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Schopenhauer's Aesthetics

Jerrold Levinson

in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics

This essay explores Schopenhauer's relationship to Kant, and stresses the extent to which the great pessimist's aesthetic philosophy relies on Kant's metaphysics even more than it does on Kant's ... More

This essay explores Schopenhauer's relationship to Kant, and stresses the extent to which the great pessimist's aesthetic philosophy relies on Kant's metaphysics even more than it does on Kant's aesthetics. It highlights the breadth of Schopenhauer's vision of the role of art and of the liberating aesthetic experiences it makes possible. It addresses the puzzle of how the art of music — which according to Schopenhauer presents us with blind, ceaseless, and hateful willing in its most unvarnished form — can yet provide aesthetic experience of the highest order, justifying Schopenhauer's according to music the foremost position among the arts.Less

Beauty Along the Color Line: Lynching, Form, and Aesthetics

Russ Castronovo

in Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era

W. E. B. Du Bois's interest in aesthetics speaks volumes about how specific content—particularly African Americans—often fails to meet putatively universal criteria that underwrite justice. By ... More

W. E. B. Du Bois's interest in aesthetics speaks volumes about how specific content—particularly African Americans—often fails to meet putatively universal criteria that underwrite justice. By attending to form in an era of lynching, Du Bois rearticulated the initial delimitations of “the beautiful” whose abstract parameters disallowed black lives from having merit both in the national sphere and in international settings of colonialism. Although Du Bois's “militant journalism,” according to David Levering Lewis, clearly follows in the tradition of Frederick Douglass's North Star, the intellectual inheritance linking African Americans to the tradition of Western aesthetics seemed tenuous if not antagonistic. Aesthetic philosophy stipulates that general precepts about beauty always met their limit in blackness, the Negro, or Africa. By starting with The Crisis, the black writers' engagement of art and propaganda, including Du Bois's own novelistic examples, this chapter brings an alternative aesthetics into focus.Less

Introduction: Aesthetic Judgment in the Contemporary Art World

Hannah Wohl

in Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

The introduction argues that artists and others in the art world make aesthetic judgments by assessing creative visions—bundles of recognizable and enduring consistencies within bodies of work. It ... More

The introduction argues that artists and others in the art world make aesthetic judgments by assessing creative visions—bundles of recognizable and enduring consistencies within bodies of work. It shows how approaches in the humanities and social sciences have conceptualized different ways in which social context and aesthetic judgment shape one another. It claims that these approaches can be extended by focusing on how individuals orient their aesthetic judgments toward oeuvres or bodies of work, rather than discrete works. This necessitates studying artists’ judgments of their own work in the creative process, examining how these judgments change over time, and exploring how the way in which others view these bodies of work shape artists’ aesthetic judgments. It theorizes this approach through Alfred Gell’s concept of bodies of work as “distributed objects.” It historically traces several key artistic and organizational transformations that progressively oriented aesthetic judgments around perceptions of creative visions within the Western art world. It situates the position of New York City in the contemporary art world and describes the interview, ethnographic, and archival data used in the study. It presents a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.Less

Conclusion: ‘the elusive inscrutable mistakable self’

Kate Hext

in Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy

This chapter draws together the argument of Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy. It concludes that Pater's central motivating concern is with the reconception of the individual under ... More

This chapter draws together the argument of Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy. It concludes that Pater's central motivating concern is with the reconception of the individual under the emerging conditions of modernity. Furthermore, in so doing, Pater creates a unique dialogue with academic philosophy which ultimately rejects the idea that the language and terms of philosophy could adequately conceive the subjective self. This final chapter considers how Pater's individualism is related to his own shadowy personal identity.Less

Afterword: Are Aesthetic Models the Best Way to Talk About the Artfulness of Literary Texts?

Charles Altieri

in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

This afterword takes a skeptical and even contentious approach some of the other contributions in this volume rather than politely reviewing and synthesizing them as afterwords more often do. It ... More

This afterword takes a skeptical and even contentious approach some of the other contributions in this volume rather than politely reviewing and synthesizing them as afterwords more often do. It suggests that essays in the preceding chapters by and large deal with materials for which “the aesthetic is not in fact central,” mostly because works whose fundamental medium is language are not what aesthetic philosophy was created to understand. It insists that the essays may attend to specific aesthetic properties of particular works of art, but, always with an eye to the social or political utility of those properties; they “build predicates for social use into the very definition of ‘aesthetic’ from the start”.Less

What Painting Does

Catherine M. Soussloff

in Foucault on Painting

Where does a new theory of painting belong in the context of Foucault’s larger philosophical project?

