Anna Christina Ribeiro

Introduction

1 Anna Christina Ribeiro

The word “aesthetics” traces its root to the ancient Greek word for sense perception (αἴσθησις, aisthêsis ); on that basis one might be justifi ed in presuming that this book is concerned with the science of perception in general. But words sometimes emigrate to distant countries, and come to acquire new meanings in their new home languages. Although “aesthetics” still retains its root connection to sense perception, it came to mean the study of our perception of the beautiful, both in nature and in works of art, when Alexander Baumgarten used it in 1735 in his Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus ( Philosophical Meditations on Some Matters Pertaining to Poetry), and unwittingly baptized what was then emerging as a new discipline within philosophy. However, the theoretical study of the beautiful and of art had a long history before this fairly recent label, and it has had a rich and variegated history since. Indeed, that history goes back to the very culture that gave it its name, for the fi rst philosophers to discuss the arts were Plato (429–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). It is fair to say that the history of aesthetics is—as A. N. Whitehead said of the history of philosophy as a whole—a series of footnotes to Plato, for he set the topics and terms of the debate, and every philosopher after him either followed or reacted against the views he fi rst set forth, any innovations along the way occurring within the framework he established. It is also fair to say that the history of the philosophy of art in particular, the area of aesthetics concerned with art forms and works, is largely the history of the philosophy of “poetry”—not in the sense in which we generally think of poetry today, that is, as lyric poetry, but in the broader sense of an art that included the composition and creative performance of epics, dramatic plays, and the lyric, accompanied by music and dance. It is predominantly to that art that philosophers devoted their attention for most of the past 2,500 years, even if the art itself underwent considerable change over the centuries. Music and dance did not seem to exist independently of recitation and performance, and, while painting and sculpture were discussed, to tell by the extant literature it is only in the sixteenth century that they received dedicated theoretical treatment. The present Companion to Aesthetics is devoted to contemporary topics and art forms in aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the analytic tradition of philosophy (the tradition dominant in the Anglophone world, one that adopts

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics conceptual analysis as its primary methodology and a scientifi c-naturalistic approach to its subject). In order to place this contemporary discussion in its historical context, I will briefl y survey the central topics and terms and the key fi gures in the history of aesthetics, noting also the changes in the roles the arts have played over the centuries. This history begins in ancient Greece and con- tinues with the cultures most directly infl uenced by it, namely, those of the “West”; it is not, therefore, representative of all theoretical work ever done about beauty and the arts. The fundamental terms in the history of our discipline, those to which all other important and later terms and issues may be traced back, are four: beauty , pleasure , art , and imitation or representation . Because the beautiful or fi ne (tò καλóν, to kalon ) was originally understood not only as a good (something of value in our lives) but also as the Good (something to which one ought to aspire, a moral and intellectual value), debate about the beautiful was, for most of the history of aesthetics, not only an aesthetic but indeed fi rst and foremost an ethical and epistemological debate. Because experiencing the beautiful was something that obviously produced enjoyment, pleasure in the beautiful and the emotions it aroused in those who experienced it came in for scrutiny. The descendant notion of aesthetic experience at a later time became defi nitive of the realm of the aesthetic, and from beauty would emerge the notion of aesthetic properties , that is, those that promoted aesthetic pleasure. In keeping with the connected yet distinct notions of the beautiful and the good, pleasures of the body were regarded differently from pleasures of the mind, and the former were typically accepted only if and when they provided a means of access to the latter. An individual’s ethical education could thus begin with her aesthetic education. The fact that the arts imitated , or represented, nature, by contrast, was used to argue both for and against their educational value (now understood in the loftier, philosophical sense of producing knowledge of the fundamental basis of reality). If the “nature” imitated was understood as the transient world of our experience, the arts were seen as obstacles to true knowledge (as Plato held); if instead artists were able to represent the nature underlying our experience (universals, as Aristotle claimed), then the arts stood as a direct source of knowledge. The imitative theory of art, which in one or the other of these versions held sway until around the eighteenth century, had another important consequence: because nature is something external to us, criteria for the evaluation of artworks could be, and were thought to be, objective. It is only when we begin to think of the artist not as representing something external to him—nature—but as expressing something within himself—thoughts, emotions, ideas—(what has been described as the “subjective turn” in aesthetics) that criteria of evaluation gradually become subjective also, and another notion emerges and becomes a central concern of philosophers of art: the notion of taste . Taste was not required for the evaluation of art and beauty up until the

