Objects, Sensation and Truth: White supremacist western aesthetics.
DRAFT ARTICLE
BEFORE AESTHETICS THERE IS SENSATION
At the end of the 15th-century white western philosophy entered into a phase of scholarship in which the relationship between material objects, sensation and Truth is a problem. The desire to absolutely know what objects are with no doubt is at the forefront of philosophy and science. Science seeks to know objects so that humans can know how to manipulate objects to their advantage. The empirical search for understanding begins with the ancient Greeks in the west. Plato continues to influence western philosophy and metaphysics [metaphysics deals with questions about existence and consciousness – like how do you know you exist, how do you know that other things exist, can you know everything there is to know about a given thing/object] especially with his theory of the Form.
The goal of Plato’s theory is to show how the only proper, complete understanding of the world outside the human subject is possible by a complete understanding of the Form of objects. The Form is not a physical characteristic of an object but is the sum of all possible things to be known about and object that will be valid throughout all time and space. To know water, one cannot merely see or interact with water; one needs to know it in all its variations of appearance in all possible spaces and at all possible times without exception. What we see in the world, for Plato, is a piece of the Form (never the complete Form) and so the object sensed becomes a sign of the eternal, immutable Form of the object which can only be thought and never directly sensed because that would require the knower to detach from all their experiences and their place in time and space to assume a view from nowhere. All objects for Plato have to have an unchanging essence, or they are unknowable, even if most humans cannot know the essence due to limited logical skills and limited experience.
The counter to Plato is Aristotle who spent many years training under Plato. Though on most points he disagrees with his former teacher. Aristotle spends a great deal of time in De Anima (Aristotle 1957) and the Metaphysics (W. H. Aristotle 1957) contemplating the role of sensation in understanding the world outside the human subject and concludes that there is no possibility of a Form that remains unchanging and the same across all time and space forever. The nature of the universe is change and all things in the universe are moving in space and time. For Aristotle to know that oneself or things exist means they must be in time and space. Something can only exist if it is somewhere at some time.
According to Aristotle, existence is in time and space and only known through the experience of things in time and space with the assistance of memory and imagination. No objects have the ability to stay exactly the same throughout all time, and the environmental space in which objects exist changes them as well. Even rocks change depending on the forces acting upon them, like water and wind. The senses may be inaccurate, but this is not as important, given that what humans can sense is subject to continual change. There is no Form; there is no eternal essence. Instead, there are potentials which become actual when action occurs.
Aristotle believes that all things exist in two constant changing states of potentiality and actuality. One can have an idea of the house one will build, so it exists as a potential thing. Once one builds the house, it exists as an actual thing. However, the house will not exist in the same static state forever. The house could lose or gain rooms, flooring changes, paint changes, the settling which changes its exact location in time and space all change the house. Sometimes the house can be destroyed and cease to exist as reality altogether. What one understands about a thing is limited by one’s experience and one’s potentiality and actuality in terms of using logic and reason. One can only know a thing as it exists at the time one encounters it from where one encounters the thing, and this perspective shapes what the thing can be for oneself.
The ideas brought forth by Plato and Aristotle are contested heavily throughout the history of western philosophy from the point of the introduction of them by Arabs in the 1200s (Walzer 1945). In fact, one can loosely divide western philosophers into two camps, one Platonic and one Aristotelian. The Enlightenment looked to the Ancient Greeks to support science through logic and reason, the methodology of philosophy. The enlightenment project sought to pin down the world through reason and logic which white scholars used to explain and set up experiments which they could repeat to prove what things were. For the most part, Enlightenment proponents believed that using science and logic; one could discover the essence of things, what they were outside of time and space. This ideology sprung out of a time where humans were creating vast networks of trade and capital creation and needed norms and repeatability to build and engineer civilization.
The Enlightenment philosophers also worked on the pesky body problem with reason as well. The body becomes a significant problem with the famous mind/body split conceived of by Descartes in his Meditations of the First Philosophy, and the relationship of sensation/knowledge/truth becomes a popular topic in philosophy. Descartes attempts to found western philosophy and his knowledge on absolute truth and certainty adopts a posture of “radical doubt” questioning everything he knows. He deduces that he cannot trust his senses. They can be faulty and deceive so one cannot know for certain one exists through the sensation; therefore, one can only exist because one thinks. Even if one is a mind floating in a void, asking questions about existence proves someone is there to ask the question. Radical doubt leads to Descartes declaring his body is only an extension of his thinking and not real or something he needs to exist. His idea is part of religious theology which emphasized the evils of the flesh and the purity of the spirit/mind and is part of the degradation of things related to the human body.
