The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  These are to us thoroughly familiar terms and assertions. They constitute—in various formulations, and with varying emphasis on the percipient’s experience of art as such, or on the attributes of the work as such—an area of congruence among New Critics, Chicago Aristotelians, American contextual critics, and Continental formalists. The claim that a literary text is not mimetic, expressive, or pragmatic, but a self-sustaining system that generates its own meanings and purely internal relations, is basic to modern structuralism. The kinds of assertions I have cited are also central to most modern theories of aesthetics and philosophies of art; even theorists who dissent from some aspect of this view usually define their negative position by reference to these assertions as the prevailing ones.

  To many of us, such assertions also seem to be patent truths, confirmed by our ordinary experience of works of art. The historical facts, however, should give us pause. For some two thousand years of theoretical concern with these matters, it occurred to no thinker to claim that a human artifact is to be contemplated disinterestedly, for its own sake, as its own end and for its internal values, without reference to things, human beings, purposes, or effects outside its sufficient and autonomous self. During those two millennia theorists and critics did not group into a single class what we now define as “the fine arts,” nor did they propose a vocabulary for identifying a mode of response which is uniquely artistic, or for talking about works of art in a way that undertakes to be definitive for them and exclusive of all other human products.

  In undertaking to account for this extraordinary change in the way we talk about art, we need to bring into prominence the fact that modern theories of art-as-such have an implicit understructure which is alien to earlier theorists. Modern theories assume a connoisseur’s stance toward the finished work of art, and many of them analyze the distinctive features of this stance on the basis of what I shall call “the contemplation model.” That is, when we set out to analyze or define the nature of art and of our experience of art, we assume as paradigmatic a situation in which a perceiver confronts an isolated work, and we usually describe his response as an exclusive attention to the features it presents to his absorbed contemplation. T. E. Hulme expressed tersely the connoisseur’s point of view and the contemplative model. “Contemplation,” he defined as “a detached interest.”

  The object of aesthetic contemplation is something framed apart by itself and regarded without memory or expectation, simply as being itself, as end not means, as individual not universal.1

  In 1960 Jerome Stolnitz introduced his Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism by reference to “the aesthetic attitude,” which he defined as a “disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone.” Resort to the aesthetic attitude has, since the 1920s, become one of the most common ways to establish the nature of art by primary reference to the experience of the percipient, and in Stolnitz we find its standard consequences. The attitude of aesthetic contemplation can be taken toward “any object of awareness whatever,” whether it is a natural object or something made by man. And a work of fine art, no less than a work of nature, is confronted as a completed object, however it got made. The fact that it is a human product, made by human design, becomes a secondary consideration; it is simply regarded as an object especially adapted to aesthetic contemplation, and so constituted as richly to reward such contemplation. But the attributes of the work of art, so established, coincide with the internal self-sufficiency attributed to it by the New Critics and other theorists who base their theory of art-as-such primarily on the nature of the work itself, rather than on the attitude of the percipient. The work, as Stolnitz puts it, is to be regarded “as a self-contained object which is of interest in its own right.”

  Whenever we are talking about works of art as aesthetic objects, we should make sure that we are talking about what is in the work itself. If we are not, then what we say is a gross confusion. . . . The work of art, when considered as an aesthetic object, has a significance and value which is inherent in itself alone.2

