THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS pdf

CHAPTER IINTRODUCTION: PURPOSE AND METHOD Although some feeling for beauty is perhapsuniversal among men, the same cannot besaid of the understanding of beauty... aesthetic life, otherwi

THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS

DEWITT H PARKER∗

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PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEUNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

PREFACE

This book has grown out of lectures tostudents at the University of Michigan andembodies my effort to express to them thenature and meaning of art In writing it, I

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have sought to maintain scientific accuracy,yet at the same time to preserve freedom

of style and something of the inspiration ofthe subject While intended primarily forstudents, the book will appeal generally, Ihope, to people who are interested in theintelligent appreciation of art

My obligations are extensive,–most rectly to those whom I have cited in foot-

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notes to the text, but also to others whoseinfluence is too indirect or pervasive to makecitation profitable, or too obvious to make

it necessary For the broader philosophy

of art, my debt is heaviest, I believe, tothe artists and philosophers during the pe-riod from Herder to Hegel, who gave to thestudy its greatest development, and, amongcontemporaries, to Croce and Lipps In ad-

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dition, I have drawn freely upon the morespecial investigations of recent times, butwith the caution desirable in view of thevery tentative character of some of the re-sults To Mrs Robert M Wenley I wish toexpress my thanks for her very careful andhelpful reading of the page proof.

The appended bibliography is, of course,not intended to be in any sense adequate,

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but is offered merely as a guide to furtherreading; a complete bibliography would it-self demand almost a volume.

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CHAPTER I Introduction: Purpose and Method

CHAPTER II The tion of Art

Defini-CHAPTER III The sic Value of Art

Intrin-CHAPTER IV The ysis of the Aesthetic Ex- perience: The Elements of the Experience

Anal-CHAPTER V The sis of the Aesthetic Experi- ence: The Structure of the Experience

Analy-CHAPTER VI The lem of Evil in Aesthetics, and Its Solution through

Prob-the Tragic, PaProb-thetic, and Comic

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CHAPTER VII The dard of Taste

Stan-CHAPTER VIII The thetics of Music

CHAPTER IX The thetics of Poetry

Aes-CHAPTER X Prose erature

Lit-CHAPTER XI The ion of Art over Nature: Paint- ing

Domin-CHAPTER XII The minion of Art over Nature: Sculpture

Do-CHAPTER XIII Beauty in the Industrial Arts: Archi- tecture

CHAPTER XIV The tion of Art: Art and Moral- ity

CHAPTER XV The tion of Art: Art and Reli- gion

Func-BIBLIOGRAPHY

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THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: PURPOSE AND METHOD

Although some feeling for beauty is perhapsuniversal among men, the same cannot besaid of the understanding of beauty The

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average man, who may exercise able taste in personal adornment, in thedecoration of the home, or in the choice

consider-of poetry and painting, is at a loss whencalled upon to tell what art is or to explainwhy he calls one thing ”beautiful” and an-other ”ugly.” Even the artist and the con-noisseur, skilled to produce or accurate injudgment, are often wanting in clear and

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consistent ideas about their own works orappreciations Here, as elsewhere, we meetthe contrast between feeling and doing, onthe one hand, and knowing, on the other.Just as practical men are frequently unable

to describe or justify their most successfulmethods or undertakings, just as many peo-ple who astonish us with their fineness andfreedom in the art of living are strangely

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wanting in clear thoughts about themselvesand the life which they lead so admirably,

so in the world of beauty, the men who doand appreciate are not always the ones whounderstand

Very often, moreover, the artist and theart lover justify their inability to under-stand beauty on the ground that beauty

is too subtle a thing for thought How,

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they say, can one hope to distill into clearand stable ideas such a vaporous and fleet-ing matter as Aesthetic feeling? Such menare not only unable to think about beauty,but skeptical as to the possibility of doingso,–contented mystics, deeply feeling, butdumb.