When white Europeans encountered Black Africans, they placed them into the realm of the body – sinful, corrupting, stupid, dangerous – along with those white people deemed female and all other non-white people. The ideology of the Enlightenment, which elevated logic and reason and degraded the animal and the body, too conveniently develops as Europe is invading and capturing foreign lands. Suddenly white Europeans are confronted with people whose language is entirely unintelligible, whose forms of worship appear sinister to Abrahamic followers, and especially whose skin, hair, and facial features are radically different to the Northern Europeans. Exploration was about money gained through theft and exploitation of material goods and humans under colonialism. Capital exploitation requires enslavement. The Europeans in power, who had been enslaving the poor, women, children, and disabled and needed fresh “workers,” made a smooth transition to enslaving the people encountered while raiding local resources. And so the creation of race begins.
THE CREATION OF RACE
Up until the early 1500s, Christianity was Catholic (with some variation between the Roman and Eastern practices). Moreover, whiles this does not exempt the earliest colonialist who arrived in Black Africa from enslaving the indigenous people, the justification for this practice did not hinge on skin/hair/skeletal features but upon language differences (Allen 1994). The Portuguese Catholics thought Black Africans were stupid because they could not speak Portuguese (projecting their embarrassment of not knowing the indigenous peoples’ languages) and did not wear enough clothes. Catholicism is a deeply ritualistic practise (especially during this period, the 1400s) full of saints and symbolism, and some of the religious practices of the indigenous get incorporated into Catholicism rather than banned and rejected outright. It is important to note here that Portugal and Spain conducted the earliest “European” exploration of Black Africa – countries whose people have dark skin compared to Northern Europeans, and curlier hair textures, larger noses, and lips. The Moors inhabited the Iberian Peninsula from the 6th century and were Black, so many Portuguese and Spanish people are “mixed” with African people.
The Northern European whites that exploited Black Africa were mostly Protestants and were more immersed in the popular concepts of race developing during the Enlightenment. For these early white European colonialist race was at first a way to distinguish ethnicity (the French were considered a race as were the Germans etc.) and then as a way to rank humans based on external appearances of hair, nose, lips, teeth, skin. This classification system provided simple ways to decide whether various people were actually humans, “primitive humans” or just animals meant to be enslaved [as the Protestants frequently cite the domination of “men” over everything that is not a “man” or not human as justification for the enslavement of Black Africans].
The urge of Enlightenment figures to use reason and logic to understand the world is the basis for western science. While it is difficult to argue that science has not improved human life, the political motivations of science are no different from that of religion (Strassberg 2005). The quest for knowledge a question for power and capital. Those who control knowledge (what can or cannot be known and who can know what) have power (Foucault 1980) (Kaufmann 2010). (Foucault, Nietzsche). As Europe saw political strife coming from the enslaved peasantry who were tired of working while living in squalid conditions, facing death and starvation while the gentry leads lavish wasteful lifestyles. The gentry fearing revolts, but needing to feed their gluttony turned to Black Africa as the source for their capital hunger, which allowed them to ease the burden of the European peasants.
Black Africans are enslaved in mass and sent out to produce the capital working in the Americas. Europeans had learned that it was challenging to enslave people in their own geographic region of which the Europeans had no maps or knowledge. Indigenous networks and knowledge meant that the enslaved could escape never to be found again. Alternatively, plots could form [sometimes in front of the Europeans who did not speak their languages] to fight off the Europeans. The European “explorers” were outnumbered, often sick from local diseases and the stress of ocean voyage, and did not have that much ammunition [and all the guns were slow loading]. It was easier to steal Black Africans and ship them to another country and not have them living in Europe where they would have a hard time running away but an easy time plotting revenge. Slavers separated black Africans into groups of individuals who came from different regions and did not speak the same languages [to prevent plotting] and were held in bondage – chained and shackled – as well as subject to physical and mental torture. The enslavement of Black Africans was necessarily violent and dehumanizing. How else would the white European be able to subdue millions and millions of kidnapped people?
