Aesthetics in the

Twentieth Century

 

Aesthetics in the first half of the Twentieth Century was built on the foundation laid down by Kant and developed by various theories of an aesthetic attitude or aesthetic experience. Its fundamental tenets are that the aesthetic is a domain of experience, and its fundamental problems are concerned around how that domain is to be marked off and what its properties and role are.The fundamental problem of defining "work of art" is approached in terms of what is understood as the more basic problem of defining aesthetic experience. The positions represented in the previous section by Bullough, Bell, and Croce explore psychological, formal, and epistemological approaches to those fundamental problems. Although they take us up to World War I, they may be regarded as belonging to an extended nineteenth century.  

Up to this point, one might expect fairly wide agreement about the central positions, the classical essays, or at least representative samples of significant positions. As we move to more recent aesthetic philosophy, however, the status of the discipline and of particular representatives of it becomes less clear. One cannot and should not expect the same kind of agreement among participants in the debates about what is most important. Issues are still very much in contention, and it is the nature of philosophy to move forward only after extended discussion and defense of positions. It would be exceedingly presumptuous to select a small number of representative essays from the second half of the twentieth century while the discussion is still ongoing. Nevertheless, four essays will be offered, not as definitive of the state of aesthetics, but as an introduction to the current situation. They represent changes in our basic understanding of what aesthetics is all about and thus alternative possible ways that we may look forward.  

Two approaches to identifying aesthetic experience were prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. A number of writers follow the path laid down by Edward Bullough and consider the problem from the standpoint of the observer or audience. On this view, everything is potentially aesthetic, but a special skill is required to achieve the perceptual point of view that provides aesthetic experience. The individual observer is in control. The most common form of theory of this type utilizes concepts of an aesthetic attitude that reach back into the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier. Initially, an aesthetic attitude was understood simply as descriptive. It marked off the state of the perceptive, cultured members of the audience from those who were more distracted. Lower classes, whose existence was preoccupied with survival, had no time for such aesthetic pursuits. In the work of a number of later theorists, an aesthetic attitude becomes a more active psychological state. In this sense, an aesthetic attitude is cultivated and is productive of aesthetic experience. For example, Virgil Aldrich claims in Philosophy of Art that "There is another access to material things - as objective in its own way as the observational is in its way - that the mind may take as prehending subject." By voluntary choosing this alternative form of perception, the objects "prehended" - which Aldrich describes as an impressionistic way of looking -become aesthetic objects and thus productive of aesthetic experience. Such prehension could apply to any object. The artist cultivates and communicates such an attitude, but everyone can opt for the aesthetic instead of the ordinary mode of perception. 

If sensibility is required for aesthetic perception, the aesthetic attitude may not be equally accessible to everyone. This alternative still maintains that aesthetic experience is a product of an attitude, a skill either inherited or acquired only by artists and sensitive audiences. The position need not be elitist since sensibility is often found in less educated people whose sensibility has not be overlaid with artificial rules and strictures. Just before the turn of the century, George Santayana claimed in The Sense of Beauty that "moments of inspiration are the source of the arts, which have no higher function than to renew them." This recalls the romantic theories that art and aesthetic expression are special forms. The romantic form of an attitude theory remains influential, though it tends to appeal more to artists and aesthetes than to philosophers, who are trained to analyze language and evidence. Elements of many of the classical alternatives persist in attitude theories. 

A significant alternative to attitude theories in the twentieth century developed around the work of John Dewey. Dewey’s form of pragmatism continued to emphasize experience, so it belongs to the main line of Anglo-American aesthetic thought. But those who followed Dewey’s line of thought emphasized a more holistic form of experience. If experience itself is not divided into discreet "moments" of perception, then aesthetic experience is not an attitude that modifies perception of such moments. Instead, aesthetic experience is located in the qualities of experience that are immediately evident when anyone is experiencing the world without theoretical bias. Dewey distinguished between experience and "an" experience. "An" experience is an ordered, emergent phenomenon, and it is always "aesthetic." In many ways, this view serves the same purpose as an attitude theory because it distinguishes aesthetic experience from more ordinary forms, and, like an attitude theory, it allows virtually any object that is experienced to appear in an aesthetic form. However, for Dewey the separation of aesthetic experience from ordinary experience is only a matter of how experience appears to us. Ordinary experience is unexamined. Aesthetic experience has an immediacy that makes it felt consciously as present. In aesthetic attitude theories, this experience would be private. Dewey’s approach to aesthetics is more communitarian and less isolating than typical attitude theories; experience is always part of a larger whole. This experience is continuous with the past and future and with the experience of others. Dewey’s influence continues to be felt, particularly in aesthetic education.

