by M H Abrams
God is beauty par excellence. . . . He offers to the reason the highest idea . . . to the imagination the most ravishing contemplation, to the heart a supreme object of love. . . .
This all-powerful being has indeed chosen to create us without having any need of us. . . . We love a beautiful or a good object because it is such, without prior consideration whether this love may be useful to its object or to ourselves. All the stronger reason that, when it ascends to God, love is a pure homage rendered to his perfections; it is the natural overflow of the soul towards a being who is infinitely lovable.36
A consequence drawn from this theological prototype is Cousin’s claim that the artistic achievements of fifteenth-century Italy manifest “the faith of art in its own self, and the cult of beauty,” and that in all ages “art is also in itself a kind of religion.”37 In his lecture series of 1818, Cousin translated Kant’s distinction between knowledge, morality, and the judgment of beauty into an explicit statement of l’art pour l’art:
The pure and disinterested sentiment of the beautiful . . . [is] an internal sentiment, distinct, special, which refers only to itself. . . . Art is not an instrument, it is in itself its own end . . . hence on the same level as morality and religion.
What is required is religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, just as art for art’s sake.38
Théophile Gautier, the flamboyant representative and propagandist of art for art’s sake, wrote in 1847 that “the mere imitation of nature . . . cannot be the end of the artist.” The “highest and most philosophical way to view art” is that of l’art pour l’art, which signifies “a work disengaged from all preoccupation except that of beauty in itself.”
The program of the modern school . . . is to seek beauty for its own sake [pour elle-même] with complete impartiality, perfect disinterestedness [désintéressement]. . . . L’art pour l’art means not form for form’s sake but rather form for beauty’s sake, abstracted from . . . all direct utility.
The artist may reflect his personal situation and that of his era, but only “under the condition that the sacred art will be always for him the end and not the means.” Undertaking the question, What is the nature of beauty which is the end of art? Gautier cites a number of philosophers from Plato through Kant, Wackenroder, and Victor Cousin, then concludes: “Beauty in its absolute essence is God. . . . It is invariable, because it is absolute.”39
The Symbolist generation of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarmé developed from such suggestions—which reimposed on Kant’s aesthetics the theological context of its origins—a full-formed religion of art, or in Flaubert’s term, “a religion of beauty”; as their English exponent, Arthur Symons, noted in 1899, the new literature “becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual.”40 Art for art’s sake, that is, becomes life for art’s sake; the artist must lose his life to find his art; and the true art lover is one of those few, out of “la foule,” the profane and vulgar masses, who has been elected as initiate and ministrant of the sacred object, the work of art. Central to this aesthetic was “a remarkable will,” as Paul Valéry remarked, which had been “predicted and advocated by Edgar Poe,” “to isolate Poetry once for all from every other essence than itself” in the “pure state” of “a perfection that is concerned only with itself.”41 In 1862 Baudelaire raised the question “whether the work of art ought to have no other end than art, whether art ought to express solely adoration for itself.”42 He himself, following the lead of Poe, attacked as “heresies” the requirements of “teaching,” “truth,” and “morality,” on the ground that “poetry . . . has no end other than itself.” “La poésie pure” is pure in that it is free from external purpose, from reference to an audience, and even from the personal passion of the poet, for “passion is natural,” and so introduces “a wounding, discordant note into the domain of pure beauty.”43 By Stéphane Mallarmé, Baudelaire’s pure poetry is translated into the ideal of the absolute poem. No longer merely a sensuous reflection of the self-sufficing perfection of the metaphysical or Christian Absolute, the poetic work aspires to be itself an absolute, totally disengaged not only from human author and audience, but from any semantic reference to the world we live in; it exists exclusively within the self-enclosed, self-sufficient, self-signifying bounds of its own verbal perfection.44
V.
In our own century theories of art-as-such, taking as their paradigm an observer confronting an isolated work of art, fall into two major types. The first of these accords with the spectator model in the empirical lineage of Addison and Burke: the emphasis is on the attitudinal and emotional response of the percipient when his attention is focused exclusively on the artistic object; the idiom is psychological; the analysis often centers on what is distinguished as the “aesthetic attitude” or “aesthetic distance”; and the work of art is regarded as something which is so constituted as to evoke and reward such aesthetic attention. The second type accords with the contemplation model proper, of which the lineage is Platonic and/or Christian: the emphasis is on the nature of a selflessly contemplative state of mind; the idiom is metaphysical, employing terms such as “knowing,” “transcendent,” “idea,” “purity,” “ultimate,” “essential,” and the distinction between “appearance” and “reality”; and the work itself is described as endowed with an integrity and self-sufficiency which require, or promote, the contemplative state. Conspicuous in this latter theory is the tendency of the contemplation model to bring back into discussion of the arts aspects of its Platonic and theological origins which had been deleted in Kant’s version, and often, to carry along a variety of associated religious elements as well.
An example is Clive Bell’s highly influential theory (1913) that “the essential quality . . . that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects” is “significant form,” or alternatively “pure form”45—an offspring of the view, common in post-Kantian theorists, that the aesthetic response is primarily to the “form” of a work of art, independently of its material medium or representational content. Bell’s theory is based on the contemplation model. “The contemplation of pure form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life,” and “the chief importance of art” is not “in its relation to conduct or its practical utility,” but in the value of things viewed “as ends in themselves.” To account for such contemplative ecstasy Bell proposes the “metaphysical hypothesis” that when we are moved by “the formal significance of any material thing . . . considered as an end in itself . . . we become aware of its essential reality, of the God in everything . . . the thing in itself, the ultimate reality.” Bell also proposes, not as hypothesis but as assertion, that “art is a religion. It is an expression of and a means to states of mind as holy as any that men are capable of experiencing.”46
More than a century earlier, we recall, Wackenroder had described “art galleries” as “temples” for the solitary contemplation of works of art “outside the ordinary flow of life,” had compared their enjoyment to prayer, and had asserted their efficacy “for the salvation of our soul.” Thus also, and precisely, Clive Bell: as men and women once went to churches in search of otherworldly ecstasy, now
they may go to the temples of art to experience, a little out of this world, emotions that are of another . . . as sanctuaries from life—sanctuaries devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion. . . .
For those who can feel the significance of form, art can never be less than a religion. In art these find what other religious natures found and still find, I doubt not, in impassioned prayer and worship.
Art in fact has the advantage that it is “an undogmatic religion” not tied to a temporal creed, and that it is therefore “universal” and “permanent.” As a consequence, Bell says, he is tempted to believe in his “giddier moments” that “art might prove the world’s salvation.”
47
In the more recent past the American New Critics were committed to the “autotelic” and sufficient “poem as such” and “literature as such,” independently of “external” ends, or of any relation to the author, audience, or extra-poetic world; they zealously defended this aesthetic creed against diverse “heresies” and “fallacies” which violate the integrity of the self-bounded poem; W. K. Wimsatt even brooded at times on the affinities between the autonomous verbal object and the divine Logos. Similar indices to the origins of the contemplation model continue to manifest themselves in various philosophers of the fine arts. I shall cite an instance because it is by someone who is both a professional philosopher and a literary artist. In her Romanes lecture of 1976, Iris Murdoch, with a passing reference to Kant, counters Plato’s derogation of the arts by transferring to the arts Plato’s own doctrine of a love which terminates in the contemplation of absolute beauty. “In the shock of joy in response to good art, an essential ingredient is a sense of the revelation of reality, of the really real. . . .”
Good art, thought of as symbolic force rather than statement, provides a stirring image of a pure transcendent value, a steady visible enduring higher good, and perhaps provides for many people, in an unreligious age without prayer or sacraments, their clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial and held quietly and unpossessively in the attention. Good art which we love can seem holy and attending to it can be like praying. Our relation to such art, though “probably never” entirely pure, is markedly unselfish.
In this felicitous reformulation of the disinterested and intransitive contemplation of a work of art as such, Iris Murdoch has moved from Platonic eros doctrine to the Christian doctrine of the love of God. And having paralleled Wackenroder’s and Bell’s assimilation of aesthetic contemplation to prayer, she goes on to suggest also their analogy between going to a gallery and going to a place of worship: “The calm joy in the picture gallery is quite unlike the pleasurable flutter felt in the sale room.”48
VI.
