Aesthetic Thinking

"As spectators of art we enter a state of calm passivity and enhanced objectivity, and the various art forms allow us to recognize diverse aspects of reality from a vantage point where our own individual will is not engaged."

The above is from an essay in the Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 15, 2010) by Christopher Janaway, who is here discussing Arthur Schopenhauer's view of the value of art, namely, its disinterestedness, which allows us to escape from the demands of "will." The sentence struck me, reminding me of something I read long ago in Freud. Though I have not been able to rediscover it since, Freud wrote something to the effect that reading a novel allows us, as in no other way, to enter into the "head" of another person. In other words, to see the world from another's viewpoint. I think he may also have been suggesting that reading of novels allows us to develop empathy for others.

When I reflect on my own thinking, it seems that it is characterized by two things. One is obsessiveness: I go over (and over) a subject, as if trying to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the subject is usually very banal. The other is "aesthetic." Often this second manner of thinking concerns art, though in a very broad sense, in that I am often absorbed by the beauty or ugliness of my surroundings. But aesthetic judgments are even broader than that, characterizing my reactions to people. Sometimes my reaction is pleasure (in the case of someone really pretty or handsome); sometimes it is revulsion (do I need to give examples?). Those reactions I would almost consider "objective," since many people might have the same reaction. But my judgment also includes reactions to people's behavior: approval, disapproval, and the like. Once upon a time, say, when I was growing up back in the 1950s, there were some "universal" standards for judging behavior. We all knew who the juvenile delinquents were. Now, of course, you can't even use that term.

It was in the 18th century that the arts -- literature, music, painting, sculpture, and so on -- became subject to discussion on a wide scale. There was a sense that the traditional authorities -- Aristotle, Horace, and so on -- no longer provided direction. Longinus appeared in this fluctuating situation as a gift, requiring that art move us. Thus, the role of feeling entered into the judgment of "taste," the word that suggests a standard but at the same time withdraws the imprimatur of objectivity. We know what is beautiful, and we expect others to feel the same.

In a sense, however, the arts are beside the point. We judge, and we expect others to share our judgments.

German philosophers since Kant have been particularly interested in the arts, for instance, Hegel and Schopenhauer (both of whom Goethe knew), Nietzsche. This interest reminds me of the Greeks: Plato and Aristotle. The Germans might be said to have returned to Western philosophy's origins and preoccupation with the mind.

Picture credit: Jeff Hopkins

The Sublime

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I was working on the "pre-Kantian sublime" and hoped to write more as my research proceeds. I have to say that the subject is so immense (that fits, I suppose, with the notion of the sublime itself) and the amount of reading I have been doing so varied and also immense that I am having trouble reducing my thoughts to blog-sized posts. My most recent post, on Goethe and translation, was an offshoot of my reading on the sublime, which has its point of entry into European literary discourse in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. It was the translation of Boileau, of the party of the Ancients, of Longinus's treatise on the sublime, that initiated the 18th-century discussion of the sublime.

My focus is, of course, German letters, specifically Johann Jakob Bodmer, the Swiss man of letters and translator of Milton's Paradise Lost into German. Bodmer was a strongly religious man, and his enthusiasm for Milton had much to do with his delight at the appearance of an ancient literary form, the epic, in a modern re-creation and, moreover, on a Christian subject. Bodmer's advocacy of Milton was challenged by the other important German man of letters of the early 18th century, namely, the Leipzig critic Johann Christoph Gottsched, a follower of Wolffian rationalist philosophy, who rejected what he considered the strange products of Milton's poetic imagination.

I am trying to trace the source of Bodmer's defense of imagination, and I suspect it was Addison, though perhaps not in Addison's own essays on the "Pleasures of the Imagination," but perhaps as Addison was transmitted in the writings of the French critic DuBos, in particular Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture (1719). I said this was immense, right?

What might have appealed to Bodmer was Addison's first category of natural objects that please the imagination, namely, "the great." Addison does not use the term sublime, but the objects he mentions -- "a vast uncultivated Desart ... high Rocks and Precipices, or a wide Expanse of Waters," which cause us to be struck by a "rude kind of Magnificence" -- clearly refer to that phenomenon. Though Addison did not explain the cause of this mental effect, he found that its cause lay in God's having framed us in order to act on us through our imagination. Thus, Addison writes that our souls experience a "just Relish" in contemplating the immensity of God's works. As the century progressed -- long before Kant's treatise on the sublime -- the concept of the sublime became secularized. But more on that later.

Picture credits: Big Picture; Cabinet Magazine

Goethe and the Sublime

What do we mean when we say that something is "sublime"? For instance, a slice of cheesecake or chocolate mousse? Or a hairdo or a dress? I suspect in both cases there is an intense feeling of something very delicious to our sense of taste and also very much out of the ordinary run of things. This contemporary use of the word is an attenuated descendent of a rather important aesthetic category in the 18th century, when the measure of the sublime was not food or dress but something much larger, say, mountain massifs or the the extent of the oceans. At the same time, there was a correspondence between the outsized, out-of-the-ordinary object of admiration and the feeling it evoked in us. Thus, the object was sublime, but a person had to feel it to be so. As Kant wrote, in The Critique of Pure Reason (1788), "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within" (tr. Paul Guyer).

