Modern Aesthetics, Tate Modern, session one.
We focused on Arthur Schopenhauer (reading 19 from the set book Cahn and Meskin eds Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology
Schopenhauer is much-loved by artists, writers and lovers of art because, unlike most thinkers, he put art and our experience of it at the heart of his philosophy. His main work, The World as Will and Representation (first published 1819, sometimes translated as The World as Will and Idea) is, like most philosophy about appearance and reality. You can listen to a podcast I made about Schopenhauer here. This is based on a chapter from my book Philosophy: The Classics.
Key Terms
The Will (with a capital 'W') is the ultimate source of everything, the undifferentiated life energy that is behind every appearance. This is the true nature of the world - it is all Will.
The world we experience most of the time is the world as Representation. This is our experience of individual things, of what he calls objectification of the Will. This representation comes in different grades, different levels of removal from the Will.
Platonic Ideas are outside of space and time and are what Schopenhauer calls direct objectifications of the Will. [Those of you who didn't take Classic Aesthetics might want to look at notes on Plato on the Forms or Ideas here and follow some of the links. Basically Plato believed that reality consists of these abstract entities - the chair you see is an imperfect copy of the abstract idea of a chair. If you find that hard to believe, think of how any real circle is always an imperfect representation of the Idea of a circle which has no imperfections. Plato famously denigrated mimetic or representational art because it was at several removes from reality - a picture of a chair is a representation of a representation, and not reliable about the Idea.]
'will' with a lower case 'w' is desire. Part of Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook is that he believes that our desires, even when fulfilled, lead to further desires and that we are for the most part in torment constantly striving for things. The experience of art can give us temporary relief from this suffering, but is more important than this because it becomes a kind of metaphysics, particularly when the art in question is music.
[Click on the red text below to read the rest of these notes on Session One]
The Beautiful and the Sublime [we didn't discuss this but it is in the reading]
When we contemplate beautiful or sublime aspects of the natural world we can be transported to a level where we forget ourselves, seem to stand outside time, and it as if what we see is all that exists, we in a sense become one with it. In such situations Schopenhauer suggest that what we know is not the individual thing (the mountain, for example) but rather the Idea (i.e. the Platonic Idea of Mountain - the abstract non-individual universal). The sublime is characterised by a conscious struggle to forget the danger we are place in - as in contemplating a thunderstorm at sea from an aesthetic point of view.
The sublime and the beautiful - both capable of transporting us to the world of Ideas, and therefore of immense value - stand in stark contrast with the merely charming for Schopenhauer. [Notice that Schopenhauer's theory of the beautiful and the sublime is tied to his metaphysics, his view about reality and the grades of representation, whereas Burke - covered in Aesthetics: Classic Theories - looked for psychological explanations of why we have the experiences we do in the presence of the sublime. Relevant notes on Burke are here]
The Charming and the Negatively Charming
The charming (see section 40) draws us down from the level of pure contemplation to that of appetite. Schopenhauer gives too examples: Dutch still lives which illustrate edible objects (fruit, herring, crabs etc.) and history paintings of semi-draped nudes which are calculated to arouse lust (John Berger makes a similar point with a feminist twist about traditional nudes in his Ways of Seeing). In both cases purely aesthetic contemplation is defeated. Schopenhauer is scathing about such base sensuality and declared that the charming is 'everywhere to be avoided in art'.
The 'negatively charming' i.e. the disgusting and offensive, designed to evoke repugnance, is even worse (I guess Schopenhauer would have had a few qualms about the Brit Art Sensation exhibition - and it is interesting in this light to think about the title of that show, presumably chosen because of the connotation of 'sensational', but also because of its appeal to raw feeling...something that Schopenhauer would see as antithetical to the purpose of art which is to transport us via aesthetic contemplation to the level of the Platonic Ideas).
Artistic Genius
Artistic genius is the ability to perceive the Ideas in nature, to perceive the essential (i.e. make that move from the individual perceived thing, e.g. the sunflower, to the abstract Idea 'sunflower'), and this is inborn. The artist is able, then, through learnt technical skill, to focus on the essential and remove irrelevant contingent elements of the subject matter - thus the artist teaches us to see with his or her eyes and makes it easier for us to be transported to that realm of abstraction and timeless contemplation that Schopenhauer so values (not least because it temporarily removes us from the relentless torment of desire and seeking fulfillment - it is 'all the same whether we see the setting sun from a prison or from a palace', and presumably all the same whether we see the actual sun or a painting of it...in fact the painting may facilitate the aesthetic transport). Schopenhauer sees the aesthetic pleasure we get from art as essentially the same as the aesthetic pleasure we get from nature. The artistic genius facilitates our access to this kind of pleasure, and even builds on the natural beauty he or she perceives: beauty in art can surpass beauty in nature.
Schopenhauer believes, probably naively, that aesthetic contemplation of human beauty makes us morally better people and quotes Goethe approvingly (section 45, p.210): 'Whoever beholds human beauty cannot be infected with evil; he feels in harmony with himself and the world.'
Music
For Schopenhauer music is a special case, different in its relation to reality (the Will) from other arts. Unlike them it isn't a copy of Ideas, but rather a copy of the will itself. Music becomes a kind of metaphysics: 'The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that this reasoning faculty does not understand...' (section 52, p.216).
In the Gallery
We visited Room 1 of Level 3 of Tate Modern and looked at (from within it!) Anish Kapoor's 'Ishi's Light' ('Ishi' is Kapoor's son's name). The artist clearly wants us to become immersed in the experience of the work.
Next week - Nietzsche (in Tate Britain)
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