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PHILOSOPHY MUSIC |
Arnold Berleant
Introduction The problems of aesthetics, like the problems of art, depend on how the field is ordered. The locus of the questions that are asked largely decides which questions are meaningful and important. If the focus is on the art object, the "work of art," then it is quite proper to wonder about what distinguishes such an object from other things. And so we are given various answers, such as formal properties that can evoke the appropriate emotion in the viewer, or distinctively aesthetic qualities located in the object, or even a philosophical theory that confers aesthetic status on an object otherwise indistinguishable from things not considered art, or, finally, membership in an institution whose imprimatur gives the object the distinction of being art. Most of the debates about art during the past century, especially its closing decades, have followed from identifying the work of art, or what I prefer to call, less complexly and assumptively, the art object, as the center of the discussion. And of course it seems perfectly reasonable to have done this on both common sense and certain philosophical grounds. On the first, in an acquisitive culture, honor and power lie in possession. Nothing can contribute more to a sense of either power or status than objects of art, a tendency to whose accumulation has become increasingly widespread and exaggerated. Other reasons for centering discussion on the art object are philosophical, and the model of scientific objectivity that developed from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries has served as the guide. After isolating the object of study, description, classification, and analysis proceed by exhaustively documenting and dissecting the object far beyond its perceptual identity. These techniques, applied to the language of aesthetic discourse, characterize the analytic approach to art. The counter tendency to this focus on the object, which is to center questions of aesthetics on the artist or the appreciator, has its roots in the subjectivist strand in philosophy that has been a powerful force in Western thought, especially since the seventeenth century. Once aesthetics is taken to be concerned with our response to art, the study of feeling or emotion, of cultural spirit, of imagination and the associated psychological questions become paramount. Adopted by the romantic movement and sometimes arrayed against scientific objectivity, this way of structuring the issues of aesthetics persists in the still forceful influence of psychoanalysis. And it assumes a different form in the ever-present Kantian model of subjectivist aesthetics, with its correlative efforts to extend beyond those limits to achieve universality, efforts that are never quite convincing. Cognitive theory is a recent trend that belongs to the same subjectivistic tradition. Both theoretical strands, the objectivist and the subjectivist, have contributed to our understanding of art and the aesthetic. The study of the art object has led to the histories of different art forms in painting, music, literature, and more recently, dance. The object-centered approach has produced analyses of style, forms, properties, and language, as well as the examination of ontological issues, including questions concerning representation and illusion. The side of response has led in recent years to studies on the contribution that active appreciation makes in many arts, including literature, theater, and film; to cognitive theory, including emotion and imagination; as well as continuing more traditional concerns with aesthetic judgment and criticism. We may consider the contribution of feminist and other theorists in emphasizing the active involvement of the body as an extension of this same tendency. The interest of empirical aesthetics in matters of preference and response also belongs here. Such trends are well-known, but I mention them in order to point up the determining force of one's initial premises. What I should like to do, in addition to urging that these theoretical assumptions be made explicit and critically reappraised, is suggest that there are other ways of ordering the landscape of aesthetics. In particular, I want to propose an alternative that has the virtue of inclusiveness and, more important, that offers an account both empirically truer and philosophically less presumptive than the object-centered or recipient centered foci. This is to base theory on aesthetic experience construed in a way sharply different from how it has usually been understood in modern Western aesthetics, which places it in the subjectivist tradition. Aesthetic experience Aesthetic experience is, in my view, the most important term in aesthetic theory and perhaps the most troublesome. A brief account can barely touch the rich and varied ways it has been discussed. But mentioning something of the variety of its characterizations will serve to introduce an alternative different enough from these to set us on a fresh course. What I want to propose is that, contrary to the usual philosophical intuition, aesthetic experience is not the dependent correlative of an object,[1] not subjective, not private, and not even exclusively personal. Rather it is experience that is engaged and embodied. At the same time it is social, influenced by learning, by the occasion on which it takes place, by custom and values, and most of all by its context. Consider some of the main stages in the development of our understanding of such experience. Kant's great and lasting insight lay in recognizing that aesthetic value is not ontologically independent but requires the essential presence and necessary contribution of human perception. From John Dewey came the awareness of the central place of experience in art, of its embeddedness in the biological and social worlds, and of the pervasiveness of the aesthetic in strikingly different modes of experience. Along with many others, Monroe Beardsley analyzed the relation of aesthetic experience to its object, and Mikel Dufrenne, in his detailed description of aesthetic experience, revealed the perceptual complexity and richness of the aesthetic object as a sensuous presence.