However, there have always been artistsand connoisseurs who have striven to re-

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flect upon their appreciations and acts, happy until they have understood and jus-tified what they were doing; and one meetswith numerous art-loving people whose in-tellectual curiosity is rather quickened thanput to sleep by just that element of elu-siveness in beauty upon which the mysticsdwell Long acquaintance with any class

un-of objects leads naturally to the formation

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of some definition or general idea of them,and the repeated performance of the sametype of act impels to the search for a prin-ciple that can be communicated to otherpeople in justification of what one is do-ing and in defense of the value which oneattaches to it Thoughtful people cannotlong avoid trying to formulate the relation

of their interest in beauty, which absorbs

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so much energy and devotion, to other man interests, to fix its place in the scheme

hu-of life It would be surprising, therefore, ifthere had been no Shelleys or Sidneys todefine the relation between poetry and sci-ence, or Tolstoys to speculate on the nature

of all art; and we should wonder if we didnot everywhere hear intelligent people dis-cussing the relation of utility and goodness

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to beauty, or asking what makes a poem or

a picture great

Now the science of aesthetics is an tempt to do in a systematic way what thought-ful art lovers have thus always been doinghaphazardly It is an effort to obtain a cleargeneral idea of beautiful objects, our judg-ments upon them, and the motives underly-ing the acts which create them,–to raise the

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aesthetic life, otherwise a matter of instinctand feeling, to the level of intelligence, ofunderstanding To understand art means

to find an idea or definition which applies

to it and to no other activity, and at thesame time to determine its relation to otherelements of human nature; and our under-standing will be complete if our idea in-cludes all the distinguishing characteristics

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of art, not simply enumerated, but ited in their achieved relations.

exhib-How shall we proceed in seeking such

an idea of art? We must follow a twofoldmethod: first, the ordinary scientific method

of observation, analysis, and experiment;and second, another and very different method,which people of the present day often pro-fess to avoid, but which is equally neces-

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sary, as I shall try to show, and actuallyemployed by those who reject it In fol-lowing the first method we treat beautifulthings as objects given to us for study, much

as plants and animals are given to the ogist Just as the biologist watches the be-havior of his specimens, analyzes them intotheir various parts and functions, and con-trols his studies through carefully devised

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experiments, arriving at last at a clear tion of what a plant or an animal is–at adefinition of life; so the student of aesthet-ics observes works of art and other well-recognized beautiful things, analyzes theirelements and the forms of connection of these,arranges experiments to facilitate and guardhis observations from error and, as a re-sult, reaches the general idea for which he

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is looking,–the idea of beauty.

A vast material presents itself for study

of this kind: the artistic attempts of dren and primitive men; the well-developedart of civilized nations, past and present,

chil-as creative process and chil-as completed work;and finally, the everyday aesthetic appreci-ations of nature and human life, both byourselves and by the people whom we seek

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out for study Each kind of material has itsspecial value The first has the advantage ofthe perspicuity which comes from simplic-ity, similar for our purposes to the value ofthe rudimentary forms of life for the biol-ogist But this advantage of early art may

be overestimated; for the nature of beauty

is better revealed in its maturer tions, even as the purposes of an individual

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are more fully, if not more clearly, embodied

in maturity than in youth or childhood.Yet a purely objective method will notsuffice to give us an adequate idea of beauty.For beautiful things are created by men,not passively discovered, and are made, likeother things which men make, in order torealize a purpose Just as a saw is a goodsaw only when it fulfills the purpose of cut-

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ting wood, so works of art are beautifulonly because they embody a certain pur-pose The beautiful things which we study

by the objective method are selected by usfrom among countless other objects and calledbeautiful because they have a value for us,without a feeling for which we should notknow them to be beautiful at all Theyare not, like sun and moon, independent of

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mind and will and capable of being stood in complete isolation from man Noworld of beauty exists apart from a pur-pose that finds realization there We are,

under-to be sure, not always aware of the tence of this purpose when we enjoy a pic-ture or a poem or a bit of landscape; yet it

exis-is present none the less The child exis-is equallyunaware of the purpose of the food which

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pleases him, yet the purpose is the ground

of his pleasure; and we can understand hishunger only through a knowledge of it.The dependence of beauty upon a rela-tion to purpose is clear from the fact that inour feelings and judgments about art we notonly change and disagree, but correct our-selves and each other The history of taste,both in the individual and the race, is not a

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mere process, but a progress, an evolution.

