Aesthetics

Nicolai Hartmann, Eugene Kelly

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110381344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The book is the first English translation of Nicolai Hartmann's final book, published in 1953. It will be of value to graduate students in philosophy, scholars concerned with 20th century Continental philosophy, students of aesthetics and art history and criticism, and persons in and out of academic philosophy who wish to develop their aesthetic understanding and responsiveness to art and music. Aesthetics, Hartmann believes, centers on the phenomenon of beauty, and art "objectivates" beauty, but beauty exists only for a prepared observer.

Part One explores the act of aesthetic appreciation and its relation to the aesthetic object. It discovers phenomenologically determinable levels of apprehension. Beauty appears when an observer peers through the physical foreground of the work into the strata upon which form has been bestowed by an artist in the process of expressing some theme. The theory of the stratification of aesthetic objects is perhaps Hartmann's most original and fundamental contribution to aesthetics. He makes useful and perceptive distinctions between the levels in which beauty is given to perception by nature, in the performing and the plastic arts, and in literature of all kinds.

Part Two develops the phenomenology of beauty in each of the fine arts. Then Hartmann explores some traditional categories of European aesthetics, most centrally those of unity of value and of truth in art.

Part Three discusses the forms of aesthetic values. Hartmann contrasts aesthetic values with moral values, and this exploration culminates in an extensive phenomenological exhibition of three specific aesthetic values, the sublime, the charming, and the comic. A brief appendix, never completed by the author, contains some reflections upon the ontological implications of aesthetics.

Engaged in constant dialogue with thinkers of the past, especially with Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hartmann corrects and develops their insights by reference to familiar phenomena of art, especially with Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Greek sculpture and architecture. In the course of his analysis, he considers truth in art (the true-to-life and the essential truth), the value of art, and the relation of art and morality.

The work stands with other great 20th century contributors to art theory and philosophical aesthetics: Heidegger, Sartre, Croce, Adorno, Ingarden, and Benjamin, among others.

Part One: The Relationship of Appearance

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First Section: The Structure of the Aesthetical Act

Chapter 1: On Perception in General

a) Looking through

The word “aesthetics” tells us that the form in which the beautiful is given to us is perception. This is our point of departure. However, it becomes immediately apparent that not any concept of perception at all will be adequate to the task of aesthetics. Therefore, we must attempt to shape the concept in a way that does justice to the phenomenon – specifically with respect to the structure of the aesthetical act, whose foundation in the consciousness of the beholder is formed by perception.

Long enough have we understood perception as though it contained only the elements of the visible, the tangible, the audible, or colors, volumes, sounds, and the like, in short as though reducible to a collection of sensations. Modern psychology has shown not only that perception cannot be so reduced, but also that we know nothing of elements of sensation as such. Such elements may only become subsequently the objects of analytic psychology; but this science has had difficulty in isolating them experimentally in a way that makes them available. To do that requires artificially produced conditions that do not occur in life.

In the content of genuine perception a complex figure is always given, a pictorial whole, a joining of many details of contrasts and transitions, whether merely a single “thing” is perceived or an entire complex of things (in practice, the latter is usually the case), a state of affairs or even something more than that. Along with what is seen belongs that which is grasped in seeing, something which is no longer given directly to the senses, but which is its entirely self-evident completion. For we never see in a purely optical sense everything that is visible upon a thing, but rather we complete the thing immediately, we interconnect and unify it, and do not even notice that we are active in this way. The line between what is optically given and what we supplement it with disappears (43) in perception. For what is achieved synthetically in perception occurs quite this side of all reflection. To be sure, it occurs on the basis of experience, but not by an inference, a comparison, a combining, or similar subsequent mental acts.

That is by no means all. In everyday perception there is contained much that is not at all comprehensible by the senses. We see the tree and the insect, but we see life in the two of them as well, differentiated, of course, as living being of two distinct types. When we enter a room, we see the poverty or wealth, the slovenliness or the good taste of the inhabitants. We see a face or a form in motion, though perhaps only from the rear, and yet just from that glimpse alone we learn something about the inward life of the person, about his character and his destiny.

Now it is precisely this, viz., the genuinely non-visible, that tends to be for us the essential matter of perception, for the sake of which we turn our attention toward an object, or rest our attention for a while upon what we see. The external aspects alone of the object would not be likely to attract our attention, no less hold it. Thus we see people looking at each other’s faces: perception forces its way through the visible forms towards what is fundamentally quite different, towards the inwardness, towards the soul; and that is so true that we normally have difficulty later in remembering the visible forms of the person and in visualizing them – while the non-visible aspects, which we perceived along with the visible, can remain before our minds in all their concrete distinctness. Our consciousness grasped the former immediately, while it hardly noticed the latter, merely grazed them, as it were, and dealt with them as something inessential and transparent as it passed through them.

