The happening of a work of art

"It is precisely in great art - and only such art is under consideration here - that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge." (Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Cooper 237)

See Bhagavan Shree Rajneesh / Osho in The Messiah commenting on something similar: some works simply emerge from the artist - like Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (and, I would add, Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things which, she says, just rolled off her typewriter with hardly any corrections). Osho also says that usually this happens once - perhaps the first time. The subsequent works betray effort, and never measure up to the first. This happened in the case of Gibran as well as Roy.

Note also that Heidegger - like Hegel - refuses to have anything to do with aesthetics as concerned with beauty. 

Hume and common standards of taste

We have been reading Hume on beauty and art these days in the Aesthetics course. Once again, I am struck by how different Hume is, from what we usually make him out to be. I had gone to Hume fully expecting him to support the 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' thing, skeptic and relativist that he was. But I found a Hume who, while admitting the subjectivity of the aesthetic judgment in the sense that 'beauty' is not exactly a property of things, still goes on to defend a sophisticated theory of how there can and are common standards of taste. No one in his right mind, he points out, will simply equate the great Milton with a middling other poet.

Hume certainly has not the sophisticated distinction that Lonergan makes between experiential and explanatory conjugates, but what he says above seems to fit well, at least at first sight, into this kind of thing. Or perhaps we might distinguish between 'beauty' as an experiential conjugate, and the aesthetic judgment as, precisely, a judgment, and therefore capable of being true or false.

Hume, at any rate, goes on to point out that the judgment of taste is conditioned by a series of factors: delicacy of taste, practice at discrimination, comparison; serenity; etc. And while it might in practice be difficult to agree about who exactly is a man of good judgment, it is, at least in theory, quite sensible to point out the qualities in a man of good judgment, and to say that such men of good judgment or taste can be relied on in making good aesthetic judgments.

Hume does admit that (1) personal factors and (2) cultural factors are difficult to assimilate into the above theory. Cooper feels that on these points Hume needs to be questioned. Standards of taste, he seems to suggest, and men of good judgment, are culture bound. Such standards and such men function well within a particular culture and age, but not across cultures and ages.

It might be interesting to transpose all this into a Lonergan context. From what I understand, Lonergan does not quite enter into questions of aesthetic judgment.

Then of course there is Gadamer with his treatment of art as a way to truth, a playful way to truth, in a manner not unlike the functioning of phronesis or common sense.

Beauty and art

The Aesthetics examination was very interesting: I actually learnt something new! And that was the distinction between beauty and art. Talking to the students, it became clear to me that there is such a distinction: not everything that is beautiful is art, and not everything that is art is conventionally beautiful.

The beauty of nature, for example, is not art. And Heidegger can speak at length about a work of art without once mentioning beauty. Could we call the Van Gogh painting of peasant shoes beautiful, in fact? Perhaps. But it lends itself better to a Heideggerean type of treatment in terms of the revelation of truth. And it became clear to me also how closely Heidegger follows Hegel: art is not so much beauty as revelation of the Idea / truth.

When asked what was the most important thing they had learned during the course, many students said they had learned to stop and appreciate beauty around them, where before they had perhaps either been 'blind' or else had had very global and undifferentiated experiences of beauty.

Kant, Schiller, Hegel

Kant: pure beauty is non-representational, because representational art is related to a concept. Thus the beauty of a man is not pure beauty, but dependent or adherent beauty. But music without words is pure beauty.

Schiller works out the relationship between beauty and the moral life. In sharp contrast to Plato, he holds that art and beauty can be conducive to the moral life.

Hegel agrees with Schiller, but goes further in pointing out that art is the representation / embodiment / manifestation of the Idea, part therefore of the objective Geist unfolding through history. But art is the lowest type of self-manifestation of the Idea, manifesting the Idea at the level of sense; higher than art is religion, which manifests the Idea at the level of myth and story; and the highest (and this is pure Hegel) is philosophy.

Further, once the Idea embodied in art has been expressed or articulated in a philosophical way – and Hegel has done that – there follows the death of art.

Kant on aesthetics

We have been reading selections from Kant's Critique of Judgment, his third critique.

It is wonderful to see the greats in action, in the first person: far better than the summaries in the histories of philosophy.

In the third critique, Kant is sharp, and also provocative at times.

Sharp: the distinctions he makes between the beautiful, the agreeable, the good. He defines beauty in terms of the feeling of pleasure, but carefully distinguishes it from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable is pleasure coupled with interest, he says. Again, we do delight in the good, but the good is connected with a concept and with interest, and beauty has to do neither with concepts nor with interest.

Provocative: he finds beauty only in form, which he subdivides into design and play. Colours, for example, and the quality of sounds, are merely charming; they do not pertain to beauty. Again, a man, or a woman, cannot be called beautiful, simply because the human form is linked to a concept of how that form should ideally be...

So Kant is against representational art, or rather, he considers representational art as 'dependent beauty', simply because it is linked to a concept, to something that it should ideally be, to a telos. Non-representational art - music without words is a prime example - is, instead, 'pure beauty', not linked to any concept.

Hume's aesthetics

Yesterday we read Hume in the aesthetics course. What a revelation! Hume in the original proves to be a clear and profound thinker. I had expected him to bandy about the usual "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and in fact he does begin by noting that there is a variety of tastes. He does admit that taste and sentiment are 'subjective', in the sense that they belong to the subject. Soon, however, he is pointing out that we do naturally seek general or common standards of taste, and he even criticizes 'philosophies which hold that it is impossible to arrive at such standards.'

He seems to be implying that there are certains forms or orders in nature that evoke aesthetic appreciation in us. He also makes a strong plea for common standards of taste. He explains the diversity by a series of external and internal factors: lack of serenity, of focus on the object, of experience, of practice, of delicacy of taste... And he warmly recommends practice: the more one practices, the more one develops delicacy of taste.