Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002

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Gaut, Berys, and Lopes, Dominic McIver Lopes, editors.  The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.  London: Routledge, 2001.  pp. xviii + 581.  ISBN 0-415-2-737-1  £60 hbk

Reviewed by

Andy Hamilton 

This Routledge Companion takes the form of 46 short article-length pieces on "The History of Aesthetics", "Aesthetic Theory", "Issues and challenges" and "The individual arts".  It is a very worthwhile collection, with a number of outstanding contributions, some covering undeservedly neglected topics.  The first section covers individual philosophers from Plato to Postmodernism (Barthes and Derrida).  Michael Inwood's "Hegel" offers a pellucid discussion of Hegel's treatment of the history of art, the five fine arts, and the end of art; Simon Glendinning's discussion of Heidegger is pellucid.  The contributors here as elsewhere have clearly been instructed to keep their articles to around twelve pages, though the resulting uniformity means that Kant receives an article little longer than those about Frank Sibley or Medieval Aesthetics.  Hume gets an even briefer treatment because he is discussed together with Hutcheson under the heading of Empiricism - an excellent piece by James Shelley, but a dense and original interpretation rather than a student-directed exposition.  The omission of an entry on Adorno, the most considerable thinker on aesthetics in the last century, is bizarre but characteristic of analytic aesthetics.

Part 2 on "Aesthetic Theory" includes articles by Carolyn Korsmeyer on Taste, Matthew Kieran on Value of art, and Stephen Davies on Definitions of art.  Alan Goldman reprises the persuasive arguments of his book Aesthetic Value (1995, Westview Press) in his very sane article on "The Aesthetic", offering a partial defence of Sibley, and considering the views of Dewey and Beardsley.  Part 3, on "Issues and Challenges", includes a model article by Roger Seamon on "Criticism" - clear and informative for undergraduates, but providing an original contribution to aesthetics, in both respects superior to the comparable entry in Michael Kelly's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998, Oxford). Certainly I learned much from it concerning the historical development of criticism.  Seamon discusses "legislative criticism" as exemplified by Aristotle's Poetics, which declined towards the end of the 17th century in favour of "appreciative description": "the function of the critic changed from legislating artistic practices to filtering increasing artistic production and educating a public in the appreciation of art...although the earlier role lingered on in the imperiously judgmental tone that much early reviewing took", he comments. 

Appreciative description is "'discourse grounding evaluation'...and evaluation is implicit in the description itself.  One cannot properly describe a performance without implicit evaluation, since the very point of the performance is to do something well that is worth doing".  "Criticism is itself a performance, not a science or an academic discipline", he argues; "criticism [is] itself an art" (Seamon's use of "performance" as a fundamental concept is something one might take issue with).  Seamon sees criticism in this sense as "a branch of rhetoric not logic", and rightly comments on how a critic who misunderstands - as William James did Impressionist painting - may nonetheless be illuminating.  Seamon goes on to further distinguish attempts at "analytic criticism", connected with formalist theories of the arts, and "interpretative" and "cultural criticism". 

Other articles in this section include Berys Gaut on Art and ethics, Alex Neill on tragedy and John A. Fisher on "High art versus low art".  As in the case of other discussions, I wonder who apart from philosophers actually uses the term "low art", or even "mass art"; "popular art" seems preferable even though it is itself a problematic term.  Fisher comments against some theorists who argue that the "high/low" distinction is a 20th century invention, that there has always been a tendency to rank arts as higher and lower; but I would argue that this tendency was transformed in the 20th century, since there are higher and more popular versions of each artform.  Fisher approves of Kaplan's comment that there "is a time and place even for popular art.  Champagne and Napoleon brandy are admittedly the best of beverages; but on a Sunday afternoon in the ballpark we want a coke or maybe a glass of beer" (A. Kaplan (1972), "The Aesthetics of the Popular Arts", in J. Hall et al eds Modern Culture and the Arts, McGraw-Hill, p. 62).  But there is a need for a gloss on the claim that "the former is superior to the latter" - perhaps that a life without the former is more impoverished than one without the latter.  Finally, I think effort would have been better spent examining Adorno rather than Noel Carroll on popular culture. 

The final section includes Peter Lamarque on literature, Murray Smith on film and Mark DeBellis on music.  Ed Winters's piece on Architecture raises some central issues in this rather neglected area of aesthetics.  He contrasts content theories both with functionalism, and with Scruton's communitarian conception.  The representational theory is an example of the first, and claims that "the classical building and its elements refer to the primitive building and its elements" (the column refers to the cut-down tree, the capital to the pad that sits the wooden beam atop it, and so on).  On this view, classicism "is not a style.  It is, supposedly, the only intelligible form of architecture".  "Aesthetic functionalism", in contrast, holds that "the form of the building is aesthetically conceived as being appropriate to the utility for which the building was designed", and defines architecture as "the art of building".  Austere functionalism holds that a building is a product of its function if it best facilitates the activity for which it is designed; it regards the conception of function as that used in engineering.  Winters comments that "whatever the claims of [austere functionalist] designers...the look of the works is aesthetically estimable and it seems incredible that this is mere caprice". 

James R. Hamilton's piece on theatre covers an even more  philosophically neglected artform.  He is concerned to undermine the traditional, Aristotelian, text-based view of theatre as enacted poetry or literature; in particular through what he regards as the promising "creation-of-observation-spaces" strategy.  He draws out the interesting asymmetry between theatre on the one hand, and music and dance on the other, in that the latter has a non-audience practice while the former does not.  It would, however, have been good to have some discussion of the views of such as Artaud and Brecht on actor and role (in this respect, the entry in Kelly's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is superior).  But the criticisms I have made of this volume have been relatively minor; in general it is an excellent collection.  I will be recommending many of the articles for my undergraduate Aesthetics course.