A Definition of Aesthetic

8/2/2019 A Definition of Aesthetic

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Philosophical Review

A Definition of AestheticsAuthor(s): Robert Morris OgdenReviewed work(s):Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 42, No. 5 (Sep., 1933), pp. 500-510Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2179821 .

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A DEFINITION OF AESTHETICSJN HIS "Foreword" to E. F. Carritt's Philosophies of BeautyD. W. Prall writes:'Aesthetics is in fact only a pseudo-science or pseudo-philosophy,astudy that no self-respecting member of an academic faculty can safelydevote himself to exclusively, or even mainly. Its subject-matteris suchwavering and deceptive stuff as dreams are made of; its method isneither logical nor scientific, nor quite whole-heartedly and empiricallymatter of fact; and its results are an unhappyjargon, no worse thanothers in its infelicities and incomprehensibility,but without appli-cation in practiceto test it and without orthodox terminology to make it

into an honest superstition or a thorough-going, soul-satisfying cult. Itis neither useful to creativeartists nor a help to amateursin appreciation.It shifts from Hegelian 'moments'to 'empathicresponses', from bits ofminute critical analysis to irrelevant rhapsodiceffusions, from 'the prin-ciples of aesthetic form' to the 'materials of beauty', from the media ofthe arts to the nature of tragedy or the sublime in nature. It uses theterms of all the arts and sciences as well as those of literary study andcriticism andhistory. In an essay on aesthetics, value, for example, maymean one sort of colourvariation,or the price of a picture,or 'any objectof any interest'. And to make the confusion complete, it has been saidthat the 'home' of all values is God, and that God is irradiated in allbeauty. Aesthetics is thus accuratelydesignated in Spinoza's 'asylum ofignorance'.No wonder it is shunnedand a little feared.With this challenge in mind we are confronted in Carritt's

excellent volume with excerpts from the writings of seventy-four persons, both ancient and modern, who have dared to ad-dress themselves seriously to the solution of a problem which, asPrall goes on to admit, "will not down". And respect, at least,must be given to the names that appear in this list; for, begin-ning with Xenophon, it includes such giants of the mind as Plato,Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, andKant.2

Not, however, until an obscure German professor of philosophygave his attention to the subject did 'aesthetics' gain a name as aseparate and distinct discipline. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten(I7I4-62) in his Habilitationsschrift3 defended a thesis previouslypropounded by Leibniz, and coined the word Aesthetik to name

Oxford University Press, I93I. ix f.2 One notes the absence of an excerpt fr'om Gustav Theodor Fechner, thefounder of experimental aesthetics.'Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poerna pertinentibus (0735).

500


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A DEFINITION OF AESTHETICS 501the inferior faculty of sensuous as distinct from the higher facultyof rational knowledge.

Leibniz had written (i684):An obscure or vague ideais one that does not sufficefor the recognitionof its object.... If I can recognize the thing, I have clear or vividknowledge of it, but this again may be either confused [sensuous] ordistinct [intellectual]. It is confused if I cannot enumerate one by one themarks which suffice for distinguishing the thing from others. . . . Thuswe see painters and other artists well enough aware what is right andwhat is faulty, but often unable to give any reason for their taste: ifasked, they reply that the work they dislike lacks a je ne sais quoi.'

It is customary to say of Baumgarten, as, indeed, Carritt does,5that his positive contribution to Aesthetics was slight. The ex-cerpts Carritt gives are from three works in Latin, one of whichwas called Aesthetica (I750). It is probably true that Baum-garten's works were little read, and, as the commentaries uponthem indicate, are dull and pedantic in tone.6 Yet the Leibnizianidea which Baumgarten developed into a special subject of studyseems to deserve more consideration than has usually been accordedit in defining the field.

Generally speaking, the subject of beauty, as distinct from truthand goodness, did not await Baumgarten's suggestion of a name;and most writers on the subject have simply accepted the name asan appropriate designation for the philosophy (and psychology)of beauty, or of beauty and ugliness. But Leibniz was not primarilyconcerned with a definition of beauty; neither was Baumgarten.Rather, they were concerned with the distinction of two ways ofapprehension: an intellectual way in which one can "enumerateone by one the marks which suffice for distinguishing the thingfrom others", and the aesthetic way in which apprehension is andmust remain sensuous and "confused" (repraesentatio confusc).

