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Thursday, November 16, 2006
Name That Philosopher/Æsthetician
UPDATE: Not a trick question! I need others to blink for me before my sanity slams its glass jaw into some meathead’s hard fist ...
If you ran across this sentence, whose theory would you think it refers to?
Æsthetic production is guided—in a strongly teleological sense—from the particular, through the imagination, to the universal.
I’ve mused myself into a corner. Whose thought would you paraphrase like that? I’ve identified nine or ten plausible candidates, but they’re all more or less equally likely. I read this one and conclude it must be that other one. I read that other one and decide it’s probably that one over there. I read that one over there and wonder whether it wasn’t the first. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
So treat me like the idiot who presses his nose to the pointillist masterpiece and complains when all he sees is this:
Be a dear and lend a fellow some perspective.
Comments
Sounds like Hegelian aesthetics to me, but I haven’t read Hegel on art since I was an undergrad. I’m probably completely wrong.
Any number of Germans, I’d guess, but pondering the ætiology of this remark, perhaps while fishing upon an æstuary, is worthwhile.
For record, helpful responses like Luther’s are preferable to stupendously subtle digs at anyone who dares copy-and-paste from Microsoft Word.
So please, continue blinking...
Coleridge, clearly.
Channeling some particulars he got from Kant/Schelling, through his own imagination, to some notion of the universal.
It certainly sounds like Coleridge; probably the Biographia. But it’s neither direct quotation, nor a specicially close paraphrase. For instance, in ch. 21—Poets write about
the natural growth of the human mind and such as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters, but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and ... Aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed.
“an involution of the universal in the individual” is more the Coleridge thang. But the reference to the imagination makes it almost certain that Coleridge is intended; or else the post-Romantic Coleridgean tradition.
Herder would have completely agreed with the statement, but I can’t imagine him making it--using a concept like “aesthetic production” doesn’t sound like his way of thinking at all. “Aesthetic expression,” maybe. (A superb new collection and translation of Herder’s aesthetic writings just came out from Princeton, if anyone is interested; look here.)
Well, the wording is all wrong, but it could be a contorted reading of Kant (think percept -> imagination -> understanding as an intersubjective production of the beautiful).
Scott, could you actually tell us what it is you’re on about here? Is this a test, where you know the answer? Or did you find this quotation in someone’s work without citation, and you’re now trying to track it down?
I didn’t want to color people’s blinking, hence the circumlocution. No, I don’t know the answer, and yes, it’s from something--and an old something at that--dissertation related. The author assumes transparency, but the sentence is so frustratingly general I can’t place it with confidence. It’s not the one he says it is, but most people seem to be thinking along the same lines I was, i.e. that it is the one he explicitly says it isn’t.
“With confidence” are the key words here, I think. I lack the courage of my convictions here, directly contradicting an author’s stated beliefs. It seems so obvious to me, but every time I dig around a little, the water muddies.
Maybe not an aesthetician proper, but the bit about production makes me think about Joshua Reynolds in Discourses on Art. Reyonlds says that painters should take in the particular, form a mental picture, and move toward the general; that “perfect form is produced by leaving out particularities, and retaining only general ideas”
David C., I could kiss you. I’m off to read some Reynolds, because if it is Reynolds, that connects it to Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and Silas Weir Mitchell.
That has to be it.
For the record, I also went directly to German aesthetics and Kant and ended up at Coleridge, but the author insisted that he wasn’t talking about German aesthetics or Kant. I thought, “Well, maybe he doesn’t get how they connect to Coleridge,” which is the leap I had steeled myself to make. If it is him, Reynolds makes much more sense. (Doesn’t mean he’s the one, though, so please, continue to reassure me that Coleridge isn’t an insane answer, or that someone else like Reynolds is.)
Scott, I’m glad that helped. Do check out Reynolds, especially Discourse IV. I can see the temptation to go directly to Kant, but as Matthew posted, it would have to be a fairly “contorted reading.”
And no, Coleridge isn’t an insane answer. Though I wouldn’t call it teleological, an imagination that functions to move from the particular to the universal sounds a lot like Coleridge’s definition of primary imagination.
What was it you were reading that had occasion to make a general comment about somebody’s aesthetic theory but in such a way that it gave no clue as to whose theory it was discussing? Weird. You don’t even say whether it’s about visual art or writing or some other type of production. Gilpin? Burke? If I found something as unilluminated by context as this sentence appears to be I think I’d have to put the whole piece of writing down as weirdly vague & read something else.
Speaking of idiots pressing their noses to things reminds me of standing in front of one of Van gogh’s starry nights in Melbourne last year and seeing a man run up to it and poke at the corner of the canvas with his thumb. He didn’t hurt the painting, but he could have. He was too quick for the guards to prevent him. Everyone in the vicinity just stared at each other openmouthed.
What was it you were reading that had occasion to make a general comment about somebody’s aesthetic theory but in such a way that it gave no clue as to whose theory it was discussing? Weird.
Source material from the late 19<sup>th</sup> Century in which, sadly, such lack of specificity seems all too common. Normally, there’s enough context to make sense of it, but this time...not so much. I didn’t specify whether it was from the written or visual arts is because it’s about representations of the visual in the written art--such as the example I discussed here, which motivated my recent foray into Keats criticism. I would’ve said this sooner, but I wanted to test the validity of my gut Kant/Coleridge feeling. Thanks to David, I did much better.
But what is it? Can you say its name?
I would, but due to certain—let’s call them “circumstances"—I don’t want to reveal too much about my original research in a public forum.
But if you’re interested, send me an email and I’ll be more than happy to tell you.
I apologize for being circumspect, it’s just that, well, you know—stupid, lazy people and such, stealing ideas willy-nilly ...