The theory of art-as-such is usually proposed as a set of assertions that claim to be timelessly and universally valid. I have tried to show, however, that it is a way of talking about the arts which was developed only some two centuries ago, and that in its recurrent mode as contemplation theory, its central model and defining predicates were imported, ready-made, from doctrines of love in Platonic metaphysics and a Platonized Christianity. To explain the provenience of this theory, however, is not to explain it away. It is only one way of talking about the arts, but the achievement of critics, whether American New Critics, Continental formalists, or structuralists, who have used some version of art-as-such as a working premise shows that it can be a profitable way to deal with the arts, fostering an unprecedented variety of concepts for analyzing the formal aspects and component elements of a work in their complex internal relations. Furthermore, the theory specifies what has now become a very common way in which we experience many works of art, in some circumstances, and it seems relatively adequate for dealing with abstract paintings, or with serialist musical compositions. But when we turn to King Lear, or Michelangelo’s Pietà, or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Picasso’s Guernica, the concepts of art-as-such are patently inadequate to account for the range of our responses to these works, which implicate our knowledge and convictions about the world, our moral interests, and our deepest human concerns. One can understand the animus motivating Nietzsche’s comment that by “the aesthetics of ‘disinterested contemplation’ . . . the emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create itself a good conscience.”49
When I first came across this view of art, however, I felt its strong appeal, and I feel it still. The question arises: Why should the claim that a work of art is self-bounded, and to be contemplated independently of all relations to a human author, a human audience, and the world of human life and concerns, serve as the ground for attributing to art its human value—indeed, for elevating it to the highest of all values? The appeal of such a theory, I believe, is not primarily empirical or rational, but the appeal of its profound metaphysical pathos. This pathos inheres in the view, which has endured from Plato through the Christian centuries, that the highest human good is to lose the sense of self and of the world in the absorbed contemplation of a metaphysical absolute or deity whose perfection consists in being totally otherworldly, serenely self-contained and self-sufficient, and for those reasons, to be revered purely for its own sake. Or to carry the analysis a stage farther back, we can say that the appeal of the theory of art as disinterested contemplation is rooted in the same desires and discontents which motivated philosophers and theologians to posit as the ens perfectissimum, as the ultimate reality and value, a timeless, immutable, impassive being whose attributes are established by a systematic negation of the temporality, the turmoil, and the passions which are the inescapable conditions of life in this world. The anomaly bears pondering, however, that the temporality, turmoil, and passions of life in this world have always been the subject matter of the literary art with which we are presumed to engage, according to the theory of art-as-such, in an uninvolved, dispassionate, and disinterested act of pure contemplation.
NOTES
1. T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Herbert Read (London, 1936), p. 136.
2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 34–35, 209, 211.
3. Introduction to Aristotle, Poetics, translated and edited by James Hutton (New York, 1982).
4. On the late appearance in artistic theory of “the fine arts” as a distinctive class of products, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Parts I and II, Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 496–527; 13 (1952): 17–46. So late as 1772 the young Goethe was contemptuous of J. G. Sulzer’s systematic attempt to put all the arts into a single class. “What,” Goethe asks, “cannot be bound together by such philosophy? Painting and the dance, eloquence and architecture, poetry and sculpture, all out of a single hole.” He remarks acutely that the grouping of products so diverse is based on the point of view of the connoisseur: it derives from “certain pursuits and pleasures of men,” and serves the aims of “fashionable dilettantes” of art. “But if a speculative treatment of the arts is to be of use, it must be directly related to the artist. . . . For the concern should be solely with the artist. . . . What does the gaping public matter . . . ?” Review of J. G. Sulzer, Die schönen Künste in ihrem Ursprung, in Goethes Werke (Weimer) 37 (1896): 206–14.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887), translated by Francis Golffing (New York, 1956), section 3, part 6, p. 238.
6. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, translated by James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1911), pp. 29, 87; the stress on “contemplation” is Kant’s own. All the following page references are to Meredith’s edition. A few of Kant’s phrases I have tried to translate more precisely than Meredith.
7. See M. H. Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (New York, 1989).
8. See the important articles of Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1961): 97–113; and “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 20 (1961–62): 131–43. See also David A. White, “The Metaphysics of Disinterestedness: Shaftesbury and Kant,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32 (1973–74): 239–48.
9. Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Etc., edited by John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (London, 1900), vol. 1, p. 94; vol. 2, pp. 128, 138, 268–69. Succeeding page references in the text are to this edition.
10. Aristotle, Eudemean Ethics, Book VII, “F
riendship,” sections 1244b, 1249b. It should be remarked that Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in this book and in his Nicomachean Ethics, as well as Cicero’s essay “On Friendship,” contributed to later moralists and theologians the distinction between the love for a friend for the ulterior ends of pleasure, utility, and personal gain, and the higher love for a friend for his intrinsic virtue, as its own end. As Cicero put it (De Amicitia, pp. xxi, 79–80): “Those are worthy of friendship who have the reason for being loved in themselves [in ipsis inest causa],” and the highest friendship “is desirable in and for itself [per se et propter se].”
11. Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna, revised by B. S. Page (London, 1956), pp. 380, 400–401, 619.
12. Plotinus, pp. 61–63, 409, 622–24.
13. See, e.g., K. Svoboda, L’Esthétique de St. Augustin et ses sources (Brno, 1933), pp. 48ff.; Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, translated by Philip S. Watson (London, 1953), pp. 349–446.