Aesthetics of Deliberation, Aesthetics of Rapture

Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. x + 299 pp.

Alan Singer, Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. viii + 302 pp.

What we now call "affects," as in the title of Charles Altieri's book, were more famously "passions"—the etymologies of both words tell us that these inner states are involuntary, undergone, suffered. They're unmistakably next to raw nature and have had a history something like raw nature, at times ancillary, at times drawn on as energy sources, at times valued on their own. Platonists, theologians, or houynhnhms who configured the world hierarchically preached that passions should serve reason. Anything else was sin. A late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century redivision of labor took reason and the passions as necessary complements in moving toward goals set by both, cooperatively. The passions brought a motive force, and reason, a predictive grasp of likely consequences. One had here a more pragmatic and worldly care for long-term interests. A third structural possibility, an alternative to this purpose-suffused both/and, is an expressive either/or. Passion and reason now are termini of a sliding scale that tells who you are, rather than what you want to have. Versions of all three—hierarchy, alliance, rivalry—have continued to our own time, flanked by extremes that few people can practice, the lives of stony Stoics here, of stoned gurus there. Each of the three options subordinates or scorns both others.

In their initial forms, too, each of the three options by and large represents a different style of argument: for hierarchy, an ontological and deontological argument prescribes a "should," whether on religious grounds or on some other tenets of what being in control entails; alliance appeals to a utilitarian argument, practical rather than theoretical; for rival holisms, the argument has to do with constructing a satisfying narrative of the self. Otherwise put, the option of hierarchy calls for humans to be aligned with an order set for them; that of alliance calls for them to act in accord with their interests; and the option of rivalry calls for them to choose an autonomous self. These priorities parallel those of "the aesthetic," a realm historically rooted in sense perception and emotion. Here the option of hierarchy makes the arts serve right reason, with religious icons an extreme example; the option of alliance gives the aesthetic its own realm, as in the apportionments of a "liberal education"; and the option of rivalry appears, say, in late-nineteenth-century positivism and aestheticism, realms of temperamental affinity as to styles of thought and values.

This doubled scheme helps locate Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture and Alan Singer's Aesthetic Reason as both authors inquire into valuable learning from the arts. Altieri contemplates truths that dawn or burst upon one; Singer, those that one deliberates. Emotional responses teach us about ourselves as individual persons, rapt Altieri believes; and he draws literary examples chiefly from the most private of forms, the lyric poem. Rational Singer leans on his notions of a supremely public form, a tragic tradition derived from the Greek polis, though his literary examples come from fiction by Beckett, Melville, and Joyce. In principle, then, these books partially complement each other.

Altieri shuns any version of option 1, preferring something between options 2 and 3: in a narrative of the self, he argues, affects have an autonomy and perform a revelatory labor of their own. He protests the tropism toward "reason," the cognitive, by which writers typically justify the uses of the affects: because cognitive accounts trivialize the force of affects in our lives, "we have to turn to reflective stances that enable us to appreciate what makes particular affective experiences seem compelling" (25). What makes them seem compelling has, for Altieri, a benign circularity. Experiences grip us because we incorporate the way of...