Aesthetics for the Contemporary Artist

Leonardo, Vol. 8, pp. 341-344. Pergamon Press 1975. Printed in Great Britain \ AESTHETICS FOR THE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST Elmer H. Duncan, Corresponding Editor Readers are invited to draw attention to articles on aesthetics appearing in Englishlanguage journals that are of special interest to studio artists and art teachersfor review by Elmer H. Duncan, Dept. of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco. TX 76703, U.S.A. V . M.Ames, Art for Art’s Sake Again?, J. Aesth. and Art Crit. 33, 303 (1975). It is too trite to say just that the more things change, the more they remain the same. But things do seem to happen that way. In this essay, Ames recalls the artists (Mallarme, the Surrealists, etc.) at the end of the nineteenth century and up to the time of World War I who advocated ‘art for art’s sake’. Ames is particularly interested in the writers of this movement ‘ ... who rebelled against the bourgeois meaning of words ... letting words exist in their own right, signifying nothing but one another .. .’ (p. 303). Today Ames finds much the same sort of work being done by contemporary French writers, especially Maurice Blanchot. He thinks Blanchot and others could have found philosophic support in the work of the pragmatists of the U.S.A., especially G. H. Mead. But Ames adds that ‘Blanchot is closer to Buddhism than to pragmatism in holding that there is nothing to hunt for beneath words or images, since the symbol does not reveal any ideas, but breaks away from the world of signs’ (p. 305). This sort of writing is now designated ‘structuralist’ but Ames seems right in saying that it amounts to a return to ‘art for art’s sake’ again. M. P . Battin, Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics (Part I), J. of Aesth. and Art Crit. 33, 155 (1974) and Part I1 in 33, 293 (1975). In the entire history of aesthetics, no work has been as much discussed as Aristotle’s Poetics; the literature is enormous. One unfortunate consequence of this fact is that new articles on the subject are likely to be ignored-we cannot read them all and we may feel that we have read enough. This new two-part essay by Battin deserves a better fate. Specifically,the Poetics is often said to be unsystematic, rambling, etc. Battin argues-persuasively-that this is not the case. A close reading of the Greek text would seem to indicate that Aristotle constructed his definition of tragedy in a completely systematic way. He seems to have used the principles of logic that he had learned as a pupil of his great teacher Plato and that he (Aristotle) had set forth in his own works on logic. In Part 11, Battin turns to Ch. 6 of the Poetics and the discussion of tragedy as ‘...accomplishing with pity and fear the catharsis of these emotions’ (p. 294; presumably Battin’s own translation). Here a problem emerges. The catharsis clause does not seem to fit. If Battin’s argument is correct, the definition is complete without the catharsis clause. 1 once heard a major classics scholar claim that the catharsis clause did not belong in the Poetics, was not put there by Aristotle but was the work of a later hand. Instead, Battin argues that it was written by Aristotle and was important to him for ‘...the fact that he was willing, so to speak, to spoil an otherwise perfectly straightforward and rigorous definition to include the notion of 341 catharsis suggests that he accorded it more than ordinary importance, and surely considered it a central feature of tragedy’ (p. 301). Of course this is speculation but Battin leaves the reader with the fascinating idea that this point, the idea of catharsis, was a major factor in Aristotle’s break with Plato. Aristotle had used his mentor’s logical methods but they led to a conclusion that, as an art appreciator, he could not accept. Battin states: ‘I suspect that the early books of the Poetics mark a critical point in Aristotle’s transition from pupil of Plato to philosopher in his own right’ (p. 301). L . B . Cebik, Creation, Predication, and Pickwick...