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ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is establish the difference between aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Part of the argument is that only a philosophy of art can give an adequate philosophical account of works of art. The argument is advanced drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant and Gunter Figal.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This paper was initially a lecture given at the University of Fribourg on Tuesday, May 17, 2022. I want to thank Professor Emmanuel Alloa for inviting me to present the lecture. The lecture has been rewritten in response to the discussion that followed its delivery.
2. Other works I have written that contribute to this project include On Gesture. Classical and Renaissance Expressions (forthcoming); “Countering Injury. On the Deaths of the Niobids,” in Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, ed. Mario Telo and Andrew Benjamin (Ohio State University Press, 2023); “Doubt and Indifference: Threshold Conditions within the Work of Art,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 12, no. 1 (2019); “Reading, Seeing and the Logic of Abandonment: Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul” in Saint Paul and Philosophy: The Consonance of Ancient and Modern Thought, ed. Gert-Jan van der Heiden, George van Kooten, and A. Cimino (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); and Art’s Philosophical Work (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).
3. Clearly the argument here pertains initially to the visual arts. However, the general claim that what is involved is a move from the primacy of the subject to the primacy of the object would also have implications for the philosophical study of both literature and music.
4. In broad historical terms, a field defined by αἴσθησις, namely in terms of perception by the senses.
5. G.W.F. Hegel (trans. T. M. Knox), Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Vol. I) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 11/Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Werke 13), (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 25.
6. Albrecht Dürer, Schriften und Briefe (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1998), 110.
7. For some of the background to the relationship between Dürer and Alberti see, Jeffrey Ashcroft, “Art in German: Artistic Statements by Albrecht Dürer,” Forum for modern language studies, Vol.48 .4, (2012), 376–388.
8. On “mattering” as the activity of matter, see my Art’s Philosophical Work (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 20–25.
9. Immanuel Kant (trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews), Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009)/Werke in sechs Bänden (Band V) (Darmstadt: WBG. 2011). This and all future references to page numbers will have the English preceding the German. Here, 162/374.
10. Kant, Critique, 101/294.
11. Nelson Goodman, “Review of E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation,” The Journal of Philosophy 57, no. 18 (September 1, 1960), 595–599.
12. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 46.
13. This is a complex claim with important implications. While visibility may be an important object of “art historical research” its counter is not literal invisibility. (As will emerge the unseen is not the invisible.) Such claims fail to incorporate conditions of visibility within the history of what could and could not be seen that is itself structured by the ideational (thus not literal visibility and invisibility) in the first instance, and not subjected to the naturalization of chronological time in the second. These limitations can only be overcome by insisting on the centrality of informed form. The latter is how the “afterlife of antiquity” is registered. For a sustained presentation of the literalization of visibility and invisibility see, Richard Neer, Three Types of Invisibility. The Acropolis of Athens. In Richard Neer, (Editor) Conditions of Visibility. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019), 7–42.
14. Aby Warburg (trans. David Britt), “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoise,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute Publications, 1999), 201. Warburg’s project has been subject to a number of important philosophically informed analyses. In terms of the nymph, see Georges Didi-Hubermann, Ninfa fluida. Essai sur le drapé-désire, (Paris: Gallimard 2015). The best overall account of Warburg’s work in addition to its relation to philosophy and art history is Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
15. Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999), 458/Gesammelte Schriften (Band V-1), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 572. There is still yet to be a sustained, adequate account of Walter Benjamin’s work on the image published in English. The indispensable point of departure for any discussion of this aspect of his work are the writings of Sigrid Weigel. See in particular “The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Benjamin’s Image-Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 (January 1, 2015), 344–366. See in addition Jessica Dubow, “Case Interrupted: Benjamin, Sebald, and the Dialectical Image” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (June 2007), 820–836.
16. Michael Baxandall, “The Period Eye” in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988), 29–57.
17. In terms of further argumentation for the philosophical significance of Warburg, see Giorgio Agamben, Ninfe (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007).
18. Balance is a key motif in Warburg. Despite the presence of conflicting forces, what he tried to identify are the possibilities of their resolution through balance. I have argued for the limitations of this position in my “Two Forms of Gesture: Notes on Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin,” Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 10, no. 1 (2017).
19. In other words, Heidegger’s point of departure need not obtain. Note his own reflections on his Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: “The foregoing reflections are more concerned with the riddle of art (das Rätsel der Kunst) than the riddle that art itself is. They are far from claiming to solve the riddle. The task is to see the riddle (Zur Aufgabe steht, das Rätsel zu sehen).” Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, in Holzwege (Gesamtausgabe vol. 5) (Frankfurt: M. Klostermann, 1977), 67.
20. See note 10 above 294.
21. Kant, Critique, 216/446.
22. Günter Figal, “Blank Spaces and Blank Spots: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in Heidegger’s Philosophy” in Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the 20th Century: A Companion to Its Main Interpretations (ed. Stefano Marino and Pietro Terzi) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 73.
23. Kant, Critique, 95/286.
24. Figal, “Blank Spaces,” 73.
25. Ibid., 73.
26. Ibid., 73.
27. Ibid., 73.
28. Ibid., 73.
29. Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), The Arcades Project (N2,3), (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 460/Gesammelte Schriften (Band V-1), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 574–5.
30. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (vol. 1), ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 253/Gesammelte Schriften (Band IV-1), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 9.
31. Kant, Critique, 107/302.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Benjamin
Andrew Benjamin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. His recent books include On Gesture. Classical and Renaissance Expressions (forthcoming), Virtue in Being (SUNY Press, 2016), Towards a Relational Ontology. Philosophy’s Other Possibility (SUNY Press, 2015), and Art’s Philosophical Work (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).