PicoBlog

It is ironic that the discipline of aesthetics, one of whose topics is beauty, has been treated as an ugly stepchild by analytic philosophy.

Pressed to defend this neglect, one might complain that aesthetics in the analytic mode revolves around a limited menu of ideas, recirculating since the 18th century; and that writing about art is best left to critics, who can be no less theoretical than philosophers but are better equipped to interpret actual works of art; they also tend to write more elegant prose.

I don’t say this judgement’s fair. The editor of Philosophy and Literature, Denis Dutton, ran a Bad Writing Contest whose winners were often literary scholars, their prose impenetrable and their theories meretricious and obscure. Taken from Paul Fry’s book, A Defense of Poetry, this sentence tied for third place in 1996:

It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness—rather than the will to power—of its fall into conceptuality.

At the same time, I can see why readers might prefer Fry’s mystical cadence to formulas like this:

X has aesthetic value if and only if there is some condition C such that, for all informed observers, Y, Y deems C apt for appreciating X and, if exposed to X in C, Y would experience pleasure in X such that Y has no end E, with respect to which Y believes that X might be of use and Y is pleased by X only in virtue of that belief.

Still, my amateur impression is that aesthetics is enjoying something of a renaissance in philosophy. One of its leading lights is Nick Riggle, whose general-audience book, This Beauty, I reviewed for the TLS.

In an essay forthcoming in the Philosophical Review, Riggle concedes that the theory of aesthetic value has been stagnant. “Philosophy is in a bad state,” he writes, “if there are no, or very few, alternatives to an influential but forcefully criticized answer to one of the oldest questions in philosophy.” The question is, roughly, “What makes something aesthetically good?”—a generalization of the question, “What is beauty?” that allows for other “aesthetic values,” from the cool to the sublime—and the orthodox answer runs along the lines of the formula above: it has something to do with inducing a distinctive sort of pleasure in the right sort of subject. This is called “aesthetic hedonism.” Aesthetic empiricists liberalize the view to encompass “aesthetic experiences” other than pleasure, but otherwise agree.

Riggle does not: he introduces something new. What comes first, he thinks, is not individual experience but the social practice of “aesthetic valuing,” in which we exercise evaluative discretion—we’re not required to value what we value aesthetically; it’s up to us—through imitation, sharing, and self-expression.

Aesthetic value just is whatever is worthy of engagement in the social, participatory practice of aesthetic valuing: it is what we create or use to self-express, what we make and share with each other to create and sustain aesthetic community, what we imitate to propel our aesthetic lives forward.

A refreshing feature of this approach is that it does not fetishize the fine arts, but treats cooking and fashion as paradigms of aesthetic life. We express our individuality through taste, both literal and sartorial; we imitate food we love and people who look good to us; we share recipes, meals, fashion tips, and clothes. The upshot is a stark alternative to aesthetic hedonism and empiricism, focused less on individual experience than on mutually supportive interaction.

I recommend the essay: it’s accessible, with no more technicality than the subject requires; it’s original; and it’s written with passion and verve. But I’m not sure what to make of its conclusion.

A difficulty Riggle recognizes: the need to explain what counts as aesthetic valuing and aesthetic community when “not … every practice that can be characterized by imitation, sharing, and self-expression is thereby an aesthetic valuing practice.” He mentions philosophy, and later religion, as exceptions. More generally, ethical pluralists insist on evaluative discretion with respect to ways of life: we are subject to moral requirements, but within them, there are many good ways to live. We imitate others, share values, and express ourselves in the careers we choose, the charities we support, the decision to have kids, or not. But these are not aesthetic choices.

Riggle says two things to distinguish aesthetic valuing from valuing of other kinds. First: “the practice of aesthetic valuing calls on and cultivates [the capacity for evaluative discretion] in profound and distinctive ways …. [in aesthetic life] we cultivate ourselves as individuals.” Second, contrasting religion with aesthetic life: “Aesthetic agents innovate, surprise, and shock.”

Neither response is fully satisfying. The first applies, too, to the choice of lives under ethical pluralism, which is an avenue for self-cultivation and solidarity. The second feels restrictive and historically local, building a certain aesthetic style into the very nature of aesthetic life. But Riggle wants to be trans-historical, answering “one of the oldest questions in philosophy.” This is made explicit in a footnote:

In assuming that it is possible to characterize the practice of aesthetic valuing, I am setting aside a sort of nihilistic historicism according to which the only resource for thinking of it as a coherent practice is genealogy.

