growth. Hearing it gives us the empty calories of musical macaroni and cheese. In these ways, we see that listening today has little to do with music.

The End of Art

For each of the following, answer these questions: Was this art? Is this art? If someone did this today, would it be art? Why would it be art or not-art?

The Philosophy

In his theory of artistic progress, American philosopher Arthur Danto (1924–) adopted a general view of the progress of art from German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and used it to provide a detailed analysis of modern and postmodern art. In Hegel’s original theory, art has progressed through different eras, very roughly speaking, by a gradual decrease of concrete and imitative elements in art and an increase in the expressive and ideal (in the sense of “being about ideas”) elements. In Greek sculpture, the statue is viewed as the god itself, and serves a symbolic function. In Classical art, most clearly in painting, realistic and literal representation is combined with expressive content, properly reflecting in beauty the nature of humanity as both free and material. In Romantic art, most clearly in poetry and music, the inner nature of humanity is emphasized. In Hegel’s view, art is about the representation of humanity, and so symbolic art is not yet art, whereas Romantic art represents a disintegration of art from its Classical realization.

Danto extends and changes this historical view, and his version is much less abstract and much more plausible. In his view, art progresses by breaking apart the limits of what can be art. At first art was imitative and took on an expressive function. The imitative aspects of art were broken down, and art became that process by which we see that each stylistic and conventional constraint on what “counts” as art is in fact unnecessary to art. I’ll show you what I mean. In Impressionism, the actual presence of the paint comes forward in the viewer’s experience of the work, deemphasizing the importance of representation. In Modernism and Abstract Expressionism, the process is carried further. In found art, the process of artistic creation itself is shown to be unnecessary. Today, according to Danto, we are “after the end of art,” because art, understood as this process of breaking down its own constraints, has finished. Today, it seems, there are no rules about what “counts,” except that art must be a further development and what used to be art cannot be art today.