20th Century Aesthetics

Towards A Theory of Feeling

Mario Perniola, Massimo Verdicchio

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441117793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

In our contemporary age aesthetics seems to crumble and no longer be reducible to a coherent image. And yet given the vast amount of works in aesthetics produced in the last hundred years, this age could be defined "the century of aesthetics". 20th Century Aesthetics is a new account of international aesthetic thought by Mario Perniola, one of Italy's leading contemporary thinkers. Starting from four conceptual fields – life, form, knowledge, action - Perniola identifies the lines of aesthetic reflection that derive from them and elucidates them with reference to major authors: from Dilthey to Foucault (aesthetics of life), from Wölfflin to McLuhan and Lyotard (aesthetics of form), from Croce to Goodman (aesthetics and knowledge), from Dewey to Bloom (aesthetics and action). There is also a fifth one that touches on the sphere of affectivity and emotionality, and which comes to aesthetics from thinkers like Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze. The volume concludes with an extensive sixth chapter on Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Brazilian, South Korean and South East Asian aesthetic thought and on the present decline of Western aesthetic sensibility.

1

Aesthetics of Life

The ‘meaning of life’ and aesthetics

The idea that aesthetic experience entails a facilitation and intensification of life, an increase and a development of vital energies, is so widespread in contemporary culture that one finds it difficult to attribute to it a specific philosophical meaning. The very notion of life seems to be too vague and generic at first sight to have a distinctive conceptual importance. Furthermore, the expression ‘philosophy of life’ has been employed too often polemically to criticize those philosophical orientations that claim to reduce or subordinate philosophical activity to experience, to the empirical dimension of existence, to the mere psychic fact, thus negating the originality and the autonomy of philosophical performance. Finally, it is hard to understand why aesthetic experience ought to be essentially related to life. After all, if what matters is the inexhaustible richness and fertility of life, it seems inevitable that aesthetic experience be something secondary and incidental, if not even parasitical, with respect to the very powerful explosion and spontaneous assertion of vital forces. In short, both the critics of ‘vitalism’ and the apologists of life do not grasp the reasons for the relation that unites life with aesthetics.

And yet this connection exists! If the word ‘life’ points to something that goes beyond the mere fact of biology is because it implies the assertion of a purpose that makes it possible to think of particular events in relation to something more general and universal. In other words, the philosophical discourse of twentieth-century thought about ‘life’ coincides for the most part with questions concerning the ‘meaning of life’. When I ask if the story of an historical subject (whether a single human being, a people or humanity as a whole) has meaning, it is precisely because I reflect on the possibility of relating its occurrence to a finality whose results are significant. This essentially teleological question confers on the notion of ‘life’ a lively and provocative character. In fact, to reopen the teleological question in the twentieth century means opposing the mechanistic and physicalistic orientation of modern science which, beginning with Descartes and Galileo, excluded finalism from the knowledge of nature. According to this view, the question of the meaning of life is nonsensical because it claims to bring to total unity or to final principles a series of events that are entirely explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry.

But what does the question of the purpose of life have to do with the aesthetic experience? Does the teleological question not belong rather to metaphysics or ethics? Why should it be regarded as an aesthetic question? To say that the aesthetic question consists in reflecting on the meaning of individual and collective life seems provocative. And yet the aesthetic reflection on life is connected with this challenge. That is why it tends to identify not only with teleology but also with the philosophy of history and with metaphysics. Whether we assert that life has meaning or we deny that it has one, the horizon within which this question is formulated in the twentieth century is strictly connected with aesthetics, which has dared to formulate the fundamental problem of existence.

