Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Lamarque, Peter, and Olsen, Stein Haugom, editors. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. pp. xii + 571. ISBN 1-4051-0581-X. £65 (HB). ISBN 1-4051-0582-8. £19.99 (PB).
Reviewed by
University of Durham, UK
In a very general sense, aesthetics has conventionally suffered from (frequently justified) accusations of being a ‘weak’ branch of philosophy. The advent of analytic aesthetics in the 1950s sought to subject traditional aesthetics to the critical methodologies employed in other branches of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, thereby conferring on aesthetic investigation a more scientific approach, as well as philosophical credibility and rigour. As a result, analytic aesthetics assumed a metacritical agenda that perceived it as not only the philosophy of art but also the philosophy of art criticism. Hence the title of this impressive collection of essays. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art immediately signals a separation between traditional aesthetics and its analytic adjunct into which the now-subordinate former has been subsequently collapsed. While philosophy of art has tended towards historically contextualised interpretations, analytic aesthetics has abjured “social, political, or ideological underpinnings” in favour of an ahistorical, quasi-scientific approach where problems are treated as timeless and “solvable, if at all, by appeal to logic.” The analytic tradition has also tended to avoid questions of evaluation, preferring instead to focus on matters of defining and identifying art, its ontological status, qualifying the properties and concepts of art, and interpretation. Indeed, these categories provide the titles of the first four sections of this anthology, while the fifth section seeks to incorporate evaluation into the overall remit of analytic aesthetics, albeit in terms of “the kinds of judgement that critics make and the criteria for them.”
In line with the development of the analytic tradition, the 46 essays collected here have been drawn from the past 50 or so years. Appropriately, the collection begins with Morris Weitz’s seminal essay of 1956, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, while the most recent, Berys Gaut’s ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art’, first appeared in 1998. Divided into eleven distinct but not unrelated sections, these essays conduct a dialogue between some of the most important philosophers of the analytic tradition. Many of the essays will be familiar: those by Weitz and Arthur Danto, along with the revised version of George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, have all been much-anthologised. The list of authors, too, is a roster of some of the most respected and innovative aestheticians of the last half-century. These include Kendall Walton, Malcolm Budd, and Jerrold Levinson (who each get three entries), Frank Sibley, Peter Kivy, Roger Scruton, Jenefer M. Robinson, Monroe C. Beardsley, and Stephen Davies (who each get two entries), and the editors themselves, who contribute five entries between them. The editors confess to “worrying over what must be excluded in the interests of manageability,” and indeed the anthology could easily have been considerably longer. There are some obvious omissions: the names of Charles Altieri, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Shusterman (whose Analytic Aesthetics would make an estimable companion volume) spring to mind. But this is a fairly minor quibble, and the collection does include a number of difficult-to-find essays, most notably Chapter 1 of Anthony Savile’s excellent but criminally out of print book, The Test of Time.
The first five sections outline the broad critical context of analytic aesthetics, establishing what the editors assert is one of the anthology’s main objectives: “to display the development of [the analytic] tradition from its beginnings in the 1950s to the present day.” The following six sections expand on this, illuminating a further objective: “to illustrate the broad range of topics and problems addressed by aestheticians, from general issues of a theoretical nature to more specific issues relating to particular art forms.” These subsequent sections feature both the unexpected and considerable surprises. The inclusion of ‘Fictionality’ (Part VI), ‘Pictorial Art’ (Part VII), ‘Literature’ (Part VIII), and ‘Music’ (Part IX) is not likely to raise many eyebrows. But the final sections on ‘Popular Art’ and ‘Aesthetics of Nature’ reveal the extent to which the analytic tradition has expanded its ambition to be more inclusive. R.W. Hepburn’s ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ from 1966 is a forerunner of ‘environmental aesthetics’. The essay bemoans what is perceived as an ongoing problem, namely the preoccupation of analytic aesthetics with art at the expense of considerations of the natural world. Part of this problem stems firstly from the commonly-held notion that nature does not fall under the concept of art, and secondly from the level of intention implied by analytic philosophy’s concerns with language. Allen Carlson agrees with Hepburn’s assertion tat art and nature provide distinct aesthetic experiences, but Malcolm Budd seeks to reclaim experiences of nature in the name of aesthetics by providing “a concept of aesthetic appreciation that makes meaningful a distinction between aesthetic and other forms of appreciation of nature.”
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this collection is the inclusion of three essays on popular art. Analytic philosophy has traditionally neglected those forms of art which take their context, motivation and raison d’être from the socio-cultural arena. Yet as both Joseph Margolis’s ‘The Ontological Peculiarity of Works of Art’ (found in Part II) and Budd’s aforementioned essay suggest, all works can be described as “culturally emergent entities.” Margolis and Budd therefore pave the way (perhaps unwittingly) for more refined considerations of works of popular art, and they open up a potential discourse between ahistorical analytic methods and historically-generated cultural productions. In ‘Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music’, Bruce Baugh insists that popular art, especially rock music, must be appreciated and evaluated according to “standards of its own, which uniquely apply to it, or that apply to it in an especially appropriate way.” Not surprisingly, this line is hotly disputed and Stephen Davies contends Baugh’s argument, claiming “I doubt that one will find contrasts [between rock and classical music] deep or distinctive enough to provide the basis for an aesthetics.” The problem here is that neither critic provides a suitable or sufficient definition of rock music. Nevertheless, the dialogue is a valuable one and it raises the ante on providing a future discourse on popular art that remains within the analytic tradition.
The editors have worked together before, producing the marvellously provocative and insightful Truth, Fiction, and Literature (1994), and this is an equally estimable book that constitutes a major addition to the ever-growing number of aesthetics anthologies.