Art and Contemplation

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PROVINCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XXII OCTOBER, 1959 No.4 ART AND CONTEMPLATION T HE notion of contemplation in an aesthetic context has been treated not only by philosophers of art but by many artists themselves. Oscar Wilde, for example, appears to espouse a Platonic type of contemplation not only directed toward the work of art itself but concretized in ·the sort of life enjoyed by the artist.. This contemplative mode of existence consists in a retiring from the distractions of daily, active life in order to look down on life as a whole as though from a tower. Such a view is clearly related to the romantic notion of " art for art's sake " as held by such writers as Flaubert and Baudelaire in France, by Schlegel and Heine in Germany, and in a derived form by Pater in England. Schopenhauer , in fact, would relate all types of contemplation to artistic contemplation, a contemplation of ideas especially found in the genius, who is most of all the artist, for art is the highest achievement the human intellect can attain. The 448 444 JOHN A, OESTERLE problem of art contemplation is proposed a less :romantic fashion in our own time by the New Critics who are preoccupied with the search for total poetic meaning. The chief difficulty standing in the way of attaching contemplative to art would seem to arise from understanding co:nt~~mpl:atlon only in the sense in which it strictly characterizes philosophical knowledge, that is, contemplation as a intellectual knowing of reality for what it is. When contemplation is so understood, art not seem to contemplative because its inescapable relation to man's emotional life. Although someone like Schopenhauer, his emphasis on the emotional life man, attempt to contemplation with artistic contemplation, many ln artistic experience is a contemplative experience, positivists. The divergence on from a failure to see a word has contemplation COJillt~~m.pl:atlOn may than ..,,.,uvc•v enjoyment would tend to suggest not only contemplative experience in appreciating works it is of a distinctive kind. Louis Reid recognizes that aesthetic contemplation will differ kinds contemplation. " The difference may be indicated very roughly pointing out that in aesthetic, as distinct from other contemplation, the object is so regarded the very arrangement of the perceptual as we apprehend them seems itself to embody valuable meaning , something apprehension of which moves, :interests, excites us." 1 To be sure, this is a somewhat "rough" indication , and recognizes that the problem of specifying "aesthetic contemplation" is not a simple one. He proceeds chiefly in a negative manner. Aesthetic contemplation is not " sustained " scientific nor by philosophical interests, nor 1 A Study in Aesthetics (New York, 1954), p. 39. ART AND CONTEMPLATION 445 does it primarily solve theoretic problems; it is not" sustained" by practical and biological interests either. Positively, it seems to be an " imaginative seeing," a perception " but something more." In the last analysis, works of art appear to possess " meanings for aesthetic contemplation which it is beyond words to describe." He refers to, without endorsing completely, the phrase "significant form" as used by Clive Bell. Bell's phrase certainly touches upon something central in artistic contemplation, but the difficulty with the phrase as Bell used it is that it never manifests in what the significance of form consists, since " significance " has to imply a significance of something, and "form" likewise a form of something. Reid's conclusion is that aesthetic significance or meaning is untranslatable .2 A close connection obviously exists between truth and contemplation , and hence between artistic truth and artistic contemplation . The problem of what truth in art means and what its relation is to truth in a philosophical sense would need extensive consideration and examination which we cannot undertake here. In a summary and no doubt inadequate fashion, let us say that truth in art consists chiefly in an imaginative understanding of what could be and even, in the artistic sense, what should be the case. The truth of a work of art lies in the comprehension of...