Let us not object too soon by asking whether this is really a “seeing.” The fact is that as a practical matter we do not know cases of seeing persons without this kind of seeing-through. And the latter is not given subsequent to the former, in reflection or by thinking the matter over; rather it is present with the sensible perception at just the same time as the self-evident and familiar completion of an object. The acts – if they are really two acts connected one behind the other in series – do not appear as temporally separate.

How are we to explain this? How can what is not perceptible be the essential element in perception?

The situation is not as paradoxical as it may appear, once one reflects that our consciousness is not simply perceptual, and that there is a risk in isolating perception theoretically – as if perception ever stood by itself alone. To the contrary, every perception occurs upon the background of a complex of interrelated acts and contents, which are always built up in two stages, as a momentary nexus of the mental act [Erlebnis] and as a nexus of experience [Erfahrung] that is broadly extended in time. (44)

These two stages of the nexus always form a structured unity in which the order of a manifold is already present. And in this unity everything apprehended, anything presenting itself to consciousness in any way is given order: that which has been told us, and that which we have experienced personally; one’s own thoughts or fancies, as well as what one has perceived.

However, within this unity dominates, as a rule, a narrow circle of objective elements upon which the interests of the perceiver depend: persons and their qualities, situations in life, the inner moods, dispositions, and intentions of men, their benevolence, their animosity, their envy, their aversions and approbations, and much more. The remainder is arranged about these elements, in the main, and out of them the external aspect of what is perceived fills itself with the inward aspect, which was not apprehensible by the senses, but which always arises immediately, and appears to be given along with them.

Because this strange phenomenon of “looking through” [Hindurchblicken] the external aspects of a thing is so universal and familiar, we are hardly surprised by it, although the delusions that we often suffer at its expense should be enough to make us thoughtful. And that is the reason why, in the end, we usually experience consciously only the inner elements of perception, while we pass over the external elements, despite their being that which is given to us through the senses directly and serve to mediate the former. In this sense, we may say: I “see” anger, melancholy, or suspicion in the changing expressions on people’s faces. For this reason we are usually far from being able to explain “how” all this is expressed in the play of people’s features.

In the face of such phenomena, it is unimportant how we characterize them as mental acts, that is, whether we should count them as a form of perception, but this becomes nothing more than a play with words. What is important is to understand correctly the facts of the case, and even then not only for all perception, but primarily for those having to do with persons, situations, and relationships that occur in the context of practical life. In these cases, we see that with every perception there is firmly tied the integration of pre-given interconnections of lived experience and of experience in general – so firmly that without these contexts, we do not count them as perceptions; rather we have the impression of not having perceived at all. The essential matter for us is just this looking-through into what has not been grasped by the senses.

b) The perceptual field as practically selected

Although we have no intention here of bypassing discursive consciousness, it is nevertheless true that a variety of general considerations are involved here. Thus, for example there is the case of the simple elaboration of what is perceived through the senses into the representation of a thing: the pattern of the thing is already present, not, to be sure, in the form of a concept, but also not in any sense in “strict” universality, as the scientific attitude would require. Nonetheless, it is still present in a loose form and not infrequently with compelling power. (45)

This universal element is the simple precipitation of experience, and operates in our understanding of objects as an “empirical analogy,” which as such need not become conscious. One could also say: it is there as a kind of familiar well-worn pathway of representations, which is no longer traced or inspected, and for that reason it is in a certain way indifferent to objective correctness or incorrectness. For if inferences from analogy are questionable, how much more so must be the analogies that we draw without noticing them! Similarly we associate, for example, based on a single past experience, certain kinds of human character (or even just with single character traits, such as kindness, reliability, frivolity, or frailty), with certain facial types; and this picture appears again immediately as a completed pattern when we again meet the same external facial characteristics. Such a phenomenon has been called “association” since the time of Hume; but this phenomenon differs from that described by Hume in that it is always already carried out in perception itself.

However much this kind of generalization may be liable to error, most of what we possess in life of shared knowledge of the inner life of other persons rests upon it. The person who has experienced much of life is one in whom such knowledge possesses a broad foundation. With this broadness of foundation, however, generalizations as such force themselves into consciousness, where they usually take the form of conceptual knowledge and can be examined and surveyed. What is taken in along with the act of perception itself is clearly different from this manifestly higher standpoint, and it is the former alone that we are considering here.

Behind the phenomenon thus described there stands, as we have already noted, an element of practical interest; we are directed towards what appears as urgent in some way. We live, of course, in need to orient ourselves continuously within the conditions of the environment. However, we cannot understand a situation without a certain amount of additional knowledge about the intentions, aspirations, and attitudes of our fellow men. For in life they are our antagonists, and it is precisely their intentions that determine the character of a situation. Understood in this manner, all practical situations are of an inward kind: what is essential about them is the play of unseen powers of the soul. And these powers are precisely the object of acts of perception that have been extended by the element of the universal in experience.