The theoretical premise of this appropriation can be found in Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Critique of Judgement (1790), where he brings both aesthetics and teleology under the single faculty of ‘judgement’. This faculty which consists in thinking the particular as the content of the universal makes it possible to have a coherent idea of the whole in its totality, as that provided precisely by a beautiful object or by a natural organism. In both cases, according to Kant, a human being rejoices and is pleased because he considers, from a cognitive and moral point of view, empirical entities in terms of unity and purpose that could never be brought back to a single principle. Thus Kant denies that finality can actually constitute the explanation of an event in the world. The unifying principle to which judgement brings back a plurality of phenomena cannot derive from experience, which is entirely subject to a mechanistic explanation (and not a finalistic one). Judgement does not proceed according to concepts but by means of the sentiment of pleasure, which derives precisely from discovering that disparate elements can be brought back to a unity. It is impossible to provide a cognitive answer to the question whether life has meaning or not. The ‘meaning of life’ cannot be the object of a scientific demonstration! It cannot even be a purpose to be realized, or a categorical imperative that can be imposed on the will. Kant excludes finality as a moral question because it is connected to pleasure and displeasure, and not to the faculty of desire. Even though, in the last instance, he places moral man as the ‘definitive purpose’ of creation, this statement has no moral validity in any strict sense. I am supposed to obey the command of reason independently of the fact that my life, nature or world have ‘meaning’.

Lived experience

Foremost among those who have asserted the relation between aesthetic experience and the meaning of life is Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). For Dilthey, the thinking of the purpose of humanity takes shape as a theory of historical knowledge, in opposition to the knowledge of the natural sciences both in method and object. In the essay ‘The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task’,¹ Dilthey claims that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics has exhausted its historical task. Simply explaining and understanding the new philosophico-cultural situation, as well as the historico-social frame (as constituted after 1848) is completely inadequate.

Writing in 1892, Dilthey claims to be at the centre of a movement that began 50 years earlier and that marked the end not only of Classicism and Romanticism, but even the conception of life and art that began in the fifteenth century. He identifies this movement with the poetics of Naturalism and demonstrates its destructive aspects when seizing reality in an immediate way without even stopping before the physiological and the bestial, and thus reducing reality to a mere fact devoid of meaning. Among the exponents of this movement, Dilthey mentions Wagner in music, Zola in literature, Semper in architecture and Otto Ludwig in theatre.

With respect to Naturalism, which aims at a global aesthetization of life in terms of a total work of art, the three aesthetic methods (rational, experimental and historical) are revealed to be painfully inadequate. The living artistic aspirations, which tumultuously are asserted in the culture of his times, do not let themselves be dominated by the notion of an harmonious order of the universe, or can they be reduced to a totality of sensations, or, finally, can they find an adequate comprehension in an aesthetics like Hegel’s which is too exclusively interested in the spiritual aspects of the work of art. The aesthetic dimension of Naturalism cannot be found in abridged versions or in voluminous textbooks. The crisis opened by Naturalism has also exploded that living, vital circulation of aesthetic opinions among philosophers, art critics, artists and the public that characterized both the neo-Classical era and the Romantic one.

In the years after 1848, Dilthey seized upon the beginning of a process of dissolution of Western philosophical and artistic legacy that, in his view, is far from being concluded. What preoccupies him, in particular, is the yielding to mere empirical duality inherent in the poetics of the reproduction of reality. Art is never a copy of reality, but a guide, a direction towards a deeper comprehension of reality. He suggests, therefore, a renewal of the science of aesthetics which must be able to answer to the challenge of Naturalism and guarantee the continuity between the great Renaissance tradition and the new artistic manifestations. After all, he writes, naturalists are motivated by the same need that moved the great artists of the Renaissance, namely, to see reality with different eyes, to compel men to make their experience of life, their vitality, more intense.

