Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Bowie, Andrew, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, Second Edition, Manchester University Press (2003), pp345, ISBN 0 719057388, PB £16.99
Reviewed by
King's College, London
“If
all we are can be stated in words, why does our being also need to be
articulated in music, as every known human culture seems to suggest?”
Andrew Bowie’s provocative question, in the Introduction of Aesthetics and Subjectivity, aptly sets the scene for his book’s central purpose. The almost dogmatic emphasis on language and scientific methodology in 20th Century philosophy has led to a real concern that important aspects of human existence (such as aesthetic experience) are being excluded from philosophical discourse. As Bowie states: “The problem with the sciences is, then, that they exclude most of the content of what Husserl terms the ‘life-world’, the untheorised horizon of our everyday experience, from any kind of truth.” All too aware of this misguided and limiting attitude, Bowie sets out to demonstrate how the oft-neglected subject of aesthetics has been underestimated in contemporary philosophy. Bowie does this by showing how the main accounts of the human subject and the conceptions of art and language which emerge within the Kantian and post-Kantian history of aesthetics play a decisive role in current mainstream philosophy. According to Bowie, these aesthetic theories can be shown both to have helped initiate the ideas which inform current debates and, at times, to be superior to many current theories. As Bowie states, “Much recent theory in the humanities has regarded the human subject as being ‘subverted’ by its failure to provide a stable ground for philosophy because, for example, of its dependence on language or on the unconscious. The point is, however, that such ideas are not the radically new insights as which they have often been presented.”
For Bowie, the importance of these theories (and why they are superior to many current theories) is that they regard aesthetic experience and production as vital to the understanding of self-consciousness. Aesthetic experience is seen as involving aspects of the self which cannot be theorised in terms of the self’s becoming transparent to itself as its own object of knowledge. Bowie’s book examines and reassesses the theories of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche but also the ideas of thinkers such as Schelling, Schleiermacher and the early Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who according to Bowie are rarely considered. For Bowie, these philosophers not only “advanced arguments as to why reason cannot ground itself in subjectivity” but also “show why it is a mistake for philosophy to relegate subjectivity to being merely a function of something else, such as language, ideology, history, or the unconscious.” According to Bowie, by considering the claims made by modernist theories of subjectivity and self-consciousness and the connections they make with aesthetic experience, we can recognise that even if cognitive science, for example, were to come up with a widely accepted exhaustive law-based explanation of the nature of self-consciousness, this would still leave open unavoidable questions about how to integrate this explanation into the forms of our self-understanding which cannot be reduced to this kind of explanation. As Bowie states: “forms of self-understanding that do not and could not have scientific status remain vital to one’s ability to make sense of and inhabit one’s own world. To this extent, one can also question theories in the philosophy of mind which aim to provide a definitive account of the structure and nature of self-consciousness. The link between aesthetics and subjectivity can be used to ask whether such theories might be bought at the expense of obscuring aspects of self-consciousness, which for instance become only comprehensible through the experience of musical production and reception.”
I will not go into detail as to whether I think Bowie’s analyses of the different philosophers are correct or not. First, because such an approach will not do justice to the weighty chapters and second, because I do not think that is ultimately what the book is about or for (see below). My main criticism of the book is one that is admitted by Bowie in the Preface when he apologises that he does “not claim to have produced a work of grace and elegance”. Unfortunately, Bowie is correct in this observation. Although the ideas presented in Bowie’s book are of great philosophical interest, his prose often lacks grace and lucidity and can be quite heavy and turgid. As a result, it was often hard to follow Bowie’s descriptions of the philosophical arguments. This was not a book I ‘enjoyed’ reading very much! Consequently, it is certainly not a book for ‘non-specialists’ or undergraduates as suggested on the back cover. On a positive note, the main reason to read this book is for its underlying purpose and goal. Bowie’s concern is one I wholeheartedly share and welcome. The exclusion and marginalisation of philosophical aesthetics from mainstream analytic philosophy is an odd but troubling phenomenon which appears to stem from two dominating views of the subject. First, from a widely-held, but false, view that there is a clear cut distinction between facts and values (with facts being viewed as epistemologically superior to values). The consequence of this view is that the study of aesthetics is seen as ‘fluffy’ as opposed to the ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’ of metaphysics or logic. For example, the mere mention of the word aesthetics to ‘died-in the wool’ analytic philosophers can sometimes provoke at best, subtle derogatory remarks or, at worst, blatant sneering! A second prevalent view of aesthetics is that it is concerned solely with art objects and institutions (and thus is more about art than philosophy). To be fair, the direction of much analytic aesthetic theory has been dominated by tortuous discussions about definitions of art and the ontology of artworks. Yet ironically, this narrow emphasis on the language and metaphysics of art in analytic aesthetics has often been motivated by a need to be taken ‘seriously’ by the ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ philosophers. So much for trying, eh?! However, as Bowie’s book reminds us, to ignore or misunderstand the great work contained in Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics is to ignore or misunderstand a way of thinking about self-consciousness that goes beyond the limits of current scientific understanding and philosophy of mind. This ignorance or misunderstanding has led to two dominant conceptions of thinking about subjectivity. On the one hand, many recent theories of contemporary culture have relied on a model in which the power or the symbolic order is the ultimate determining factor in the constitution of modern subjectivity. On the other hand, as Bowie rightly argues, analytical philosophy of language excluded the hermeneutic insights of the nineteenth century for a long time, only for them to return with a vengenance with Quine, Davidson and others.
The thinkers considered in Bowie’s book came up with ideas of great interest and insight about the most crucial aspect of subjectivity, which is the fact that what it knows of itself and what it is can never be said to fully coincide. To finish this review where I started, it is because of this crucial aspect of subjectivity that Bowie devotes a whole chapter to the importance of music. “The role of music as the most symptomatic art form of this period will, then, be central to my argument because music exemplifies how our self-understanding can never be fully achieved by discursive articulation.” Bowie expresses astonishment that: “At a time when at least the quantitative role of music in cultural life has probably never been greater, music rarely plays even a minor role in most contemporary philosophy.” Quite. If mainstream contemporary philosophy marginalises or excludes an important and valuable aspect and activity of human life, such as music, then one has to question the direction and methodology of the discipline itself. Bowie attempts to do precisely that and for that reason alone he should be applauded as well as read.