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books Introduction eighteenth century; rather, education was. Now taste was something at once ineffable and indicative of a superior character; it was accorded its own mental “faculty,” although it seemed that only the chosen few truly had it. Finally, the notion of art (τέχνη, technê) underwent its own transformations over the centuries since the time of Plato. This has mainly to do with a shift, also dating to a few centuries ago, from works of art existing as part of larger cultural practices to their emancipation from these practices. Songs, for instance, were often part of religious rituals, just as paintings in medieval churches served educational and illustrative purposes. Importantly, through and despite this partial decontextualization, artworks continue today to be understood as sources of value—of a unique pleasure, moral guidance, and knowledge which, for many of us, cannot be found in any other human practice. When we look back on ancient Greek culture, we fi nd that public recitations of epics such as Homer’s Iliad , and performances of tragedies and com- edies such as those of Sophocles and Aristophanes, played a central role in it, especially as poets had from time immemorial been revered as the teach- ers of humankind in matters religious, moral, and even historical (the three were very much entangled). Moreover, poetry was composed and inscribed or performed by commission for all manner of signifi cant occasion: weddings, anniversaries, epitaphs, and so on. But by Plato’s time, philosophy had been around for some two centuries, and, as a foremost representative of the new approach to knowledge, he took the poets to task for being mere “imitators,” and for being unable to explain the meaning of their works: like soothsayers, they may have been divinely inspired, but were not wise. They thus stood in the way of knowledge as well as virtue—a radical idea that fl ew in the face of an ancient tradition. Furthermore, poets engaged our emotions, a lower part of our soul, and thereby demoted reason from its rightful place, again weakening its capacity for knowledge and virtue. Aristotle then came to the defense of poetry and poets, arguing that poetry is in fact philosophical insofar as poets must know what is possible : in particular, how different characters might react to certain circumstances. Poets thus evince a deep, if implicit, knowledge of human nature. Moreover, Aristotle claimed that poetry had a “cathartic” effect upon us: this left us better able, rather than unable, to exercise reason in our daily lives. Poetry is thus “something useful with a view to virtue, purifying . . . the irrational part of the soul” as well as providing us with a more acute insight into human nature. Much is said about pleasure in post-Aristotelian, pre-Christian times, by the various philosophical schools that formed in that period, but the primary focus of the discussion concerns pleasure in relation to moral value, pleasure in the beauty of nature or works of art being valued as a means to moral edi- fi cation rather than as an end in itself. In this Hellenistic thinkers continued to stress the connection between the beautiful and the good already found in Plato

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics and Aristotle and that would survive until the eighteenth century, but they now emphasized the experience of delight felt in the presence of the beautiful and in the attainment of virtue, an idea that was to fi nd fuller expression in the Catholic mysticism of later centuries. Subscribing likewise to the Classical Greek idea that art imitates nature, Stoics and Epicureans followed that idea to the conclusion that if nature constitutes an objective reality, then the criteria for the evaluation of works that seek to represent it must themselves be objective. Amusingly, some Stoic thinkers argued that some letters in the Greek alphabet were more euphonic than others, and that the quality of a poem could, therefore, be established on the basis of the ratio of euphonic to cacophonous letters found therein. The Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110–35 BCE), whose work is being painstakingly reconstructed from the charred papyri that were buried under lava in Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, showed the absurdity of such theories by drawing attention to the essential importance of content. Similarly, Longinus (fi rst century CE) distinguished between knowledge and passion (content) on the one hand, and fi gures of speech, diction, and composition or word arrangement (form) on the other, claiming that only the latter could be taught, and sensibly arguing against those who claimed that the quality of a work could be measured by the number of tropes in it. Longinus is also famous for introducing the notion of the “sublime,” the type of feeling literary works should aim to elicit in those who read or heard them recited or performed. This notion would become of central importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it was contrasted with the notion of the beautiful. A couple of centuries after Longinus, the Neoplatonist Plotinus (205–270 CE) wrote a treatise on beauty, and set the stage for how the topic would be treated for centuries, distinguishing between beauty perceived by the senses and beauty perceived by the soul or intellect. The soul partakes in the Form of Beauty, which is also the Form of the Good (concepts drawn from Plato, who also equated these with the Truth), and it is what makes any other beautiful things or actions beautiful. Not only is this beauty bestowed by the soul superior to the beauty perceived by the senses, but the senses, and anything physical, are now considered impediments to the soul sharing in what is natural to it. Thus, Plotinus helped establish the dichotomy between body and soul, and earth and heaven, that became a central characteristic of medieval thought. In the few instances where Christian philosophers spoke of beauty or of the arts— Augustine (354–430), Bonaventure (1217–74), and Aquinas (1225–74) are the main examples—they operated within this framework. On the one hand, the beautiful and the (moral) good were different ways of naming or speaking of the same good; on the other, the sensible good or beautiful was considered infe- rior, or merely a means to, the ethical and the intellectual good or beautiful. Besides the concepts of the beautiful/good/truth, the notion of pleasure, and that of imitation (μίμησις, mimêsis ), another aspect of the framework within

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books Introduction which these and all Western thinkers up until the eighteenth century were operating concerns the meaning of “art” and the role and social standing of artists. The words τέχνη (technê ) in Greek and ars in Latin, signifi ed “craft” or “skill,” already indicating how artists and their products were regarded. They were δημιουργόι (demiourgoi , literally “those who work for people”), that is, craftsmen, paid to write verses for the epitaph of a nobleman or to sculpt bas- reliefs for the tomb of a tradesman; summoned to set mosaics for a living room or paint frescoes on its walls; commissioned to create statues depicting gods and myths, realistic representations of the professions, or busts of a wealthy politician’s forebears as a means to honor and remember them, much as we might have photos of our grandparents in our living rooms today. Poets had a separate and higher standing than painters or sculptors in part because, as mentioned earlier, they performed a serious role as moral, religious, and historical guides, and in part because the ability to use words well, and to read and write, was the privilege of a minority and, importantly, did not involve manual labor, something openly scorned by those who could afford not to live by it. Music, in addition, had the good fortune of having been associated with mathematics by Pythagoras (who was venerated by Plato and many others), and both in turn with astronomy. It is to the association of poetry with grammar and rhetoric, and of music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, that we owe these two arts being part of the fundamental “liberal” education for some 2,000 years. Together with logic, the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and musical harmony comprised the seven liberal arts (the “skills” to be learned by free citizens); in the Middle Ages, the fi rst three, known as the trivium, were preparatory for the latter four, known as the quadrivium . Even so, although poetry and its attendant arts of music and dance were treated with higher regard than architecture, sculpture, or painting, for most of their history they too were generally treated as skills one could acquire and put in the service of those who could pay for them, in quite the same way one could pay a cobbler to make shoes, a smith to make a sword, or a carpenter to make a bed. All of these, and many others, were artes or technai , and the “artist,” anonymous except for some poets, was a trader of his skill. (This partly explains why nearly all of them were men, since the public realm of trade and study was eminently male, while women’s province was the private world of the home.) Given this bias against the senses and manual labor, and the consequent low standing of any art other than poetry and music up until the sixteenth century, when architects, sculptors, and painters emancipated themselves from artisan’s guilds and formed their own Academia del Disegno in Florence in 1563, it is not surprising that it took two more centuries for philosophers, themselves emancipated from the confi nes of Catholic scholasticism, fi nally to dedicate their thoughts to analyses of the arts and of our sense of beauty. Before them, however, artists themselves were writing treatises on the newly emancipated

