By the "modern world", we mean to include all post Renaissance, post scientific revolution western history. "Modernism" is a complex term with different meanings for different people. It may be more or less inclusive. In its broadest interpretation, modernism signifies the world as perceived by Western individualist culture. Perhaps that perception of the world has lost its dominance. We may in fact now belong to a "postmodern" world. We will define the "modern world" for our purposes as the Western world from the Renaissance to the end of World War I. Whatever else it means, that period shaped aesthetics.
No clear historical line need be drawn between classical aesthetics and the modern world. The medieval world still operated with essentially classical assumptions about beauty, harmony, and order. The Renaissance declared itself a rebirth of classical values out of a medieval "darkness" as Renaissance writers characterized their own past. Certainly the visual arts exploded into new forms and new aesthetic attitudes. However, much of Renaissance thinking continued throughout the Middle Ages. The very idea of a Renaissance cannot be precisely defined historically. As early as the fourteenth century in Italy, many of the elements of a break with medieval thought already were evident. As late as the seventeenth century in England and Germany, some of the same elements were just being acknowledged.
As far as aesthetics is concerned the decisive change began with the late seventeenth and eighteenth century’s acknowledgment of sense as the basis of judgment and appreciation. The neo-Platonic hierarchy of being was finally replaced with a more immediate dependence on experience. Artist, writers, and critics already had changed practically, Philosophy followed. For our purposes, no sharp division need be drawn. We acknowledge that "modern" culture and philosophy emerges gradually from the medieval and Renaissance world. Aesthetics should be no different.
The development and explication of these modern beginnings require us to hypothesize a long, extended nineteenth century. We might think of the nineteenth century as reaching all the way to the battlefields of World War I. The destruction and death brought by that war surpassed all expectations of its participants. In a literal sense, it changed the world, and art changed with it (see Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That). Therefore, we will take the Great War as a convenient, though not absolute, ending to that extended century. Modern art and modern aesthetics were marked by a sense of optimism, of progress, of new developments and new movement. Feeling gained a legitimacy that made art and aesthetics central to philosophy in a new way. That optimism ended on the battlefields of France. The aesthetic of sense and sensibility have faced new challenges in the twentieth century. Our responses are built on the modernist aesthetics of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but we are still very much a part of a new, emerging world culture with its diversity and nonwestern, nonmale reorientation. For the purposes of this work, we will draw the line around 1914.
Modern Aesthetics:
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Baroque
(1600-1750 C.E.)
Between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries a decisive shift in the theoretical principles applied to aesthetics occurred. New artistic practices such as the use of perspective and attention to human form, which developed in the earlier Renaissance, demanded new theories. The social and cultural role of art shifted. Patronage passed from church and court to middle-class city dwellers and independent landowners. The new aristocracy and the rising middle-class had money to spend, leisure time, and a high level of literacy. New art forms appeared. The invention of printing created an audience and an insatiable demand for writers to supply new tastes not just for poetry and fiction, but also for comment and criticism. Literature, in particular, saw the rise of a new form of fiction, the novel, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The metaphysics of Aristotle and neo-Platonic theories of knowledge and reality made the empirical world only a first stage to a higher, spiritual understanding. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a shift away from neo-Platonism and medieval scholastic theories. Perhaps the most important element in this shift was the new science of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The rise of the new science created a different standard, empirical evidence, and a new focus of attention, the individual experience of an observer. In philosophy, both the empiricist, led by John Lock, and the rationalist, led by Gottfried Leibniz and Rene Descartes, agreed in turning inward to the individual mind as the arbiter of knowledge.
Modern aesthetics is, first of all, aesthetics of individual experiences of discrete objects. Observers have experiences through their senses. So thinkers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, turned to an aesthetic sense as the source of aesthetic experience. The five ordinary senses were supplemented by the postulation of a sense of beauty and a moral sense that responds to aesthetics and moral qualities in what is observed. In its early forms, claims for the existence of an aesthetics and moral sense were tentative. Neo-Platonic language about order, harmony, and beauty continued to be the more common mode of description of the experience of art, beauty, and the good. Increasingly that language was turned to more individualistic purposes.
The model for aesthetic sense is not the eye, as usually was the case in the classic world, but the tongue. Taste was transformed into an aesthetic term; foremost among the reasons for this shift is the analogy that taste offers for the diversity, privacy, and immediacy of the kinds of experience that art and beauty produce. When I taste something, I experience that taste without having to think about it. It is my taste in a way that cannot be denied. If something tastes salty to me, no one can make me believe that it doesn’t. Yet someone else may have a different experience. Taste that one person finds pleasant may not please another, and nothing that I can say or do will change that situation. The experience of art and beauty seemed to many early modern philosophers and critics to be exactly like that of taste.