  In sharp contrast, theorists from classical Greece until the eighteenth century discussed the arts within a totally different frame of reference; they assumed the maker’s stance toward a work, and analyzed its features in terms of a construction model. The term “the arts” itself was used in the classical era to identify the total class of things which are not found in nature, but are brought into being by human contrivance—a class that included shoemaking and farming as well as painting and sculpture; and the term techne or ars referred to the particular principles and skills, teachable to all those who are born with the requisite talents, which a human being applies to produce a specific kind of product. The Greek poiema (Latin, poema) signified a “made thing,” in accordance with a poiesis (poesis)—an art or mode of making—put to use by a poietes (poeta), or maker; and in the European languages, “poet” and “maker” remained interchangeable terms through the Renaissance. Traditional critical theorists, as well as writers of technical manuals, treated their subject in terms of the requisite elements and principles for constructing an artistic product, and they applied their analysis not to “the arts” in general, but to a single art, most often poetry, or to a subclass of poetry such as tragedy, which they paralleled only occasionally, and only in selected aspects, with one or more of what we now call the other “fine arts”; and their critical treatises were designed no less to guide a poet in writing a good poem than to help the critic in judging whether, and in what ways, a poem is good or bad. In this aspect Aristotle’s Poetics, despite its important differences, is at one with the rhetoricians, with Horace, and with Longinus—those classical theorists who, as they became known, established the basic modes and terms for dealing with a fine art which persisted through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century.

  As James Hutton emphasizes, “It must always be kept in mind that the Poetics is not about poetry in some vague sense of the word but about the art of poetry; it is an ‘art’ or techne (how to compose successful poems), but an ‘art’ that is founded on a scientific understanding of the subject.” “Everything is viewed from within the poet’s art.”3 Aristotle’s opening statement makes clear his constructional approach to the elements and ordering principles of each kind of poem:

  The art of poetry, both in its general nature and in its various specific forms, is the subject here proposed for discussion. And with regard to each of the poetic forms, I wish to consider what characteristic effect it has, how its plots should be constructed if the poet’s work is to be good, and also the number and nature of the parts of which the form consists.

  Classical books on rhetoric were designed to show how one constructs a discourse that will exploit all available means to effect persuasion in an audience on any given subject and occasion. And Horace’s Ars Poetica, expressly addressed to an aspiring poet, lays out the way to compose poems that will have the greatest possible success with a discriminating reading public. That work will be most widely acclaimed in which the poet includes both the useful and the pleasurable, utile et dulce, in order prodesse et delectare, both to instruct and to delight the audience; to which later theorists added a third term from Cicero’s statement of the functions of rhetoric: not only to teach and to please, but to evoke emotion. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, selected topics from classical treatments of the art of poetry—at first (and almost always predominantly) from Horace’s Ars Poetica, then from Aristotle, and finally from Longinus—got applied to painting and then to others of “the fine arts.” It is clear, however, that from the point of view of the construction model, the patent differences in the materials and required skills of a poet effecting a work of verbal art, a painter wielding a brush, a sculptor hewing marble or casting bronze, an architect designing an edifice, and a composer deploying tones to form a melodic and rhythmic product, would keep such diverse arts from being clas
sified together in any systematic fashion; and they in fact remained largely separate in theory until the end of the seventeenth century.4

  Given the long life of this way of dealing with the separate arts, it is plausible to assume that the grouping of all the fine arts under the defining criteria of art-as-such—that is, as independent and self-sufficient entities—is taken for granted by many of us, in part at least, because it is built into our current language for discussing the arts. I shall sketch the emergence of the concepts of art-as-such—especially in the radical form of the contemplation model—and then go on to identify the intellectual prototypes whose availability and familiarity to philosophers may account not only for the precise features of this unprecedented theory of art, but also for the speed with which, once introduced, the new theory was accepted and exploited.

  I.