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics art forms. Leon Battista Alberti (1409–72), Leonard da Vinci (1452–1519), and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) wrote variously on painting, sculpture, architecture, geometry, and on the all-important new discovery of perspective in painting. Meanwhile poets such as Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) also wrote on their own craft, continuing the Platonic-Aristotelian debate. That artists themselves were writing about their craft was historically signifi cant: they were now educated not only in their artistic métier , but also in critical and philosophical theory. Their theoretical contributions would go a long way toward earning prestige for arts other than poetry, and toward the radical changes that would take place in the artworld in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century can truly be considered a period of revolution both in the artworld and in philosophical aesthetics—indeed the time when both the “artworld” and “aesthetics,” as we understand them today, were born, and when our four notions of beauty, pleasure, representation, and art underwent radical transformation. Until then, artworks and performances were always part of a larger cultural practice or setting which gave them whatever meaning they had. In medieval Europe, that context was in large part provided by the Catholic church, as evinced by the architecture (e.g., Romanesque and later Gothic churches), sculpture (statues of saints and of the Christ crucifi ed), painting (depiction of biblical scenes), music (Gregorian chant), and theater (morality plays) of the time. Artists were now beginning to produce works that were separate from these practices and settings, and offering them up for appreciation on their own, in a setting of their own—not in the private houses of the nobility, or within the walls of a church, but in a museum or a performance hall; not serving the purposes of a ritual, a festival, or a house- hold tradition, but for their own sake. Likewise, philosophical thought about beauty and the arts was, from the beginning, part of the larger framework of ethics, epistemology, and later on, theology); aesthetics was now emerging as a subdiscipline of its own. It is a testament to the power of art that artworks retained the power to speak to us and move us profoundly independently of their traditional contexts; were that not so, it is unlikely we would have an independent “philosophy of art” today. This new cultural environment was thus refl ected in many philosophical treatises written in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century, most of which were concerned with the grounds for the evaluation of works of art. As in other areas of philosophy, we can detect a rationalist and an empiricist trend in aesthetics as well. In keeping with the trend in other areas of philosophy and with the infl uence of René Descartes (1590–1650), rationalist- minded writers hailed mainly from France. Unlike the British empiricists, they were mostly literary theorists and art critics rather than philosophers. French rationalists, or neoclassicists as they came to be known, looked to the ancients for their models and standards. As was the case with some ancient writers,

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books Introduction neoclassicists fi rmly believed that there were strict rules to be followed in the making of art, rules which in turn served as principles by reference to which one work could be deemed better than another. Here again the notion of art as the imitation of nature was paramount; among others, it was the principle in Baumgarten’s Meditations on Poetry mentioned earlier, and in the infl uential Les beaux Arts réduits à un même principe by the Abbé Charles Batteux (1746). But whereas for Plato that was a reason why the arts were defi cient, for the neoclassicists nature became the rule. Standards of taste were thus taken to be objective, and the closer an artist’s work was to what had been produced by the Greeks and the Romans, the better. It is to this time that we owe more and less successful attempts to fi t the various prosodies of the Romance and Germanic languages to Greek poetic meters; but Greek meters were based on syllable length and generally did not fare well as an import. Greek and Roman models were also the paradigm to be followed in sculpture and architecture, a marked contrast to what had been produced in the Middle Ages. It is also in this period, as indicated by Batteux’s Beaux Arts and by Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–72), that the arts of poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture are fi rst grouped together as the Fine Arts , and the search begins for what their même principe , or common essence, might be. The wisdom of this search would only be questioned two centuries later, by the philosopher Morris Weitz (1916–81), in his infl uential “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (1956). Inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the analytic orientation in philosophy that had by then established itself, his essay was a clear sign that a peculiarly analytic philosophy of art was now fl ourishing. Because they argued for our role, and, in particular, the role of our senses, in constructing the world around us, the eighteenth-century empiricists turned the notion of beauty on its head: rather than being something objectively existing in the world, it was a pleasurable sensation that some external qualities had the capacity to arouse in us. For the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), humans were endowed with a “moral sense” that enabled us to perceive both the beautiful and the good (themselves identical with truth). We can thus see him as a transitional fi gure, still holding on to the ancient Platonic idea of a conjoined ethical-aesthetic-epistemological value. Another residue of earlier thought is evident in the notion of disinterestedness that he posited and that would come to be seen as an essential characteristic of the aesthetic attitude and of aesthetic pleasure. At heart, this is an ethical notion, for the attitude betrays a resistance to the physical world already found in Plato. For an action to be truly virtuous, as for an experience to be truly aesthetic, desire or interest could not be present; the same, of course, goes for the pursuit of truth if it is to be considered truly intellectual rather than instrumental. It was left to his follower Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) to make a real break with the past and posit a “sense of beauty” that was purely aesthetic, and which was “activated”