The perception of the invisible along with the visible loses much of its mystery when we realize how it plays a broad role even in relation to far simpler objects. Think, for example, of how our ability to replace the sense of touch by that of sight increases as our consciousness matures. Upon each thing, we are able to see more and more of what is invisible: we “see” the hardness or elasticity of things, or even their weight and the inertia that resists efforts to move them. And similarly mutatis mutandis for the sense of hearing: we hear steps in an adjacent room, (46) but “see” in the mind’s eye a human form in motion, as it goes about some business or other; or we hear the quiet rustle of a wicker chair, but we see inwardly how the person sitting upon it is rocking in some specific way. In these cases also, perception is directed, without any concern for the limits of the sensibly given, toward that which is important to us because of some interest we have in it.

At this point, the insight is immediately apparent that our entire perceptual field is pre-structured by practical interest. Perception itself, and to a great extent experiential events, are both subject to a principle of selection by the prior accents that we ourselves bring into the act of perception by our states of interest. Out of all the things that may be given to us as objects of potential experience, only those that carry these accents appear in the full light of consciousness; the direction of our attention depends upon them. What appears thus as emphasized or as salient is not what is essential in itself, but only what is essential for us.

In a highly developed theoretical consciousness, naturally, what is essential in itself may be approached; but then consciousness makes a sharp distinction between what is given to the senses and what is not, and perception takes on the form of consciously focused observation. At that point, we have quite a different kind of standpoint, one that is quite far from everyday perception.

Finally, also standing behind this process of accentuation and selection in perception are clearly demonstrable value-qualities. All states of interest can be traced back precisely to value-elements, which we bring to experience and then transfer to the circuit of the perceptible. In his day, Max Scheler³² saw this phenomenon and described it for the first time in all generality. The result may be summarized in his own words: the field of perception is subject to a principle of selection that is oriented towards values. Of course in no sense do the higher ethical values play a role here originally, or only on a secondary level; rather, the values of goods (including a variety of values relative to situations) and of vital states are primary. Most prevalent are precisely the standpoints relative to “getting one’s bearings” [Sich-Zurechtfinden] and “asserting oneself” [Sich-Durchsetzen]. Such standpoints, along with the values themselves that stand behind them, are nevertheless elements that are essentially removed from perception.

Let us add here parenthetically a word about knowledge of human nature. It does not normally rest upon genuine knowledge, but rather upon a sharpened intuitive vision, and thus essentially upon a seeing of what is not visible along with what is visible. Such knowledge belongs as such precisely in the circle of perceptual phenomena that has been described here. It is similarly conditioned by thoroughly practical considerations, and is led by value perspectives. The nature of such knowledge is constituted, along with the plasticity of the experience, by apt generalizations from what has been previously experienced, thus again by empirical analogies. For that reason, it possesses some of the liabilities inherent in all thinking by analogy: it limits itself frequently to generalizations; it forms models, and is sound (47) only when these models are appropriate. The eye of the man who knows the ways of men is therefore directed upon the typical, and it fails him when it is faced with authentic personal existence. For what is personal is unique, and requires a more loving gaze to make it visible.

c) Emotional components

All of this goes far beyond perception itself. And yet it belongs to perception, and is quite closely and intimately related to it, such that we are not familiar with it in any other way. The solution of this puzzle is the one given above, namely that there is no purely perceptual consciousness, not, at least, in human beings, and not at all in spiritually developed ones. All these perceptual phenomena are thus already placed within a very broad context upon which they all are arranged.

These phenomena can also be viewed from the other side, and then they appear as follows: perception “transcends” itself. This expression is to be taken literally: perception goes beyond itself; it passes beyond its own limits, which were imposed upon it by the faculties of sense. On its own, it forces itself toward something different from itself, something that is not given to it directly; it claims it nevertheless for itself, and indeed without any concern for whence it came. So it forces its way towards entities, unities, interrelationships, backgrounds – and in such an elemental and immediate way that we imagine ourselves to be experiencing such things in perception, and we accept them as having been given along with it. Thus it happens that we think we “see” the ulterior motives of a person in his face, and, in a certain sense, we really are able to see them.

This “self-transcendence” of perception thus consists in the fact that it does not remain within itself, but rather expands beyond itself. And for that very reason, the phenomena of perception do not allow themselves to be isolated psychologically....

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Translator’s Introduction: Hartmann on the Mystery and Value of Art
• Introduction
• Part One: The Relationship of Appearance
• Part Two: The Bestowal of Form and Stratification
• Part Three: Values and Genera of the Beautiful
• Appendix
• Postscript
• Index of Names
• Index of Terms