Impressionism
Aesthetics in the first part of the twentieth century continued to be based on the principles from Kant at the end of the eighteenth century and developed throughout the nineteenth century by artist and philosophers. The principles included the following: the aesthetic is unique emotional sphere, characterized by its own form of pleasure; the aesthetic is fundamentally experiential and subjective; art and artist play a special role in providing aesthetic experience, but having the right kind of experience is all that is necessary for it to be aesthetic; and intellectual and practical judgments are distinct and even alien forms that interfere with aesthetic perception. As we shift to contemporary concerns, a number of new and interesting formulations of these basis principles emerged. Two shifts should be noted. First, the idealism that dominated the nineteenth century was under scrutiny at the turn of the twentieth century. The alliance between aesthetics and the philosophy of mind must be reexamined. Second, psychology was emerging as a separate discipline. Thus a psychological aesthetics must be distinguished from its conceptual counterpart.
A central aesthetic problem has to do with where and how the aesthetic is to be experienced. Aesthetic theory was influenced in this sphere by the emergence, around the turn of the century, of psychology as a discipline distinct from the philosophy of mind. New empirical approaches to the study of mental phenomena influenced aesthetic theory. In the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of an aesthetic attitude appeared as a fully developed theory of how people could have aesthetic experience. But an aesthetic attitude was a part of an idealist theory of knowledge. The mind and mental phenomena had significance as mirrors of the world. The world itself was thought of as essentially mental. The new psychology suggested ways that aesthetic experience could be studied without appeal to romantic and idealist philosophy. An aesthetic attitude could be part of a theory of perception. The emphasis shifted from a comprehensive system in which the aesthetic is one part to a more pragmatic exploration of how the mind might adopt different states and control its emotional and perceptual input. A number of theories along these line occupied philosophers and artists as well as psychologists.
A different link between aesthetics and philosophy - religion - assumed increasing importance. Modernism includes a strong secular, naturalist thesis. Under the pressure of scientific theory and a wider knowledge of the world, supernaturalism increasingly was untenable within the sphere of ordinary life. Scientists did not need god to explain natural phenomena. The immense variety of religious beliefs challenged the primacy of any one religion. Natural disasters were harder to fit into a divine plan when viewed from a global perspective. Very early, experience was seen as an alternative source of religious explanation. The similarities between religious and aesthetic experience were offered during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries as ways of retaining religious experience without the intrusion of the supernatural into the sphere of science: both religious and aesthetic experience could claim direct, subjective verification. Both offered a form of significance independent of ordinary consequences. Both appealed to contemplation and intrinsic rewards. In the eighteenth century, for example, the German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) suggested that cultured unbelievers could approach religious experience through nature and art. Religion, which remained culturally central, could be supported by appeals to art, which was more accessible and not subject to so many doctrinal and metaphysical doubts. Gradually the alliance between aesthetics and religious feeling was pulled apart and became a competition.
In the later nineteenth century and continuing into the pre-war twentieth century, the roles began to reverse. Aesthetic experience now offered an independent alternative to religious belief. It had all of the immediate subjective characteristics without any of the metaphysical baggage modern aesthetics find unacceptable. Art no longer was viewed as supporting religion; instead, religion was viewed as an earlier form of aesthetic experience that could now be replaced in a more enlightened age. Someone who found religion problematic could continue to appreciate religious forms without having to take seriously their metaphysical or doctrinal content. In many theories, the interrelation is subtle. As more and more of the explanatory power shifted to other forms of theory, aesthetics offered a refuge. At the same time, art and nature perceived aesthetically offered powerful solace. Religion did not need to be explicitly repudiated by someone who finds aesthetic significance the most attractive alternative to a modern secular isolation. Only in extreme forms was the dehumanization of art understood as an avant-garde reaction against all that modernism came to represent.
Several possibilities were explored in the years preceding World War I. First, one form of early twentieth-century aesthetics embraced the difference between aesthetic experience and ordinary or scientific perception. An aesthetic attitude is a particular version of older theories of aesthetic sense and taste. Second, some critics and philosophers then elevate aesthetic experience into an alternative metaphysics. That elevation gives us the alternative religion of art and the aesthetic to replace supernatural forms. A third possibility exists. Hegelianism and systematic idealism gradually lost out to the critiques by analytical and phenomenological philosophers. As different as these complex philosophical movements are, they shared an essentially analytical approach to phenomena. They professed not to know what to do with abstract entities such as Hegel’s absolute being. An alternative, non-Hegelian form of Kantianism arose that sought to retain a more empirical and culturally significant theory. These "neo-Kantians" looked for ordering principles in cultural phenomena such as language. Thought, language, and art were recognized as the embodiment of knowledge. Language and culture can be studied with the tools of linguistics and anthropology. Rather than isolating the aesthetic from scientific and practical concerns, neo-Kantians sought to reunite them by looking for common roots. Some found them in language itself, others in culture, myth, and reconceived theories of perception and experience. Together these new theories connected aesthetics to a theory of knowledge that is less abstract and speculative than the idealism of Hegel and the nineteenth century.
Finally, a trend in early twentieth-century aesthetics abandoned altogether both the system building of the nineteenth century and the complex epistemology of analysis. The focus shifted to specific forms of art. Theory of any kind was suspect. Music, painting, and literary theory came in for specific attention. The result was what we call critical and aesthetic formalism. In reaction to the sometimes grandiose claims of a quasi-religious aesthetics and the complications of idealists and neo-Kantian theories, attention was focused on the forms of art. Formalism offered a way to talk about the specifics of art forms without appealing to the intersubjectively unavailable data of personal experience, though many formalists were quite ingenious in retaining the emotional roots of traditional modern aesthetics while they described essentially formal relations in works of art. Formalism did not so much deny theory as give it up in disgust. Concrete criticism could do without too much theory. All that was really needed, according to a critic like Clive Bell, was sensitivity to spatial form and color, unimpeded by cultural prejudice. Similar ideas were voiced in music criticism and literary theory.
The selections in this section illustrate three different methodologies: psychological exploration, formalist criticism, and a more modest idealist-epistemological theory. All three grew directly out of the cultural changes that were taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century. They also illustrate the complex and interactive nature of early twentieth-century aesthetics and how it is built on eighteenth and nineteenth century foundations. The following sections are from Benedetto Croce, Edward Bullough, and Clive Bell.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |