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1. Review Article
Arguing About Art
Peter Lamarque
Aesthetics, edited by Susan L. Feagin and Patrick Maynard. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997, vii + 418 pp.
ISBN 0-19-289275-4 pb
Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, by Gordon Graham.
London: Routledge, 1997, xi + 193 pp.
ISBN 0-415-16688-8 pb
Aesthetics, by Colin Lyas. London: UCL Press, 1997, xii + 239 pp.
ISBN 1-85728-580-8 pb
Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates, edited by Alex Neill
& Aaron Ridley. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995, xv + 346 pp.
ISBN 0-07-046191-0 pb
An Introduction to Aesthetics, by Dabney Townsend. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1997, vi + 248 pp.
ISBN 1-55786-730-5 pb
I
What might an undergraduate (in the English-speaking world) expect in a course
on aesthetics at the start of the 21st Century? A generation ago the fare on offer
would have been readily predictable, dictated largely by the topics in Monroe
Beardsley’s definitive analytical text Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of
Criticism (1958): the intentional fallacy, meaning and truth in the arts, the objec-
tivity of judgement, aesthetics as metacriticism Kant would have figured, possi-
bly Hume, certainly not Hegel. Croce and Collingwood might have been wheeled
on to exemplify the disastrous consequences of metaphysics and idealism.
Judging from this recent cluster of undergraduate texts, there is much less
predictability now. If Neill and Ridley set the pattern – in their attractive and
teachable collection Arguing About Art – then students will be debating (among
European Journal of Philosophy 7:1 ISSN 0966–8373 pp. 89–100  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford
OX4 1JF, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

2. other topics) whether it is defensible to ‘colorize movies’, what it is to
appreciate the environment aesthetically, whether sentimentality is all bad,
how music can be ‘profound’, whether there is a distinctively feminist
approach to art, and what role there is for museums. The Feagin and Maynard
anthology Aesthetics, in the new Oxford Readers series, pushes the boundaries
even further, with some 11th century Chinese poems, essays on Japanese
aesthetics, African art, jokes, tragedy, emotions, authenticity in music, as well
as pieces by Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, and the anthro-
pologist Clifford Geertz.
The three other volumes under review, all monograph introductions to
aesthetics, are more constrained to ‘cover the ground’, but it is remarkable how
different they are, not just in tone and style (where the difference is pronounced)
but in topics chosen, art forms discussed, and lines taken. Gordon Graham stirs
controversy (probably unwittingly) in the very title of his book apparently equat-
ing aesthetics with the philosophy of art. This premise, though widely assumed,
is wrong; there is much in aesthetics which has nothing to do with art, as
evidenced by revived interest in the aesthetics of nature. However, of the three
authors, Graham offers the most detailed discussion of particular art forms,
notably music, painting, poetry, film, and architecture. Colin Lyas and Dabney
Townsend barely mention these last two. Indeed Townsend’s book, which is the
most densely analytical of the monographs, seldom engages with actual forms of
art, far less individual works. His concerns are more abstract: what kinds of
objects works of art are, what kinds of theories are appropriate to them. Colin
Lyas in his racy, impassioned, introduction aims to spark constructive puzzle-
ment and wonder in his (undergraduate) readers at the pleasures afforded by art
and to nudge them towards philosophical questioning. He cultivates an engag-
ingly populist tone, stressing that the puzzles arise equally for his readers’
assumed taste for pop music as for the great canonical works. Nevertheless, he
makes it difficult for himself in proposing Benedetto Croce’s ‘expression’ as the
defining feature of art, an idea that even the most dedicated professionals find
obscure.
Before turning to the issues in detail, it is worth pausing a bit longer on the
range of topics. In fact one can notice both a breadth and a narrowness in the
approaches of these introductory texts, which, including the anthologies, are
aimed at an undergraduate readership. They are narrow in two respects, the first
a matter of fact, the second a matter of interest. First, they are resolutely ‘analytic’
in philosophical style and citation. None gives space to the likes of Heidegger,
Adorno, Benjamin, Ingarden, Gadamer, Bakhtin, Lukács, Foucault, Bourdieu, or
Eco. So be it. There isn’t room for everyone. But it shows once again how easily
reading lists in philosophy split into ‘camps’. Jacques Derrida is the exception.
