Chapter 18

The fortunes of Aesthetic after Vico were very various, and the list of aestheticians who fell back into the old pedagogic definition, or elaborated the mistakes of Baumgarten, is very long. Yet with C.H. Heydenreich in Germany and Sulzer in Switzerland we find that the truths contained in Baumgarten have begun to bear fruit. J.J. Herder (1769) was more important than these, and he placed Baumgarten upon a pedestal, though criticizing his pretension of creating an _ars pulchre cogitandi_ instead of a simple _scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice cogitans_. Herder admitted Baumgarten's definition of poetry as _oratio sensitiva perfecta_, perfect sensitived speech, and this is _probably the best definition of poetry that has ever been given_. It touches the real essence of poetry and opens to thought the whole of the philosophy of the beautiful. Herder, although he does not cite Vico upon aesthetic questions, yet praises him as a philosopher. His remarks about poetry as "the maternal language of humanity, as the garden is more ancient than the cultivated field, painting than writing, song than declamation, exchange than commerce," are replete with the spirit of the Italian philosopher.

But despite similar happy phrases, Herder is philosophically the inferior of the great Italian. He is a firm believer in the Leibnitzian law of continuity, and does not surpass the conclusions of Baumgarten.

Herder and his friend Hamann did good service as regards the philosophy of language. The French encyclopaedists, J.J. Rousseau, d'Alembert, and many others of this period, were none of them able to get free of the idea that a word is either a natural, mechanical fact, or a sign attached to a thought. The only way out of this difficulty is to look upon the imagination as itself active and expressive in _verbal imagination_, and language as the language of _intuition_, not of the intelligence. Herder talks of language as "an understanding of the soul with itself." Thus language begins to appear, not as an arbitrary invention or a mechanical fact, but as a primitive affirmation of human activity, as a _creation_.

But all unconscious of the discoveries of Vico, the great mass of eighteenth century writers try their hands at every sort of solution. The Abbé Batteux published in 1746 _Les Beaux-arts réduits a un seul principe_, which is a perfect little bouquet of contradictions. The Abbé finds himself confronted with difficulties at every turn, but with "un peu d'esprit on se tire de tout," and when for instance he has to explain artistic enjoyment of things displeasing, he remarks that the imitation never being perfect like reality, the horror caused by reality disappears.

But the French were equalled and indeed surpassed by the English in their amateur Aesthetics. The painter Hogarth was one day reading in Italian a speech about the beauty of certain figures, attributed to Michael Angelo. This led him to imagine that the figurative arts depend upon a principle which consists of conforming to a given line. In 1745 he produced a serpentine line as frontispiece of his collection of engravings, which he described as "the line of beauty." Thus he succeeded in exciting universal curiosity, which he proceeded to satisfy with his "Analysis of Beauty." Here he begins by rightly combating the error of judging paintings by their subject and by the degree of their imitation, instead of by their form, which is the essential in art. He gives his definition of form, and afterwards proceeds to describe the waving lines which are beautiful and those which are not, and maintains that among them all there is but one that is really worthy to be called "the line of beauty," and one definite serpentine line "the line of grace." The pig, the bear, the spider, and the frog are ugly, because they do not possess serpentine lines. E. Burke, with a like assurance in his examples, was equally devoid of certainty in his general principles. He declares that the natural properties of an object cause pleasure or pain to the imagination, but that the latter also procures pleasure from their resemblance to the original. He does not speak further of the second of these, but gives a long list of the natural properties of the sensible, beautiful object. Having concluded his list, he remarks that these are in his opinion the qualities upon which beauty depends and which are the least liable to caprice and confusion. But "comparative smallness, delicate structure, colouring vivid but not too much so," are all mere empirical observations of no more value than those of Hogarth, with whom Burke must be classed as an aesthetician. Their works are spoken of as "classics." Classics indeed they are, but of the sort that arrive at no conclusion.

Henry Home (Lord Kaimes) is on a level a trifle above the two just mentioned. He seeks "the true principles of the beaux-arts," in order to transform criticism into "a rational science." He selects facts and experience for this purpose, but in his definition of beauty, which he divides into two parts, relative and intrinsic, he is unable to explain the latter, save by a final cause, which he finds in the Almighty.

Such theories as the three above mentioned defy classification, because they are not composed by any scientific method. Their authors pass from physiological sensualism to moralism, from imitation of nature to finalism, and to transcendental mysticism, without consciousness of the incongruity of their theses, at variance each with itself.

The German, Ernest Platner, at any rate did not suffer from a like confusion of thought. He developed his researches on the lines of Hogarth, but was only able to discover a prolongation of sexual pleasure in aesthetic facts. "Where," he exclaims, "is there any beauty that does not come from the feminine figure, the centre of all beauty? The undulating line is beautiful, because it is found in the body of woman; essentially feminine movements are beautiful; the notes of music are beautiful, when they melt into one another; a poem is beautiful, when one thought embraces another with lightness and facility."