Anglo-American aesthetics in the first half of the twentieth century remained fundamentally essentialist about the nature of art. Philosophers wanted definitions that would make clear distinctions between art and non-art or aesthetic experience and ordinary experience. Even if the dominant aesthetic theories focused on aesthetic experience and how it might be achieved, those theories still held that art was a unique form that could be defined. The usual ways to approach such definitions was to look for some quality or set of qualities that all art had and only art had. Necessary and sufficient conditions apply to language; they are conditions for the application of the term "art" to objects of experience. Thus, philosophy of art was closely related to philosophy of language. 

The simplest form of definition referred back to the fundamental concept of aesthetic experience: a work of art is any artifact specifically designed to produce aesthetic experience or converted to that use. As a definition, this one is quite vague since it does not specify what aesthetic experience is or how it can be recognized. Philosophers expended considerable ingenuity on attempts to make the definition more descriptive and theoretically significant. Among the more influential attempts were: Susanne K. Langer’s definition of art as the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling and R. G. Collingwood’s adaptation of Croce’s idealism into a definition of art as the expression of emotion. Such definitions embody theory in much the same way that physics embodies theory in its definitions of such concepts as force and energy. Theoretical definitions of this type provide the center for much of the most interesting work in aesthetics during the first half of the century.

Theories of aesthetic experience usually devalue criticism. In some cases, the hostility is open; a critical attitude is felt to interfere with achieving an aesthetic attitude. In other cases, criticism just becomes irrelevant. Since the experience is the important thing, critical judgments are beside the point. Aesthetic experience is most often understood as a pleasant emotion. Critical judgment requires intellectual discrimination. At best, it will be preliminary to the felt emotion; at worst, it will conflict with the emotion by occupying the perceiver in the wrong way. However, in both the visual and literary arts, a powerful formalist criticism developed in the first half of the twentieth century. The watchword of this critical approach was attention to the text or object itself, and it insisted on the priority of internal form over external cultural, historical, biographical, and psychological information about the art object or text. So students were taught to look closely at formal details of paintings, for example, and not to make too much of the work as social commentary, biographical information, or something with a religious function. In literature, internal relations of the part to the whole, particularly rhetorical features such as irony and metaphor, were considered more important than the author’s intentions or the cultural context of the work.

Formalist criticism provided the basis for an alternative approach to aesthetic theory. In an influential text and a number of essays, Monroe Beardsley proposed to treat aesthetics as a form of metacriticism. By this, Beardsley meant that the critical canons of the New Criticism (as the critical movement came to be called when it applied to literature) were themselves aesthetic principles subject to analytical ordering and discipline. The properties of unity and complexity by which the critic is able to assess the structure and value of a text are also the properties that are productive of aesthetic experience, Beardsley argued. The properties being judged critically are perceptual properties in a broad sense of perception that distinguishes perceptual experience from an awareness of the source and end of the object. We can only know about the source and goals of art by thinking about the past and future of its production. We can have a perceptual experience by paying close attention to what is in front of us. Aesthetics, on this understanding, is a modest discipline that aides the critic who in turns aides the audience and the artist in focusing on the perceptual properties. Beardsley’s theory follows eighteenth and nineteenth century models in many ways, since it still takes an aesthetic experience to be an intrinsically valuable and pleasurable emotional form. But Beardsley succeeded in making a place for the intellectual analysis of art that other forms of traditional Anglo-American aesthetics lost.

The fundamental essentialism of Anglo-American aesthetics came under increasing attack after 1950. One part of the attack was a direct criticism of the theoretical definitions philosophers had offered. New art forms arose at a dizzying pace. The avant-garde in all its forms shattered any pretensions philosophers had of being able to encompass art within the confines of necessary and sufficient conditions. A second part of the attack was on the nature of theoretical definitions themselves. Unlike their scientific counterparts, theoretical definitions in aesthetics are neither predictive nor constructive value. Increasingly critical analysis showed them to be concealed forms of persuasion. 

A major influence in the turn away from essentialism in aesthetics was the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s work broke down the traditional "philosopher’s problems" about the existence of an external world and certainty in knowledge by relocating them in the context of the practical use of language. One consequence of this refocusing of philosophy was to call attention to the way language is used as a more significant clue to its meaning than definitions. The kinds of definitions that earlier aestheticians sought are rare and have only a limited technical use. If we want to understand art, therefore, we must look to the practice of artists and audiences.

