Aesthetics beyond the Arts

New and Recent Essays

Arnold Berleant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317184836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.

PART I
The Arts as Experience

Chapter 1
Judging Architecture

Introduction

One of the perennial problems in aesthetics is the justification of normative judgments.1 How can we support the claim that a painting in a new and unfamiliar style is superb rather than mediocre, the action in a drama humanly revealing rather than tawdry, or a public building that does not honor the classical convention of monumentality or the modern one of striking individuality nonetheless magnificent?2

To assess the value of objects or situations that are qualitative and unique seems for many a thoroughly non-rational process. Must such judgments, whether of moral worth or of aesthetic value, rely on an intuitive sense of what is good, right, or beautiful? Or must they rest on feeling, which may be another word for the same thing? Appealing to principles is no clear solution. Principles are necessarily general and cannot respond to the peculiarities of individual circumstances and, when they are imposed on unique conditions, often offend by their hard-hearted indifference to context or to their expedient disregard of the full range of their effects. And in the aesthetic judgment of architecture, ideology, whether political, social, or artistic, can do violence to both creativity and originality. Indeed, architecture seems to be particularly vulnerable to the difficulties of aesthetic judgment because it serves a social function and involves practical considerations in design and use.

What alternative is left? If we mistrust feeling and intuition as inveterately personal and thus not transferable to others, and principles as impossibly abstract and thus impervious to unique particularities, the result seems to be pure arbitrariness. End of question? Not so, for building needs arise, architectural competitions proliferate, and decisions have to be made, if not by aesthetic criteria, then by political or economic expedience, and if not by choice, then by default. If reflect we must, some resolution of this quandary is needed. How then to proceed?

Architecture is as representative as any other art of the difficulties in making judgments of aesthetic value. At the same time it differs in significant ways from most other arts, for the union of function and beauty in architecture puts the lie to any theory that makes disinterestedness a condition of aesthetic value.3 It may be, however, because of the fusion of the practical and the aesthetic, that cognitive support for aesthetic judgments can be offered more readily and clearly here than for other arts for moral judgment or for normative judgment in general. And it may even be that the direction we shall take on architectural judgment can prove useful in these other recalcitrant domains of normative thought. At the very least, in an architectural context the problem of aesthetic judgment may seem less threatening, at least at first.

Judgments of Aesthetic Value: The Critic

Efforts at making credible judgments of aesthetic value in architecture, as in the other arts, seem to center on one of two apparently opposite poles: the person engaged in appreciative experience or the aesthetic object. Either the basis for the value of a building rests on the response of persons, individually or collectively, to its pleasing qualities, or it rests on features of the structure, features that conform to standards for which universal validity is claimed, such as unity in variety or the object’s presumed “aesthetic” qualities.

Both alternatives seem unsatisfactory. A critic’s judgment can easily appear peremptory, but no more than an individual’s pronouncement based on little more than personal preference, while the aesthetic characteristics of the building are ultimately conventional traits or circular (e.g., aesthetic qualities are what make an object aesthetic). And if one chooses to adopt a presumably scientific approach and attempt to quantify those traits, the grounds for judgment are frequently the questionable selection of preferences by unskilled observers of those objects.

How, then, to proceed after so complete a dismissal of the alternatives? Let us begin by looking at some aspects of these contrary approaches, aspects whose usefulness may persist beyond the limitations of their origin. First let us consider the person making the judgment, in the most authoritative case, the architectural critic.

Although two and a half centuries have passed since it was first published in 1757, Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” remains the preeminent philosophical discussion of critical aesthetic judgment.4 While it hasn’t settled the question, Hume’s clear description of the traits of an ideal critic is a thorough and compelling account of the qualifications that may be expected in an expert judge of artistic merit. This essay is too well known for it to be necessary to more than cite the qualifications to be expected of an expert critic, nor will it serve our purpose to contribute to the continuing debate over them. Rather, Hume’s account can help to focus the discussion here, so a brief review of his characterization of the expert critic will launch our inquiry.

Central to Hume’s position is the claim that authoritative judgments of aesthetic value are the considered pronouncements of a properly qualified critic. Since there is presumably no objective scientific formula for determining these judgments, criticism that is adequately grounded seems the only possible basis. So for Hume, a “true judge in the finer arts” possesses healthy and well-developed organs of sense, a sensitive imagination (which Hume describes as “delicacy of taste”), full experience of the arts in question and knowledge of their principles and practices, a wide acquaintance with other arts, which enables one to make revealing comparisons, and a mind free of prejudices, both personal and theoretical, that obstruct the unhampered exercise of experience and judgment. Finally, Hume adds to this list the ability to keep in mind all these factors and qualifications and arrive at a fair and balanced assessment.

To Hume’s list it is important to add Dewey’s suggestion that we include familiarity with different cultural traditions in art. At the present stage of social development this may seem an obvious requirement, but for Dewey, writing three quarters of a century ago, it is a sign of the breadth of his awareness. Further, in addition to stressing the perceptual qualifications of the expert critic, Dewey adds a synthesizing function to the critic’s analytic one. It is an easy matter to see how this portrait of the ideal critic can represent the more focused purview of the architectural critic.

This list of capabilities that characterize an expert judge of aesthetic value is rich and full. It is necessary, however, to underscore one of Hume’s requirements: a mind free of theoretical and personal prejudices. Contemporary cultural criticism, building on work that has been done over the past century, has shown how deeply and pervasively our cognitive preconceptions direct and color our experience and understanding.5 Despite perceptual sensitivity, a lively imagination, wide experience with aesthetic matters that extends beyond one’s native culture, and the educational background to focus and direct that experience, the influence of cognitive prejudice may be more pervasive and powerful still.

We have come to this recognition from many different sources: the Marxist critique of ideology, insights from the sociology of knowledge and linguistic anthropology, and more recently, hermeneutics and its influence on interpretation, culminating in the unresolvable pluralism of postmodernism. We cannot evade the realization that, despite the intent and efforts of phenomenology and the psychology of perception, there is no pure experience. And in the present context, we can infer that there is no pure aesthetic experience. We look at the world metaphorically, so to speak, through a multitude of superimposed filters: the filters of language and, even more comprehensively, the ontology and metaphysics of our culture. How else to explain, for example, the pervasive and persistent dualisms of Western civilization, especially psychophysical dualism, an ontology not shared by most Eastern traditions? How to explain the insistent transcendentalism in the classical tradition in Western philosophy, a vision that contrasts sharply with the animism and naturalism prevalent in pre-literate and non-Western societies? The fact that we cannot escape such influences and that, in order to view the world at all, we cannot avoid looking through lenses and filters, does not vitiate entirely what we see. It rather defines, orders, and colors it, and this should make us wary.

Such ruminations bear on all inquiry but they are especially pertinent to the judgments we make, particularly judgments of value, of aesthetic value. For here we may attempt and even presume to determine normative status on independent, impersonal grounds. The fact that this is impossible and that interpretive filters are unavoidable does not, however, relegate our judgments to the undebatable realm of subjectivity or to mere chance. Hume’s critic is not speechless, nor is ours. What we need, in fact, is to become more explicit, to identify and expose the filters that “correct” our vision and to be more aware and deliberate in recognizing those in active use. Here lie the main grounds for debate on critical artistic appraisal, since what we can control is perhaps not so much what we see but the lenses through which we see it.

In the case of architectural judgment, the choice of lens is basic. There are, I believe, two opposite poles with numerous intermediate positions.6 These defining opposites are not only theoretical alternatives but are also those most commonly endorsed and practiced. For convenience they may be called the observational standpoint or the spectator view and, second, aesthetic engagement or the participatory approach. The observational standpoint comes from a long tradition in Western culture that understands humans’ relation to nature as one of separation, objectification, and opposition. Here nature serves human needs and people impose their wills on it. Thus humans consider themselves distinct and different, standing apart from nature and projecting their views, values, and desires onto the natural world. This long-established cognitive tradition of separation and distance culminated in Descartes’ mind-body dualism and emerged in modern aesthetic theory in Kant’s notion of aesthetic appreciation as disinterested contemplation. The Claude glass, a small instrument for viewing scenery popular in England in the eighteenth century, exemplifies disinterestedness strikingly. It reflects a miniature image of the landscape on the convex surface of a small viewer of black or colored glass, not only distancing but also framing and perhaps also tinting the landscape.

The alternative to aesthetic disinterestedness is the concept of engagement. Here, in a full aesthetic experience, there is no separation with a contemplative distance between viewer and object. Both merge in perception, the appreciator becoming entirely absorbed by the object in a rich and complex unity of experience, and the object assimilated perceptually into the appreciator’s experience. As in musical appreciation understood as the progressive unrolling of musical sound, architectural experience encourages the feeling of being fully connected in physical and perceptual consciousness when entering a building or moving through an architectural complex. Aesthetic engagement is a perceptual state that is intensely active, with cognitive, affective, and somatic dimensions. It is also thoroughly cultural (as is its alternative, disinterestedness). That is why it is essential for architectural judgment to take into account the theoretical lenses the critic brings to the process.7

Judgments of Aesthetic Value: The Building

Let us now turn from the critic to the opposite pole of the presumed normative coordinates: the architectural structure. The synthesizing function to which Dewey refers is the request that the critic search for some unifying feature in the work under consideration. By revealing an integral whole, the critic provides a guide for the appreciator. Such a theme, however, must actually be present in the work and not an ingenious contrivance of the critic, and it must be found in the work consistently.8 The requirement of a unifying principle clearly follows from the central theme of Dewey’s own aesthetic theory: the idea of aesthetic experience as a unified whole, an experience that moves through its course to fulfillment.9

Dewey’s theory is especially useful for architectural criticism because of this very focus on the unity of experience. What Dewey leads us to recognize is that, in speaking of any art, we are actually speaking of our experience of that art. So when we look for aesthetic unity, it is the unity of experience with which we must be concerned and not the formal unity of the building or other art object. The focus of the theory, then, must be on the architectural experience and not on the structure, and, similarly, the grounds for considering a building beautiful rest ultimately on the complex interplay of the building with its user, visitor, or inhabitant.

To his account of the function of critical judgment, discrimination, and unification, Dewey added a caveat in the form of two fallacies. The first is a reductive fallacy. From sensing a qualitative aspect of a building, such as its marble facing or the style it emulates, this fallacy consists in taking one of these or any other single constituent of the work and then reducing the valuation of the entire complex whole by basing it on that isolated element. Other factors often taken in isolation are the current architectural fashion and the fashionableness of a particular architect. This fallacious reductive practice also includes historical or sociological criticism that embodies a political or aesthetic ideology that biases judgment. Each of these factors may be relevant, but none offers a sufficient account in itself of the complexity of considerations that join in justifying a judgment of architectural excellence.10

The second fallacy Dewey identified is one that is often mixed with the reductive one. It consists in the confusion of categories, such as taking an historical judgment for an aesthetic judgment or a mathematical analysis for an aesthetic analysis. This occurs when judgment is based on the fact that a building represents a specific historical style or is simply old, or on discovering the golden section in analyzing a structure. This fallacy has a practical counterpart in the common confusion of values, such as mistaking historic, scientific or religious values in a work for its aesthetic value. Such confusions result from neglecting the intrinsic significance of the experience of the medium, which must always be central, since ultimately “the function of criticism is the re-education of perception of works of art.”11

Dewey’s approach to aesthetic evaluation thus takes a focus somewhat different from Hume’s. While its purpose resembles Hume’s in foregoing any objective, quantitative standards by which the aesthetic merit of a building can be measured, it differs in turning to a discriminatory examination of the building’s capacity to produce an aesthetic experience. It searches for what there is in the structure that engages one in experience, directly and immediately, as a shaped and unified succession that brings a sense of fulfillment in coming to completion. This approach does not center on the appreciator or the critic nor does it concentrate on the features of the building. Rather it focuses on the experience that is generated by the coming together of these factors as a direct experiential process. Thus we must attend to both the appreciator and the object of appreciation together.12

Now is a building most fully appreciated as disinterested or engaged? A full discussion of this question demands a more extended treatment than we can pursue here, and it is a question that has been considered elsewhere.13 Suffice it to m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Toward an Aesthetics beyond Art
• Front-chapter
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Arts as Experience
• Part II Environmental Aesthetics
• Part III Implications
• Index