The Greek term from which Baumgarten coined his word meansperceptions,but it means a perception that rests heavily on feelingas distinct from knowing.7 This distinction has a profound psy-4Carritt 57.5Carritt, 8i.6 Cf. Johannes Schmidt, Leibnitz und Baumgarten, ein Beitrag zurGeschichte der deutschen Aesthetik (Halle, i875), and Max Schasler,Kritische Geschichteder Aesthetik (Berlin, i872) 347 fCf., the writer's Psychology and Education, New Edition, revised in col-

laborationwith Frank S. Freeman, I932, Chaptervii, on Perception.


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502 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XLII.chological significance, though modern schools of psychology havedone their best to obliterate it. In an effort to be 'exact' and 'sci-entific', modern psychology has chosen an analytic method of ap-proach which has led to the two opposed schools commonly knownas those of "existentialism" and "behaviorism". The first wouldanalyze experience into all its varying kinds, and by approvedmethods of classification put sensations, affections, images, and eventhoughts into their appropriate categories. From this point of view'feeling' and 'knowing' as modes of apprehension are simplyeliminated from all consideration, since it is the 'whats' and not the'hows' that concern the 'existentialist'. The 'behaviorist', disdainingexperience as such, attempts to establish a science of psychologyout of materials which at first glance one might think belongedmore properly to physiology. The emphasis placed upon the em-ployment of such terms as stimulus, response, and conditionedreflex, points to an analysis of behavior without reference to any'feeling' or 'knowing' of what may be happening.There is, to be sure, another psychology of more ancient lineagewhich still has its advocates, and which insists on treating psy-chology as a functional inquiry. Here feeling and knowing arefamiliar rubrics; but it is questionable if mind can interact withbody in a 'scientifically' functional manner.

Not until the advent of Gestalttheorie did the possibility of ascience of psychology in functional terms become apparent; thegist of Gestalttheorie being its denial that science prescribes 'ele-ments', either of conscious data-experiences-or of units of ac-tion-reflexes. The organismic conception of physiological actionputs the elements of muscle, nerve, and gland in the category ofabstractions, and, instead of supposing that a living organism isa machine made up of individual and discretely acting parts, pro-poses the view that an organism acts, both to begin with andthroughout its life, as a total unit of behavior. By growth andlearning, this total unit acquires such partial patterns of behavioras it may, by individuating appropriate organs to satisfy its owninternal demands as a dynamic unity. The conjuring word integra-tion thus comes to mean a two-sided process in which parts arenot only assembled, but modified, and even created, under theexigencies of a situation which demands satisfaction or comple-


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No. 5.] A DEFINITION OF AESTHETICS 503tion in terms of conditions both internal and external to the or-ganism.

According to Gestalttheorie the phenomena of experience are ofno scientific interest per se, since they are in essence experiencesof behavior. Organisms always feel, and may also know, whatthey are about. This is a postulate which, when universalized toinclude all living creatures, is based upon analogical reasoning. Itis precisely that to which Leibniz refers as "clear or vivid knowl-edge", which may be either "confused or distinct". Whence comesthis experience of behavior is a metaphysical question which weshall not attempt to answer. But the postulation of its existence asdescribed, that is, as a phenomenon which finds its true correlativein physiological action, raises an epistemological question whichcannot lightly be set aside. If experience indubitably exists for me,and if I fail to know at once whence it comes because it alwayspoints beyond itself to something of which it is but the phenome-non, then by what reason, other than a postulate of faith, can Ibe sure that it is not there positively of its own right withoutreference to the actual or moving existence of that to which itpoints? The reason which holds me from a sheer positivistic viewof these phenomena is that the conditions of my experience tran-scend the experience itself. If I am unwilling to accept these con-ditions as existing apart from me and my own reflections uponthem, I can find no basis for my customary expectations and theirfulfilments. Thus a postulation of experience per se is inadequateto my needs, whereas a postulation of experience as the criterionof my behavior is adequate.

Turning to behaviorism, it appears that there is nothing in thisterm which contradicts our postulate. But whereas many behavior-ists, including the coiner of the name, John B. Watson, deny thescientific validity of experience altogether, our postulate acceptsit as the one criterion which defines psychology as distinct fromphysiology and its biological associates. In other words, psychologyis the study of behavior by means of experience.

