Aesthetics

“I don’t know much about art, but I

know what I like.” (The Pope)
Click Me!
 What Issues are Raised by this
Clip?
• What is art?
– True to life?
– A mirror of nature?
– Original?
– Created by a genius?
– Supporting a certain world view?
– The product of hard work and skilled craftsmanship?
– Revolutionary?
– Validated by external sources?
– Aesthetically pleasing?
• Where do we encounter art?
• Who produces it?
• Who decides what is, and is not art?
• How should we interpret art?
• Who decides how art should be interpreted?
• Should art be interpreted at all?
• Does art have any meaning beyond the specific context (historical, social,
geographical) in which it was produced?
 Art
• Originally meant “skill”, “technique” or
“craft”;
• Later (Middle Ages) came to designate
fields of study.
– Trivium: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric
– Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Music, Geometry,
Astronomy
• In C19 “Art” (note the capital A) had been
divided into fine and applied fields.
 Artistry
• Implicit in the term “Art” are a number of ideas:
– “Art” is a creative act, whereby something new is
formed;
– “Art” is an act of deception, whereby something
apparently real is created such as the characters of a
novel or the landscape in a painting (an “insubstantial
pageant [which] leaves not a rack behind” (The
Tempest);
– “Art” is an unnatural act, which results in the creation
of something artificial (as opposed to natural);
– “Art” is a revelatory act, which causes the
viewer/reader/audience to understand the world in a
new way;
– “Art” is a defamiliarising act, in which something
(such as a word, image or sound) previously
unremarkable is made new and strange.
 Is this art?
‘This is just to say’

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
What should art do?
• Early theorists, including Plato, saw
art as being an imitation of nature,
where nature is more perfect than
anything human hands can fashion;
• By the Renaissance, theorists such as
Sir Philip Sidney argued that it was
the role of poetry to make the natural
world more perfect: “[Nature’s] world
is brazen, the poets only deliver a
golden.”
• Other thinkers have argued for a
moral purpose in art, whereby the
audience must somehow be
instructed by what they experience.
• Art has often been co-opted into
supporting a social project,
representing a set of beliefs or values,
such as Christian art or the socialist
realism of early C20 Russia.
 What makes art great?
• Early literary criticism was concerned with
measuring and assessing greatness;
– Matthew Arnold’s league tables of poets in which
Chaucer’s ‘roughness’ (all those common characters
and red-hot pokers) made him slightly less successful
than the more polished Dante;
• The New Critics’ (Leavis et al) attempted to
define the qualities that are found in great art.
– They saw perfection in art as linked to its moral
qualities: good art must be in some way instructive, as
well as highly polished
 Qualities of Great Art*
• Complexity
• Aesthetic unity
• Literary language
*
• Elevated subject matter This list is by no means
• Canonical status exhaustive, and should
be treated with some
suspicion…
• Moral cleanness
Is this great art?
‘This is just to say’

