Miller, leave me out of your dumb comments. You don't have the slightest idea of meaning or meaninglessness or of much else. William Conger
________________________________ From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, October 3, 2009 12:19:20 PM Subject: Reading Kivy - Chapter One: How we got here and why What would distinguish the 'fine arts' from the arts that are merely pleasing? Eventually, Kivy is hopefully going to question that question itself, but in the first chapter he offers a brief history of the answer given by European philosophy from the 18th Century, when "Certain things transpired to alter in very important ways how we think about an experience works of fine arts, some of them philosophical or in some other way theoretical, others "institutional" (for want of a better word)" They are: *The coming into being of the branch of philosophy known as "aesthetics" *The forming of what Kristeller has called "modern system of the arts" *The evolution of what has been called, after Kant, "the aesthetic attitude" or "attitude of disinteredness" *the establishment of the fine arts museum, concert hall, and public concert *the rise of instrumental music into an equality with vocal music, as an occupation for composers and focus of audience interest. Kriseller's "Modern system of the Arts" is just the notion that the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry comprise a category distinct from all other practices, to which may also be added, though with less consensus, " the gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature." Also, Kristeller asserted that "it is generally agreed that such dominating concepts of modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century." (his 1951 essay may be found here: http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Krislteler%20Modern%201.htm ) And what is the "meme principe" that defines this new category of "beaux arts" ? Mimesis. Which, at least for Kivy, makes the rising status of instrumental music the greatest challenge to this system - so he calls it the avant-garde artform of its time, following Noel Carroll's claim that "it is the problematic works of the avant-garde that drives aesthetic theory to formulate new definitions of art" What the hell could instrumental music be representing? (BTW - this conundrum continues to engage Objectivists) This was no problem for the Scottish "common sense" philosopher, Thomas Reid (1710-1796), who tells us that "every strain in melody that is agreeable, is an imitation of the human voice in the expression of some sentiment or passion, or the imitation of some other object in nature, and that music, as well as poetry,is an imitative art" - and -- "so far as I can judge by my ear, when two or more persons, of a good voice and ear, converse together in amity and friendship, the tones of their different vices are concordant, but become discordant when they give vent ot angry passions; so that , without hearing what is said, one may know by tones of the different voices, whether they quarrel or converse amiably" (BTW - this was the reason , two thousand years earlier, given by Confucius for why Gentlemen should learn the practice of music) But Kant was concerned with more than just "the agreeable". In the following passage, Kant allows that music can be beautiful: "If we assume with Euler that colors are isochronous vibrations of the ether, as sounds are of the air in a state of disturbance, and what is more important - that the mind not only perceives by sense the effect of these in exciting the organ, but also perceives by reflection the regular play of impressions (and thus the form of the combination of different representations) - which I very much doubt - then colors and tone cannot be reckoned as mere sensations, but as the formal determination of the unity of a manifold of sensations and thus as beauties" (with some confusion regarding the phrase "which I very much doubt" because it becomes "which I do not doubt" in the third edition) But then he wonders whether music can do any more than "give expression to the aesthetic idea of an integral whole of an unutterable wealth of thought that fills the measure of a certain theme forming the dominant affection of the piece" Can music also "provoke the free play of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding" ? -- and by Kivy's reading of section 54 of Kant's "Critique of Judgment", Kant will answer that music has its payoff, not in the free play of the cognitive faculties, but merely in the physical feeling of well being:"In music, the course of this play is from bodily sensations to aesthetic ideas, which are the objects for the affections, -- and then from these back again, but with added strength to the body" -- so that "music deserves to be ranked rather as an agreeable than a fine art" Perhaps it was the effect of Beethoven and Schuber, but twenty years later Schopenhauer would conclude the reverse: "This music is as immediate objectivication and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the ideas, but a coy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas" Got it ? Music is important because it is a representation - and the thing being represented is even more important than any ideas - so if written text accompanies any music, it can only diminish the effect: "If music tries to stick too closely to the words, and to mould itself according to the events, it is endeavoring to speak a language not its own" Over the following ten years, Hegel lectured on the same subject, and he proposed: "Amongst all the arts, music has the maximum possibility of freeing itself from any actual texts as well as from the expression of any specific subject matter, with a view to finding satisfaction solely in a self enclosed series of conjunctions , changes, oppositions, and modulations falling within the purely musical sphere of sounds. But in that case music remains empty and meaningless, and because the one chief thing in all art, namely spiritual content and expression, is missing from it, it is not yet strictly to be called an art. Only if music becomes a spiritually adequate expression in the sensuous medium of sounds and their varied counterpoint does music rise to being a genuine art.." Kivy notes that Hegel has changed the issue from "representation" to "expression", which will accomodate modern art theory (especially Mando's) ever since, but he also offers no examples of where "spiritual content" can be found - and he was critical of music in "recent times" where "music has torn itself free from a content already clear on its own account and retreated in this way into its own medium; but for this reason it has lost power over the whole inner life, all the more so the pleasure it can give relates to only one side of the art, namely bare interest in the purely musical element int he composition and its skillfulness, a side of music which is for connoisseurs only and scarcely appeals to the general human interest in art" Why must contemplative pleasure be somehow separate from spiritual content? -- and why is it not in the general human interest to become a connoisseur of one or more of the arts? He also waffles on the importance of written text, later saying "music must, on account of its one-sidedness, call on the help of the more exact meaning of words and, in order to become more firmly conjoined with the detail and characteristic expression of the subject matter, it demands a text which alone gives fuller content to the subjective life's outpouring in the notes" It seems that Hegel had never left the world of the Protestant seminary where he graduated. At this point in time, Kivy notes, text-free music had already entered the "modern system of the arts", and this philosophical ambivalence was handled by assigning text to music that was composed without it -- i.e program music and the tone poem. Or as Kivy calls this "art imitating philosophy", and the next challenge that he sees to the "meme principe" comes nearly a hundred years later from art critics like Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and the notion of "significant form" Concerning these two, Kivy writes: "I do not know of any case in the philosophical literature - at least in the philosophy of aesthetics - more prone than that of formalism , as a real definition of art, to the charge that whatever its technical difficulties, vicious circles,and the like might be, it so violates our common sense as to constitute an obvious reductio ad absurdum of itself on that basis alone"