Finally, our postulate raises functional psychology to the levelof a scientific inquiry, by its refusal to accept an interaction ofmind with body, or teleological consequences of a mental guid-ance for bodily functions; such guidance and such functions as


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504 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XLII.there are being implicit in the behavior itself. The 'values' whichattach to it as right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly,are simply inherent.8 It therefore follows that behavior can nolonger be regarded as the manifestation of a machine. Instead, theorgans of behavior, the brain especially, possess an equipotentialityof function which makes the outcome of behavior unpredictable inthe mechanical terms of interplaying parts, and requires instead aconception of field-dynamics in which masses obey impulses andattain resultant states of dynamic equilibrium which sometimesoverride the influence of preformed organs with set ways of action.An existential functional behaviorism of this order brings backto the term feeling, or aesthetic, the significance which Leibniztruly descried, and upon which Baumgarten attempted to build.But, to quote Prall, though we moderns are more enlightened,

What science in the Authorized Version cannot tell us we refuse toknow. And science cannot yet say how we came to have eyes to see with,nor just how, having eyes, we do see colours and shapes through them,nor how our ears manage to hear the chords of music. How then can werespect a study the very data of which must be found in intuition-intui-tion which is itself only the word for the fact that we do so find data-ascience the method of which is utterly unsettled and all of its results soindeterminately stated that we cannot be quite sure of their meaning,much less of their general bearing?9If the 'Authorized Version' of the science of psychology were

either existentialism-which is on the wane-or behaviorism-which has also shot its bolt-then the hope for a definition of aes-thetic studies would be still remote. But, fortunately, that is nolonger our situation. The contribution of Gestalttheorie, togetherwith the even more powerful contribution of organismic theoriesof biology, is rapidly changing the present outlook of all life-sciences. Even inanimate physics is less secure in the exactness ofits analytical methodology than a few years ago when some thoughtthat all the major work in this field had been done.

But though the age-old distinction of perception from intellectionagain finds a proper place in scientific discussion, the definition of

8 Cf. the writer's article "Learning as Improvement",American Journalof Psychology (I927) XXXIX 235 f. According to Santayana, "Valuesspring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of vital impulse, andfrom the irrational part of our nature"; The Sense of Beauty. (Carritt i98.)' Carrittxi.


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No. 5.] A DEFINITION OF AESTHETICS 505Aesthetics-of an art no longer inferior, though genetically priorto the arts of discernment-is still a matter of continual achieve-ment rather than a fait acconmpli.Aesthetics, as here conceived, em-braces not only the pursuit of beauty, including all artistic en-deavor and its appreciation; it embraces as well all technique andcraftsmanship. The means whereby a carpenter planes a boarduntil it is smooth and level, the technical proficiencies of mecha-nicians, sportsmen, printers, and so on, are no less aesthetic thanthose of the artist who creates and the connoisseur who enjoyspaintings, music, and literature. Since our definition of the aes-thetic applies to the faculty of intuition, as Prall calls it, it mustinclude all those behaviors, both recipient and executive, the de-tails of which cannot be enumerated without disrupting the activitythat is going forward. The well-known illustration of this fact isgiven in one's inability to walk in a straight line whilst attendingto the specific movements of one's legs. Such attention to the partsdestroys the 'melody' of the movement as a whole. And yet onecan and must discern the object or goal, the straight line one istreading. Discernment, or knowing, is something superimposedupon feeling or perceiving. We can have discernment and feelingat the same time, for feeling furnishes knowing a natural back-ground or general criterion of what is going on. We also havefeeling with little or no discernment, and we can have discern-ment in a logical essay where feeling has become so attenuated thatin operations with signs and symbols the background of bodilyresonance is held largely in abeyance. It is not well to forget, how-ever, the genetic priority of feeling. The aesthetic criteria of be-havior are those chiefly employed by animals other than man,and by man himself, not only in his early stages of life where theyare dominant, but throughout his career. One may venture theopinion that it is because of this fundamental animal method ofgaging behavior in terms of its fitness, that man in his intellectualstate of development still finds need for that beauty of perfectionin things seen and done which can be felt, but not known.

Yet to describe this need is not to explain either its meaning orits general bearing. What, indeed, can one say positively for ascience which is rooted in the indiscernible? If Aesthetics is con-cerned with both art and craft, surely there is much that goes into


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506 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XLII.the products of both artist and craftsman which requires steadydiscernment and enumeration. So, too, the critic of these productsexercises his skill in a very articulate and discerning manner, oftento the quite justifiable distress of the artist and builder.

In so far as Aesthetics is a science it must deal discerninglywith those products of behavior which are aesthetically or undis-cerningly conceived and carried out. Aesthetics therefore, like anyother science, is critical. Its distinction rests in this, that its dataare not themselves discernible items, like genes or atoms, but areinstead rhythms and designs in which a special regard for theirwholeness must always be had. When it comes to a discernment ofpartial patterns of behavior and their occasion, the aesthetician musteither turn over his problem to a special science in which it can beadequately handled, or he must borrow from this source enoughrelevant information to warrant his conclusions.

