GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

From The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy entry on Aesthetics

Philosophy of art has also dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, representation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art.

This is in essence a laundry list of the things I find compelling about esthetics, and in this essay, I plan to dig into each one of them.

Taste

Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines taste relative to esthetics:

OED: 8. The sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful; esp. discernment and appreciation of the beautiful in nature or art; spec. the faculty of perceiving and enjoying what is excellent in art, literature, and the like.

Note the struggle here to insert an analytical capability into a pre-linguistic experience. Sense is pre-linguistic, discernment and appreciation are post-linguistic, and faculty is an attempt to unify the two as an analytical skill. In my view, esthetic experience is a two-step process, where sense governs step 1, and discernment governs step 2. This is directly analogous to Coleridge’s primary and secondary imagination, the former coming up with innovations, the latter imposing shape and form upon them. Provided we maintain a disciplined separation between the two steps, we can indeed call this a faculty.

This begs a bigger question, however. How does the pre-linguistic capability of sense recognize what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful in the first place? What is the connection between the external and the internal?

Beauty

This is as close as we are going to get to the external pole of esthetic experience, the thing that causes the impact on the internal pole, our conscious self.

OED: 1. Such combined perfection of form and charm of coloring as affords keen pleasure to the sense of sight.

OED: 2. That quality or combination of qualities which affords keen pleasure to other senses (e.g. that of hearing), or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties, through inherent grace, or fitness to a desired end.

Look how out of its depth the OED is here! It is forced to use the word charm twice to invoke little more than inexplicable magic. It is not that I disagree with the word, but what the hell does it mean? OK, let’s ask the OED again:

OED: 3. Any quality, attribute, trait, feature, etc., which exerts a fascinating or attractive influence, exciting love, or admiration.

OK, I agree that beauty has charm, but that does not explain its force, it only labels it. Why is beauty charming? What is it that is fascinating or attractive, exciting our love or admiration?

At the material level, with visual arts, the consensus is that it is due to a combination of color and form that strikes us as harmonious, another word that I agree with but that also seems mystical. But here I think we can make a connection with the experience of mindfulness by asserting that the harmony involved in both experiences is the same. That would suggest that beauty is a spiritually refreshing experience, that it homeostatically returns us to a state of well-being. One virtue of this notion is that it makes it easy to bridge to other arts, like music, where form and color are not the active ingredients, but venturing out and returning to a state of well-being is still in play.

To be fair, for some at least, well-being itself may also be a mystical term, foreshadowing the possibility of an infinite regress of definitions as the analytical intellect struggles to engage with ineffable experiences, but I am willing to stop here and say, from a Darwinian perspective, it makes sense to me that homeostasis is real and relatively prevalent, that it is core to well-being, and that evolution would select for experiences that reinforce it as conferring competitive advantage in human affairs.

Imagination and Creativity

Both these topics extend far beyond the domain of esthetics and the philosophy of art and, if pursued at length, will lead us far off-topic. Within the domain of esthetics, both terms communicate admiration for the ingenuity of the artists who have in some way surprised us with their work. Surprise itself is an integral part of esthetic experience which we will address subsequently.

What we want to investigate here is the presence of the artist in the esthetic experience. In one sense, the artist is not present. We experience the artwork in their absence. But as we engage with multiple works from the same artist, we develop a sense of their style, their values, their topics of interest, and the like. We say things like, “I love Dylan,” or “I can’t stand Proust,” and both statements serve to summarize our esthetic experiences of their work. Where this goes awry, in my view, is when we drag the artist out onto center stage, creating a cult of personality—not a bad thing in itself necessarily, but outside the bounds of esthetics.

Representation, Expression, and Expressiveness

This collection of three terms manifests a tug of war between the Enlightenment and Romanticism about where to anchor the esthetic experience. The Enlightenment focuses on representation as the interaction between the art object, the experiencing subject, and the world at large, positioning art as a subject-object experience that upon absorption reshapes our subject-world experience. In this context, the role of esthetics is to critique the art in relation to the world—how well does the art represent the world to us, and how much has it changed our perception of things? The artist is not directly part of this equation.

