Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 3, December  2004

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Kivy, Peter, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 354 pages, ISBN 0-631-22130-1, Hardback £60.00 / $69.95, ISBN 0-631-22131-X, Paperback £18.99 / $34.95.

Review by

Siobhán Collins

University College Cork

The title of Peter Kivy’s introduction to The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, “Aesthetics Today”, highlights what is most innovative and welcome in this volume: its self-conscious contribution to philosophical aesthetic theory as an historical phenomenon that is currently experiencing a new growth. This book provides both a mapping and critique of contemporary aesthetics, offering the reader a pluralist approach to the philosophy of art. Collectively, the 18 essays in this volume, written by an assembly of distinguished philosophers, capture the many strands, and vitality, of present-day aesthetics.

Intended as “a valuable resource for a broad range of students and readers, including professional philosophers”, this book corresponds in its structural organization to Kivy’s adopted maxim of success: “divide and conquer”. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, “The Core Issues”, contains 10 essays that focus on the theoretical aspects of aesthetics and art’s relation to major philosophical concerns such as epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, rhetoric, and the philosophy of mind. Part II, “ The Arts and other Matters”, contains 8 essays that bring a theoretical perspective to play empirically on a broad, but by no means exhaustive, spectrum of particular art forms. The empirical domain of the essays in Part II adds philosophically to the volume by balancing the generality of Part I with the concreteness of specific cases. Kivy’s editorial decision to “divide and conquer” acknowledges the multifaceted and thriving nature of contemporary aesthetics. In doing so, it accommodates, through its diversity of essays and perspectives, a broad range of readers – from the student of humanities, including philosophy, literature, history, film, dance, and music etc., to the professional philosopher.

It is not possible to comment on each individual essay within the scope of this review. However, I will concentrate briefly on several essays that engage with the concepts of beauty and pleasure, and their relation to the concept of value judgements.

            George Dickie, in “Defining Art: Intension and Extension”, attempts to capture the cultural essence of art by suggesting that art can only properly be defined as “an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public” (59). Alan Goldman’s “Evaluating Art”, which implicitly subscribes to Dickie’s “institutional” theory of art, points out that “to call something an artwork is already to grant it a positive evaluative status” (93). He puts forward the notion of an objective criterion of evaluation for distinguishing particular artworks, and in the process raises, and tackles, many important traditional questions. One such question is, “Do [aesthetic] evaluations refer to objective properties of artworks, or are they merely expressions of subjective taste?” (95).  Goldman does not shy away from expounding the sceptical thesis regarding the subjectivity of evaluation. As a result his essay is well balanced and informative. Goldman appeals to the notion of an ideal, and fully engaged, critic - that is one who is “knowledgeable of the traditions from which the work emerges, … able to discern complex relations among the elements of the work, and … sensitive to the values of aesthetic experiences that these elements and relations can provide” (99).  Goldman completes his essay with a section titled, “Objections and Questions”, that further advances and clarifies his position while making his argument easily accessible to the general reader or student.

Laurent Stern’s “Interpretation in Aesthetics” is a perfect companion piece to Goldman’s essay. While Goldberg focussed on an idyllic model of the ideal critic’s role in objectively evaluating an artwork, Stern’s emphasis is on how in reality conflicting interpretations in the arts are an inevitable fact, yet of philosophical importance if we are to understand the process by which the interpreting activity takes place. This in turn, he argues, will further allow for a value judgement on that interpretation. In particular, Stern grounds his argument by focussing on the ongoing debate surrounding the notion of authorial intentions. Stern recounts the intentionalist / anti-intentionalist debate, giving many concrete illustrations to illuminate what has often become abstract in theory.  Although firmly on the anti-intentionalist side of the debate, Stern’s essay is thought provoking and open-ended, which encourages further critical thought on the part of the reader.

 Mary Mothersill’s clearly written “Beauty and the Critic’s Judgement: Remapping Aesthetics” suggests that “aesthetic value” is a meaningless term, and that contemporary aesthetics has reductively restricted itself to the theory of criticism. She argues for a return to the venerable philosophical concern with the concept of beauty, which is the basis of aesthetics.  Beauty, she claims, “is a distinctive and timeless concept” (157). Mothersill superimposes the universality of the concept of beauty on the changing historical vogue of what counts as beautiful or, in other words, the “institutional” theory of art, and argues, “[p]hilosophical aesthetics has as its charge to explicate the concept of beauty and to explain the practice of criticism in the arts” (165).