Aesthetics is of necessity a border-line science, which does notalways know its own boundaries. Yet with its highly special cri-terion of feeling one's way through to a desired end, it has anindubitable field of operation which is a major concern neither ofpsychology nor of any natural science. Its distinction from psy-chology is obviously less clear than from other sciences, partlybecause psychology is itself less sure of its own definition. Butthe fact remains that both artistic production and skill can be'psychologized' with little or no reference to that intrinsic phenom-enon of the fitness of things which makes the 'inferior' knowledgeof Baumgarten a real datum of current behavior.

Consider the following observation of Socrates in the Philebus:I do not now intend by beauty of shapes what most people would ex-pect, such as that of living creatures or pictures,but, for the purpose ofmy argument, I mean straight lines and curves and the surfaces of solidforms produced out of these by lathes and rulers and squares, if you

understand me. For I mean that these are not beautiful relatively, likeother things, but always and naturally and absolutely; and they havetheir proper pleasures, no way depending on the itch of desire. And Imean colours of the same kind, with the same kind of beauty andpleasures."1

Whether or not an erudite psychologist would follow up thissuggestion in an effort to determine what these forms are, whichwe intuit so successfully as elements of sheer beauty, is beside the

10Carritt 30.


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No. 5.] A DEFINITION OF AESTHETICS 507point. Here, at any rate, is an aesthetic problem, the solution ofwhich can in no wise be given by a geometry of indifferent meas-urement. It is a simple datum of intuition, as Prall says, that cer-tain proportions have qualities which others lack. A critical analysispartly reveals the interest which attaches, say, to the oblong withthe proportion of the golden sector. When defined logically thisproportion is sheer geometry; but it also has an aesthetic signifi-cance which is something else. Thus, we cannot say that all ob-longs, the proportions of which are such that the width is to thelength as the length is to the sum of these two dimensions, mustbe beautiful. We can, however, say that this proportion lends adistinct interest to such a figure, and with the aid of geometrywe can analyze the reasons why it is interesting.

The reasons are mainly two:(i) As regards the dimensions themselves, two lines in this

proportion will have the greatest possible individuality; for theproportion is such that the longer line in relation to the shorterhas the optimal effect of an elongation which differs as much aspossible from the shorter line without approachingits double length.In other words, in comparing any two linear extensions we tend toregard the shorter as a unit. The logical tendency is therefore toregard the longer as something more than this unit or somethingless than two units, something more than two units or less than threeunits, and so. The greatest degree of individuality which can at-tach to a succession of units in which simple multiplication is setaside is provided by the proportion: a: b :: b: a + b.

(2) As regards the area of this figure, it is divisible into twoparts, one of which is a true square, and the other a reciprocal ofthe figure itself, that is, an oblong on end which has the same shapeas the original figure. Since this reciprocal is in turn divisible inthe same way, we have the possibility of a succession of divisionseach one cutting off a true square as its 'gnomon' and constitutingwhat has been called the 'whirling-square' rectangle. The move-ment of these squares defines a spiralwhich, according to Jay Ham-bidge, has been generously employed in the patterns of Greekvases.1'

' Cf. Dynamic Symmetry (i920); also Edward B. Edwards, Dynama-rhythmic Design (1932).


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508 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XLII.This illustration should serve to show what an aesthetic prob-

lem is like, wherein it demands a special methodology of research,and how its facts can be stated with the aid of logic so as to escapethe indeterminateness of which Prall makes his complaint.

The trouble with most aesthetic inquiries and the results theyattain is that they are mainly concerned with a reduction of theaesthetic to logic. Those who approach the subject from a phil-osophical position are concerned to define beauty as over againstlogic and ethics. The aesthetic thus becomes a judgment, whichis a contradiction in terms, because what, for instance, the whirl-ing-square rectangle means aesthetically is a felt and not a knownproportion. Our knowledge, in this case, is obtained logically likeany other knowledge; but only serves to explain the basis of anaesthetic apprehension which is not enhanced, and may be de-stroyed, by the very logic of analysis that reveals the reason of theeffect.

Similarly those who approach the problem by way of a psycho-logical experiment are inclined to reduce their materials to suchbare elemental factors that an enumerative method of analysis isthe only one the observer can employ. As remarked by BishopBerkeley:

The architects judge a door to be of a beautiful proportion, when itsheight is double of the breadth. But if you should invert a well-propor-tioned door, making its breadth become the height, and its height thebreadth, the figure would still be the same, but without that beauty in onesituation which it had in another.'Instead of following Berkeley's line of thought that the door on

its side "would not yield convenient entrances to creatures of ahuman figure"-a line of thought which, by the way, has provedmore common than fruitful in the explanation of psychologicalphenomena-we maintain that the immediate total effect of theproportion in its setting is what makes it aesthetically satisfying,and not the mere proportion apart from any relevant context, orwith sole reference to a customary usage.