”We were wrong in calling that poem tiful,” we say; ”you are mistaken in thinkingthat picture a good one”; ”the eighteenthcentury held a false view of the nature ofpoetry”; ”the English Pre-Raphaelites con-fused the functions of poetry and painting”;

beau-”to-day we understand what the truly torial is better than Giotto did”; and so on

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Now nothing can be of worth to us, onething cannot be better than another, norcan we be mistaken as to its value exceptwith reference to some purpose which it ful-fills or does not fulfill There is no growth

or evolution apart from a purpose in terms

of which we can read the direction of change

as forward rather than backward

This purpose cannot be understood by

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the observation and analysis, no matter howcareful, of beautiful things ; for it exists inthe mind primarily and only through mindbecomes embodied in things; and it cannot

be understood by a mere inductive study

of aesthetic experiences–the mind plus theobject–just as they come; because, as wehave just stated, they are changeful andsubject to correction, therefore uncertain

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and often misleading The aesthetic pulse may falter and go astray like any otherimpulse; a description of it in this condi-tion would lead to a very false conception.

im-No, we must employ a different method ofinvestigation–the Socratic method of self-scrutiny, the conscious attempt to becomeclear and consistent about our own pur-poses, the probing and straightening of our

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aesthetic consciences Instead of acceptingour immediate feelings and judgments, weshould become critical towards them andask ourselves, What do we really seek inart and in life which, when found, we callbeautiful? Of course, in order to answerthis question we cannot rely on an exam-ination of our own preferences in isolationfrom those of our fellow-men Here, as ev-

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erywhere, our purposes are an outgrowth

of the inherited past and are developed inimitation of, or in rivalry with, those ofother men The problem is one of inter-preting the meaning of art in the system

of culture of which our own minds are apart Nevertheless, the personal problemremains Aesthetic value is emphaticallypersonal; it must be felt as one’s own If

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I accept the standards of my race and age,

I do so because I find them to be an pression of my own aesthetic will In theend, my own will to beauty must be clearedup; its darkly functioning goals must bebrought to light

ex-Now, unless we have thought much aboutthe matter or are gifted with unusual na-tive taste, we shall find that our aesthetic

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intentions are confused, contradictory, andentangled with other purposes To becomeaware of this is the first step towards en-lightenment We must try to distinguishwhat we want of art from what we want ofother things, such as science or morality;for something unique we must desire fromanything of permanent value in our life Inthe next place we should come to see that

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we cannot want incompatible things; that,for example, we cannot want art to hold themirror up to life and, at the same time, torepresent life as conforming to our privateprejudices; or want a picture to have ex-pressive and harmonious colors and look ex-actly like a real landscape; or long for a po-etry that would be music or a sculpture thatwould be pictorial Finally, we must make

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sure that our interpretation of the aestheticpurpose is representative of the actual full-ness and manysidedness of it; we should ob-serve, for example, that sensuous pleasure

is not all that we seek from art; that truth

of some kind we seek besides; and yet that

in some sort of union we want both.This clearing up can be accomplishedonly in closest touch with the actual experi-

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ence of beauty; it must be performed uponour working preferences and judgments Itmust be an interpretation of the actual his-tory of art There is no a priori method ofestablishing aesthetic standards Just as noone can discover his life purpose apart fromthe process of living, or the purpose of an-other except through sympathy; so no onecan know the meaning of art except through

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creating and enjoying and entering into theaesthetic life of other artists and art lovers.This so-called normative–perhaps bet-ter, critical–moment in aesthetics introduces

an inevitable personal element into everydiscussion of the subject Even as everyartist seeks to convince his public that what

he offers is beautiful, so every philosopher

of art undertakes to persuade of the

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ity of his own preferences I would not makeany secret of this with regard to the follow-ing pages of this book Yet this intrusion ofpersonality need not be harmful, but may,

on the contrary, be valuable It cannot beharmful if the writer proceeds undogmati-cally, making constant appeals to the judg-ment of his readers and claiming no author-ity for his statements except in so far as

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they find favor there Influence rather thanauthority is what he should seek In pre-senting his views, as he must, he shouldstrive to stimulate the reader to make aclear and consistent formulation of his ownpreferences rather than to impose upon himstandards ready made And the good ofthe personal element comes from the powerwhich one strong preference or conviction

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has of calling forth another, and compelling

it to the discovery and defense of its grounds

In so far as aesthetics is studied by theobjective method it is a branch of psychol-ogy Aesthetic facts are mental facts Awork of art, no matter how material it may

at first seem to be, exists only as perceivedand enjoyed The marble statue is beautifulonly when it enters into and becomes alive

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