But perhaps this need can no longer be satisfied neither by art nor by aesthetics as traditionally understood. Kant distinguished aesthetic judgement (immediately perceiving the finality of an object by means of the subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure) from teleological judgement (thinking nature as an objective system of ends). For Dilthey, the search for ‘meaning’ was either oriented towards the perception of natural and artistic beauty or towards the understanding of nature as an organic whole. Even though he considered the hypothesis that even human culture in its guise as civil and cosmopolitan society could constitute an ultimate end,² he excluded history from his consideration of finalism. Only with Hegel is the ultimate end of humanity located in the historical process, for which the ideal is not to be realized in the future but rather is something already realized, objectified and completed in the three forms of Absolute Spirit (art, religion and philosophy). The task of philosophy in the fullness of its development and articulations (one of which is in fact the aesthetic) is to capture the ‘meaning’ of life, but, like the owl of Minerva that flies only at dusk, everything will have already occurred. Hegel attributes to philosophy as a whole a function that Kant had limited to aesthetic and teleological judgement, namely, to identify the ultimate purpose of humanity. Hence the characteristic of ‘great novel’ that confers an ‘aesthetic’ colouring to the entire Hegelian philosophy: reason makes use of the passions and the interests of individuals to realize its ends. To the highest form of social organization, namely the State, Hegel attributes the same characteristics that Kant attributed to Nature, namely, that of ‘an organic whole’ in which every single moment is at the same time a means and an end.³

Dilthey also locates the sense of human existence in history but, unlike Hegel, he believes that it cannot be founded metaphysically in universal reason, but rather discovered critically in the historico-social reality. The protagonist of this operation is the writer of history who, on the basis of his lived experience, connects the testimony of the past in an organic narrative from which the meaning of life emerges. The faculty of connecting disparate elements together and bringing the particular back to the universal, which is the function of judgement, is exercised not on nature but on the remnants of what has been. The real protagonist of aesthetic experience, therefore, is the historian who, through the characterization of dynamic connections, grasps a continuity from which the meaning of the past emerges. The historian, therefore, more than anyone else, is in direct relation with lived experience. In his essays on Lessing, Goethe, Novalis and Hölderlin (now collected in Poetry and Experience⁴), Dilthey demonstrates this activity with the greatest subtlety. In his analysis of poetic imagination, which transforms empirical facts into meaningful events and makes possible the access to a wider, richer and more profound dimension of life, Dilthey is able to reflect upon his own historiographical research. After all, the poet and the historian, the artist and the philosopher proceed in the same manner. Through the elaboration of dynamic connections, they discover the meaning of life. Hence, Dilthey’s tendency to identify aesthetic experience with the work of the narrator.

By contrast with Naturalism, Dilthey believes that the meaning of life cannot be grasped immediately. For Dilthey, what has primacy is not natural and empirical life but rather Erlebnis, lived experience or, better, relived experience.⁵ The highest form of understanding is reliving. Only by reliving can we prevent the present from disappearing by transforming it in an always available presence. Therefore, the task of the poet and the historian is extremely important. They alone can snatch the human world from caducity, oblivion and death by conferring on it a sense, forever. By identifying aesthetic experience with a participating narrative that reconstructs the past on the basis of structural connections unknown to those who have lived them, Dilthey transforms the search for the purpose of life in an infinite labour of emotional re-elaboration and rethinking of what has been. The emphatic treatment that the notion of life finds in his theoretical work is functional with respect to an intellectual strategy that views the impermanence and fleetingness of natural existence as the enemy to be overcome. Aesthetic experience acquires, therefore, the aspect of a continuous and endless struggle against death. Poets and historians revive their ancestors. In fact, they make them live again since their natural life was only a continuous disappearance!

Living is evaluating

Unlike Dilthey, who accounts for life in its temporal dimension, George Santayana believes that aesthetic experience is essentially objectification. For Santayana, what is relevant is not the opposition between life and death, but between life and objects, between the animate and inanimate, the organic and inorganic.