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics when the proper ratio of uniformity and variety presented itself to it via objects in the external world. Characteristically more skeptical of any such objective standards, David Hume (1711–76) proposed instead that any standard of taste would still have to refer to individuals, in this case those possessing considerable experience with the art in question, in addition to what he called “delicacy of taste” and an unprejudiced attitude. Since such “true judges,” no matter how great their efforts, could never fully overcome the particularities of their time, place, or temperament, we simply had to give up on the idea of a fully objective criterion of evaluation, although Hume did not think that such critics were to blame for those limitations. The joint verdict of such ideal critics was the new standard of value in art. Again as elsewhere in philosophy, rationalism and empiricism were followed by idealism, and the key fi gures are likewise Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), Georg Friedrich Hegel (Philosophy of Fine Art, 1835), and Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea, 1819, 1844). What is striking in this philosophical school, and in the literary romanticism that followed, is the metaphysical and epistemological elevation of the arts to the top of their grand philosophical systems. From an obstacle to truth, as we had seen with Plato, artworks were now the concrete embodiment of it; consequently, from an impediment to proper learning, they were now necessary to a complete education. Besides enshrining the notion of a disinterested pleasure as paradigmatic of the experience of beauty, the idealists also vindicated the ancient notions of art as representation (mimêsis ) and of the artist as divinely inspired by inter- preting them in direct opposition to what we had seen in Plato’s philosophy. “Divine inspiration” now meant direct, unmediated access to truth, through the imagination as opposed to reason or understanding. Whereas philosophers and scientists arrived at their conclusions via the painstaking work of obser- vation, analysis, and synthesis, artists had a special communion with a deep, underlying reality not easily amenable to the cool tools of logic and reason. This emphasis on artists and art has the additional consequence of demoting beauty from the pride of place it had held until then: for nature certainly could be beautiful, but it had not gone through the organizing, conceptual fi lter of the artist. Aesthetics thus becomes principally the philosophy of art. Directly related to this metaphysical turn of the notion of art, and the epistemological turn of the artist as the spokesperson for truth, is the new focus on the artist as a genius that fl ourished in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century; the expression of the artist’s thoughts and emotions is now by default worthy of our attention for the insight into life that it can bring about. This would have been anathema to Plato for, as we have seen, the idea of the artist as an oracle whose pronouncements we ought to respect was precisely what he argued so vehemently against in the Republic and the Ion .

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books Introduction

The nineteenth-century resurgence of this very ancient, possibly prehistorical notion had two consequences: in philosophy, in the debate over whether and how poetry in particular can convey any truths, and in literary criticism, in the interest in the biography of the artist, a central characteristic of the Romantic movement. This interest, initially infl uenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, broadened in the twentieth century from an interest in the psychology of the individual into an interest in the sociopolitical context of artistic creation, to the effect that, indeed, voices far beyond what the artist might have been aware of were speaking through him. But the Muses at whose mercy the artist was were never too kind, and many artists stood condemned for that very gift for which they were originally thought to be special. They were like oracles indeed, their words never to be taken at face-value but as symbols of something beyond themselves. The difference between them and their ancient counterparts was that the modern oracles never seemed to reveal anything positive, but only the evils of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and so on—or so the various postmodern- ist schools of interpretation would seem to suggest. Perhaps also in line with how oracles are typically interpreted—we tend to read in them what we wish to read—the most radical version of this approach championed the idea that it is the reader who, in the process of reading, “creates” the work, each reader, therefore, creating a new work. Besides such approaches to interpretation, more typical of the so-called “Continental” philosophical tradition (which nevertheless generated abundant debate on the correct approach to the interpretation of art among analytically minded philosophers), the twentieth century saw assiduous efforts to establish a defi nition for the arts that had been grouped together in the eighteenth century. Weitz had not questioned the grouping itself, but he argued that all we could, and should, hope to discover were “family resemblances” among the various art forms, thus denying the possibility of defi nition in terms of necessary and suffi cient conditions. Philosophers rose to the occasion and coun- tered with functional defi nitions (Monroe Beardsley), institutional defi nitions (George Dickie), historical defi nitions (Jerrold Levinson), and even with dis- junctive defi nitions (Berys Gaut) based on the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances that Weitz had used to argue against the defi nitional project. Notably, mimêsis or representation was no longer a requisite for art status. But by the turn of the twenty-fi rst century some philosophers were calling for all to desist from the quest for this holy grail and turn instead to the project of defi ning and analyzing the individual arts (Noël Carroll, Peter Kivy, Dominic Lopes). Another challenge to the defi nitional project came, repeatedly, from the artworld itself: when photography emerged in the late nineteenth century, it was not originally considered an art form, because, it was argued, it registered what was already there rather than created something new, leaving no room

