This is part of a much larger problem—namely, that of the relation between aesthetic and everyday experience. Two extreme positions serve to illustrate this problem. According to one, art and nature appeal primarily to our emotions: they awaken within us feelings of sympathy, or emotional associations, which are both pleasant in themselves and also instructive. We are made familiar with emotional possibilities, and, through this imaginative exercise, our responses to the world become illuminated and refined. This view, which provides an immediate and satisfying theory of the value of aesthetic experience, has been espoused in some form or other by many of the classical British empiricists (Shaftesbury, Hume, Addison, Lord Kames, Alison, and Burke, to cite only a few). It is also related to the critical theories of writers such as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and F.R. Leavis, whose criticism would make little or no sense without the supposition that works of art have the power to correct and corrupt our emotions.
According to the opposite view, aesthetic interest, because it focuses on an object for its own sake, can involve no interest in “affect.” To be interested in a work of art for the sake of emotion is to be interested in it as a means and, therefore, not aesthetically. In other words, true aesthetic interest is autonomous, standing outside the current of ordinary human feeling—an attitude of pure contemplation or pure “intuition” that isolates its object from the stream of common events and perceives it in its uniqueness, detached, unexplained, and inexplicable. This position has been taken in modern times by Benedetto Croce and, following him, by R.G. Collingwood, whose resolute defense of the autonomy of aesthetic experience was also associated with a theory of the autonomy of art. Art is not only seen as an end in itself but it is an end in itself, in a profound and significant sense that distinguishes art from all its false substitutes (and, in particular, from craft, which for Collingwood is not an end but merely a means).
Between those two poles, a variety of intermediate positions might be adopted. It is clear, in any case, that many questions have been begged by both sides. The aesthetic of sympathy, as Croce called it, has enormous difficulties in describing the emotions that are awakened in aesthetic experience, particularly the emotions that we are supposed to feel in response to such abstract arts as music. With what am I sympathizing when I listen to a string quartet or a symphony? What emotion do I feel? Moreover, the position encounters all the difficulties already noted in forging a link between the imaginary and the real.
The aesthetic of autonomy, as we may call it, encounters complementary difficulties and, in particular, the difficulty of showing why we should value either aesthetic experience itself or the art that is its characteristic object. Moreover, it assumes that whenever I take an emotional interest in something, I am interested in it for the sake of emotion, a false inference that would imply equally that lovers are interested only in their love or angry people only in their anger. Collingwood thus dismisses “amusement art,” on the spurious ground that to be interested in a work of art for the sake of amusement is to be interested not in the work but only in the amusement that it inspires. That is to say, it is to treat the work as a means to feeling rather than as an end in itself. Such a conclusion is entirely unwarranted. Amusement is, in fact, a species of interest in something for its own sake: I laugh not for the sake of laughter but for the sake of the joke. While I may be interested in an object for the sake of the emotion that it arouses, the case is peculiar—the case, in fact, of sentimentality, often dismissed by moralists as a spiritual corruption and equally by critics as a corruption of the aims of art.
The difficulties for both views are brought out by a fundamental aesthetic category: that of enjoyment. Whatever the ultimate value of aesthetic experience, we pursue it in the first instance for enjoyment’s sake. Aesthetic experience includes, as its central instance, a certain kind of pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? While our emotions and sympathies are sometimes pleasurable, this is by no means their essential feature; they may equally be painful or neutral. How then does the aesthetic of sympathy explain the pleasure that we take, and must take, in the object of aesthetic experience? And how does the aesthetic of autonomy avoid the conclusion that all such pleasure is a violation of its strict requirement that we should be interested in the aesthetic object for its own sake alone? Neither theory seems to be equipped, as it stands, either to describe this pleasure or to show its place in the appreciation of art. The work of art
As the above discussion illustrates, it is impossible to advance far into the theory of aesthetic experience without encountering the specific problems posed by the experience of art. Whether or not we think of art as the central or defining example of the aesthetic object, there is no doubt that it provides the most distinctive illustration both of the elusive nature and the importance of aesthetic interest. With the increasing attention paid to art in a corrupted world where little else is commonly held to be spiritually significant, it is not surprising that the philosophy of art has increasingly begun to displace the philosophy of natural beauty from the central position accorded to the latter by the philosophers and critics of the 18th century. Nor is this shift in emphasis to be regretted, for the existence of art as a major human institution reminds us of the need for a theory that will attribute more to aesthetic experience than enjoyment and that will explain the profundity of the impressions that we receive from beauty—impressions that may provide both meaning and solace to those who experience them. It is thus worth reviewing some of the special problems in the philosophy of art that have most influenced contemporary aesthetics. Understanding art
The use of the concept of understanding in describing the appreciation of art marks out an interesting distinction between art and natural beauty. People may understand or fail to understand T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Michelangelo’s David, or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but they cannot understand or fail to understand the Highlands of Scotland, even when they find them beautiful or ugly. Understanding seems to be a prerequisite to the full experience of art, and this has suggested to many critics and philosophers that art is not so much an object of sensory experience as an instrument of knowledge. In particular, art seems to have the power both to represent reality and to express emotion, and some argue that it is through appreciating the properties of representation and expression that we recognize the meaning of art. At least, it might be supposed that if we speak of understanding art, it is because we think of art as having content, something that must be understood by the appropriate audience.
Michelangelo: DavidDavid, marble sculpture by Michelangelo, 1501–04; in the Accademia, Florence.© Digital Vision/Getty Images
The most popular approach to this concept of understanding is through a theory of art as a form of symbolism. But what is meant by this? Is such symbolism one thing or many? Is it a matter of evocation or convention, of personal response or linguistic rule? And what does art symbolize—ideas, feelings, objects, or states of affairs? Representation and expression in art
Various theories have been proposed in answer to these questions, the most popular being that the forms of art are similar to language and are to be understood as language is understood, in terms of conventions and semantic rules. A few examples of contemporary theories that have described art in this way include Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms; Susanne K. Langer’s theory of presentational symbols; the works on semiology and semiotics, largely inspired by the writings of Roland Barthes, that were fashionable in continental Europe; and the semantic theory of art developed by Nelson Goodman. It seems important to review some of the arguments that have been employed both for and against the overall conception of art that such theories share.