Modern writers on aesthetics struggled to overcome the evident subjectivity of their starting point. Once individual ideas became the criteria, as they did for Locke, or the individual thinking subject took precedence, as it did for Descartes, each person’s experience stood on an equal footing. Aesthetic response is the most variable form of experience. It seemingly is unchecked by any failures of prediction or practical consequences. Science and morality are corrected by their results. If what scientists predict will happen does not happen, their theories are refuted. If a moral theory leads to suffering, it is a bad theory. In contrast, experiences of art and beauty are personal and matters of taste, so they need no correction. But then they provide no principles either. To the early modern writers on aesthetics, taste seemed the perfect way to describe this situation. What one’s taste approved could not be questioned.
In addition to taste itself, the problems of aesthetics were multiplied by the chaos of new forms, which created new demands in art and literature during the period known by historians as the Enlightenment. One way to control taste would be to have a reasonably homogeneous art world. As long as most consumers of art think more or less alike, differences in taste will be minimized. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many new consumers of art expressed their preferences and taste, and they did not think alike. Artists and writers struggled to find rules that would guide their practice, but many of the most successful artists were the ones who broke the rules. So a struggle developed in aesthetics between the quest for guiding rules within an empirical context and the constant push for new forms. Creativity eventually became a value in itself.
Beauty was a function of the order and harmony of the cosmos in classical and medieval theories. Nature could exemplify beauty because it reflected the greater cosmological order. When modern writers spoke of natural beauty, they began to associate it with sensual experiences of nature. Those experiences could be enhanced by arrangement and by associations with art. Modern theories replaced the clear priority that nature had over art in classical theories of imitation with expectations about nature that often made it difficult to tell which comes first, art or nature. No where is this ambiguity clearer than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ taste for landscape and the picturesque. Painters looked for views that met aesthetic standards. A subgenre of literature, the travel narrative, a rose provides vicariously the experience of the picturesque. Nature came to be envisioned as it was depicted in art. It was long before the obvious step was taken to make nature conform to aesthetic principles. Landscape gardening joined the fine arts. Nature had to be made to look like the pictures painted by artists and the imagined landscapes of writers. If no romantic ruins were available, they could be built.
Theories of taste gradually merged into theories of an aesthetic attitude. Taste tended toward a passive response on the model of perception laid down by Locke. The properties of the object were thought of as acting upon the sensory organs; by analogy, natural beauty and works of art were thought to act on a complex inner sense to produce the characteristic experiences of aesthetic taste. But once authority was ceded to the observer and beauty was no longer conceived of as a property of the organism of the cosmos or of transcendent forms, thinkers began to suggest that the observer could convert external sensory data into aesthetic forms by modifying the way the world is perceived. At that point, the analogy of taste was abandoned and was replaced with an active mind whose imaginative powers transform and express what is perceived and its own powers. The aesthetic became, in a phase common to a number of later eighteenth century thinkers, an expression of the powers of the mind itself.
Two characteristics mark the shift to modern aesthetics. The first is the idea of aesthetic experience itself. Aesthetic experience is different and valuable for its own sake. Art and nature alike can supply the means, and the audience participates in converting them to the right "kind" of experience. The second characteristic identifies aesthetic experience with a particular emotion, pleasure. Modern aesthetics becomes fundamentally hedonistic, separating emotional response from the intellect. A number of thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, tried to reunite the intellect and aesthetic judgment.
The eighteenth century gave us the modern word "aesthetics". The term aesthetics is usually credited to the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. Baumgarten was a part of the continental philosophical movement known as rationalism. The rationalists tried to reconcile experience and science with an overarching rational principle that assured order and certainty. Baumgarten’s task was to fit the immediate experiences of sense into that rationalist scheme. He coined the word "aesthetics" for the independent realm of feeling that had its own reasons and science. Immanuel Kant adopted the term and made it central to our philosophical vocabulary. The term "aesthetics" captures perfectly an area of feeling, the peculiar pleasures of art and nature that are studied and valued for their own sake. For both rationalist and empiricist, experience became fundamental to the ability to know anything. Since aesthetics appealed directly to sense, it also could be understood as a new form of knowledge. Sense and knowledge, rules for producing art and ways of experiencing it, and the quest for standards in a chaotic new field dominated modern aesthetics.
The selections focus on the formative stages of modern aesthetics. Because of the way aesthetics develops, one would certainly be justified in looking to poetry, literary criticism, and art history for alternative selections. But the central achievement of early modern aesthetics was to give a philosophical form to aesthetics as a discipline within philosophy. Frances Hutcheson began that systematic task, David Hume confronted the problems that the increasing subjectivism of aesthetics raised; and Immanuel Kant took up Hume’s challenge and laid down the foundations that Hegel, the German Idealist, and the Romantics each developed.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |