http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2018/10/impure-aesthetics/
This is in a sense just a teleological way of stating the principle of “disinterestedness” that Kant inherited from earlier writers on aesthetics: If we judge a table for its usefulness as a platform for food and drink, we are not making an aesthetic judgment. We have to evaluate without any notion of end.
Combined with this is Kant’s recognition that any artistic object is, inherently, purposive. That is because the artist at least intended to evoke pleasure, satisfaction, or provocation from his viewers. Natural beauty, by contrast, is not purposive, since, in Kant’s view, it is not an artistic product with a definite end.
As a result, Schaeffer writes, “artificial beauty is aesthetically less central than natural beauty it never elicits are pure aesthetic judgment,” that is, a judgment purified of interest and intent.
This has some disagreeable consequences.
It means that for Kant, artistic objects are most effective when they conceal their artificiality; there is an inherent deceptiveness in art. Truth and artistic beauty seem uncoupled at a basic level. It also means, Schaeffer says, that the art “most in conformity with the pure judgment of taste will be purely decorative art,” since “canonical arts” are either representational or are linked to a use (like architecture, or music composed for singing).
But the problem is more fundamental for Kant, since this conclusion that decorative art is the most purely aesthetic of human products “collides head-on with another Kantian thesis, according to which purely decorative works belong to the category of the agreeable rather than to the beautiful, for they please chiefly at the level of empirical sensation.”
Kant’s theory of genius is an effort to sidestep or overcome this contradiction. A genius is a kind of conduit of nature; his works are not the product of the application of rules, but a product of an inexplicable inspiration.
But this doesn’t help Kant much. Even genius painters have to know how to mix and apply paint, purely mechanical matters. Besides, genius, Kant wants to say, produce works of art that are exemplary, both for other geniuses and for pupils who are not geniuses. Pupils can abstract from the exemplary works of their genius master rules by which they reproduce works similar to their master’s.
Schaeffer asks: “if the work remains essentially opaque to the genius who produced it, and even to the genius-disciples who are inspired by it . . . , by what miracle can it become transparent for ordinary receivers who can only be imitators?” Indeed.
All these problems arise because of Kant’s obsession with purity. He wants aesthetic judgment purified of interest; aesthetic objects purified of intentionality; aesthetic judgments purified of any concept that would bring them back into the realm of pure or practical reason.
Hamann, again, got it right: The better aesthetics is the impure aesthetics, the aesthetics that recognizes the coinherence of reason and sensation, an incarnational aesthetics that unfolds the aesthetic consequences of the communicatio idiomatum.
To borrow terminology provided in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, there is a System 1 way of thinking and a System 2 way of thinking. System 1 is what we colloquially think of as the realm of intuition, of immediately grasping whole patterns, the part of the brain or the mind that can, simply in observing things, assesses spatial relationships or patterns. System 2 is what we colloquially think of as the analytical, rule-establishing and procedural reason, the reason that is brought in and trained for scholarly thought or explicitly and consciously involved in problem-solving. From the Romantic era on in Western art these two systems of thought often get put in opposing corners in aesthetics and artistic education and analysis ... even if there would not necessarily have been such an opposition between System 1 and System 2 in earlier or even subsequent eras of artistic analysis or creation.
One of the perennial problems in analysis and art history is that System 1 and System 2 very often don't overlap in terms of creation or analysis. There are all kinds of reasons for this but one reason was articulated by Leonard B. Meyer as follows:
STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4
page 10
The constraints of a style are learned by composers and performers, critics and listeners. Usually such learning is largely the result of experience in performing and listening rather than of explicit formal instruction in music theory, history, or composition. In other words, knowledge of style is usually "tacit": that is, a matter of habits properly acquired (internalized) and appropriately brought into play. Even when a composer invents a new rule or, more commonly, discovers a novel strategy for realizing some existing rule, the invention or discovery may be largely tacit. He or she finds a relationship that works but may be unable to explain why it does so--how it is related to other features and other constraints of the style.
It is the goal of music theorists and style analysts to explain what the composer, performer, and listener know in this tacit way.
from footnote 18 on page 10
Textbooks dealing with harmony, counterpoint, form, and so on, are not, despite customary usage, theoretical treatises, explaining the bases for the constraints employed in some style. Rather they are practical manuals of how-to-do-it rules. They bear the same relationship to theory of music as an instruction book for radio repairing bears to the theory of radio transmission, or, more to the point, they bear the same relationship to the theory and analysis of music as an English grammar of the eighteenth century bears to the style of, say, the poetry of William Blake.
Meyer went on to invoke Searle on the distinction between types of rules, Searle using the example of a game.
pages 11-12
Let us imagine a group of highly trained observers describing an American football game in statements only of brute facts. What could they say by way of description? Well, within certain areas a good deal could be said, and using statistical techniques certain "laws" could even be formulated. For example, we can imagine that after a time our observer would discover the law of periodic clustering: at statistically regular intervals organisms in like colored shirts cluster together in a roughly circular fashion (the huddle). Furthermore, at equally regular intervals, circular clustering is followed by linear clustering (the teams line up to play), and linear clustering is followed by the phenomenon of linear interpenetration. Such laws would be statistical in character, and none the worse for that. But no matter how much data of this sort we imagine our observers to collect and no matter how many inductive generalizations we imagine them to make from the data, they still have not described American football. What is missing from their description? What is missing are all those concepts, which are backed by constitutive rules, concepts such as touchdown, offside, game, points, first down, time out, etc., and consequently what is missing are all the true statements one can make about a football game using those concepts. The missing statements are precisely what describe the phenomenon on the field as a game of football. The other descriptions, the descriptions of the brute facts, can be explained in terms of institutional facts. But the institutional facts can only be explained in terms of the constitutive rules which underlie them.
[John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, 1969]
pages 11-12
... One can list and count traits--say, the frequency of sforzandi in Beethoven's music or the number of deceptive cadences in Wagner's operas--till the end of time; but if nothing is known about their functions (structural, processive, expressive, and so on), it will be impossible to explain why they are there, how their presence is related to other features observed, or why their frequency changes over time. Such traits may even serve as reasonably reliable "identifiers" of Beethoven's or Wagner's style, yet contribute nothing to our understanding of how the style functions. Put in another way; all the traits (characteristic of some work or set of works) that can be described and counted are essentially symptoms of the presence of a set of interrelated constraints. What the theorist and the analyst want to know about are the constraints of the style in terms of which the replicated patternings observed can be related to one another and to the experience of the works of art.
But we are not precisely in the same position as Searle's observers. They can find knowledgeable informants in the grandstand or on the playing field who can tell them what the rules are; indeed the rules of football are written down and can be studied. In the arts, however, the constraints governing the choices made are seldom explicitly recorded or consciously conceptualized, even by those most accomplished in their use. As we have seen, they are usually known tacitly. As a result the theorist/style analyst must infer the nature of the constraints--the rules of the game--from the play of the game itself. [emphasis added]
The gap between what in Searle's taxonomy of cognition can be thought of as "brute facts" (what you just saw that went on in the football game) and "institutional facts" (knowing what on earth any of those events mean "as a game of football") is one of the longstanding gaps in art theory and practice on the production side and the reception side.
Meyer explained how much the Romantic era thinkers on art and artists themselves leaned on what in Kahneman's terms would be System 1 thinking.
page 176
... The Romantic affirmation of the primacy of unconscious, spontaneous inspiration growing out of individual emotion, and the concomitant denial and denigration of the claims of consciousness and shared rationality, result in a curious, almost paradoxical dichotomy between the creative act and the aesthetic object. For though reason plays virtually no role in inspired creation, the relationships that are prized in works of art result from the inevitability and inner logic of organic development.
page 221
The valuing of individual inner experience is evident in the shift from the eighteenth-century idea that music represented emotions (affects) to the nineteenth century belief that music expressed the feeling of the composer.
Goethe:
Feeling is all in all; the name is sound and smoke, obscuring heaven's pure glow.
"Feeling" does not have to be feeling as we might understand it, as emotions, it can be an invocation that things worth understanding can be understood at an intuitive level. As Daniel Kahneman put it in Thinking Fast and Slow, 80 to 90 percent of the time our System 1 thinking gets things right so quickly we don't even have time to consciously think about the reality of our brain thinking. The trouble is, of course, and thus one of the reasons for the book, is that when our System 1 patterns of thinking for the brain jump to the wrong conclusion we jump to categorically and often catastrophically wrong conclusions.
To reformulate this observation in terms of the gap between Romantic and 20th century modernist and avant garde arte, constant appeals to the innate rightness of System 1 intuitionist art could make sense because the underlying constraints or "rules of the game" were not in question in the Romantic era in practical terms. Sure, Anton Reicha could theorize about the viability of quarter-tones and his student Franz Liszt could do the same but absent instruments that could habitually produce those quarter tones theorizing about quarter tones inside of chromatic half steps in equal tempered instruments was just that, theorizing.
The emergence of dodecaphonic music in the wake of nascent atonality; the emergence of symmetrical scales and what Messiaen termed modes of limited transposition; cumulatively these different approaches to dividing up octaves and the practical realization of instruments and instrumental techniques that split the chromatic minor second into multiple tones broke down what in the Romantic era had been the "innate" foundation of the creative game. Romantic and post-Romantic grandstanding about how you could break all the rules of X or Y at some formal level because the bedrock of tonality wasn't going anywhere was shown up to be contingent.
A way to translate the shock of this revolution in musical terms, specifically, would be to say the early 20th century modernists such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern in the West, or Scriabin or a Debussy for that matter, let alone a Wyschnedgradsky or a Haba or a Cowell or an Ives, was we could perhaps too lightly suggest that with a bit of help from System 2 analytical thinking these composers looked at what 19th century conventions regarded as bedrock, the chromatic scale in equal temperament, and asked point blank why THIS was the bedrock of musical thought and activity. It wasn't for centuries so why did it have ot keep being the bedrock for musical activity moving forward from, say, 1914?
In light of subsequent criticism of the legacy of Kant via German Idealism one of the criticisms that can be made of Kantian aesthetics is that it doesn’t have room to account for arts that call attention to their own artifice … in a word … the sublime in art is separated as more holy than art that calls attention to itself that in English would colloquially be known as “camp”. There wasn't necessarily a lot of room in German and German-influenced aesthetics and other philosophy about art that left room for artists to make art that recognized and reveled in its own artifice.
While in theory Romantic era artists and thinkers wanted people to cast off the hidebound rules and follow their instincts, so to speak, this was largely a rhetorical claim made with an understanding that there were twelve chromatic half steps dividing the octave. There were no suppositions that the octave could be divided into 53 pitches governed by wildly different sets of intervals that were, nonetheless, derivable from the overtone series. Xenakis had some fun pointing out the irony of reactionary musicians and arts critics who invoked the overtone series as a defense of tonality who thereby hoped to defend the role of intuition in the arts, because (of course) these defenses were made on the basis of invoking mathematical and scientific parameters. Xenakis was able to see the irony and humor in those who clung to Romanticism as an aesthetic tradition and its musical legacy on the basis of mathematics and science because by the mid-20th century those most eager to defend what we could call art-on-the-basis-of-System 1 thinking were trying to do so on the basis of the most stringent would-be System 2 forms of argument available, never mind that the overtone series wouldn't and couldn't be realized in an equal tempered chromatic scale that gives us just major and minor scales or octatonic and whole-tone scales in the way equal-tempered instruments give those to us. It's not that we can't make fun music using those instruments,obviously, it's that the math deosn't add up, as writers from Xenakis to Ben Johnston have pointed out over the last half century.
Where this may be relevant to 19th century era theorizing from the example of 18th century arts is at this point--the 19th century observers understood 18th century arts on the basis of their ideological and aesthetic concerns and were drawn to artists who became emblematic and canonical in 19th century terms who were not necessarily indicative of what was well-received in 18th century terms. So we get people talking about how so many people were wrong to regard Mozart as having failed to please 18th century audience ideals when, if we took the accounts of how and why Mozart was thought to have failed, we'll see that Mozart perhaps "did" fail in some of his music to connect to audiences based on the conventions the audiences were accustomed to. Not all the time, obviously, because Mozart was able to find success in his life, if not always to the degree he wanted--but it's a post-Romantic mythology that has it that Mozart was better than all the others and that his work, more than those works by a Clementi or a Salieri or a Wagenseil or a Vanhal should be taken as the music to consider (or a Dussek or a Ditters or an Albrechtsberger or ... ).
Having been anti-Romantic in a lot of my sympathies and convictions most of my life I can appreciate the beauty of a lot of Romantic era art, music and literature while not seeing a particularly compelling reason to be tethered to their variety of ideological claims about the arts or the way our brains perceive, understand or appreciate the arts. That so many of the early 20th century avant garde attempted to create new strategies or invent new proverbial rules of the game doesn't mean they were doing so because they were "wrong", which is to say they weren't wrong to try to find new constraints to organize musical development because the supposedly foundational nature of equal tempered chromatic major and minor keys was called into question. As Ben Johnston put it, we can think of that whole realm of music as still valid but a smaller subset of a larger conception of pitch organization that derives from the overtone series.
If there's a faultline between the poptimists and the rockists in musicology debates that seems to keep emerging as an undercurrent or even as a full-blown textual issue, it seems to be a question of camp. Poptimists seem pretty reconciled to the reality of camp in the arts, whereas rockists seem to view all forms of camp as having some kind of general failure of authenticity.
To translate what this can mean in practical terms, there are audiences and critics who don't like to watch movies that break the fourth wall at all or in a "knowing" way--there are those who want to be emotionally manipulated but they don't want to watch something that they believe "knows" is manipulating them emotionally. The verisimilitude of character psychology hinges on a viewer being able to suspend disbelief long enough to "fall for" the emotional and narrative arcs of a story or a song. To borrow Adorno's terminology, there are people who want art to put them under "the spell" and dislike art that is at any point (let alone constantly!) calling attention to its own artifice and perhaps even reveling in it. To give an example from mid-20th century American cinema there are folks who are into Citizen Kane and there are folks who are into Bugs Bunny. There are, of course, people who enjoy both Welles films and Looney Tunes but schools of criticism can emerge which prize one over the other or sets one against the other in terms of being "legitimate" art or not.
I admire music by Beethoven and Mozart, to be sure, but I've written for years that my favorite of the "big three" from that era of music has always been Haydn. That's not likely to change. Haydn was not as long-winded as Beethoven so often was and he never seems as glib (however funny he very often is) as Mozart often seems to have been. Haydn's work has paradoxically been respected into irrelevance since the Romantic era but in an era in which poptimists and rockists debate the merits and demerits of musical idioms and works I believe Haydn's work can be understood from either or both sides of that kind of divide. I also think that Haydn's work (although certainly not just his work!) can give us a potential prototype for ways of thinking about ameliorating ideological and aesthetic barriers that rockists and poptimists like to erect within musicological debates in our own time, not least of which could be a manufactured divide between "high" and "low" in the arts that is predicated on what may, after all, have turned out to be a post Kantian double bind within aesthetics between categories of aesthetic appreciation.