The treatment that Black Africans received during enslavement was unlike the Poor Europeans who were enslaved by the gentry in terms of frequency of extreme violence. As European capitalism develops, those in power need a way of persuading the lower classes [who are not literate and still suffering hunger and disease at disproportionate rates compared to people with money] that chattel enslavement of millions of people is morally right in gods eyes. At the same time, those in power need to persuade the rising middle and upper class that enslavement is not just religiously justified, but also scientifically logically justified.
AESTHETICS AND WHITE SUPREMACY
With the occupation of Black Africa by Europeans, the enslavement of Black Africans, the rise of capitalism, science and industry all in the background white western aesthetics becomes another tool of white western domination of Black Africa. Here we take up Terry Eagleton’s understanding of how aesthetics is a social-political tool. Aesthetics “is a whole program of social, psychical and political reconstruction on the part of the early European bourgeoisie. (Eagleton 1988, 327)”
The first western philosopher to use the term Aesthetics is Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten [1714-1762] who in 1735 named this category for the first time in western philosophy (Baumgarten 1735). (though the study of aesthetics can is in the Ancient Greeks’ ideas about beauty). Baumgarten thought about aesthetics as being the concern of beauty and how beauty can be known. Aesthetics cannot be strictly about logic, as it also clearly involves the subject sensing things in the world. Aesthetics is a concrete logic because it comes from the experience of the physical world. Eagleton notes that Baumgarten also believes that “Only by such a concrete logic will the ruling class be able to understand its own history; for history, like the body is a matter of sensuous particulars, in no sense merely derivable from rational principles. (Eagleton 1988, 328)” Thus, from the outset, the formalization of western aesthetics is concerned with far more than what is beautiful; it has to do with the history of societies.
English Enlightenment thinker David Hume 1711-1776 rejects the notion that humans are born with aesthetic judgment (Dickie 1997, 17). Instead, Hume asserts that beauty relies on “rules of composition” which humans universally find pleasing. The universality of the rules means that that humans learn to judge what is beautiful using the normative rule of composition. This definition leaves out the possibility that there are other ways to formulate the rules of beauty and positions the non-normative rules as not counting because inferior cultures create them. The idea of universality here suggests that if we did a universal empirical survey of all individuals, we could define beauty standards in precisely the same. White people consider non-whites people as unable to participate in this survey, because they are less than human, so their opinion is of no concern. For a thinker like Hume, it was apparent the white western people created these categories of art because of their natural, cultural supremacy.
I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. … Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE [sic] slaves dispersed all over EUROPE [sic], of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. (Hume 1777, 208)
So Enlightenment aesthetics were concerned with white western concepts and objects of beauty as white western culture was the only one capable of creating or appreciating beauty.
Kant like Hume, was a racist and thought the white people were superior and not just in terms of appreciation and creation of art and beauty but also were morally inferior. Kant, as in all his philosophy, believes that aesthetics must have a moral component. Earlier philosophers had already equated beauty with perfection and therefore god, and the creation or enjoyment of beauty as being only available to the morally worthy. Kant’s major work on aesthetics is the Critique of Judgment (Immanuel Kant 1987).
This work follows atypical Kantian ideology in which truth must found through detachment and reason, not emotion. Truth only counts if derived from logic and reason, and must be eternal and unchanging because this is how the Abrahamic god has designed the universe to be understood by humans. Kant is very strict in his requirement for detachment while making an aesthetic judgment, so beauty is detached both from desire and sensual pleasure (Immanuel Kant 1987, 46). Kant is certainly a Platonist who believes that understanding what an object is meant to be is not required for understanding if it is beautiful, beauty is not about the usefulness of the object (Immanuel Kant 1987, 51). Kant is concerned with philosophy leading, through logic and reason, to an understanding of what beauty is in-itself, without any experience or emotion or space-time boundary changing what is beautiful. Beauty is not something that inheres in things; it is a property, so cannot be dependent on differing opinions as to what beauty is (Immanuel Kant 1987, 56).
