The Insistence of Art: Philosophy and Aesthetics after Early Modernity

305 Pages·2016·25.26 MB·English

The Insistence of Art
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The Insistence of Art
Aesthetic Philosophy after Early Modernity
Paul A. Kottman, Editor
Fordham University Press
New York 2017
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Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press
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Publication of the images in “Goya: Secularization and the
Aesthetics of Belief” was supported by a subvention from
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available online at catalog.loc.gov.
Printed in the United States of America
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First edition
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contents
Introduction. The Claim of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy
and Early Modern Artistry
paul a. kottman 1
1. Allegory, Poetic Theology, and Enlightenment Aesthetics
victoria kahn 31
2. Object Lessons: Reifi cation and Renaissance
Epitaphic Poetry
rachel eisendrath 55
3. How Do We Recognize Metaphysical Poetry?
andrew cutrofello 77
4. Literature, Prejudice, Historicity: The Philosophical
Importance of Herder’s Shakespeare Studies
kristin gjesdal 91
5. Reaching Conclusions: Art and Philosophy in Hegel
and Shakespeare
paul a. kottman 116
6. “All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music”
—Except the Art of Music: Reviewing the Contest
of the Sister Arts
lydia goehr 140
7. The Beauty of Architecture at the End of the Seventeenth
Century in Paris, Greece, and Rome
maarten delbeke 170
8. Strokes of Wit: Theorizing Beauty in Baroque Italy
jon r. snyder 194
9. Goya: Secularization and the Aesthetics of Belief
anthony j. cascardi 227
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vi Contents
10. Remembering Isaac: On the Impossibility
and Immorality of Faith
j. m. bernstein 257
List of Contributors 289
Index 293
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introduction
The Claim of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy
and Early Modern Artistry
Paul A. Kottman
Considering the attention paid to artists from the early modern period by
philosophers working in what we now recognize as “aesthetics,” consider-
ing the extent to which artworks and practices of the fi fteenth through the
eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discus-
sions about the arts and their relation to one another, and considering
above all the sheer breadth and scope of the artistic achievements in the
period, it is striking that so little recent effort has been made to understand
the connection between early modern artistic practices and the emergence
of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course of the eighteenth
century.1 It is striking, that is, how seldom nowadays specifi c artworks and
artistic practices are seen as explaining, clarifying, requiring, or embodying
the distinctive set of concerns articulated in that philosophical discipline
we call aesthetics.2 Art is more often taken by philosophers and historians
as a “stand-in” for, or refl ection of, some other question, historical event,
or social event of signifi cance, rather than as being the phenomenon itself.
The ten essays in this volume attempt to remedy this.
Each essay included suggests ways in which the artworks and practices S
of the early modern period show the essentiality of aesthetic experience N
1
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2 Paul A. Kottman
for philosophical refl ection, and in particular for the rise of aesthetics as a
philosophical discipline, while also showing art’s need for philosophy. Each
contribution teaches us by example how we might better grasp central ar-
tistic and philosophical preoccupations of the preceding centuries and our
own time, by asking after both early modern art’s claim on philosophy and
philosophical realizations of the claim of art.
This broad historical framing—“early modern art” and “modern aes-
thetics” —implies some delineations concerning, for instance, the divide
that separates the cultures of the fi fteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth cen-
turies in Venice, Florence, London, or Amsterdam from the eighteenth
century in Königsberg, Weimar, or Berlin. Each essay in this volume ar-
ticulates that frame in its own way. Overall, however, making sense of this
framing is understood here not just as a matter of establishing or gathering
facts that might help us determine whether, say, Hegel ever laid eyes on
a particular painting or how well Herder may have grasped Shakespeare’s
English—though gathering these facts, too, is an ineliminable part of our
collective work. Rather, since we do not doubt that artworks and practices
from the early modern period exist alongside works of aesthetic philoso-
phy from the eighteenth century, what we really want to know is whether
these two existences are connected in some essential way. By “essential
way” I do not just mean a further fact—or a so-called “smoking gun”—
but something like what Hegel might have called the Wirklichkeit, or what
earlier philosophers might have called the logos (the actuality or reality)
of a connection between early modern art and aesthetic philosophy. Put
another way, we want to know what reasons we might have for reconsider-
ing the stories we already tell ourselves about early modern art and philo-
sophical aesthetics. We want to know how, whether, and why we should
reconsider the intellectual histories that have prevented these two histori-
cal phenomena from being considered together as part of our collective
inheritance.
As Richard Rorty once pointed out, the German way of doing intel-
lectual history—“starting with the Greeks and working down through,
for example, Cicero, Galileo and Schelling before saying anything off your
own bat—is easily parodied.”3 But, as Rorty went on to note, this kind of
approach helps us conscientiously clarify what we might otherwise take for
granted, or carelessly assume. After all, we “all carry some potted intellec-
tual history around with us, to be spooned out as needed. . . . Such stories
determine our sense of what is living and what is dead in the past, and
S thus of when the crucial steps forward, or the crucial mistakes or ruptures,
N occurred.”4 And those of us who do not undertake the historians’ legwork
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Introduction: Aesthetic Philosophy and Early Modern Artistry 3
ourselves generally borrow a story from someone else—Karl Marx, say,
or Hans Blumenberg. Taking the spirit of Rorty’s remark—that we would
do well to be more vigilant when it comes to the histories in view of which
we understand our present—the fi rst thing this Introduction will do is
consider what, in our “potted histories,” has been blocking, or effacing, a
clearer view of the connection between early modern artistic practices and
aesthetic philosophy.
There are a number of these, of course. However, I think we can use-
fully identify four narratives—sections 1–4 below—that have arguably
contributed the most to obscuring our view of the relation between early
modern artworks and aesthetic philosophy. First, there is a story according
to which art proper, the fi ne arts, or notions of aesthetic autonomy, took
shape only in the eighteenth century. Second, we fi nd aesthetic philoso-
phy’s self-articulation over the course of the eighteenth century and its
introduction of an apparently new set of issues and questions for the hu-
man sciences. Third, there is the concurrent emergence of art history as
an academic discipline in the work of J. J. Winckelmann especially and its
predominant focus on ancient artworks rather than on the art of the early
modern period (as had been the case in the work of Giorgio Vasari, for
instance).5 Fourth, the establishment of the “Renaissance,” the “Baroque,”
or the early modern period itself, as objectively distinct, was in part predi-
cated on scholarly methods and apparatuses that took shape in the late
eighteenth century.
Let me briefl y describe each of these by trying to lay bare the “potted
history” implied or contained in each, in order to make clearer how they
tumble into and compel questions under investigation in this volume. I
then turn to a discussion of the essays included here.
1
One history that is commonly borrowed to explain the emergence of aes-
thetics in the eighteenth century was infl uentially told by Paul Oskar Kri-
stel ler, a German scholar of Renaissance humanism (who emigrated to the
United States in 1939), in a two-part article he published in the Journal of
the History of Ideas in 1951–52, titled “The Modern System of the Arts:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics.”6 There Kristeller argued that the
“system of the fi ve major arts, which underlies all modern aesthetics and is
so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume
defi nite shape before the eighteenth century, although it has many ingre- S
dients which go back to classical, medieval and Renaissance thought.”7 N
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