Art And Engagement

Notes

NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. See Frank Sibley, "Aesthetic Concepts," in Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts (New York: Scribner's, 1962), pp. 63-87. 2. In The Book ofthe Courtier (1528), for example, the Italian Renaissance nobleman Count Baldassare Castiglione grouped in undifferentiated order such activities as the appreciation of poetry, music, and painting with fencing, horseback riding, the collection ofcoins, medals, and natural curiosities , and classical learning. The classic account of the historical coalescence of the various arts into a stable group of fine arts composed of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry is Paul Oskar Kristeller's essay, "The Modem System of the Arts," in his Renaissance Thought, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 207, 222-23, 225. 3. The brief account of the emergence of modem aesthetics that follows here summarizes part of my developed study in "The Historicity of Aesthetics, 1," British Journal ofAesthetics, 26, no. 2: 101-11, and in "The Eighteenth Centnry Assumptions of Analytic Aesthetics," in V. Tejera and T. Lavine, eds., History andAnti-History in Philosophy (Dordrech, The Netherlands : Kulwer, 1989),pp. 256-74 (used by permission ofKluwer Academic Publishers). How the notion of disinterestedness arose to denote a special kind of attention, how it was disentangled from moral considerations of ends and consequences, and how it became established as the central trait of the aesthetic attitude are questions that have attracted continuing attention. Copyrighted Material 215 The seminal discussion of the historical emergence of aesthetic disinterestedness is Jerome Stolnitz's, "On the Origin of 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness :" Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2: 131-43. More recent scholarship has contested Stolnitz's claim that a clear sense of "aesthetic disinterestedness" can be found as far back as Shaftesbury. Saisselin detects the notion earlier in the French Enlightenment, while Townsend finds it entangled with the sense of 'experience: showing no steady evolution but developing gropingly in the Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and the Scottish Enlightenment writers, and finally emerging in its modem sense at the end of the eighteenth century in Kant. See Remy Saisselin, "A Second Note on Eighteenth Century 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness:" Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 21, no. 2: 209; Dabney Townsend, "From Shaftesbury to Kant:' Journal ofthe History ofIdeas, 48: 2; and "Archibald Alison: Aesthetic Experience and Emotion," British Journal ofAesthetics 28, no. 2: 132-44. Attention to this important period in the history of modem aesthetics continues also in the work of George Dickie, Peter Kivy, Stephanie Ross, Noel Carroll, and Ted Cohen, among others. 4. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics ofMen, Manners, Opinions , Times (1711) (New York, 1900), vol. I, p. 94; vol. 2, pp. 136-37, 13031 . Shaftesbury, "A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules" (1712), quoted in Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 89. 5. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofBeauty and Virtue (1725) (3rd ed.; London, 1729), sect. 2, paras. 1,3. 6. Thomas Reid, On the Intellectual Powers ofMan (1785), "Of Beauty." 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment (1790), sects. 43, 45. 8. Kant, Critique of Judgment, sect. 5. Further, when Kant describes taste as universal (sects. 6-9), he frames his view within the cognitivist tradition that has dominated Western thought since classical times. 9. Kant, Critique of Judgment, sects. II, 16. Kant, of course, was himself not as exclusive as this account may suggest, for he distinguished between pure and impure judgments of taste and admitted a relationship between the arts and culture. However, Kant's enormous and continuing influence, like that of most seminal thinkers, derives from a selective and therefore unbalanced interpretation of his theory. The descendants of a theoretical giant are frequently more orthodox than the originator. It appears , furthermore, that this tendency toward enshrining disinterested perception as peculiarly aesthetic was not conSistently or universally maintained at the time it was being formulated. See Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 103, 104, 131-32. 10. Hugo Miinsterberg, The Principles of Art Education (1905), see Calogero's more recent description of the aesthetic attitude as "lyrical equi216 Notes to Chapter One Copyrighted Material librium" in Max Rieser, "The Aesthetics of Guido Calogero," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30, no. 1: 19-26. 11. Edward Bullough, " 'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Esthetic Principle," British Journal ofPsychology 5 (1913); reprinted in Melvin Rader, ed...