Not too be overly immodest, but just about everything Goethe wrote about the sublime can be found in my article in the Goethe Yearbook. By the time he occupied himself with the subject, in the early 1770s, he was the beneficiary of almost a century of European discussions on the role of the sublime in aesthetic theory. Kant in turn made the aesthetic sense the basis of his moral philosophy.

It all began with the translation of the treatise On the Sublime into French by the critic and poet Nicolas Boileau, which appeared in 1674 and introduced the ancient rhetorician Longinus to the European literary world. Europe was ready for a change in its way of thinking about art. Before the 18th century theorists on art agreed with Aristotle that art was a particularly good way of transmitting universal and objective truths in graspable form. And since there were objective truths, it was also agreed that there were objective criteria for producing works of art.

By the 18th century in western Europe, however, there was a move toward more subjective criteria for judging art. This is where Longinus and his treatise on the sublime come in. Longinus, who had lived in the time of Marcus Aurelius (indeed, according to Boileau it was Marcus who ordered Longinus' execution), went beyond the conventional resources of the rhetorical tradition for achieving elevated effects and conveying powerful emotions. He suggested that nobility of soul and powerful and inspired emotions -- innate qualities in a person -- were more essential than in the traditional discipline of art.

One's inner state is occasionally the site of calm and docile emotions, but just as likely one of powerful, chaotic forces. There was nothing cute or nice about the sublime, and thus it was drafted to suggest the more powerful emotions of the soul. The sublime had its correspondence in the outer world -- be it God or infinity or some otherwise uncalculable natural phenomenon, like the massive, irregular, and chaotic geological formations of Switzerland -- while the sublime experience was the response of a person to the grandeur of the sublime object.

I have lately been working on the sublime, in particular the early transmission of this aesthetic idea into German literature in the 18th century. My focus has been Johann Jacob Bodmer (1698-1783), the learned Swiss man of letters who also introduced John Milton, in particular Paradise Lost, to German readers. Milton was for Bodmer the poet with the most noble mind and soul who likewise produced an epic on the most noble and sublime subject. Not much attention has been paid to the effect of the Swiss mountains on Bodmer's thinking. I like very much the paintings of Swiss mountains by Caspar Wolf, for instance, the above one, which shows visitors admiring the splendid ragged formations, which in effect indicates the taming of the sublime. Wolf was a predecessor of the Romantic-period painter Caspar David Friedrich in the portrayal of awesome natural subjects. By Friedrich's time, however, the awe felt in the face of powerful nature seems almost sentimentalized, as can be seen in the painting Wanderer in the Sea of Fog, at the top of this post, from 1814. Wolf seems to have been a much more modest figure, to show by this self-portrait.

Already by 1712, when Addison wrote his Spectator essays, these mountains (which Addison had seen on his trip to Italy) were a conventional trope in connection with the sublime. (They also figure prominently in Edmund Burke's 1757 essay on the beautiful and the sublime.) For Bodmer, it was Addison's emphasis on the quality of "great imagination" that drew him to John Milton. This subjective quality went on to play a huge role in the development of German literature in the 18th century, for instance, in the notion of "Genius."

It also played a role in Goethe's early oeuvre, in the so-called Storm and Drang period of the early 1770s. An expression of the sublime style and the expression of sublime emotion is on view in Goethe's essay on German architecture (1772), in which he rhapsodizes about the Gothic cathedral in Strassburg and its inspired architect, whom he compares to a second creator. Like God, such artists look down on their works and exclaim, "It is good!"

Later, Goethe abandoned this enthusiastic response in connection with sublime subjects. He became a "classicist," subsuming himself to the "edle Einfalt und stille Größe" (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur), which Winckelmann believed characterized ancient Greek art. I think Goethe's immersion in his scientific pursuits, beginning in the late 1770s, also distanced him -- made him more objective? -- vis à vis nature's more powerful and chaotic phenomena. He also was reacting against the kind of sentimental self-aggrandisement that is suggested by the Friedrich painting and that the discourse on the sublime had done so much to introduce to the European consciousness. Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has something interesting to say about this secularization of emotion in The Ideology of the Aesthetic. He writes of the "production of an entirely new kind of human subject [in the 18th century] -- one which, like the work of art itself, discovers the law in the depths of its own free identity, rather than in some oppressive eternal law. The liberated subject is the one who has appropriated the law as the very principle of its own autonomy, broken the forbidden tablets of the law in which that law was originally inscribed in order to rewrite it on the heart of flesh."

Picture credit: Alpenverein