Romano Guardini

I spent practically the whole morning wasting time on Guardini: picking up the notes I had taken at the Greg, filling them in from memory, then from the two-page handout, and then from the net. Trying to get the names of “his first two works on art” – hardly listed anywhere – I came across a doctoral thesis by Luigi Castangia, in Italian, which is a study of Guardini’s work on Dostoievsky. The title is Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk. Romano Guardinis Interpretation des russischen Schriftstellers (2009-2010), and one of the two guides is Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz.

One thing I picked up was that Guardini took interest more in literature than in sculpture or painting – but that needs to be verified.

There are the two books on person that I picked up yesterday from LDC:

·      Persona e personalità (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006). Tr. of “Über Sozialwissenschaft und Ordnung unter Personen,” in Die Schildgenossen 6 (1926) 125-150; probably later published in Unterscheidung des Christlichen, 1^st ed. (Mainz: Grünewald, 1935), 3^rd ed (Mainz/Paderborn: Grünewald/Schöningh, 1994) 1:44-75.

·      Mondo e persona. Saggio di antropologia cristiana. (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2015). Tr. of Welt und Person. Versuche zur christliche Lehre von Menschen, 1939¹, 1962⁵ = 1988⁶ (Mainz/Paderborn: Grünewald/Schöningh, 1995).

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. 

Memory, experience, art

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I 980b 25 - 981a 6:

The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings. And from memory experience is produced in men; for many memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. Experience seems to be very similar to science and art, but really science and art come to men through experience; for "experience made art," as Polus says, "but inexperience luck." And art arises, when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about similar objects is produced.

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.

Aristotle on feelings

Aristotle seems to have a different take on feelings from Plato.

He has the famous definition of tragedy as effecting a catharsis of the two emotions of pity and fear. (Poetics ch. 6, 1449b)

Cooper comments: Good art [note the adjective 'good'] can benefit both understanding and emotions - or better, in doing either of these, it does both. I.e. if it benefits one, it benefits the other. to benefit one is to benefit the other. The reason Aristotle can say this is that he rejects Plato's Manichean divide between reason and the passions. (Recall the higher and lower parts of the mind.) Far from the latter being always a distraction to reason, it will often be irrational not to feel, say, shame or anger. Mature understanding and mature emotional sensitivity are inseparable elements of the good life. And art can contribute to both. (Cooper 29-30)

In contrast to Plato for whom art itself is bad, we find Aristotle here speaking of good art (implying, presumably, that there is also bad art).

Poetics ch. 13, in fact, talks about what should not be shown in poetry: virtuous men passing from good to bad fortune, since this does not arouse fear or pity, but only outrage; bad men passing from bad to good fortune: this is neither tragic nor does it satisfy human feeling, nor does it arouse pity and fear; nor a wicked man passing from good to bad fortune: this would satisfy human feeling, but not arouse pity or fear. So there is one alternative left: the man who is not pre-eminent in moral virtue, who passes to bad fortune not through vice or wickedness, but because of some piece of ignorance, and who is of high repute and great good fortune.

Poetry, history and philosophy

In contrast to Plato, who spoke of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, Aristotle makes poetry closer to philosophy than to history. Where history deals with the particular and contingent, poetry deals with the probable or necessary - and so it approaches philosophy which, according to Aristotle, deals with the necessary.

The essential difference [between history and poetry] is that one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen. That is why poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth while than history. (Poetics ch. 9, 1451a - 1451b)

What is interesting is that Gadamer thought it fit to look to art as a way of conceptualizing the approach to truth in the human sciences - including, I suppose, history.

But keep in mind also Lonergan's distinction between human studies and human sciences. History would be part of the former, while sociology part of the latter.

Amplitude

Aristotle's remarks on amplitude are fascinating (Poetics ch. 7, 1450b - 1451a).

He is obviously dealing with art and beauty. "It is not enough for beauty that a thing, whether an animal or anything else composed of parts, should have those parts well ordered; since beauty consists in amplitude as well as in order, the thing must also have amplitude".

And not just any amplitude, he goes on. Too small a creature cannot be beautiful, "since our view loses all distinctness". Neither is an enormously ample one beautiful, since our view of it is not simultaneous, so that we lose a sense of its unity and wholeness. The ideal seems to be 'the ampler the better, provided it remains clear as a whole.'

I am thinking of Michelangelo's David: it is huge, much larger than I had expected, and breadth-taking.

And Monet's Nympheas: you can't take it all in at one glance, simply because it is painted all over an oval shaped room; but it does have its own beauty!

Aristotle on art and truth

Aristotle takes pains to link art to truth. Thus he notes that mimesis is innate to human beings, that we take our first steps in learning through it, and that we take pleasure in instances of mimesis because we enjoy getting to understand something. (Poetics 1443b)

Art and truth

It is only when one recalls Plato's repudiation of art, one of the grounds being that it is doubly removed from the real and the true, that one begins to appreciate the significance of Gadamer's turn to art in order to discover there an approach to truth.

But then Gadamer, Plato scholar though he was, is relying here on Aristotle's phronesis, and Aristotle was, according to David Cooper, the first philosopher on record to appreciate the distinctive functions of art, and its value and claim to truth.

Art and beauty

Lonergan, it seems, did not dwell on beauty and the sublime, but on art. Joe Flanagan says that his chapter on art in The Topics is the high point of his reflection on art: it comes between the 3 pages in Insight and the 2 pages in Method.

The 19th century debunked the link between beauty and art. So when Heidegger, for example, reflects, it is purely on the work of art, not on beauty.

Unless you take beauty as a transcendental in the scholastic sense - so you don't get stuck on prettiness, Glenn Chip Hughes said last night at the Workshop.

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.