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics for the unique techné of the artist; this line of argument still has its defenders (e.g., Roger Scruton). Similar arguments were made against granting art status to fi lm, to the ready-mades of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, and later on to works of installation and conceptual art such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed , John Cage’s 4’33 , or Vito Acconci’s Following Piece . Time and again novel art forms have won the battle against prescriptive criticism and theory. Though the old forms are alive and well, the erstwhile new ones are today established and ubiquitous. A survey of twenty-fi rst-century thought about beauty and the arts soon reveals that we are still the children of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics. The various defi nitional approaches mentioned here are answers to the problem bequeathed to us by the cultural forces that led theorists to group various cultural activities and crafts into the “Modern System of the Arts,” as the art historian Paul Kristeller called the eighteenth-century grouping of the fi ne arts. The concern with beauty that in the eighteenth century became a concern with the qualities in the world that promote the experience of beauty—aesthetic properties—is still a central topic in aesthetics, though it now draws much more heavily from theories of properties in metaphysics. The notion of disinterested pleasure that is presumed to characterize the aesthetic experience, though it has not gone unchallenged, remains of central interest. That we feel pleasure in engaging with artworks also led Hume to ponder why we should enjoy even those that depict profoundly sad events; discussion of the paradox of tragedy remains alive and well today. So does debate concerning the paradox of fi ction, the question of why we should care for the fates of fi ctional characters and whether we can be said to have real emotions for them while remaining rational. The connection made between art and aesthetic experience to the effect that the former was defi ned in terms of the latter (so that artworks are, by defi nition, those objects and activities that promote the aesthetic experience) culminated in the work of Clive Bell (1881–1964) and Monroe Beardsley (1915–85). Defi nitions of this sort are now charged with having divorced artworks from the contexts which once gave them meaning and value. And the ancient Platonic problem of whether art can convey knowledge is still widely discussed under the label of the “cognitive value of art.” Although philosophers may no longer be willing to automatically grant the title of “oracle” or “genius” to artists, the Romantic perception of the artist as someone with something profound to convey contin- ues to hold sway; one will be hard-pressed to fi nd anyone today claiming that artists are merely skilled workers. However fascinating these historical continuities may be, genuinely novel topics and avenues of inquiry did emerge in aesthetics in the twentieth century. One of them concerns the ontology of artworks. What kinds of entities in the world are works of art? Musical works cannot be merely the scores where