Both Lyas and Graham discuss Derrida’s version of poststructuralism, although
both hover near caricature. For Lyas there is an ‘apocalyptic’ and a domesticated
Derrida; the former denies the possibility of communication and faces an obvious
reductio, the latter is simply a neo-Rylean denying the Cartesian self-as-substance.
Graham stresses the Derrida who gives ascendancy to ‘play’ and believes ‘no
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3. interpretation can be wrong’. More tellingly, Graham reflects on an approach to
art associated with ‘Marxism and the sociology of art’ – which encompasses at
least some of the aforementioned names – arguing that it is in danger of incoher-
ence in both purporting to give a theory of art at the same time rejecting any
essentialist ahistorical conception of art. ‘What’, Graham asks, ‘is the Marxist
theory of art a theory of?’
The second, more interesting, narrowness of these texts is what might be called
their cultural parochialism. There is scant recognition, except in Feagin and
Maynard, of artistic traditions other than that of Western Europe. Yet how confi-
dent should Lyas be that his Crocean expression theory applies, say, to Chinese
calligraphy or ancient Egyptian funerary art? The point is not the glib complaint
of ‘Eurocentrism’. Aesthetics, unlike philosophy of mind or epistemology, faces
deep methodological problems about its scope and generality, its universalist
ambitions confronting culture-bound relativism. Can aesthetics do more than
merely map the contours of particular artistic traditions and aesthetic sensibili-
ties? Only Feagin and Maynard address the issue, albeit halfheartedly, and I will
return to it.
Even given the philosophical and cultural narrowness of these texts it is
remarkable how different they are in the placing of emphasis and selection of
topics. This I take to be a good sign for the health of the subject. There is no
standard line trotted out. Gordon Graham gives focus to what he calls ‘norma-
tive theory’ which takes as fundamental not ‘What is art?’ but ‘What is valu-
able about the arts?’ The answer he develops is a form of ‘cognitivism’. More
on that later. Feagin and Maynard include virtually nothing on cognitivism in
their fifty-seven chosen items. They highlight emotional responses to art; they
have a section on expression, although without Croce; they favour taxonomies
of the arts over the definitional debate; they have eclectic bits on inter-
pretation (Wollheim, Danto, Sontag) and evaluation (Ducasse, Schapiro,
Hume, Isenberg); and they struggle to find entries on creativity (only Kant – on
genius – has much to say of substance). Neill and Ridley have assembled
debates (pairs of essays) none of which directly confronts the bread-and-butter
issues but which taken together afford the clearest insight into where sparky
controversies lie. The section on forgery sheds light on identity conditions and
value assessments; the papers on photography and musical profundity illus-
trate, among other things, the problems of ascribing intentionality and ‘about-
ness’ to art; the essays on appreciating nature explore the role of background –
even scientific – knowledge in appreciation. Lyas, as already noted, gives
prominence to ‘expression’ and, rejecting the once fashionable ‘family resem-
blance’ view, bravely attempts to define art with necessary and sufficient
conditions. Dabney Townsend takes a different line again, somewhat surpris-
ingly labelling his preferred outlook ‘postmodern’, a step beyond imitation
theories and theories of aesthetic experience. This next step is historically and
institutionally oriented, according to which an art world creates the very
possibility of aesthetic production. Curiously, he does not discuss Arthur
Danto.
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4. II
It is striking how little space is given to the definition of art. There was a time
when one could barely begin doing aesthetics without tackling the question
‘What is art?’ Nowadays courses on aesthetics might expect to run through the
standard theories – imitation, expression, ‘significant form’, functionalism, insti-
tutionalism – if only to show the weaknesses of each before moving to another
topic. Townsend follows this path, with characteristic scrupulousness; Graham
prefers to move on quickly. Of course there is no reason why aesthetics should
get hung up on the definitional question, any more than other branches of philos-
ophy stall on ‘what is mind?’, ‘what is knowledge?’, ‘what is goodness?’ But the
peculiarity of ‘what is art?’ lies in the cat-and-mouse game the question encour-
ages between philosophers and artists themselves. A philosopher who purports
to find the essence of art provokes the artist to show the inessentiality of that
essence: up to the point, if Danto is right, when artists turn into philosophers
making the undefinability of art the very subject-matter of their work. The power
of institutional theories is that they can both be essentialist (offering defining
conditions for art) and outmanoeuvre the mischievous artist. But the price is high
for it means, in most versions, that whatever artists call art becomes art. And that
seems to forsake any substantive conception. Lyas is right that institutional theo-
ries, the kind that make art dependent on acceptance by an ‘art world’, apart from
being susceptible to circularity, fail to account for the value or power of art.
Lyas takes the unfashionable route of offering an essentialist definition which
does not rely on relational (historical, institutional) properties. He thinks that
Croce has got it right in identifying art with expression. Being an expression, in
Croce’s sense, is, Lyas believes, both necessary and sufficient for being art. It is a
strong claim and Lyas does his persuasive best to make it plausible. But for
several reasons he surely fails. Croce’s account of expression is rooted in episte-
mology and psychology (in fact Townsend offers a fuller explanation of the epis-
temology of expression than does Lyas). Expression, for Croce, is the way the
human mind organises the inchoate stimuli presented by the senses. The aesthetic
is at the core of this activity (an appealing feature of Croce’s theory for aestheti-
cians) for through aesthetic ‘intuition’ the mind produces representations of
particulars. Thus expression both helps us make sense of the world and provides
therapeutic relief from the pain of confusion. So far, so good. Lyas notes the
Kantianism in Croce.
The step to art, though, is never fuller explained. It is too easy to move from
references to the aesthetic to generalisations about art. No doubt there are paral-
lels between the artist’s struggle to mould a medium into a coherent vision and
the mental processes required of us all in constructing an objective world. But
there are disanalogies as well, not least the fundamentally different starting
points. Lyas (even more so than Croce) makes the leap quickly – too quickly – to
art, stressing the way artists seek just the right word or painted line or musical
chord to express themselves precisely. Before we know it, art has become expres-
sion (and vice versa).
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5. This is not the only sleight of hand. Expression begins as a process of mind, a
kind of psychic organisation. Through an imperceptible slide, it becomes, for
Lyas, a property of works. Take what he says about art criticism. At first Lyas
insists that the critic must ‘grasp … [the] expression’ of the artist (on Croce’s
account, something in the artist’s mind). He endorses Wollheim’s notion of ‘crit-
icism as retrieval’ (an essay reprinted in Feagin and Maynard). All this is rooted
in psychology. But soon Lyas is speaking of ‘the articulated expression in the
work’ and ‘organic unity’. The aim of criticism now becomes that of showing how
the parts contribute to the overall effect. When he gets round to putting theory
into practice (in Chapter 5) – showing how ‘a conception of art as expression
helps … with puzzling cases of avant-garde art’ – he starts his examination of
Duchamp’s Fontaine, ‘as all good appreciation starts’, by ‘letting [his] imagination
engage in a play controlled by the work’. ‘What’, he asks, ‘do fountains suggest
to me?’ So much for ‘retrieval’.
Gordon Graham, following an argument from John Hospers, puts his finger on
the slide here, though he writes about Collingwood rather than Croce. Expression
theory at its simplest (Graham calls it ‘expressivism’ and singles out Tolstoy as a
clear proponent) holds that the work of art is an expression of an artist’s actual
emotion(s). Such a theory, though widely popular, is easy to refute, at least as a
generalisation across the arts (John Hospers produced knock-down arguments in
Hospers 1955 – Feagin and Maynard give snippets from Tolstoy and Hospers on
expression, but not from the 1955 piece). For Tolstoy artists seek to ‘infect’ others
with the emotions expressed. This is psychologism through and through.
Collingwood offers a version of expressivism somewhat less psychologistic,
insisting that attention be directed to the work rather than to idiosyncracies of the
artist’s mind but he holds onto the view that ‘the artist’s business is to express
emotions; and the only emotions he can express are those which he feels’. The
Hospers/Graham move – now a commonplace in aesthetics – is to distinguish
‘being an expression of’ and ‘being expressive of’; crudely, the former refers back
to the artist, the latter to the work alone. The simple point that is most damaging
to the Croce-Lyas view is that it is possible to identify expressive properties of
works without reference to psychological states either which an artist strives to
express or those aroused in an audience. This break with psychologism – seem-
ingly reflected in Lyas’ actual practice – amounts, so Graham convincingly
argues, to an abandonment of expressivism.
Lyas seems content to strip away most of the epistemological and psychologi-
cal origins of expression, which becomes, in the end, little more than an utterance
or artifact which ‘gets it right’, serves its purpose with clarity and precision, is
coherent between part and whole. These are archetypical aesthetic properties but
have no necessary dependence on therapeutic states of mind. Is Lyas still a
Crocean?
His neo-Croceanism emerges in two striking claims, neither, I think, sustain-
able. The first is that ‘“art” and “expression” have the same intension but a differ-
ent extension’. Even apart from breaching the basic semantic principle that
intension determines extension, that seems bizarre. When I say that I noted the
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6. sad expression on your face, not only am I not referring to art but I do not mean
anything about art either. Not all uses of ‘expression’ mean the same as ‘art’.
Behind Lyas’ point is the Crocean thought that there is no difference in kind
between simple expressions (like saying ‘I love you’) and complex art (like The
Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock – Lyas’ examples). This accords with his populism.
There is only a difference of degree between the great masterpieces and what you
and I can do. But if ‘art’ and ‘expression’ mean the same, how can they have
different extensions? It is, Lyas says, just an ‘accident of language’ that the term
‘art’ is applied less widely (with no implications for meaning?). It is tempting to
see a mirror image of institutionalism in Lyas’ account. For the institutionalist
nothing is art until it is called ‘art’ by the art world; for Lyas everything is art but
the snobbish art world agrees to call only a small subset ‘art’.
The second striking claim (or ‘conjecture’) arises from the first, that ‘the only
division that we need is between things that are made and things that are not, art
and nature’: ‘all made things are art’ (p. 103). The trouble is squaring this hypoth-
esis with Lyas’ own project. There is no reason to think that everything made is
an expression, even in the loosest sense of the term. And what becomes of the
‘power’ of art if art is so ubiquitous and mundane? The main problem, though, is
that the aesthetic and the artistic get run together. Aesthetic concerns no doubt
are ubiquitous; to the extent that anything made is designed there will be a
concern with how it looks as well as how it works. Lyas writes:
Aesthetics, for example, although it may involve us with works of
grandeur and complexity, and with grandiose concepts like beauty and
sublimity, has its roots in the kinds of things that we do when, for exam-
ple, we reject a jacket because the lapels look too wide. If this were not so
we could not learn aesthetic terms (p. 101).
This is exactly right but it shows that aesthetic terms and judgements apply well
beyond works of art. It does not show that jackets and lapels are works of art.
III
For Lyas, the value of art lies in the possibilities of expression. For Graham it lies
in modes of understanding. The difference goes deep. Cognitivism, after all, gets
little purchase at the lower end of Lyas’ scale. Graham makes art’s capacity to
enhance understanding absolutely central to the role of art in human lives. It
explains how art can have a serious place in education; it provides a way of
discriminating between works; it accounts for the prominence in critical vocabu-
lary of terms like ‘insight’ and ‘profundity’ (terms, he claims, that sit ill with
expressivism). Graham’s account is subtle and seductive but on closer examina-
tion yields somewhat less than it promises.