  The theory of art-as-such was not a product of late nineteenth-century aestheticism and its laudation of l’art pour l’art. It both originated and came to fruition in the course of the eighteenth century. Crucial was the turn from the traditional perspective on the arts as diverse modes of making to the new perspective on each work of art as a completed object which is attended to by a perceiver. This shift in the controlling paradigm is apparent in all three of the new ways of reasoning about art which appeared in the eighteenth century. It constituted the framework of the Neoplatonic consideration of life and art, according to a play of analogy between the human contemplation of higher and lower modes of being, in the Characteristics of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, published 1711. It was manifested that same year, in a very different mode, in the epochal, although seemingly casual, causeries by Joseph Addison on “The Pleasures of the Imagination”: Addison assumes as paradigmatic the situation in which a spectator confronts an object and proceeds, in the empirical fashion of Locke’s philosophy of perception, to analyze the causal relations between features of the object and the pleasurable responses of the percipient mind. A parallel shift of paradigm is evident in the German “rationalists” of the school of Leibniz and Christian Wolff who undertook, in quasi-geometric fashion, to deduce empirical truths from self-evident premises. The founding texts of this third way of treating the arts were the writings of Alexander Baumgarten, his Philosophical Reflections on Poetry in 1735 and his Aesthetica in 1750. Baumgarten coined the term “aesthetics” and established the area of concern that it designated as a standard branch of philosophy; his definition of aesthetics as “the science of sensuous knowledge,” and his definition of a poem as “a perfect sensuous discourse,” reveal his adoption of a specific kind of cognition by a perceiving mind as the ground from which, more geometrico, he undertakes to deduce the essential features of a work of art. Since all three modes of theorizing take the point of view, not of the artistic craftsman, but of the connoisseur, the differences in skills, media, content, and aims of the hitherto diverse arts drop out of essential theoretical account. Instead, these arts tend to be grouped together (and in Shaftesbury and Addison to be largely equated, as objects of enjoyable regard, with beautiful things in nature), and are assumed to possess common features which qualify them to perform their common social role: their role, in other words, as objects conducive to the connoisseur’s pleasurable attention.

  In 1790, only eight decades after Shaftesbury had established the Platonic contemplator, and Addison the Lockean spectator, as the generative center of artistic theory, the concepts of art-as-such achieved a full development in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Philosophic commentators on Kant’s theory concern themselves, properly enough, with the matters constituting the bulk of his Critique; that is, his analysis of the complex play of the mental faculties in aesthetic experience, and especially his attempt to demonstrate that an individual’s “subjective” judgment that an object is beautiful, since it makes a tacit claim for agreement by all mankind, involves an a priori principle which is common to all minds. My concern, however, is not with Kant’s elaborate philosophical superstructure, but only with what he takes for granted; and that is, the normative experience of an object of aesthetic attention. And in this respect we find that Kant simply accepts certain aspects, already severally current in English and German thought, as defining aesthetic experience. He does not argue for or against these defining attributes. Instead he systematizes them, and occupies himself with showing how this “unique” mode of experiencing an object aesthetically (which he calls “the judgment of taste”) is, as he puts it, “possible”; that is, how it can be accounted for, by reference to distinctive operations of the inherent faculties that the mind brings to all its experience—the same faculties which Kant had posited, in his earlier two Critiques, to account for the possibility of valid knowledge and of valid moral decisions.

  Nietzsche long ago remarked that “Kant, like all philosophers, instead of viewing the issue from the side of the artist, envisaged art and beauty solely from the ‘spectator’s’ point of view.”5 Nietzsche is right, in that Kant takes as paradigmatic an encounter between a perceiver and an object which is held isolatedly in attention, and is “immediately”—that is, without intervening thought, or reference to a “concept”—experienced pleasurably as being “beautiful,” or as possessing “aesthetic quality” [aesthetische Beschaffenheit]. But I would specify that Kant’s model for analyzing this encounter is not the Addisonian spectator, but a contemplator—a model with a very different philosophical provenience. In Kant’s summary statement: a “pure” judgment of taste “combines delight or aversion immediately with the bare contemplation [blossen Betrachtung] of the object irrespective of its use or of any end.”6 Such a judgment, it should be remarked, is “pure” in that it satisfies all, and only, the necessary and sufficient criteria for being accounted an aesthetic judgment—without, that is, any superfluous or conflicting elements.