I began with one irony; here is another: I suspect that Riggle’s theory is more plausible if we approach it as historicists. What he’s describing is not the trans-temporal essence of aesthetic life—there is no such thing—but a culturally and historically specific practice, in which autonomy, self-expression, and individuality are central. This practice is organized around “aesthetics” in the etymological sense that was connected with beauty by Baumgarten in 1735: aesthetics, unlike ethics, is essentially concerned with the perceptible. This is the truth in aesthetic empiricism.

At the same time, Riggle may be right that aesthetic values are necessarily ones we imitate and share, and through which we express our individuality. Larry Shiner’s influential book, The Invention of Art, contends that both art and beauty are conceptual innovations of modernity. Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers cared about the quality of crafts and performances, the fine or fitting (kalon). But it’s anachronistic to impose on them an idea of beauty severed from functional excellence, or a conception of art, as such. It was only when creative practices were linked with ideas of inspiration, autonomy, and individuality in the eighteenth century that art, in the modern sense, was born. The wider consumption of fine art, and the institutions of taste—the library, the museum, the public concert—emerged in this period, as did the “aestheticization” of nature by poets such as William Wordsworth. Art and beauty were for sharing and taste became a mode of self-expression.

Shiner would now qualify his case. Two decades after The Invention of Art, he posted a thread of “Revisionary Thoughts” on his book page, conceding Stephen Halliwell’s argument in The Aesthetics of Mimesis that “Aristotle’s category of ‘imitative arts’ closely resembles the modern category of the fine arts”—while insisting on the discontinuities sketched above. (I wish more philosophers would post second thoughts about their books online; they must be having them.)

Although I am no expert on the history of aesthetics, Shiner’s narrative—which historicizes Riggle’s aesthetic community—rings true to me. I am tempted by a non-nihilistic historicism on which an account like Riggle’s is largely right about the nature of something, but the something is historically specific.

I thought of this while reading Jason Farago’s fascinating essay in the New York Times, “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill.” Farago confirms the appearance of exhaustion, repetition, and recycling in contemporary aesthetic life:

We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.

In the 1980s, philosophers and critics were proclaiming the “end of art,” as the modernist revolution—whose mantra was “Make It New!”—had run its course. They were off by forty years:

looking back now, the ‘postmodern’ turn of the later 20th century looks much more like a continuation of the modernist commitment to novelty than a repudiation of it. John Cage’s noteless composition “4'33"” was no last music, but flowered into the impostures of Fluxus and the ambient experiments of Brian Eno. The buildings of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid did look like nothing that came before. … Since the start of the 21st century, despite all recent digital accelerations of discovery and transmission, no stylistic innovations of equivalent scale have taken place.

What is refreshing about Farago’s essay is that he urges us to be undismayed. We need to shake the modernist conviction that “art demonstrates its value through its freshness.”

There is no inherent reason—no reason; this point needs to be clear—that a recession of novelty has to mean a recession of cultural worth. On the contrary, non-novel excellence has been the state of things for a vast majority of art history. Roman art and literature provides a centuries-long tradition of emulation, appropriating and adapting Greek, Etruscan and on occasion Asian examples into a culture in which the idea of copying was alien. Medieval icons were never understood to be “of their time,” but looked back to the time of the Incarnation, forward to eternity or out of time entirely into a realm beyond human life.

Perhaps he is right to be sanguine. But it’s striking that Farago reaches back for models well before the aesthetics of Romanticism, an aesthetics which has some claim to be definitive. The hundred-and-sixty years of innovation Farago traces to a standstill is continuous with a hundred-and-thirty years of post-Romantic aesthetics, and discontinuous with the previous centuries of relative stasis he cites.

On this reading, the threat of aesthetic stagnation is not just a threat to the transient and optional ambitions of modernism but to a tendency implicit in aesthetics, as such. The question is how far the autonomy and individualism that define aesthetic life can thrive on a limited menu of recycled options: how far we need originality of the sort Farago fears we’ve lost. If he is right, the cultural standstill may force shifts in how we relate to the value of the perceptible more radical than the shifts within three hundred years of aesthetics—a coming revolution whose mantra is “Make It Old!”

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