From the start Graham characterises his version of cognitivism by using
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7. metaphors: art enriches understanding, it illuminates and helps us explore experi-
ence, it directs the mind, it broadens our horizons. There is nothing wrong with
metaphors in philosophy but their use in this case increases the impression that
art stands to understanding in a somewhat less than straightforward manner.
Indeed that is Graham’s view. The importance of art is not that of imparting infor-
mation. We can learn from art – but not exactly truths (Graham does not defend
the ‘truth’ of art). Art yields understanding in ways quite different from science
and philosophy; there is no obvious ‘logic’ of inquiry and no clear route from
‘established ground’ to ‘terminus’. There are no theories expounded. The imagi-
nation is all-important so, in Graham’s example, while it would be a serious fault
in a guidebook to depict Salisbury Cathedral from an angle from which it could
never be seen we do not censure Constable’s well-known painting for doing just
that. Similarly when Macbeth says ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ it would be crass
to counter by remarking that life’s not as bad as Macbeth/Shakespeare makes
out. We should not insist on simple correspondences between art and life.
‘[R]ather than checking art against the world’ we should ‘think about bringing art
to the world’. So in the Macbeth case we should think of the speech as constitut-
ing an image ‘not just of one man’s mood but of despair itself’. In this way we
move from the particular to the universal. Works of art ‘take the form of imagi-
native creations which can be brought to everyday experience as a way of order-
ing and illuminating it’ (pp. 53–62).
The bulk of Graham’s book consists in applying this account to individual art
forms. He sees it not as a definition of art nor as an exclusive account of art’s value
but as part of a ‘normative’ theory. Here is the application to visual art:
First, by forcing our attention to pure visual experience, it [visual art]
may lead us to explore that experience. Second, by providing us with
visual images of emotion and character, painting and sculpture may
heighten our awareness ... of those states in ourselves and in others. But,
third, if it cannot supply us with any ‘philosophy’, it may nevertheless
broaden the horizons of our understanding by imagining possibilities
and giving form to things whose substance is in doubt (p. 98).
Few would deny that there must be something right here. The metaphors –
exploring experience, heightening awareness, broadening horizons – have a reas-
suring ring about them. Yet consider how little is being said: only that these
vague, if desirable, outcomes ‘may’ occur.
What is obviously right is that we take seriously the great works of visual art
(painting and sculpture). They have an impact on us, we cannot remain indiffer-
ent to them, their images become lodged in our consciousness, they even change
the way we view the world. On the latter, Wilde was especially astute in his bon
mot that ‘Nature imitates Art’:
At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets
and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.
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8. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. … But no one saw
them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till
Art had invented them (Oscar Wilde, in Feagin and Maynard, p. 41).
Literature is another strong case for Graham’s cognitivist intuitions: ‘Novels and
poems supply patterns of human relationship, its fulfilment, destruction, or
corruption, and these can enter directly into the moral experience of those who
are reflecting upon how best to live, because the devices of art reveal to us the
internal “how it feels” as well as the external “how it is”’ (p. 129).
Few would dispute such facts. But has Graham established that ‘enriching
understanding’ is at the core of art’s value? I think not. For a start, too much
hangs on the inherent vagueness of the metaphors. ‘Enhance’, ‘enrich’,
‘heighten’, ‘illuminate’ are all positive value terms and are reinforced by the
value conventionally attached to art. But what exactly is an understanding that
is ‘enriched’? Part of the answer might lie in this last quotation where an under-
standing of ‘how it is’ is enriched when it includes an understanding of ‘how it
feels’. But learning from art how it feels (or, in another idiom, ‘what it is like’) is
by no means as clear as it might seem. Does it, for example, mean actually expe-
riencing the feeling? But empathetic response to art, apart from being relatively
rare, seems somehow unsophisticated and immature, hardly the root of artistic
value. Yet if it is not sharing the feeling, what is the mark of understanding ‘how
it feels’? Perhaps it is another feeling: feeling that we understand how it feels.
But to cite any such psychological effect takes us, at best, into the realm of instru-
mental values.
In general it is legitimate to ask of the special kind of understanding Graham
associates with art what evidence exists of its presence. It is not hard to test
understanding in more familiar contexts. We know when a child understands a
mathematical problem, a foreign language, or a warning not to misbehave. What
are the marks of someone’s having acquired an ‘enriched understanding’ of
human nature from exposure to the arts? We would not expect, on Graham’s own
admission, that they are more knowledgeable about facts or theories or well-
versed in the subtleties of psychology, social science or philosophy. Art is not
cognitive in that sense. Perhaps it is practical knowledge or wisdom (phronesis)
we might expect, a marked sensitivity to others, or sympathy, or open-minded-
ness. Yet, I contend, there is absolutely no empirical evidence that those with the
closest exposure to the arts – teachers, museum curators, collectors, artists them-
selves – stand out as especially wise or clear-thinking individuals. More to the
point no-one expects that they should.
Nor is it obvious in our everyday attitudes that we look to the arts as a source
of worldly understanding. A good reason for going to a natural history museum
is that we want to learn about evolution, fossils, etc. A good reason for reading
Hume’s Treatise is that we want a deeper understanding of epistemology. Yet
who would offer as a reason for going to an art gallery that they want to enrich
their understanding of human nature or learn about themselves? A far better
(more natural) reason would be the simple desire to see and enjoy the works,
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9. think about them, maybe pass judgement on them, or even learn about an artist,
period or style.
Graham’s mistake is to concentrate on the effects of art. Yet it is only a small
step back from talking about enhanced understanding to talking about qualities
of works themselves, the kind of step Graham encouraged in the argument
against expressivism. Much of what he says in support of cognitivism keeps the
focus where I believe it should be. Thus the following seems precisely right: ‘It is
in literature – poems, novels, plays – that our self-images are fashioned with the
greatest complexity and where exploration of the constitutive images of moral
and social life is most obvious’ (p. 129). Fashioning and exploring images of the
self in moral and social life is what literature does best. Such concerns are of
perennial interest and their thematic development in literary works explains the
enduring value of these works (see Lamarque & Olsen 1994). The value lies in the
artistic achievement; appreciation of that achievement is what takes us back to the
works, not the search for a cognitive payoff. If cognition is needed – to stave off
facile hedonism – it can be found deep within appreciation itself which, at its
most serious, requires hard work, thought, reflection, background knowledge, as
well as imagination, open-mindedness, and sensitivity to detail.
Just how strained Graham’s cognitivism is becomes clear when he turns to
other art forms, notably music and architecture. The ideal of architecture, he
argues convincingly, is when ‘the form of a building expresses its function’. Is that
not value enough? No, Graham also wants a learning function: the finest buildings
are ‘vehicles for the exploration and elaboration of certain human ideals’. The
great Gothic cathedrals enhance our understanding of the Christian City of God.
Maybe, but mostly buildings tell us something more mundane, about their
designers or occupants, about power, pride, self-aggrandisement, hubris.
The case of music is interesting for here arguably Graham finds too little,
rather than too much, cognition. The value of music, he claims, boils down to its
‘unique ability to extend and explore aural experience’. Why should that be
important? Graham’s answer seems lame: ‘aural experience is part of human
experience and by enlarging and exploring that aspect of experience, music
assists us in understanding better what it is to be a human being’ (p. 85). Is that
all that can be said about the value of the great symphonies, that they teach us
about the human capacity for hearing?
The problem arises for anyone, like Graham, who denies that music (without
words) is about anything. It surfaces in the debate on profundity in music (in Neill
& Ridley) between Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson and Aaron Ridley. Kivy takes a
reductive line, similar to Graham’s, though he believes there is something right in
the idea that certain musical works are profound. His view, in Levinson’s
summary, is that ‘music is profound when it is about the possibilities of musical
sound and displays or explores these possibilities with the utmost craftsmanship’
(pp. 255–6). Levinson and Ridley find this too reductive (as I do) and seek to
show, in their different ways, how the emotional expressiveness of music can
provide a more substantial source of profundity. The important point, which
concurs with a central thought of Graham’s, is to separate aboutness from assertion
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10. or truth. A piece of music can be about an emotion and, in Graham’s favoured term,
‘explore’ that emotion profoundly, forcing an imaginative engagement in listeners,
without making any truth-claim, without requiring assent or dissent, and without
being quasi-linguistic. Profundity is a property of a work bearing on subject matter
(aboutness of this kind) and manner of presentation. This is where we should look
for the cognitive element of art, not in enriched cognitive states in appreciators.
IV
The anthology edited by Feagin and Maynard is ambitious and thoughtful.
Familiar names are present – Aristotle, Batteux, Bell, through Hegel, Kant and
Mill, to Tolstoy, Walton and Ziff – but not all are philosophers or so familiar.
Overall the selection is imaginative, with a broad sweep, if at times frustrating in
the heavy editing and incisions. The bibliography is lazy. Only Sartre’s Nausea is
listed, nothing of his on literature or the imagination. The only Wilde (excluding
the snippet from ‘The Decay of Lying’) is – good grief! – The Importance of Being
Earnest, whose charm rests on its containing absolutely no philosophical ideas.
Under ‘A Variety of Aesthetics’ nothing non-Western is listed.
Early on the editors state that ‘an important initiative of this collection is to
draw attention to the neglected field of multiple aesthetics’ (p. 5). This promises
well and potentially sets apart the collection from the other introductions. But,
disappointingly, little comes of it. The items representing non-Western aesthetics
are a motley. Four tiny extracts, three in poetic form, from Early Chinese Texts on
Painting provide no deep insight into Chinese aesthetic principles. No elaboration
is offered (how, for example, should we understand ‘natural genius’ in the 11th
century Su Shih’s text?). Something of Japanese aesthetic sensibility emerges from
Kakuzo Okakura’s piece on the tea-room and the novelist Tanizaki’s well-known
‘In Praise of Shadows’ but there is nothing about Japanese artistic traditions.
Otherwise, there is an informative piece by an anthropologist on forms of artistry
by the Gola people of Liberia (especially helpful is the attempt to explain the
concepts by which the people themselves describe their activities) and a shorter,
somewhat less instructive, piece on bowl designs from Northwest American
Indians.
What is missing is any reflection on how these ‘multiple aesthetics’ impinge on
the philosophical enterprise called ‘aesthetics’. How universal can philosophical
aesthetics be? A number of distinctions might get the debate going. The first is
between the aesthetic per se and the artistic: the former concerning the pleasures
of beauty, harmony, or form in any manifestation, touching matters psychologi-
cal, the latter concerning a class of valued cultural artifacts, which looks more
anthropological. Another distinction is between an insider’s and an outsider’s or
(in Michael Baxandall’s terms, from a piece in Feagin and Maynard) a partici-
pant’s and an observer’s view of social practices, including the creation and
reception of art. The insider engages in a practice, taking its meanings, values,
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11. and rules for granted, often without formulation or self-awareness; the outsider,
usually not also a participant, adopts a detached ‘scientific’ attitude, seeking
‘explanations’, and employing a vocabulary different from that of insiders. A
third distinction is between two roles for aesthetics, internalist and externalist.
Internalist aesthetics – in the sense in which we speak of Chinese or Japanese or
‘Western’ aesthetics – maps a particular culture, its aesthetic sensibilities and its
artistic traditions, it analyses insiders’ concepts and discourse, and provides a ratio-
nale for critical evaluations and modes of interpretation. Strikingly, it is not always
obvious to those doing internalist aesthetics that that is what they are doing; their
methods might be objective and analytical, their aspirations towards universal truth.
Thus, for example, Aristotle on tragedy, Kant on genius, Hume on taste, and Burke
on the sublime (all items in Feagin & Maynard) represent internalist perspectives,
for tragedy, genius, taste and sublime are concepts rooted in a distinct (‘Western’)
cultural tradition, just as mono no aware (the sadness of things), yugen (mysterious
beauty) and sabi (rustic simplicity) are embedded in Japanese aesthetics.