Two powerful critiques of traditional aesthetics emerged in the mid-century. Both have their roots in the earlier history of aesthetics and in the practice of art, but they gained new force as experimental forms and philosophical criticism combined to dissolve the established theories. First, it was argued that "taste" concepts are independent of rules. Aesthetic language uses predicates such as "is elegant" and "is graceful". That language refers directly to perception and experience, making both the critic and the philosopher equally irrelevant. The only function for critics is to point out things that other people might miss. Philosophers of art are limited to removing critical confusions and demolishing exaggerated claims for aesthetic standards. Aesthetic theory is reduced to a kind of therapy for linguistic confusion. Second, some kinds of games do not have fixed rules; they are open to variations and improvisation. Art is like those games. It has a set of common practices, but it has borderline cases that blur into other practices. Art is orderly, but its rules apply only within a limited sphere located within a larger practice. No sharp boundaries can be drawn around such shifting practices, nor should we want them. Art on this view is an expanding form of life related to culture. This approach has the clear advantage of accounting for the diversity of art forms. It is open and non-judgmental. But it relinquishes any philosophical basis for judgment and in some writers produces one of the many forms of cultural relativism that characterize much recent philosophy.

More recently, many of the insights of analytical aesthetics have been developed in a new direction. Even if art lacks essential properties, a great deal may be said by way of defining the field. Definitions may specify the kind of properties that depend on how one thing is related to another. The essential properties of being someone’s child are genetic; the properties of being a citizen are created by establishing relations that can be granted. Relational properties can identify artistic practice and distinguish it from other practices. Aesthetics done in this way has a close connection with actual artistic and critical practice. For example, the kind of metacriticism advocated by Beardsley has been modified by George Dickie so that not just the critic but the practices of the art would as a whole - artists, critics, and ordinary consumers -define what will be included in aesthetics. Other work along these lines focuses on the constructive role of theory in the production of art and aesthetic response. In a somewhat different vein, Richard Wollheim has emphasized the interaction of art as a form of life with other life forms.

A common thread running through this work is its rejection of the earlier identification of aesthetics as a unique kind of experience. Aesthetics is identified with a practice rather than with theoretically or experientially defined areas of experience. Practices change. They are added to, and they lose some functions. Later readers and viewers may be able to recover earlier forms by learning their "languages," but that does not imply that anyone will be able to adopt the practice in a productive way. Aesthetics understood in this way requires neither systems nor special knowledge, but it does require participation either as an audience or as a producer. Thus, such aesthetics is antitheoretical in an oddly theoretical way. Theory functions only descriptively, not normatively.

Two other developments along these lines should be noted. A different adaptation of Wittgensteinian themes combined them with the work of the English philosopher J. L. Austin to locate aesthetic practice even more centrally within the context of cultural practice and language. Cultural artifacts such as film both shape culture and are shapes by it. They do not stand apart for inspection by independent audiences but draw us into their own practice. At the same time, they are not independent artifacts but a part of the language of our culture. The aesthetician can only comment on film by viewing film and becoming part of the audience. The language of film and philosophy overlap in this way of doing aesthetics, and the same must apply by extension to other art forms. Philosophers are not simply audience members. By virtue of their philosophical sophistication, they bring to art questions that other participants only implicitly understand. By being part of the audience, they also change the conditions for art. At its best, this kind of cultural aesthetics produces a dense but engaging encounter with the material of aesthetics. However, it can become introspective in obscure ways.

A divergence between Anglo-American aesthetics and continental European aesthetics becomes marked only in the twentieth century. Clear differences existed earlier. British aesthetics tented to remain closer to its empiricist roots. But such founders of British aesthetics as the Earl of Shaftesbury had more significant reputation in Germany in the nineteenth century than they retained in England. Parallel developments in idealism on the continent and in Britain after Kant shifted aesthetic preeminence to continental writers.

An important twentieth-century movement in continental aesthetics is Marxism. Twentieth-century Marxism is anti-Hegelian. It arises out of the same historical context as other reactions against Hegelian forms of aesthetics that developed out of the work of the Danish theologian/philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, the Platonic idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer, and Fredrich Nietzsche’s radical dialectic. Hegelian aesthetics believed ideas were absolute, real forms. Marxism believed only material forms were real. Hegelian aesthetics saw history as a movement of Absolute Spirit. Marxists believed history was moved by economics forces. The influence of Marx also challenged belief in a unique aesthetic experience as one more form of cultural hegemony. Escape into aesthetic pleasure is escape from the reality of economic and material life. Moreover, such escape is at once the privilege of a few and a means of concealing the true conditions of our lives. Like religion, aesthetic experience is a means of controlling a portion of a class that might otherwise be moved to revolution. So Marxism mounted one of the first and most powerful attacks on the basic principles of modern aesthetics. Art was viewed by Marxists as one more part of the struggle to achieve the historical equality toward which we are being drawn inexorably.