By contrast, in the Romantic esthetic, the artist does take center stage. Art is positioned as a subject-object-subject experience, the artifact bridging between the artist and us rather than us and the world. Expression refers to what the artist puts into the artifact, and expressiveness refers to how much of that comes out of the experiencer’s end. For Romantics, this is at the heart of the esthetic experience. For followers of the Enlightenment, it is more of a distraction. They are looking for a solo experience that centers them with respect to the world at large, not a dialectic experience that destabilizes that relationship.

Style

Style is a secondary attribute of esthetics in that one can have style without esthetics, as with a cartoon, as well as esthetics without style, as with a natural landscape. That said, for the Romantics, with their focus on artistic expression, style does indeed “maketh the experience.” It serves as a bridge into the artist’s vision of the world, a way of seeing and being that can be transformative for the experiencer. For the Enlightenment, on the other hand, style is more of a societal asset. It has classic roots in proportion and harmony, attributes that are taken to transcend individual experience, understood instead as autonomously real. Both of these traditions make style more central to art than it was taken to be in the Early Modern period. At that time poetry was said to “teach and delight,” with commentators calling out style—the Elizabethans would have said rhetoric—as one of the chief sources of delight. Indeed, there were handbooks galore about how one could decorate one’s writing and speech with beautiful figures. This represents an early stage of playful euphoria when vernacular languages were displacing Latin across the entire spectrum of European culture.

Today, while all three of these views are still in play, contemporary criticism is often more interested in a fourth—style as a medium for communicating subtext, a mechanism for teasing nuances out of the more overt dimensions of the artwork. Juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements reframes our experience of what otherwise would be familiar and taken for granted. The work engages the experiencers’ analytical facilities in the midst of the fantasy experience, a distancing effect that makes them both participant and observer at the same time, accentuating their perception of irony, a cornerstone of the modern esthetic.

Do artworks convey knowledge or truth?

Although this question is intended to help us learn more about art, it introduces two very elusive concepts of its own, namely knowledge and truth, so we need to tread carefully. Nonetheless, the question is a valid one, and we owe it an answer.

To the degree that knowledge and truth are understood to consist of language-enabled statements, the answer is no, artworks do not convey either one. This is the Enlightenment’s position, one that caused it to turn to the concept of taste instead. By contrast, to the degree that knowledge and truth are conceived to transcend language-enabled understanding, meaning that they can reside beyond the scope and ken of reason, then the answer is yes. This is Romanticism’s claim, one that called it to substitute art for religion as a portal to spiritual experience.

Both these positions, however, are unsatisfactory. To be fair, the Enlightenment self-corrected itself in part by directing attention to the sublime, something that since antiquity had always been conceived as transcending reason. But at the end of the day, that did not open any new path to incorporating esthetic experience into one’s overall understanding of the world. The barrier of taste stood firmly in the way. The Romantics, by contrast, embraced transcendence wholeheartedly. Its problem was that it could not access it reliably. That is, neither nature nor art is able to consistently evoke the spiritual refreshment that Romantics value so highly. One is left in a state of anticipation, broken by occasional inspirational moments, but how and when they come at some times and not at others is a mystery. Indeed, the whole claim is a mystery, one that is hard to reconcile with any claims to knowledge or truth.

Contemporary culture, specifically the post-modern wing, dodges these issues by calling into question the reality of both knowledge and truth. Pragmatically, this is just a mistake. The reason we have words for both knowledge and truth is that they represent forces at work in the world that are relevant to our strategies for living. The fact that they are hard to come to grips with does not warrant dismissing them altogether. With that in mind, let us return to our original question: do artworks convey knowledge or truth?