Externalism in aesthetics can take different forms, e.g. sociological (often
inspired by Marxism, as criticised by Graham), sceptical (postmodernist, perhaps,
rejecting the category of the aesthetic and the values on which art is based), and
philosophical. The philosophical externalist approach, motivated by universal-
ism, strives for a level of abstraction which generalises across all artistic traditions
and all aesthetic sensibilities. For its subject matter it examines, typically, inten-
tional objects, depiction, ontology, fictionality, ideology, symbolism, and so forth.
Such an approach (exemplified by Townsend) looks unimpeachably ‘philosophi-
cal’ – but at the same time somewhat remote from ‘aesthetics’.
This is precisely the dilemma facing the discipline, one that talk of ‘multiple
aesthetics’ should have exposed and debated. The more universalist and exter-
nalist aesthetics becomes the further removed it is from any cultural tradition and
the more it threatens to vanish into metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral
philosophy, or epistemology. On the other hand, the more internalist it is, explor-
ing specific cultural concepts, and linking into art criticism and history, the more
parochial, in global terms, its subject matter appears. (For more on this, see
Lamarque, forthcoming.)
Curiously the only hint of this dilemma in Feagin & Maynard comes from the
problematic quarter of ‘feminist aesthetics’, a topic ignored by the three mono-
graphs but raised in both anthologies. Feminist aesthetics, characteristically, chal-
lenges universalism. What have been taken as universal truths, about the values
of art or the nature of aesthetic experience, are, so feminists argue, nothing of the
kind; they are, rather, deeply imbued with gender-bias. Again, though, Feagin
and Maynard miss an opportunity here to consolidate a thesis about ‘multiple
aesthetics’. Instead of looking to philosophers, they give space only to feminist art
historians – Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock – who, although showing in
telling ways how Victorian attitudes to women are manifested in representational
painting (Nochlin) and the rise of modernism (Pollock), have little to say about
aesthetics. There is nothing inherently revolutionary about examining how
women are depicted in painting. Identifying hitherto unremarked aspects and
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12. attitudes is the very stuff of art criticism (nor does the angry rhetoric change the
status). In contrast, Mary Devereaux, in a piece in Neill & Ridley, pushes the
stakes higher, demanding a ‘new paradigm’, a ‘conceptual revolution’, and chal-
lenging the ‘autonomy’ of aesthetics (and of art).
Feminism, in Devereaux’s picture, might offer a new emphasis in art criticism
or perhaps a sociological externalist perspective on aesthetics itself. Neither,
though, amounts to a new kind of aesthetics. What feminism cannot offer is an
alternative internalist aesthetics, in the above sense, simply because women do
not constitute an autonomous cultural community, with a recognizably distinct
set of practices, traditions, concepts, etc. Women – like men – represent too
heterogeneous a group for any interesting cultural generalisations to apply.
Reading or viewing ‘as a woman’ only becomes a substantive critical parameter
when other cultural factors – nationality, historical situation, class, education, age
– are taken into account and the latter are likely to trump gender alone. To
suppose otherwise is either to hold an unwarranted essentialism or represents
another kind of cultural parochialism.
V
A final evaluation. My first choice for a core text in an undergraduate course
would be Neill & Ridley. On every topic their lively collection stimulates thought.
Feagin & Maynard, an impressive and magisterial survey of the subject, is more
suitable as a source book for dipping into. Townsend is the most solid on argu-
ments for and against standard positions and could be recommended as an infor-
mative guide on any one of them. Lyas is the man for a palatable Croceanism and
Graham for a defence of cognitivism. Their books are attractive and readable but,
as I have shown, I am not persuaded by the lines they take.
Peter Lamarque
Department of Philosophy
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
England
REFERENCES
Hospers, J. (1955), ‘The Concept of Artistic Expression’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 55, pp. 313-44.
Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S. H. (1994) Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lamarque, P. (forthcoming), ‘The Aesthetic and the Universal’, in Journal of Aesthetic
Education.
100 Peter Lamarque
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