Marxist aesthetics is not uniformly and drearily political. Aesthetics in this tradition discloses the fundamental ways that political, economic, and cultural conditions are encoded into works of art. Critics as well as artists are part of this process and a philosopher of aesthetics is a cultural critic as well. The actual results can take many forms, including psychological criticism and formalism. Some of the most penetrating criticisms of the movements in American abstract art are from a formalist-Marxist perceptive. What unites these approaches is their concern that art not be divorced from its cultural roots and that it be defended against the exploitive tendencies of commercial capitalism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, continental philosophy was shaped by the seminal phenomenological work of Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology is a form of analysis of the "content of consciousness." Since everyone thinks, thought can be analyzed without having to decide questions about what is and is not real. Husserl proposed a method of analysis that he called "reduction," that has stimulated a school of phenomenological analysis. Husserl had little to say about aesthetics, but several of his followers turned to aesthetics as one area for analysis. The Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden is among the most prominent investigators of art and the aesthetic in the phenomenological tradition. He subjected each aspect of literary aesthetics to analysis. Ingarden’s approach was to identify and describe each element in the conscious apprehension of a work of literary art. From the side of the subject, he described aesthetic experience. From the side of the object, he described the objective content of aesthetic experience. Neither is merely introspective or subjective; each has formal features that common to the structure of conscious apprehension. Thus a phenomenological approach to aesthetics shares something with its Kantian heritage. It differs in that it seeks a direct analytical presentation of the structure of aesthetic consciousness rather than the Kantian transcendental, a priori structures. Phenomenology also is influential in French philosophy, particularly in the work of Mikel Dufrenne.

Equally important, phenomenology is developed by two students of Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, into competing forms of the movement known as existentialism. Whereas phenomenology claims to be primarily a neutral, analytical movement, existentialism denies that consciousness can be separated from the experience of the person who is conscious. In aesthetics, in one way or another, art and literature are conscious forms that belong to radically historical movements. Aesthetics is neither the distanced, disinterested realm of Kantian aesthetics nor the culturally deterministic element of Marxist aesthetics. Instead, aesthetics is an activity of consciousness. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in the background, but for both the Heideggerian and Sartrian forms of existential aesthetics, aesthetic experience, particularly as it is realized through art, is a form of experience that cannot be fixed. Every experience changes with every moment, and memory is nothing more than another present experience that is always changing. Consciousness shapes itself in confrontation with its own contingency. Because both Heidegger and Sartre began as phenomenologist, they produced systematic explanations of how consciousness is located in its own field of awareness that have direct bearing on aesthetics. In their later work, they both moved away from systematic analysis to more evocative and literary forms as the only appropriate philosophical response to the contingency of consciousness. Heidegger found in poetry the form of expression by which "Being" is able to appear in consciousness. Sartre turned to novels and plays to make his philosophy concrete. 

A related continental movement, Hermeneutics, has its roots in the theories of biblical interpretation developed by German theologians going back to the eighteenth century. Hermeneutics emerged in the twentieth century as a comprehensive theory of interpretation in the phenomenological-existentialist tradition. The fundamental aesthetic insight of Hermeneutics is that any encounter with art must involve a confrontation of a subject and a text in a way that modifies both. When I, as viewer or reader or hearer, encounter an aesthetic object, I bring it into my already structured experience and modify that experience by what I bring into it. The aesthetic object is also modified. It is now something that has been interpreted by me, and my interpretation potentially becomes part of it. For example, when a play by Shakespeare is performed, each new performance adds to the meaning of the play by providing a new way that the play can be interpreted. Thus every aesthetic experience is a complex modification of the being of both. Hermeneutics is aware of history as a major part of this encounter; so aesthetic experience is never purely subjective as it is in traditional and existential aesthetics, but it cannot be independent and unique, either. Thus audience and object move in an interpretive circle in which interpretation is constantly changing but is colored by the past. 

Continental aesthetics in the tradition of phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutical theories is quite diverse and flexible in the way it deals with specific art forms. It is open to avant-garde movements, and it is deeply historical in that history itself is a fundamental context. But even in its beginnings, it remained essentially descriptive. The traditional questions of Anglo-American aesthetics - What is art? and How is aesthetic experience to be identified? - were either bypassed or presumed to have been answered already by Kant. Kant’s influence is so strong that everyone has a tendency to take "aesthetic experience" as a given or, alternatively, to look on any theoretical pronouncements about its nature as part of a dead metaphysics. The fluid world of existentialism and hermeneutics denies the possibility of the kind of philosophizing that seeks criteria of identity.