[2] To such key points in the development of modern Western aesthetics over the past three centuries, many others have made important contributions. There is a history of aesthetics to be written along such lines, but that is not my intent here. Rather, what I want to do is suggest a characterization of aesthetic experience that joins these insights into a coherent pattern that I call the aesthetic field. It is a pattern that takes such experience beyond the constraints of a focus on either the aesthetic object or the appreciative response, that enlarges it to include creative and performative factors, and that extends it toward a more inclusive setting that recognizes the social, cultural, and other contextual influences that shape and color our experience of the aesthetic. The Aesthetic Field In a characteristically aesthetic situation, four main factors contribute to what is a seamless and continuous occasion. Of what the object and the appreciator offer I have already spoken. To these we can add two others: the creative contribution in shaping the experience, and the performative one in activating it. Many forces drive these four dimensions of an aesthetic occasion: cognitive influences, social conventions, cultural values, technological resources, perceptual experience, and habit, including body memory. The idea of an aesthetic field does not pre-judge the specific balance of the central and peripheral factors on particular occasions, but it does insist that an adequate account of art include most if not all of these factors. This idea bears a curious resemblance to Aristotle's four causes, a kind of pre-Post-modern explanation, where a full account of causality requires the collaborative contributions of different factors, including the human one. What we have in the aesthetic is a richly complex situation involving four major factors and realized in different emphases and patterns in different arts, at different historical times, and ultimately on particular, unique occasions. We can say, to be sure, that this characterization describes any kind of human experience. What, then, makes one aesthetic? The answer lies, I think, in the predominately perceptual tone of aesthetic occasions. Such perception occurs directly and unmediated, although it is certainly influenced profoundly by the kinds of forces and conditions I mentioned earlier.[3] But the truth of the aesthetic lies, I believe, in its compelling presence, and that presence is perceptual in the fullest sense, engaging all the senses synaesthetically and embedded in the wide sensibility of the entire human body. As participants in an aesthetic field, we are continuous contributors in all of its dimensions: objective, appreciative, creative, and performative. It is the active continuity of such experience that I designate by the term 'aesthetic engagement.' Experience that is aesthetic, then, is not a uniquely different kind of experience, one marked by some distinguishing designating component or quality. Rather it epitomizes human living in all its complexity as situated. The aesthetic thus expands to encompass the full range of human occasions -- social, practical, erotic, religious, even cognitive. But we recognize in our encounters with the arts and with nature those quintessential occasions in which the aesthetic dimension of experience can flower most fully and freely, sometimes in richly beguiling complexity, sometimes in disarmingly pure simplicity, and sometimes in an astonishing combination of both. Examples of these are endless. For simplicity one may think of Rubens' masterly drawing of his son Nicholas,[4] holding in a few simple strokes the momentarily untouched innocence of childhood. Or of the smooth form of Brancusi's "Bird in Flight," embodying all the movement, grace, and aerial exuberance of its subject. Like the unadorned, quiet symmetry of a Chinese vase, the opening of the slow movement of Bartók's Second Piano Concerto possesses a profundity that cannot be articulated. It is not possible to illustrate aesthetic complexity by a snatch of sound or passing slide, but we all acknowledge the monumental power of the "St. Matthew Passion" and of Beethoven's "Ninth," of the Sistine Chapel and of "Guernica." Perhaps most surpassing are those works of art (and I use the expression literally) that succeed in combining both the simple and the complex. Bach's "Goldberg Variations," the finale of Mozart's "Jupiter Symphony," one of Rembrandt's late self-portraits and Rothko's last, almost monochromatic canvases achieve such aesthetic ultimacy. We can experience a similar range of simplicity and complexity in a natural setting. The delicate colors appearing on a water-washed stone along the seashore or the trillium raising its white blossom in early spring amid the brown leaves of the forest floor can be contrasted with the panoramic light show of a sunset in a partly cloudy sky or the undulating waves of a receding mountain range. Aesthetic engagement Such aesthetic encounters can obviously be explained in various ways. But the account I find most compelling is one that places them directly in the richly living course of human experience. This is not the world of critical analysis; it is not the world of contemplative musing; it is not the world of attentive disinterestedness. It is, I believe, the ongoing course of human life, in which the aesthetic is an often persistent feature that at times becomes dominant. At that point vital activity does not cease but becomes focused and intensified, most fully lived and most memorable. Such aesthetic experience at its most powerful and compelling is aesthetic engagement. Aesthetic experience shares many features with religious experience. Like the