French sensualism shows itself quite incapable of understanding aesthetic production, and the associationism of David Hume is not more fortunate in this respect.

The Dutchman Hemsterhuis (1769) developed an ingenious theory, mingling mystical and sensualist theory with some just remarks, which afterwards, in the hands of Jacobi, became sentimentalism. Hemsterhuis believed beauty to be a phenomenon arising from the meeting by the sentimentalism, which gives multiplicity, with the internal sense, which tends to unity. Consequently the beautiful will be that which presents the greatest number of ideas in the shortest space of time. To man is denied supreme unity, but here he finds approximative unity. Hence the joy arising from the beautiful, which has some analogy with the joy of love.

With Winckelmann (1764) Platonism or Neo-platonism was vigorously renewed. The creator of the history of the figurative arts saw in the divine indifference and more than human elevation of the works of Greek sculpture a beauty which had descended from the seventh heaven and become incarnate in them. Mendelssohn, the follower of Baumgarten, had denied beauty to God: Winckelmann, the Neoplatonician, gave it back to Him. He holds that perfect beauty is to be found only in God. "The conception of human beauty becomes the more perfect in proportion as it can be thought as in agreement with the Supreme Being, who is distinguished from matter by His unity and indivisibility." To the other characteristics of supreme beauty, Winckelmann adds "the absence of any sort of signification" (Unbezeichnung). Lines and dots cannot explain beauty, for it is not they alone which form it. Its form is not proper to any definite person, it expresses no sentiment, no feeling of passion, for these break up unity and diminish or obscure beauty. According to Winckelmann, beauty must be like a drop of pure water taken from the spring, which is the more healthy the less it has of taste, because it is purified of all foreign elements.

A special faculty is required to appreciate this beauty, which Winckelmann is inclined to call intelligence, or a delicate internal sense, free of all instinctive passions, of pleasure, and of friendship. Since it becomes a question of perceiving something immaterial, Winckelmann banishes colour to a secondary place. True beauty, he says, is that of form, a word which describes lines and contours, as though lines and contours could not also be perceived by the senses, or could appear to the eye without any colour.

It is the destiny of error to be obliged to contradict itself, when it does not decide to dwell in a brief aphorism, in order to live as well as may be with facts and concrete problems. The "History" of Winckelmann dealt with historic concrete facts, with which it was necessary to reconcile the idea of a supreme beauty. His admission of the contours of lines and his secondary admission of colours is a compromise. He makes another with regard to the principle of expression. "Since there is no intermediary between pain and pleasure in human nature, and since a human being without these feelings is inconceivable, we must place the human figure in a moment of action and of passion, which is what is termed expression in art." So Winckelmann studied expression after beauty. He makes a third compromise between his one, indivisible, supreme, and constant beauty and individual beauties. Winckelmann preferred the male to the female body as the most complete incarnation of supreme beauty, but he was not able to shut his eyes to the indisputable fact that there also exist beautiful bodies of women and even of animals.

Raphael Mengs, the painter, was an intimate friend of Winckelmann and associated himself with him in his search for a true definition of the beautiful. His ideas were generally in accordance with those of Winckelmann. He defines beauty as "the visible idea of perfection, which is to perfection what the visible is to the mathematical point." He falls under the influence of the argument from design. The Creator has ordained the multiplicity of beauties. Things are beautiful according to our ideas of them, and these ideas come from the Creator. Thus each beautiful thing has its own type, and a child would appear ugly if it resembled a man. He adds to his remarks in this sense: "As the diamond is alone perfect among stones, gold among metals, and man among living creatures, so there is distinction in each species, and but little is perfect." In his _Dreams of Beauty_, he looks upon beauty as "an intermediate disposition," which contains a part of perfection and a part of the agreeable, and forms a _tertium quid_, which differs from the other two and deserves a special name. He names four sources of the art of painting: beauty, significant or expressive character, harmony, and colouring. The first of these he finds among the ancients, the second with Raphael, the third with Correggio, the fourth with Titian. Mengs does not succeed in rising above this empiricism of the studio, save to declaim about the beauty of nature, virtue, forms, and proportions, and indeed everything, including the First Cause, which is the most beautiful of all.