In “Art and the Aesthetic” Marcia Muelder Eaton distinguishes, without completely separating, works of art and the aesthetic experience. She argues: “anything can be viewed aesthetically, but only some of these things can be viewed artistically” (63). She claims, against Kant, that knowledge is at the heart of the pleasure we experience when contemplating beauty, whether of nature or art. This assertion prefigures Donald W. Crawford’s thesis in “The Aesthetics of Nature and the Environment” in Part II of this book. Crawford offers a very contemporary view of the close relationship between aesthetic appreciation, nature, and knowledge: “[a]ppreciation of nature … as environment requires knowledge … either metaphysical or scientific, … that there are natural forces deserving of our appreciation and warranting our respect in the form of minimal interference” (309).

            The link between aesthetics and ethics is integral to Crawford’s theory. This link, as Noël Carroll points out in “Art and the Moral Realm”, “is enduring and complex” (126). “In all probability”, Carroll states, “art and morality arrived on the cultural scene at roughly the same moment, inasmuch as the earliest tribal moralities and values of the race were articulated and disseminated through the songs, poems, dances, narratives, and visual arts of our early forebears” (126). Carroll offers an exposition of how and why art and morality have increasingly occupied separate realms since the eighteenth century, and argues that sometimes “aesthetic and ethical evaluation converge” (146). Objections to the link between art and ethics, he demonstrates, is not insurmountable but “serve as a salutary pretext for attempting to clarify what we are doing and why we are doing it when it comes to speaking about art” (147).

The division of spheres between literature and philosophy, morality and aesthetics, is the subject of Peter Lamarque’s and Stein Haugom Olsen’s essay, “The Philosophy of Literature: Pleasure Restored”. This essay puts forward a very interesting, and timely, argument that the divide between literature and philosophy (which stretches back to Plato’s dismissal of poets from his ideal republic) needs to be abridged in order to realign the social and historical values of literature with its aesthetic value. This highly informative and historical essay argues that the development of literary criticism as a separate discipline over the ages involved an increasing rejection of the notion of pleasure as an integral element of literature in favour of focussing on its moral and social worth. Lamarque and Olsen put forward an outline of a philosophical aesthetics of literature “drawing on all that the discipline of aesthetics has to offer, and capturing a conception of literature that is true to the literary tradition”(203).

The formal arrangement of the essays is one of the most remarkable features of The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. The first and last essays in this volume - Paul Guyer’s “The Origins of Modern Aesthetics: 1711-35”, and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Art and the Aesthetic: The Religious Dimension”, respectively - reflect, in both their formal placement and content, the historical cycle the philosophy of art has undergone from the first origin of the term “aesthetics” in eighteenth century secularized philosophy – to the acknowledgment of a debt to a pre-modern religious vocabulary in how we express the sense of aesthetic experience today. Kivy comments: “if for us secularists art has taken on something like the place of religion in our lives, it is no wonder that artists have become our high priests, and philosophy of art the interpreter of their sometimes dark and impenetrable sayings” (11). It would be fascinating to have Nietzsche’s perspective on the relation between art and religion put forward in this context! However, Nietzsche’s aesthetics, despite its revolutionary import on contemporary theories of art and philosophy, does not receive a proportionate mention in this volume. 

Nevertheless, background material on historical aesthetic theories does inform and clarify the ideas presented in most of the essays in this volume. The aesthetic theories of Plato, Aristotle, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Baumgarten, Kant, and Bell, among others, are well represented. Although the prose style in general is clear and accessible, the average undergraduate may have some difficulty with the historical material, which is not always explained in elucidatory detail. However, notes and references accompany each essay, which offers the interested reader scope for further research.  Also, the index provided is extensive and allows the reader quick access to major movements, themes and theorists within the field of aesthetics.

To conclude, Kivy has realised his objective of putting forward a volume of essays as “evidence for the philosophical health of aesthetics” (4). These essays, I believe, will serve to address and correct the peripheral position aesthetics has held in relation to other philosophical fields.  The contributors emphasise the multiple dimensions of value in works of art, thereby contributing to the growth of aesthetic theory, while broadening our appreciation of the variety of art forms that give birth to the aesthetic experience. This book would be a positive edition to the humanities section of every library and an excellent resource for students of a variety of disciplines within the arts as well as for professional philosophers.