Set aside the incidental communication of information that might accompany an esthetic experience, and focus instead on the experience itself. An external force has, with your permission, taken possession of your faculties and is manipulating your mind to its own ends. This force can be extraordinarily effective at creating belief. Whether that belief represents knowledge or truth cannot be determined from within the experience. Once the experience is over, we can analyze our memory of it, and in that context determine if it warrants being called “justified true belief,” which is philosophy’s gold standard for defining knowledge.

The nature of narrative and metaphor

Narrative and metaphor are two of humanity’s superpowers. Narrative is our most ubiquitous problem-solving tool. Each step in a story implies a cause-and-effect relationship that then can be tested by analytics for credibility. That’s the core function of criticism. Similarly, metaphor is one of our most ubiquitous innovation tools. Each instance proposes a strategic correlation between apparently dissimilar domains, whereby the tactics that have proven successful in the first domain are implicitly applied to address unsolved problems in the second. Again, this too must be tested, either by analytics or experiment.

In this context, what are the esthetic dimensions of narrative and metaphor? What makes for a good story or a good metaphor? I would vote for an experienced tension between expectations and fulfillment which both surprises and enlightens. In narrative, think of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. What we expect is going to happen in that final encounter and what actually does happen is both surprising and enlightening. Similarly, with respect to metaphor, think of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

In this most industrial of situations, we are surprised and enlightened to find a kind of beauty we thought belonged only in nature.

The importance of genre

To the degree that surprise and enlightenment are core to esthetic experience, genre somewhat surprisingly takes center stage. It sets audience expectations through its established conventions. If it is a comedy, we know that our protagonists will be OK in the end; if it is a tragedy, they will not. To the degree that a given work of art fulfills our expectations, we are pleased but not enlightened. Indeed, if there are no deviations at all—what is often called the domain of stock response—we are likely to get bored and maybe even offended. At the other end of the spectrum, if the work refuses to provide any signals as to genre, we typically ignore it as we have not been invited to participate. However, when a work of art creates expectations and then deviates from them as it unfolds, we can experience a variety of reactions—intrigue, annoyance, doubt, curiosity, and others. The point is, it has engaged us. We are having an esthetic experience whether we like it or not.

Genre creates the bulk of its expectations around beginnings and endings, the former inviting us to open up our minds to engage with and be manipulated by an external force, the latter to bring that experience to a close and initiate any reflections we may have about it. The extent to which art invades our privacy is extraordinary, and so it is natural that we have developed defenses against it. Genres offer an implied contract with respect to what is within bounds and what is off limits. This allows us to prepare ourselves for what is to come, including the option of excluding it altogether (I do not watch horror movies, for example).

Norman Holland gave us a great acronym for understanding this relationship: DFT, which stands for Defense, Fantasy, and Transformation. My contribution is to add an E to it, making it DEFT, where E stands for Expectation. The esthetic experience, in other words, unfolds through four stages, as follows:

1. Defense. Because art is inherently intrusive—indeed, manipulative—we all have psychological defenses against letting it in. The function of movie trailers, book covers, and online reviews is to get us to take down our defensive barrier and let this particular artwork in. We should keep in mind that this is a relatively rare occurrence. Most shows we do not watch. Most books we do not read. Most museums we do not attend.
2. Expectation. The way art gets past our defenses is by using genre signals to create an expectation of getting an experience we would like. We know we are being “sold,” but we also are looking for experiences of some sort, and so we are potentially willing to “buy.”
3. Fantasy. This is the pay-off, the essence of the esthetic experience. The term applies most directly to fiction where we internally imagine scenes based on nothing more than words we are reading. But visual and performative arts also enlist our imaginations, personalizing our experiences such that no two are identical, not even when we are the experiencer both times. These experiences are so intimate and engaging that we have developed an entire discipline to help us interpret them. It is called criticism.
4. Transformation. Transformation is the business of criticism. We seek to extract from the residue of our fantasy experience ideas that we can incorporate into our strategy for living. We do this both through reflection and conversation, but regardless of the mode, the only evidence we have is our memories of the fantasy experience, and every one of those memories is unique, not only in place (whose memory) but also in time of recall (because memories change every time they are reexperienced). Nonetheless, we persist because these memories are now part of who we are, and if we fail to understand them, we fail to understand ourselves.