The name of G.E. Lessing (1766) is well known to all concerned with art problems. The ideas of Winckelmann reappear in Lessing, with less of a metaphysical tinge. For Lessing, the end of art is the pleasing, and since this is "a superfluous thing," he thought that the legislator should not allow to art the liberty indispensable to science, which seeks the truth, necessary to the soul. For the Greeks painting was, as it should always be, "imitation of beautiful bodies." Everything disagreeable or ill-formed should be excluded from painting. "Painting, as clever imitation, may imitate deformity. Painting, as a fine art, does not permit this." He was more inclined to admit deformity in poetry, as there it is less shocking, and the poet can make use of it to produce in us certain feelings, such as the ridiculous or the terrible. In his _Dramaturgie_ (1767), Lessing followed the Peripatetics, and believed that the rules of Aristotle were as absolute as the theorems of Euclid. His polemic against the French school is chiefly directed to claiming a place in poetry for the verisimilar, as against absolute historical exactitude. He held the universal to be a sort of mean of what appears in the individual, the catharsis was in his view a transformation of the passions into virtuous dispositions, and he held the duty of poetry to be inspiration of the love of virtue. He followed Winckelmann in believing that the expression of physical beauty was the supreme object of painting. This beauty exists only as an ideal, which finds its highest expression in man. Animals possess it to a slighter extent, vegetable and inanimate nature not at all. Those mistaken enough to occupy themselves with depicting the latter are imitating beauties deprived of all ideal. They work only with eye and hand; genius has little if any share in their productions. Lessing found the physical ideal to reside chiefly in form, but also in the ideal of colour, and in permanent expression. Mere colouring and transitory expression were for him without ideal, "because nature has not imposed upon herself anything definite as regards them." At bottom he does not care for colouring, finding in the pen drawings of artists "a life, a liberty, a delicacy, lacking to their pictures." He asks "whether even the most wonderful colouring can make up for such a loss, and whether it be not desirable that the art of oil-painting had never been invented."

This "ideal beauty," wonderfully constructed from divine quintessence and subtle pen and brush strokes, this academic mystery, had great success. In Italy it was much discussed in the environment of Mengs and of Winckelmann, who were working there.

The first counterblast to their aesthetic Neo-platonism came from an Italian named Spalletti, and took the form of a letter addressed to Mengs. He represents the _characteristic_ as the true principle of art. The pleasure obtained from beauty is intellectual, and truth is its object. When the soul meets with what is characteristic, and what really suits the object to be represented, the work is held to be beautiful. A well-made man with a woman's face is ugly. Harmony, order, variety, proportion, etc.--these are elements of beauty, and man enjoys the widening of his knowledge before disagreeable things characteristically represented. Spalletti defines beauty as "that modification inherent to the object observed, which presents it, as it should appear, with an infallible characteristic."

Thus the Aristotelian thesis found a supporter in Italy, some years before any protestation was heard in Germany. Louis Hirt, the historian of art (1797) observed that ancient monuments represented all sorts of forms, from the most beautiful and sublime to the most ugly and most common. He therefore denied that ideal beauty was the principle of art, and for it substituted the _characteristic_, applicable equally to gods, heroes, and animals.

Wolfgang Goethe, in 1798, forgetting the juvenile period, during which he had dared to raise a hymn to Gothic architecture, now began seriously to seek a middle term between beauty and expression. He believed that he had found it, in certain characteristic contents presenting to the artist beautiful shapes, which the artist would then develop and reduce to perfect beauty. Thus for Goethe at this period, the characteristic was simply the _starting-point_, or framework, from which the beautiful arose, through the power of the artist.

But these writers mentioned after J.B. Vico are not true philosophers. Winckelmann, Mengs, Hogarth, Lessing, and Goethe are great in other ways. Meier called himself a historian of art, but he was inferior both to Herder and to Hamann. From J.B. Vico to Emmanuel Kant, European thought is without a name of great importance as regards this subject.

Kant took up the problem, where Vico had left it, not in the historical, but in the ideal sense. He resembled the Italian philosopher, in the gravity and the tenacity of his studies in Aesthetic, but he was far less happy in his solutions, which did not attain to the truth, and to which he did not succeed in giving the necessary unity and systematization. The reader must bear in mind that Kant is here criticized solely as an aesthetician: his other conclusions do not enter directly into the discussion.

What was Kant's idea of art? The answer is: the same in substance as Baumgarten's. This may seem strange to those who remember his sustained polemic against Wolf and the conception of beauty as confused perception. But Kant always thought highly of Baumgarten. He calls him "that excellent analyst" in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and he used Baumgarten's text for his University lectures on Metaphysic. Kant looked upon Logic and Aesthetic as cognate studies, and in his scheme of studies for 1765, and in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, he proposes to cast a glance at the Critique of Taste, that is to say, Aesthetic, "since the study of the one is useful for the other and they are mutually illuminative." He followed Meier in his distinctions between logical and aesthetic truth. He even quoted the Instance of the young girl, whose face when distinctly seen, i.e. with a microscope, is no longer beautiful. It is true, aesthetically, he said, that when a man is dead he cannot come to life, although this be opposed both to logical and to moral truth. It is aesthetically true that the sun plunges into the sea, although that is not true logically or objectively.