Santayana’s aesthetics also has its roots in Kant, but, his thought is not mediated by idealism but rather through Herbart’s realism, proud opponent and sharp critic of Hegel. Herbart separated distinctly the discourse on being, proper of theoretical sciences, from judgements of value, in which he also included moral evaluations. Aesthetic experience, therefore, consisted for him in the exercise of evaluation, in approving or disapproving, in appreciating or depreciating something. Kant’s faculty of judgement was understood in the literal sense of critical activity. Santayana’s first work The Sense of Beauty⁶ considers aesthetics a theory of evaluation, without even referring specifically to Herbart. Aesthetic experience, however, is something more than just an intellectual judgement. It is an appreciative perception and implies a sensible gratification that goes beyond a simple thinking exercise. It is a vital act that pours forth from our deepest and most hidden dimensions of our existence. For Santayana what is important is the emotional participation of those who assert value. This cannot be considered to be something objective and independent of individual appreciation. However, in contrast to Herbart, Santayana distinguishes aesthetics from ethics. Aesthetic judgements are positive: they consist in asserting value. Aesthetic experience is saying ‘yes’ to life with energy and enthusiasm, with purity and immediacy. Moral judgements, instead, are negative: they stem from the perception of an evil and aim at preventing it. While aesthetics is linked to a vital pleasure, ethics is oriented towards the prevention of suffering. The first entails praise, celebration, an exaltation of existence, the latter censure, blame, a detraction of some aspect of life. Moralists forget that morality is a means to avoid pain, and not an end in itself, the latter can only be grasped by aesthetics. Santayana goes so far as to assert that all values are to a certain extent aesthetic because the aesthetic is the positive appreciation as such. In actual fact, the ugly understood as a negative aesthetic value does not exist. When it produces an actual displeasure it falls within the area of the ethical, which, in fact, is not concerned with pleasure or joy, but with preventing evil. After all everything is beautiful because everything is in some measure capable of raising attention and interest. But this does not mean that everything is equally beautiful. Things differ greatly in their capacity to please us and, therefore, in their aesthetic value. Santayana refuses to define his theory of aesthetic experience as ‘hedonistic’. Hedonism, precisely because it posits pleasure as a purpose to be realized, precludes access to that affirmative immediacy that characterizes aesthetic evaluation.

If experience coincides with an admired, moving and satisfied appreciation of reality, what does its specificity consist of? In other words, is the contemplation of a view the same as eating a pizza? Is admiring a painting the same as indulging in the pleasures of the flesh? In what does aesthetic pleasure differ from other types of pleasure? Kant had defined the peculiarity of aesthetic pleasure in its disinterestedness (i.e. devoid of interest with respect to the real existence of the object), and in its universality (i.e. capable of soliciting everyone’s consent). Santayana denies these two properties. As far as the first is concerned, any pleasure is interested, that is, sought after for itself. Aesthetics, for Santayana, coincides with the empirical dimension of living. Finalism, the search for ‘meaning’ permeates every vital activity. Whoever has aesthetic experiences has interests enormously greater than he who is concerned only with his house, but for both of them the care of oneself coincides with the care of the things they love. As far as universality is concerned, Santayana believes that appealing to the agreement of others betrays an insecurity with respect to sensation and evaluation. What is important is not how many people like a work of art, but how much it is liked by those who appreciate it more!⁷ The specificity of aesthetic experience, according to Santayana, must be sought in the phenomenon of objectification, in the fact that, differently from physical pleasures, which are connected with the organs that feel them and remain their prisoner, aesthetic pleasures direct our attention immediately towards an external object. While physical perception remains closed within a subjective feeling, in aesthetic experience the senses become transparent and make possible the direct access to something that presents itself as external and objective. In fact, beauty consists precisely in not having an autonomous and independent existence, apart from being the object of a personal evaluation. Therefore, beauty as a pleasure, considered as the quality of a thing, is an ultimate end that opens us to the external world and frees us from ourselves. In this way, Santayana finds an original solution to a problem that has been much debated in his time, that of Einfühlung, empathy.

With this term we understand the transposition of our sentient self in the form of an artistic object. The theorists of Einfühlung, among whom the most important is Theodor Lipps ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1 Aesthetics of Life
• 2 Aesthetics of Form
• 3 Aesthetics and Knowledge
• 4 Aesthetics and Action
• 5 Aesthetics and Feeling
• 6 Aesthetics and Culture
• Notes and Works Cited
• Index