The logical extension of this fluidity is found in the recent turn to a post existentialist, post-structuralist aesthetics. Existentialism made everything depend on a particular time and a particular place. Structuralism was a way of analyzing cultures that developed in anthropology. No time of place was privileged, so cultures had to be examined by looking at how they structured their activities and relations. Post structuralists concluded that the observer could not claim to be neutral, so all analysis of culture occurs from a shifting, involved point of view. Play has long been an important category in continental aesthetics. Aesthetic experience was understood as free play of the imagination in Kant, and this playfulness was identified as a freedom from the constraints of reality in subsequent neo-Kantian aesthetics. In the post-structuralist aesthetics that developed out of the work of Jacques Derrida, play, especially the play of language itself, is the logical outcome of the unavoidable fluidity of the existential encounter of consciousness with its own historical contingency. Aesthetics, in a sense, becomes the detached form of the mind’s movement in a world without fixed or absolute forms. Such play is not unmotivated. It remains an intentional act of exploration. But it cannot be restricted to analytical or logical forms because those forms themselves are dissolved in the play of consciousness. If postmodern aesthetics leaves sober philosophical types fuming, so much the better from the point of view of the newly freed aesthetics.

The separation between continental and Anglo-American aesthetics, which was taken for granted for much of the twentieth century has recently begun to disintegrate. It was always somewhat artificial, given the common roots of aesthetics in the work of Kant and the Romantics. Recent interest in rhetoric, semantics, and historical forms of pragmatism have served to reopen contacts and reintroduce common themes. For example, a writer in the tradition of continental hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur, draws on analytical philosophy of language in his work on metaphor and the reading of texts. Analytically trained philosophers such as Arthur Danto turned to continental forms of criticism to understand contemporary movements in the arts.

Much recent work focuses directly on cultural phenomena and takes its systematic cue from their concerns. Among the areas of intense interest recently have been environmental aesthetics. The existence of massive art projects in natural settings focuses environmental aesthetics on the role of nature but goes beyond specific works to consider not only their appeal but also their sometimes destructive presence. Awareness of the environment and its effects on us returns aesthetics to a sensitivity of nature and our place in it which has been obscured by the emphasis on art. Feminist aesthetics challenges the male-dominated models of art and masculine forms of aesthetic response as well as opening aesthetics to a wider cultural experience. For example, a body of film theory begins with feminist elements in film. It uses psychological insights to distinguish male and female roles. The act of viewing itself has a gender, it is argued. Aesthetics extends those insights to a more comprehensive view of the relation of an audience to a projected image. Cultural studies and the expansion of our understanding of the relations between art and society have opened whole new ranges of texts and deepened our consideration of what is relevant to the formation of aesthetic judgments. The boundaries between art history, music theory, and aesthetics are being crossed in interesting ways. Writers in these areas note that artworks create their own context. To understand such work, an audience must understand the issue and the background upon which their cultural significance rests. Work in these fields proceeds concretely and takes its theoretical cues from the works themselves and from the philosophy which is associated with the movements. In all these cases, the earlier twentieth century limitations of the aesthetic to a special realm of contemplation have been left behind. Aesthetics in the Anglo-American tradition has become extremely diverse. Its theoretical shape (if any) remains unclear. Where we will end is not clear but the journey is likely to stimulate philosophers in ways that we cannot presently anticipate.

In the context of choosing selections, it is impossible to represent all of the currents in contemporary aesthetics. They are too diverse and the process of debate and the inevitable sorting that philosophical debate implies is ongoing. I have chosen, therefore, to look forward from the end of the extended nineteenth century in a very limited way by selecting influential essays that can be taken as representing turning points in aesthetics in the mid-twentieth century. Walter Benjamin comes from the Marxist tradition, but it is by no means doctrinaire. It has a strong historical awareness and shares much with hermeneutics in its awareness of the way that culture changes the context in which works of art are available to an audience. Morris Weitz was a seminal adaptation of Wittgenstein’s insights about language to the problem of aesthetics. George Dickie directly confronts the earlier dependence on an aesthetic attitude and argues that such an attitude is itself a "myth"; there is no such thing, and therefore aesthetics must rethink its whole history. Arthur Danto combines historical and cultural awareness with the real conditions of what he dubs the "artworld" to reposition aesthetics. No one, including the authors themselves, would maintain that these essays sum up the twentieth century aesthetics. They are, however, ways of opening the door to the contemporary discussion.