No one, even among the greatest, can yet tell to what extent logical truth should mingle with aesthetic truth. Kant believed that logical truth must wear the habit of Aesthetic, in order to become _accessible_. This habit, he thought, was discarded only by the rational sciences, which tend to depth. Aesthetic certainly is subjective. It is satisfied with authority or with an appeal to great men. We are so feeble that Aesthetic must eke out our thoughts. Aesthetic is a vehicle of Logic. But there are logical truths which are not aesthetic. We must exclude from philosophy exclamations and other emotions, which belong to aesthetic truth. For Kant, poetry is the harmonious play of thought and sensation, differing from eloquence, because in poetry thoughts are fitted to suggestions, in eloquence the reverse is true. Poetry should make virtue and intellect visible, as was done by Pope in his _Essay on Man_. Elsewhere, he says frankly that logical perfection is the foundation of all the rest.

The confirmation of this is found in his _Critique of Judgment_, which Schelling looked upon as the most important of the three _Critiques_, and which Hegel and other metaphysical idealists always especially esteemed.

For Kant art was always "a sensible and imaged covering for an intellectual concept." He did not look upon art as pure beauty without a concept. He looked upon it as a beauty adherent and fixed about a concept. The work of genius contains two elements: imagination and intelligence. To these must be added taste, which combines the two. Art may even represent the ugly in nature, for artistic beauty "is not a beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing." But this representation of the ugly has its limits in the arts (here Kant remembers Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit in the disgusting and the repugnant, which kills the representation itself. He believes that there may be artistic productions without a concept, such as are flowers in nature, and these would be ornaments to frameworks, music without words, etc., etc., but since they represent nothing reducible to a definite concept, they must be classed, like flowers, with free beauties. This would certainly seem to exclude them from Aesthetic, which, according to Kant, should combine imagination and intelligence.

Kant is shut in with intellectualist barriers. A complete definition of the _imagination_ is _wanting_ to his system. He does not admit that the imagination belongs to the powers of the mind. He relegates it to the facts of sensation. He is aware of the reproductive and combinative imagination, but he does not recognize _fancy_ (_fantasia_), which is the true productive imagination.

Yet Kant was aware that there exists an activity other than the intellective. Intuition is referred to by him as preceding intellective activity and differing from sensation. He does not speak of it, however, in his critique of art, but in the first section of the _Critique of Pure Reason_. Sensations do not enter the mind, until it has given them _form_. This is neither sensation nor intelligence. It is _pure intuition_, the sum of the _a priori_ principles of sensibility. He speaks thus: "There must, then, exist a science that forms the first part of the transcendental doctrine of the elements, distinct from that which contains the principles of pure thought and is called transcendental Logic."

What does he call this new science? He calls it _Transcendental Aesthetic_, and refuses to allow the term to be used for the Critique of Taste, which could never become a science.

But although he thus states so clearly the necessity of a science of the form of the sensations, that is of _pure intuition_, Kant here appears to fall into grave error. This arises from _his inexact idea_ of the _essence of the aesthetic faculty or of art_, which, as we now know, is pure intuition. He conceives the form of sensibility to be reducible to the _two categories of space and time_.

Benedetto Croce has shown that space and time are far from being categories or functions: they are complex posterior formations. Kant, however, looked upon density, colour, etc., as material for sensations; but the mind only observes colour or hardness when it has _already_ given a form to its sensations. Sensations, in so far as they are _crude matter_, are _outside_ the mind: they are a _limit_. Colour, hardness, density, etc., are _already_ intuitions. _They are the aesthetic activity in its rudimentary manifestation._

Characterizing or qualifying imagination, that is, _aesthetic activity_, should therefore _take the place occupied by the study of space and time_ in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and constitute the true _Transcendental Aesthetic_, prologue to Logic.

Had Kant done this, he would have surpassed Leibnitz and Baumgarten; he would have equalled Vico.

Kant did not identify the Beautiful with art. He established what he called "the four moments of Beauty," amounting to a definition of it. The two negative moments are, "That is beautiful which pleases _without interest_"; this thesis was directed against the sensualist school of English writers, with whom Kant had for a time agreed; and "That is beautiful which pleases without a concept," directed against the intellectualists. Thus he affirmed the existence of a spiritual domain, distinct from that of organic pleasure, of the useful, the good, and the true. The two other moments are, "That is beautiful which has the form of finality without the representation of an end," and "That is beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure." What is this disinterested pleasure that we experience before pure colours, pure sounds, and flowers? Benedetto Croce replies that this mysterious domain has no existence; that the instances cited represent, either instances of organic pleasure, or are artistic facts of expression.