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books Introduction they are set, any more than literary works can be identifi ed with the paper copies in which their texts are inscribed; neither can they be identifi ed with their performances or recitations. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and buildings, they can be read or heard in different parts of the globe at the same or different times. Various theories have been offered to handle the ontological diffi culties raised by works of art, diffi culties that seem to be peculiar to them and that do not arise with other things in the world whose nature we wish to understand. Some have argued that artworks are mental entities in the mind of the artist, and the work a medium via which others may reconstruct that artistic object (Benedetto Croce, Robin Collingwood); others that they are the actions of the artist (Gregory Currie, David Davies); others that some of them (musical works in particular) are eternally existing universals (Peter Kivy), and still others that they are types (Richard Wollheim, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Jerrold Levinson). Another area of interest, one that could hardly have emerged before the twentieth century, is “evolutionary aesthetics.” While the history of philosophizing about beauty and the arts dates back to the fi fth century BCE, the history of our “aesthetization” of life goes back much, much further. The earliest records we have date back to 40,000 years ago, and consist of cave paintings, such as those of Chauvet in France and Altamira in Spain, whose beauty cannot be attributed to mere chance. Far from being utilitarian depictions that might aid a viewer in identifying, say, the animal depicted, their attention to color, shape, and real- ism is striking. How much longer before then were we already sensitive to such properties? Some today speculate that perhaps as long as 400,000 years ago, since some apparent stone tools of that age also seem to exemplify a concern for the aesthetic, inasmuch as their beautifully symmetrical teardrop shape was not functional. Clearly, this stretches the notion of “we” to pre-Homo sapiens time, but if our species ancestors already had aesthetic inclinations, then that only reinforces the claim that we came around already equipped with them. Inquiry into the evolution and psychology of our aesthetic sensibilities and the evolution of our artistic practices was only made possible after the publication of Charles Darwin’s works on the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century. And if the popularity of Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct (2009) is any indica- tion, evolutionary aesthetics should remain an area of interest throughout the current one. Other new areas of debate include environmental aesthetics, standpoint aesthetics, everyday aesthetics, and popular art forms not previously included under the umbrella “art.” Environmental aesthetics pertains to our aesthetic appreciation of nature. Although aesthetic interest in the natural environment was widely discussed in the eighteenth century (especially in connection with the notion of the sublime), discussion today includes ethical issues that were not part of that

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics earlier repertoire, such as that of our responsibility toward the environment. “Standpoint aesthetics” is a label that derives from standpoint epistemology, a new fi eld in the theory of knowledge that endeavors to explain the crucial role of perspective, or standpoint, in the construction of knowledge. With respect to aesthetics, theorists seek to give an account of the role of perspective in our perception of the beautiful, in our conception of what constitutes art, and of what constitutes good art. In particular, it investigates voices that were previously marginalized, such as those of women, minorities, and non-Western peo- ples, with respect to how the aesthetic and the artistic are construed. Similarly, philosophers have begun to devote serious study to previously marginalized art forms and cultural practices, such as rock music, comics, computer art, and video games. Finally, everyday aesthetics is a very recent area of debate in the fi eld; as its name suggests, it seeks to shed light on the aesthetic value of everyday experiences and objects. Beauty , pleasure , art , imitation : we have now seen how these fundamental notions unfolded and gave rise to new ones in the history of aesthetic thought. With this long and rich philosophical history behind it (only the highlights of which could be covered here), aesthetics and the philosophy of art have developed at a fast pace in the recent past. As noted above, much of this is the result of aestheticians drawing from other areas, not only in philosophy (e.g., metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language) but also in the related fi elds of psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, as well as of their taking seriously both perspectives and art forms that were previously marginalized. The present Companion to Aesthetics aims to bear witness to this development and expansion, while covering the issues that have tradition- ally been central to the discipline. Chapter 2 is devoted to methodological issues, that is, what is the proper object of study in aesthetics, and how we should go about studying it. The main part of the book, “Core Issues and Art Forms,” may be divided into four sections. Chapters 3 and 4 , on the defi - nition of art and the ontology of artworks, pertain to the philosophy of art rather than to aesthetics broadly conceived, and consider the arts as a whole. Chapter 5 through 7, on aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and aesthetic and artistic value, discuss topics that straddle aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Chapters 8 through 15 discuss specifi c art forms, such as music, dance, theater, the visual arts as a whole, and the various forms of popular art. Chapters 16 and 17 are about the two relatively new areas in aesthetics and the philosophy of art mentioned above, namely, environmental aesthetics and global standpoint aesthetics. The fi nal chapter in “Core Issues and Art Forms” effectively constitutes a section of its own, treating of new directions in the fi eld, and focusing in particular on the aforementioned emerging area of “everyday aesthetics.”

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books Introduction

Under “Resources” the reader will fi nd two tools thus far absent from com- panions and handbooks on aesthetics: the fi rst, an extensive chronology of works in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from the fi fth century BCE all the way to the twenty-fi rst century CE—2,500 years worth of texts—and the second, a list of resources, including online resources, in the fi eld. The serious student of theories about the aesthetic and the arts, after having a taste of the current philosophical debates in these pages, will know exactly where to go for more.

philosophy.ribeiro.continuumbooks.com © Anna Christina Ribeiro (eds) (2012) The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics London: Continuum Books