La belleza en Charles S. Peirce: Origen y alcance de sus ideas estéticas by Sara Barrena (review)

La belleza en Charles S. Peirce: Origen y alcance de sus ideas estéticas (The beauty on Charles S. Peirce: Origin and scope of his aesthetic ideas) is a clearly written and well-structured book on Peirce’s aesthetics. Barrena’s thesis is that aesthetics, conceived as a normative science, is central to Peirce’s philosophical system, and especially to his pragmaticism (p. 11). The goal of the book is twofold: it aims to offer an analysis of the biographical and theoretical aspects of Peirce’s interest in aesthetics and the arts (p. 10) and purports to elaborate a pragmaticist aesthetics. Both objectives can be said to be well achieved.

The book is divided into four chapters. The first is devoted to the origin of Peirce’s aesthetic ideas. Firstly, attention is paid to Peirce’s social context. It is shown that, despite the industrial and scientific environment of Boston and Cambridge (Massachusetts), and the absence of a strong artistic tradition in those towns, arts were always valued in Peirce’s family, providing him a special sensibility to appreciate arts (pp. 15–25). Next, the focus turns to the American artistic context of XIX century, highlighting the influence of American luminism and transcendentalism, in which nature is conceived as a mirror or manifestation of God (p. 30–2) and the role of the artist is to capture the reality of the landscape in the purest way in order to allow the manifestation of God in the artwork. The claim is that:

There is a reality that had to be respected at all costs, because the infinite or the ideal could be in some way achieved through it (. . .). The concrete, the material, is supposed to be the medium through which the impalpable, the sublime, the divinity, the reasonable, will be present. (. . .) Art expresses God in the nature and it is necessary to make it with scientific correction in all the details.

(p. 34–6)

These ideas are said to have influenced Peirce’s view of art. The search for God is taken to be a common ground of art and science (p. 33–46). The five trips that he took to Europe and the development of his taste and his ideas of art are exhibited drawing from Peirce’s correspondence. The most important of these ideas is that the capacity to express something is a criterion of artistic value (p. 60). Arts are valued to the extent of their capacity to express. The influence of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in this respect is indicated (p. 61), as is the connection between natural beauty and the spiritual dimensions of the human being (p. 32). The role of the artist is understood as a matter of capturing in his experience the ungraspable and offering it in a comprehensible way in the artwork (p. 64). Then, Peirce’s idea of art as expression of general ideas and a consequent relation between the historical development of thought and art is addressed (pp. 68–69). In the next section, from an analysis of Peirce’s novel Topographical Sketches in Thessaly, with Fictional Embroideries, Peirce’s general view of art is defined now as a matter of “grasping impressions and shaping them” (p. 82) or, in other words, “grasping feelings through the experience and turn them reasonable” (p. 83).

The first chapter also discusses Schiller’s influence on Peirce’s account of the important role played by aesthetics in instruction. According to Schiller, there are three main impulses in the human being: the sensible one, related to the physical world; the ideal one, the intellectual realm; and the game one, associated to the faculty of imagination. It is claimed that Peirce takes from Schiller, and also from Kant, the idea of the impulse of game as the equilibrium and harmony of the two others, and the result of this impulse is beauty, through which the...