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
 The Canon
• Originally taken to mean (amongst other
things) the books considered to be divinely
inspired by the Christian Church (the
Bible), as distinct from apocryphal texts;
• Later taken to mean those texts which
form the backbone of a literary tradition.
– Which authors would you consider to be
canonical?
 An example of a canon of Western
Literature
• Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
• The Old Testament
• Aeschylus: Tragedies
• Sophocles: Tragedies
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
• Herodotus: Histories John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; ; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women;
• Euripides: Tragedies Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
• Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
• Hippocrates: Medical Writings Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
• Aristophanes: Comedies Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; Walden
• Plato: Dialogues Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Capital; The Communist Manifesto
• Aristotle: Works George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
• Epicurus: "", "" Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
• Euclid: The Elements Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
• Archimedes: Works Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
• Apollonius: The Conic Sections Henrik Ibsen: Plays
• Cicero: Works Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
• Lucretius: On the Nature of Things Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
• Virgil: Works William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; ; Essays in Radical Empiricism
• Horace: Works Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
• Livy: The History of Rome
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
• Ovid: Works
• Jules Henri Poincaré: ;
Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
• Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; ; Civilization and Its Discontents;
• Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
• Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion Max Planck: ; ;
• Ptolemy: Almagest Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution;
• Lucian: Works John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; ;
• Marcus Aurelius: Meditations Alfred North Whitehead: ; ; ;
• Galen: George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith;
• The New Testament Lenin: The State and Revolution
• Plotinus: The Enneads Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time; the original French title is À la recherche du temps perdu)
• St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; ; ;
• The Song of Roland Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
• The Nibelungenlied Albert Einstein: ; ; The Evolution of Physics
• The Saga of Burnt Njál James Joyce: "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
• St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica Jacques Maritain: ; ; ;
• Dante Alighieri: The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; The Divine Comedy Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
• Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History;
• Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
• Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; Cancer Ward
• Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
• Thomas More: Utopia
• Martin Luther: ; Three Treatises
• Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
• John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
• Michel de Montaigne: Essays
• William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
• Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
• Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
• Francis Bacon: ; ; Novum Organum; The New Atlantis
• William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
• Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
• Johannes Kepler: ; Harmonices Mundi
• William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; ; On the Generation of Animals
• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
• René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
• John Milton: Works
• Molière: Comedies
• Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises

I know what you’re

• Christiaan Huygens:
• Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
• John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
• Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
• Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; "Monadology"

thinking: the list is too

• Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
• Jonathan Swift: "A Tale of a Tub"; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; "A Modest Proposal"
• William Congreve: The Way of the World
• George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• Alexander Pope: "Essay on Criticism"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
•

small to read. That’s

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws
• Voltaire: Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary
• Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
• Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Dictionary, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets
• David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, , An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, , Emile, The Social Contract

because there are 138

• Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
• Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
• Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
• Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
• James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
• Antoine Laurent Lavoisier:

items on it. Harold

• Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
• Jeremy Bentham: ;
• Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier:

Bloom’s canon of Western

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit; The Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
• William Wordsworth: Poems
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
• Carl von Clausewitz: On War
• Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma;

Literature runs to nearly

• Lord Byron: Don Juan
• Arthur Schopenhauer:
• Michael Faraday: The Chemical History of a Candle;
• Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
• Auguste Comte: The
• Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet

70 pages
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: , , Journal
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
How many canonical texts / authors
can you name?
 Problems with the canon
• It tends to be dominated by dead, white
men;
• Who decides what becomes canonical?
• It represents the interests of a very
specific group of readers;
• It is inflexible and resists the growth and
development of a literary tradition;
• Most of the books on it are really long.
 Discussion Points
• Argue the case for a text of your choice to
be included within the literary canon:
• A song lyric;
• A work of popular fiction;
• A work by a living author;
• A work by an author from a different cultural
background or ethnic group;
 Aesthetics
• Derives from Greek “αισθητικός” which
concerns sensory perception;
• Later meanings concern what effects
art has on readers / viewers /
audiences, and why it achieves those
effects;
• C19 aestheticism concerned the pursuit
of only the finest sensations: wine,
painting, music, literature; coarseness
was to be avoided at all costs.
• In common parlance, “aesthetically
pleasing” is associated particularly with
visual pleasure of a beautiful scene.
(Note also the implication that
something which is “aesthetically
pleasing” may actually be deceptively
shallow or unpleasing in other ways.
 The Beautiful
• Closely allied to aesthetics is the concept of
beauty;
• Beauty was described by early theorists such as
Kant and Hogarth as a pleasant sensation which
causes the viewer to feel peaceful;
– Kant claims that flower beds, grazing flocks and
daylight are all beautiful;
• In contrast to the Beautiful, the Sublime was a
feeling evoked by powerful or terrifying objects,
such as mountain tops, raging storms and night.