religious, it is self-transcending. The aesthetic encourages connections and continuities among the elements of our awareness. Grasping meanings and increasing understanding can enhance the experience and sometimes even make it possible. Without religious knowledge, the crucifixion and the many arms of Shiva are more puzzling than elevating, just as cubist and pointillist paintings may seem unnecessarily arcane without some understanding of the perceptual principles that underlie them. But we do not need to know the teachings of the Buddha to grasp the subtle, otherworldly and yet benevolent trace of a smile that is characteristic of the.Khymer buddhas, and basic human experience is all that we need to bring to Vermeer's "Young Woman with a Water Jug." A distinguishing difference, however, lies in the fact that, unlike religious experience, the aesthetic is never transcendent but unambiguously localized, embedded in a field in which the human participant is an integrated and inseparable factor. On rare occasions the art exceeds the message and the line between the aesthetic and the religious blurs, as in Grünewald's crucifixion, whose powerful images of torment and putrefaction assail the onlooker, or Raphael's "Madonna del Granduca."[5] Maternity, like death, is a theme that exceeds its cognitive appropriation. Perhaps it is the sense of the sacred that brings both the aesthetic and the religious together. The force of engagement is at the same time both the mark of the aesthetic and the standard by which its success can be judged. This is what it is to work as art, the end to which we strive as creative artists and appreciative ones. It is exemplified in our experience of good art and the ineffectuality of bad. It is epitomized in the overwhelming force of great art, in the sense of being taken out of ourselves that we associate with our most powerful and unforgettable encounters with artistic and natural beauty and with the sublime. But such occasions are not the only occurrence of aesthetic experience. For the aesthetic occurs in many degrees, from the mild enjoyment and modest delight that characterizes many of our aesthetic pleasures, through progressively more compelling experiences, leading finally to those that are unforgettable in their intensity and power. Aesthetic engagement also may take many forms: purely sensuous delight; feelings of empathy; the sense of being caught up in the unfolding of a dramatic plot; the illumination of a new awareness; the process of unfolding visual, auditory, or kinesthetic perception; the spatial sense of bodily passage in juxtaposition with masses; the quiet, restrained involvement of traditional contemplation. Such experiences always involve a field of factors and forces, and they combine a unique mix of cognitive, habitual, cultural, and social influences, all embedded in a somatic matrix of immediate perception. Aesthetic engagement includes many of the traditional features associated with that experience, such as emotion, imagination, and pleasure centering on an object. But it surpasses that tradition in recognizing the embedded and embodied character of experience, the plurality of factors implicated, and their center in immediate perception. It reflects the wholeness of art and the continuities of living experience. There is nothing more profoundly human, and there is nothing greater. If it weren't for the peach, we should starve.[6] "Experience as Aesthetic," paper given at the American Society for Aesthetics annual meeting, Minneapolis, 25 October 2001. This essay brings together ideas developed in my other writings. See especially The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas l970). Cybereditions: cybereditions.com/spis/runisa/dll?SV:cyTheBooksTmp. Second edition, with a new Preface; and Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). [1] Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p. 65. [2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment; John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1934); Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Phénomenologie de l'expérience esthétique (1953)) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Beardsley assigns more importance to the pole of experience in "Aesthetic Experience Regained," THE JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM, 28 (1969), pp. 3-11. [3] By perception I mean full synaesthetic awareness shaped and colored by cultural and ideational influences. Many writers locate the aesthetic more narrowly. J. O. Urmson, for example, in "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" identifies a fundamentum divsionis that distinguishes the aesthetic from other evaluations and confines it to "sensible qualities which affect us favorably or unfavorably." (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol.XXXI (1957). Monroe Beardsley finds aesthetic experience in "the form and qualities of a sensuously presented or imaginatively intended object on which his primary attention is concentrated." "Aesthetic Experience Regained," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1969), pp. 3-11. I use the term 'perception' in its most inclusive sense to denote the full range of sensory awareness. This includes not only direct sensation -- kinesthetic, muscular, and skeletal awareness, in addition to the usual five sense receptors -- but imaginative and mnemonic sensory awareness, as well. [4] Nicholas was the model Rubens's "Study for an Infant Christ," a drawing in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna. [5] This is a Madonna and Child. See H. W. Janson, Key Monuments of the History of Art (New York: Abrams, 1959), p. 710. [6] This reference is to T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." The line, "Do we dare to eat a peach?" was the guiding image of a panel on "Re-thinking Aesthetic Experience," presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Minneapolis, October 25, 2001, for which this essay was written. |