  The analyzable aspects (“moments”) of the aesthetic judgment which Kant details coincide with the concepts and the philosophical vocabulary which I have specified for art-as-such. The crucial aspect is that this judgment is “disinterested,” or “independent of all interest”—“taste in the beautiful,” Kant further specifies, “is the one and only disinterested [uninteressiertes] and free delight” (pp. 42, 49). The judgment is disinterested in that it is “purely contemplative [bloss kontemplativ],” hence entirely distinct from the “interested” judgments of what is “agreeable” or “useful,” or “the moral good” (p. 48). As “mere contemplation,” aesthetic perception must also be “indifferent . . . to the real existence of the object,” and can have no reference to one’s desire to possess the object, or to any function that the object may serve as a means to an “external” end (pp. 43, 48–49). The pure contemplation and judgment of its beauty is independent even of the emotion an object may evoke in the percipient (pp. 65, 68). The contemplated object, Kant says, thus “pleases for its own sake [für sich selbst gefällt]” (p. 90). And the beauty of an object, whether in nature or in art, is experienced, in Kant’s noted phrase, as “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck” [purposefulness without a purpose]—it has no determinate purpose, yet achieves the purpose it doesn’t have (pp. 69, 86). That is, the beauty of a thing, whether natural or an artifact, “appears as if it were preordained” precisely to effect the pleasurable aesthetic judgment or response, yet it is not referable to any express purpose, or intention, on the part either of a natural agency or of a human agent to make it serve that end (pp. 91, 61–62, 216). A beautiful work of art, no less than a beautiful object in nature, may thus be said to have no determinate end except to be just what it is for our disinterested aesthetic contemplation.

  It is important to note that it is only after Kant has fully established the essential features of general aesthetic experience—effected by a beautiful rose or birdsong no less than by a work of art—that he goes on, in the second book of the Critique, to discuss die schönen Künste, or fine arts. His list of the major arts is the one that had already become, and
still remains, the standard one of poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music; he includes also eloquence and landscape gardening. In this section of his work, Kant deals with the production of a work of art. His aim, however, is not, as in traditional theories based on the construction model, to establish the principles by which an artist selects, modifies, and orders the elements of a work of art in order to effect deliberate artistic ends. Instead, a chief enterprise is to explain how it is possible (in terms of the interplay of the productive faculties of the mind) that an artist, whatever his ruling concepts and ends, manages nonetheless to achieve a work which is adapted to the disinterested, concept-free, and end-independent “pure judgment of taste.” Kant’s problem, in other words, is to show how it can be that an artist, without intending to do so—and in fact while often intending quite different ends—effects a product which meets the precise criteria which Kant had already established by reference to the contemplation model of the encounter between a percipient and a ready-made aesthetic object.

  In line with this philosophical enterprise, for example, Kant distinguishes the degree to which architecture and painting are unqualifiedly a “fine art,” or “free art,” in the sense of being independent of an “ulterior end.” In a work of architecture, the “essential character” is “the adaptation of the product to a determinate use,” and the very “form” of a building is not taken from nature, but is determined by this “arbitrary end.” Its character as a fine art consists in the way the building presents itself to us in this intentional aspect, “yet at the same time as aesthetically purposive [äesthetisch-zweckmässig]”—in other words, so as to manifest that purposiveness-without-purpose which, when it is viewed as an object of aesthetic contemplation, is a necessary condition for our judgment that it is a beautiful building. “On the other hand,” Kant says, “a pure [blosses] piece of sculpture” is “made solely to be looked at and must please for its own sake [für sich selbst gefallen soll]”; although, as a corporeal imitation of something in nature its sensuous truth “must not go so far as to lose the appearance of being an art,” hence “a willed product [Produkt der Willkür]” (pp. 186–87). So also with paintings “in the true sense of the word”—that is, paintings “which are not intended to teach such matters as history or natural science”; these “are there entirely to be looked at [zum Ansehen], in order to . . . engage the aesthetic judgment independently of a definite end” (p. 188).