PHIL1011 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Aesthetics, Arthur Danto, Robert B. Pippin
23 May 2018
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Aesthetics
What do I mean when I say something is beautiful? Is it merely subjective or
are there some universal beauties.
What can this teach us about the human relationship to nature?
Does Aesthetics cross over with morality?
Aesthetics: The branch of philosophical investigation concerned with sensuous
particulars and how they are perceived.
Why did Aesthetics emerge?
Robert Pippin: "Aesthetics emerges in the 17th century as a direct result of the
scientific revolutions" - The new science booted art out of its place in the world.
It effected a double displacement which revealed aesthetic experience to be a
new philosophical problem.
1) Arts objective place in the world is unsettled. In a process of secularisation art
loses its devotional context. It is not longer obvious what art is for.
2) The subjective relation to beauty becomes newly problematic
16/5/17
If artwork is a work, what work does it do?
• Does art make anything happen? "For poetry makes nothing happen" W.H
Auden in memory of W.B Yeats
• Arts/ aesthetics seems to be of no practical use, they are practically
impotent
Plato's Republic 380BCE - a dialogue about the order and character about a just
city state; he notoriously expels the poets in this society ruled by philosopher
kings
There are three interrelated arguments Plato makes for his expulsion:
These nicely map onto the three regions in which philosophers may analyse art.
As a:
1) Work (an object of performance in the world)
2) Form of Production (an activity done by artists)
3) A form of reception (what it is like to view, hear, respond to the work)
The first two claims say that art is irrational and ineffectual and the third that art
is dangerous
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1. The (Art)Work
Plato claims that art is three times removed from truth. It creates an
appearance of an appearance.
To understand this, we need to grasp platonic dualism.
Plato's metaphysical dualism holds that the caused physical bodies are
ephemeral; literally the things of the world pass away, erode, decay
- Because they are ephemeral, they are not themselves true substances, we
cannot depend on them in the future.
- For Plato, art is imitative (mimetic). So it's making a copy of something. But it
fails to imitate the eternal forms. It doesn't imitate the right thing, it instead,
imitates the "sensuous transitory state"
2. Production
"The artist knows only the appearance of things not how to either manufacture
them or to put them to use." Homer is only talk: he does not cure illness or wage
war.
In saying that art is not a practical know-how, Plato lays the groundwork for the
modern distinction between fine art and craft (or skilled work) e. g the
distinction between fine art - the drawing of a table, and craft the creation of the
table by a skilled tradesman.
Background to this: Greek term for art 'techné' denotes all kinds of human
activities and skills.
3. Reception
Because the poets lack knowledge the power of the artist is not of reason but of
purportedly darker and more confused forces. Plato regards the feelings that the
audience taps into as lower than intellect.
The Quarrel between philosophy and art
Philosophy: Clarifies concepts/universals by engaging the intellect
Art: Depicts the sensuous physical particulars, and proceeds by engaging
emotional, imaginative responses
Arthur Danto, describes the two stages of Platos' attack
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One: 'ephemeralisation' to describe the attempt to dismiss art by associating it
with the realm of appearances, illusions, shadow effects, and ephemeral, passing
things that we philosophers shouldn't bother ourselves with.
Two: 'Take over' that art tries to do what philosophy does, but only uncouthly,
without knowledge of its own true nature.
So does aesthetic experience really matter? Does art make anything
happen?
Aesthetic experience is philosophically important in fact because it is at a remove
from our usual desires, objectives and conceptual modes of understanding the
world.
The Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, (1790) is the founding text of
modern aesthetics.
He asks: " What do I mean when I say 'this is beautiful'? "
Kant rejects the 'relativistic ' drift seen in "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
instead Kant thinks that other beholders should see it too.
18/05/17
On Kant's Critique of Judgement
Kant responds to the challenge of 18thC. Aesthetics by examining:
- The conditions of subjective taste/ how does something come to be beautiful to
me
- How subjective judgements are communicated between communities of
shared taste
The Arc of Kant's argument
Judgements of aesthetic pleasure, seem to be both:
a) subjective 'in me' and
via 3 steps (or moments) in that each moment is a 'withdrawal' from our
usual ways of relating to the world
b) intersubjective, communicable with others.
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