In the same way, the aesthetic effectiveness of skill, and the factthat feeling one's way through an activity is the only way in whichone can ever learn to be skilful, are quite other than the calculat-

'2Carritt 76 f.w


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No. 5.] A DEFINITION OF AESTHETICS 509ing approach of the craftsman to his task. It is a logical but not anaesthetic distinction that we make when we assert in the wordsof Oscar Wilde that "the only beautiful things are the things thatdo not concern US".'3 Significant as this saying is, it draws a prac-tical not a theoretical distinction. Practically we distinguish artistfrom artisan. Practically, we look for beauty in the creations ofthe artist, rather than in the constructions of the artisan. There isactually much more kinship in the artist and the artisan than weare wont at times to consider. Both are in effect technicians, whorely upon their aesthetically apprehended skill to carry them on tothe completion of their respective tasks. As Lascelles Abercrombieremarks:

When a poet chooses his subject-or I had better say, when a subjectchooses a poet-there is no necessity for beauty to have any say in thebusiness: but there is absolute necessity for every subject which poetrysuccessfully communicates to us, to have thereby become invested withbeauty.1'The investment with beauty distinguishes the work of the artist

from that of the artisan. Both, however, may achieve the sameend, the one wittingly, the other unwittingly. A poet, though hemay follow his technique as unwittingly as any mechanician,knowsnevertheless that the garment of beauty must be thrown over hiscreation. The mechanician, though aesthetically guided, expectsbut a resultant means to some ulterior end. This distinction, im-portant though it be, is not an aesthetic distinction, but one ofjudgment. The effect of any technical product may be beautiful orugly, useful or useless; and it may have qualifications of bothkinds. Distinction rests on the fact that beauty is felt, and utilityis known. The emphasis upon feeling characterizes pure art, andupon knowing, mere utility.

'Cf. The Decay of Lying; also, from Kant's Critique of Judgment, theexcerpt by Carritt (p. iii) "Taste is the faculty of estimating an objector a type of idea in respect of satisfaction or dissatisfaction without anyinterest. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful."14 Cf. The Theory of Poetry (0924) 44. A. C. Bradley writes in similarvein: "If the poet already knew exactly what he meant to say, why shouldhe write the poem? The poem would in fact already be written. For onlyits completion can reveal, even to him, exactly what he wanted. When hebegan, and while he was at work, he did not possess his meaning; it pos-sessed him. It was not a fully formed squl asking for a body: it was aninchoate soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague ideas and

a few scattered phrases" (Carritt, 226 f.).


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5I0 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWAs we have defined it, Aesthetics is the science of felt behavior.

The field of study includes whatever an organism does, the criterionof which is an immediate experience uncontaminated by enumera-tive discernment. Thus, rhythm and design are the two terms weconjure with in giving an aesthetic description of our actions. Butin order to justify the employment of these terms it is necessaryto seek their implications by rational discernment. In so far asAesthetics is a science it is as logical in its method and results asany other. The fact remains that its datum is an 'intuition', andnot itself a result of reason or analytic prescription. Further, theanalysis it undertakes in seeking the grounds for a feeling of fit-ness is always functional and never structural. The aesthetic in-tuition is never the compulsory result of a calculating procedure.If Poe actually composed "The Raven" as he describes the processin his well-known essay on "The Philosophy of Composition",that fact will explain the defects rather than the merits of hisachievement. No doubt the artist knows what he is about, and em-ploys his technique as means to an end, yet his criterion of excel-lence is not his knowledge but his sensibility to the figure of hiscomposition as a whole. And it is this sensibility which makes ofhim an artist and not merely an artisan.

By recourse to Baumgarten's original use of the term, it seemspossible to give a definition to Aesthetics which goes some waytowards determining its problems in a manner which will counterthe charge that it is "only a pseudo-science or pseudo-philosophy, astudy that no self-respecting member of an academic faculty cansafely devote himself to exclusively, or even mainly"; for if, asis generally admitted, the subject "will not down", and if, as Leib-niz pointed out, there is a real difference in knowledge that "maybe either confused [sensuous] or distinct [intellectual]," then theproblem of accounting for the confused effects of immediate ap-prehension apart from enumerating "one by one the marks whichsuffice for distinguishing the thing from others" is quite as realand quite as reputable an undertaking as the more cogent, but atthe same time more artificial, procedure of rationalization.

ROBERT MORRIS OGDENCORNELL UNIVERSITY

A Definition of Aesthetic

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