Visual Signs: Abstraction, Poetry, and The Pope of Modern Art

Natalie Ferris

in Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945-1980

The opening chapter examines the aesthetic philosophy and critical influence of Herbert Read, holding in balance his activities as establishment figure, art historian, and poet. It argues for the ... More

The opening chapter examines the aesthetic philosophy and critical influence of Herbert Read, holding in balance his activities as establishment figure, art historian, and poet. It argues for the centrality of his undervalued poetic sequence 'Vocal Avowals' (1959), to which he returned repeatedly throughout the final decade of his life, to suggest that this collection was the most radical attempt made by Read to disturb the expressive potential of language. Referring to correspondence with T. S. Eliot, Ben Nicholson, and other contemporaries, the discussion considers the occasion of the collection’s composition—his ‘abstract’ poetry—as one charged with a confluence of Read’s intellectual, creative, and philosophical motivations, as well as an attempt to bring together Continental and American influences drawn from art and literature both before and after World War Two.Less

The Joy of Looking: What William Blake’s Pictures Want

Mike Goode

in Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media

The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of an audience elite enough to rise to the challenge of the sublime but in its viral medial appeals to ... More

The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of an audience elite enough to rise to the challenge of the sublime but in its viral medial appeals to audiences’ heterogeneous tastes for beauty. Individual Blake pictures have long tended to circulate apart from the composite, multi-media art to which they are supposedly integral. The chapter argues that this tendency activates formal potentials in the art. Blake worked at a time when aesthetic philosophers conceived of aesthetic experience, particularly of “the beautiful,” as an organic legislative force. The chapter argues for the potential radicalism of Blake’s multi-media art for its own age—and for others—on the grounds that it turns “the beautiful” into a legislative force designed to activate and exploit the disintegrated, heterogeneous wants of the populations that experience it.Less

Nelson Goodman: An Analytic Approach to Music and Literature Studies

Eric Prieto

in The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, although little discussed by word-and-music scholars, offers a powerful set of concepts for understanding the relations between music and literature. Goodman ... More

Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, although little discussed by word-and-music scholars, offers a powerful set of concepts for understanding the relations between music and literature. Goodman addresses the relationship between the arts by considering them in terms of a more general theory of symbolisation, one that foregrounds such apparently mundane tasks as measuring, labelling, sampling, and comparing. Although initially disconcerting, this approach has the advantage of reframing historically intractable questions of musico-literary aesthetics in ways that make them easier to analyse. For example, if music, as a presentational art, does not re-present in the manner of language, how does it convey meaning? Goodman’s answers to such questions are exemplary for their clarity, simplicity, and power. At the heart of Goodman’s theory are his three basic categories of symbolisation: denotation, exemplification, and expression.Less

Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought

Catherine M. Soussloff

in Foucault on Painting

The historio-critical situation for Foucault’s writings on painting, including a discussion of significant issues of translation and reception that impinge on the specific theoretical matters ... More

The historio-critical situation for Foucault’s writings on painting, including a discussion of significant issues of translation and reception that impinge on the specific theoretical matters addressed by each of his texts about painting.Less

The Place of Painting: Velázquez’s Las Meninas

Catherine M. Soussloff

in Foucault on Painting

The specific aspects of the painting of 1656 by Diego Velázquez that relate to Foucault’s interpretation of it as knowledge (savoir) itself, a point he subsequently made about painting in general in ... More

The specific aspects of the painting of 1656 by Diego Velázquez that relate to Foucault’s interpretation of it as knowledge (savoir) itself, a point he subsequently made about painting in general in The Archaeology of Knowledge.Less

The Negativity of Painting: Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe.

Catherine M. Soussloff

in Foucault on Painting

In his writing on the Surrealist Magritte, Foucault explored the impact of avant-garde “word and image paintings” in the history of twentieth century painting. He proposed that the circulating ... More

In his writing on the Surrealist Magritte, Foucault explored the impact of avant-garde “word and image paintings” in the history of twentieth century painting. He proposed that the circulating similitudes initiated by and proposed in The Treachery of Images (1928) were fulfilled in contemporary series painting, such as the Campbell’s soup cans by the Pop artist Andy Warhol.Less

Writing the Unspeakable in A Single Man and Mrs. Dalloway

Jamie Carr

in The American Isherwood

This chapter examines the influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. In his diary in the early 1960s, Isherwood unquestionably praises Woolf’s ... More

This chapter examines the influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. In his diary in the early 1960s, Isherwood unquestionably praises Woolf’s novel as “one of the most truly beautiful novels or prose poems or whatever that I have ever read. It is prose written with absolute pitch, a perfect ear. You could perform it with instruments. Could I write a book like that and keep within the nature of my own style? I’d love to try.” That Isherwood was rereading Mrs. Dalloway while beginning to compose A Single Man suggests a more profound connection between his and Woolf’s work than his later remark indicates. In their efforts to speak the truth in their novels, Woolf and Isherwood convey a shared political aesthetic philosophy that literature can articulate a counterdiscourse to the social proscriptions against same-sex desire and public mourning when this love is lost.Less