Genre participates directly in each of the four steps above, helping bypass our defenses (hey, it’s just an action movie), creating expectations (and it’s from the Marvel universe), teeing us up for fantasy (the viewing experience in which we let the movie take over our mind), and triggering a transformation conversation when it is over (I think Iron Man may need some counseling, or maybe I do).

The ontological status of artworks

Art consists of artifacts whose primary purpose is to deliver an experience as opposed to accomplishing a task. Typically, they do so by engaging the imagination of the participant in a fantasy shaped through either a sensory stimulus (painting, sculpture, dance, music, and the like) or a language act (stories, poetry, novels, and the like) or a combination of the two (plays, films, opera, and the like). We assign these artifacts a special status because we evaluate them not only on their craft but also on the quality of the experiences they evoke. Assessing that quality, its impact, and the contribution that craft makes to it is the purpose of esthetics.

The realm of esthetics extends well beyond the fine arts. In contemporary culture, for example, cuisine has taken center stage, for even as it performs a utilitarian task, it also creates emotional experiences of considerable force, particularly when tied to family, ethnic, or personal traditions. Proust’s Madeleine is a famous psychological example, but today the focus is more on cultural ties, where esthetics helps promote cross-cultural connections that can reinforce social cohesion. Similar esthetic circles form around cars and personal attire, really any field of life where identity binds itself to experiences that go beyond utility. The dialog is typically a mixture of the practical and the esthetic, the two fusing into a kind of expertise that goes viral on digital media, which brings us to our last topic.

The character of our emotional responses to art

One way to characterize our responses to art is in relation to our emerging knowledge of how our brains actually work. Our consciousness resides in the neocortex, that part of the brain we see from the outside that looks something like a cauliflower. The neurons in the neocortex are optimized to perform two functions:

1. Engage with the things and events that are happening around us and initiate appropriate responses to them, and
2. Imagine how such things and events might be different, and what such differences might lead to in terms of alternative responses.

It turns out that the very same neurons that perform function 1 also perform function 2, which makes for some interesting implications:

• Each function trains the other one. That is, experience in the world feeds the imagination with material to work on, and imagined experiences expand the repertoire of alternatives our engagement function can draw upon.
• Because the exact same neurons are used in both cases, the functions are mutually exclusive, meaning you can’t engage with the world when you are imagining, and you can’t imagine things when you are engaging with the world.

These implications cast important light on two elements of our response to art. The first is that we are drawn to it naturally. That is, evolution favors constructive use of imagination, and imagination is enhanced by engaging with art. Esthetics in this context investigates the specifics of the attraction itself, what elements in the art motivate us to attend to it, and the impact the experience has on our ability to engage with the world thereafter.

The second point, that we cannot both imagine and engage at the same time, speaks to the question of whether there is a specific attitude one must take in order to appreciate art. The answer is, yes, but it is totally involuntary. The notion that one must train oneself to adopt the appropriate attitude is yet another example of the analytical intellect overstepping its bounds. Analysis is fundamental to Transformation, but it has no role in Fantasy.

Our emotional responses to art touch all four phases of the esthetic experience. That is, our Defense against art we don’t like is driven by an emotional rejection we often are unable to explain. In contrast, our Expectation that some art will please us is driven by desires we are only too willing to explain. Regardless of our expectations, our Fantasy experience is highly varied with respect to emotion, which often correlates with how much or how little we value the art in question. Finally, our Transformation experience seeks to assess the impact of whatever emotion we did experience when recollected in tranquility.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Click here to Read Part 1 if you missed it

Image Credit: Pexels

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