Aesthetics - session narratives |
From Taste to the Aesthetic: Hume and Kant |
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On the first row of this page are three "Elvis on Velvet" images that are very popular with many people. Many Elvis fans would have them on their living room or bedroom walls. Others would find them tasteless, badly painted and repulsive. Still others would find them "kitschy"and "camp", (especially "The King and Jesus"with its ironic title), and would collect them or even display them on their walls just because they are so direct, unsophisticated, and gauche. Andy Warhol loved such images, as he loved all of popular culture; he presented his "Double Elvis"to Bob Dylan (who according to an Elvis fan site was "so unimpressed with it that he traded it to his manager for a used sofa"). Is there anything to these preferences beyond the variety of personal tastes or culturally prevailing norms? Are beauty, and aesthetic value more generally, in the eye of the beholder? Is there something more objective about them? David Hume asked that question, and came up with an answer. On the one hand, he thought that aesthetic value was definitely subjective. Beauty and ugliness, coherence or incoherence, appropriateness or inappropriateness, and so on...these are not objective properties of things, he said, but rather they are ways that we react to things. That means that if I sincerely say something is beautiful, I must be right. Or at least, if I am wrong, I must be wrong about my own feelings, because I am saying how the thing makes me feel.On the other hand, Hume noticed that some works of art have endured the test of time and come out winners. The poems of Homer, the sculptures of Praxiteles, and the music of Bach are examples of work that has survived the test of time in the west. It seems ridiculous to compare greeting card poems, lawn ornaments and Brittany Spears songs with works such as these. Isn’t the Constable Gillingham Mill just better painted, more attractive and more interesting than the Thomas Kincaid Cobham Mill? Isn’t there some objective sense in which some works are just better than others? In spite of his opinion that taste is subjective, Hume thinks that some works really are better than others. He combines these apparently contradictory insights (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but some things are just more beautiful than others) by reference to human nature. Human nature leads people to admire the same things down through the ages. (Recently, biologists, psychologists and anthropologists have asked whether there are such continuing preferences, and whether they have a biological basis. To some degree the answer seems to be "yes".) However, the eye and the ear can be trained. To sort out the things that will survive the ages from those that will be gone tomorrow takes a refined sensibility. That’s where Hume’s rules for the development of taste come in. There are several of them; see the annotated version of his essay for a list of them.The rest of the images on this page are samples of "taste" as it showed up in the 18th century, when Hume was alive. They show both the enduring quality of some works, and the very specific standards that prevailed at the time they were made. In particular, they illustrate the division between The Beautiful and The Sublime, the two categories that Immanuel Kant and many other 18th century writers talked about. Of these two categories, it was the Sublime that was taken more seriously. The Beautiful was decorative, sweet, lovely, but not deep or challenging. The Sublime, by contrast, was exalted, and perhaps even stretched us beyond our capacity. The beautiful still life by Chardin, The Silver Goblet, is an example of The Beautiful. Like other genre paintings, it was admired but not taken so seriously. The same goes for Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Broken Eggs and The Wicked Son Punished. They communicate a moral lesson, and so serve an important purpose. But they were not at the high level of seriousness of history painting, what was done in the Salon. By contrast, David’s The Oath of the Horatii and Marat Assassinated are examples of history painting, The Sublime par excellence. Here the lessons of history are painted in an exalted manner, and the dignity of human nature is exemplified. If you wanted to be a serious painter, it was history painting (along with portraits of royalty and the nobility) that you should aspire to do. The idea of an "Aesthetic attitude" arose from the idea of Taste, the faculty that is able to recognize the Beautiful and the Sublime. It was Kant who gave this transformation its classic statement. He agreed with Hume that taste was subjective, but stressed the universal claim made by judgments of taste. He thought this claim was inevitable and legitimate. To guarantee its universality, he claimed that an aesthetic judgment should be made in a "disinterested" fashion, that is, independently of any use or personal association that a work might have for a viewer. Only by an appropriately disinterested view could one expect to connect to the "purposeful purposelessness" in the object. This view, still very popular today, was one source of the idea of aesthetic contemplation, the kind of attention we pay to a work when we are only seeing what it looks or sounds like, how it holds together, how it impresses us, without regard to use, financial value, personal associations, and the like. Influential critics like Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg used Kant's ideas to defend abstract art as the best example of the purely aesthetic, the ideal object for purely aesthetic contemplation. According to them, Significant Form is what matters in a work of art; and if the significance is there but cannot be put into words, so much the better. Larry Shiner, in the middle section of The Invention of Art, makes a careful study of how Taste turned into The Aesthetic. Among other things, this story recounts the transformation of a notion with fairly obvious social and economic roots (as Shiner puts it, "Polite Arts for the Polite Classes") into a notion whose social and economic function are largely invisible (the modern notion of Fine Art or Art for Art's Sake), even though if you stop to think about it you will see that that function has not changed much. |