Evaluating Art

Chapter Two: The Historical Background

CHAPTER TWO The Historical Background One of the most remarkable and relatively recent changes in the way that philosophers theorize about the evaluation of art has been the rejection of the representative or more generally the cognitive element as being of artistic value. Plato long ago of course denigrated the value of the representation in art of the world of sights and sounds, but his view is generally regarded as idiosyncratic and merely curious. Aristotle in contrast uses imitation (representation ) as one of the criteria of artistic value. Imitation establishes a powerful relation between art and the world it represents. The great majority of humankind from Aristotle's day to the present has agreed with him that imitation is artistically valuable, and so have most philosophers until relatively recently. The conventional wisdom of the dominant, present-day philosophical theorizing about the evaluation of art, however, denies the importance of representation and other cognitive elements that relate art to the world and thereby denies the significance of the relation between art and the rest of life. Beardsley's theory is a prime example of this negative attitude toward the artistic value of the cognitive aspects of art, but many of the views that will be discussed in the following chapters also exhibit this same attitude. How has this relatively recent change come about? 15 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The explanation of the change in the value status of the representational and cognitive elements generally in art must begin with an examination of the views of certain eighteenth-century philosophers . The attempt to develop theories to explain the experience of art and to justify the evaluating of art did not begin in the eighteenth century, but a new beginning was made early in that century with the advent of the theory of taste. An enormous number of different theories of taste appeared during the eighteenth century. The artistic value of representation or imitation in the experience of art was acknowledged in one way or another by these theories, so it was not the theory of taste as such that did in imitation. It was Kant's theory of taste, especially as understood by Schopenhauer, that sealed the fate of imitation, denying it a role in the proper experience of art. Or rather, it was one aspect of Kant's theory of taste, the aspect that so influenced Schopenhauer, that sealed the fate of imitation. Kant made a technical adjustment in the notion of the faculty taste and thereby altered the course of aesthetic theory. Kant did not himself reject imitation as unimportant-at least in the later part of "The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement," although perhaps he should have in order to be consistent with its earlier part. In any event, it was the earlier part that influenced Schopenhauer and thereby helped determine the dominant view, and insofar as the dominant view is concerned, imitation is not an artistic value. (In the remainder of this chapter, when I refer to Kant's theory of taste, I shall be referring to the influential earlier part.) In this chapter, I shall discuss the theories of taste of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, Hume, and Kant, because all of these theories are important in the line of historical development I am tracing. I shall also discuss Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, which as noted absorbed the relevant Kantian notion and embedded it in modern philosophical thought. The notion of the disinterestedness of the experience of beauty plays a central role in each of the theories of taste and in Schopenr6 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND hauer's aesthetic theory also. In the earlier theories of taste, the disinterestedness of the experience of beauty involves no necessary conflict between the experience of a beautiful art object and the experience of representational (imitative) features of that art object. With Kant's alteration in the theory of taste and the consequent enormous expansion of the scope of disinterestedness in his and Schopenhauer's theories, it became the dominant view that there is a necessary conflict between the experience of a beautiful art object and its representational features. In what follows, I shall trace the idea of disinterestedness from its introduction into theorizing about beauty in theories of taste to Schopenhauer's theory, which has been so influential on present-day theories of aesthetic experience. As is well known, disinterestedness was brought: into the theorizing about beauty by Shaftesbury. What is...