If something is beautiful, it must be beautiful to all who qualify to make objective, logical judgments. The requirement for universal agreement means that beauty is not a matter of opinion, and those who are not appropriately educated or smart enough cannot judge whether something is worth the title of beautiful. Judgment is a faculty that moral humans have and need in order to logically decide what is good, what is bad, what is beautiful, what is ugly, what is useful, what is useless. For Kant, aesthetic, and likewise, moral judgment is something that humans are born with, that exists before birth and that humans know from the moment of birth. The problem here is that not all people are considered logical enough to be moral or exercise good judgment or good taste.
Judgments of taste or aesthetic judgments should be empirical, void of emotion and sensations of the body which are tainted and interfere with the ability to apprehend truth. Again this emphasis of the corrupting body and elevation of western logic put non-white people in the category of sin or pre-human unable to be moral or appreciate beauty. Beauty for Kant was associated not so much with human-created objects, but the beauty found in nature which revealed to humans gods power and perfection. Of all the attributes Christians assigned to god, Kant championed the idea of perfection as a proof of gods existence (like Descartes before him). Beautiful things would be those closest to perfection (geometrically balanced, no mars or flaws in patterns, fitting within a mathematical ratio [the golden mean]) and the most beautiful thing would be god who is the most of any good quality. So those closer to god- i.e. white Christians – would be considered the best judges of beauty, taste and morality. White westerners painted Black Africa as a land of cannibals, demon worship, and witchcraft. Therefore Black Africans were thought as having no ability to understand or recognize true beauty or be moral.
“[T]hat reason exerts over sensibility only for the sake of expanding it commensurately with reason’s own domain (the practical one) and letting it look outward toward the infinite, which for sensibility is an abyss. It is a fact that what is called sublime by us. Having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral ideas. In all the evidence of nature’s destructive force…” (Immanuel Kant 1987, 124)
Notably, while today we associate aesthetics with plastic arts like painting and sculpture, for Kant and many other philosophers of the time this is not the case. Art is not nature but a product of humans. However, proper art is also a product of reason.
By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason. For though we like to call the product that bees make (the regularly constructed honeycombs) a work of art, we do so only by virtue of an analogy with art; for as soon as we recall that their labor is not based on any rational deliberation on their part, we say at once that the product is a product of their nature (namely, of instinct). and it is only to their creator that we ascribe it as art. (Immanuel Kant 1987, 170)
Kant is not excited about visual art, because it requires the senses for humans to experience it, and because so much of it is uses humans and bodies as its subject matter.
Of course, fine art is important to society, but not all cultures can produce fine art, only white western ones rooted in white western history and knowledge systems.
[F]ine art in its full perfection requires much science: e.g., we must know ancient languages, we must have read the authors considered classical, we must know history and be familiar with the antiquities, etc.; and this is why these historical sciences have, through a confusion of words, themselves come to be called fine sciences, because they constitute the foundation and preparation needed for fine art, and in part also because they have come to include even a familiarity with the products of fine art (as in oratory or poetry) (Immanuel Kant 1987, 172).
Unsurprisingly Kant believes that fine art is created by artistic geniuses who are born with artistic talent. Artists release the beauty of objects, especially natural ones, reveal the rules of art. So the artist must be an expert in beauty and highly moral to accomplish their aim.
For every art presupposes rules, which serve as the foundation on which a product, if it is to be called artistic, is thought of as possible in the first place. On the other hand, the concept of fine art does not permit a judgment about the beauty of its product to be derived from any rule whatsoever that has a concept as its determining basis, i.e., the judgment must not be based on a concept of the way in which the product is possible. Hence fine art cannot itself devise the rule by which it is to bring about its product. Since, however, a product can never be called art unless it is preceded by a rule, it must be nature in the subject (and through the attunement of his powers) that gives the rule to art; in other words, fine art is possible only as the product of genius (Immanuel Kant 1987, 175).
Art is worthwhile because it allows people to learn about beauty and beauty is equated with morality, so Kant sees arts as producing representations of moral goodness.
Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good; and only because we refer [Rucksicht] the ‘beautiful to the morally good (we all do so [Beziehung] naturally and require all others also to do so, as a duty) does our liking for it include a claim to everyone else’s assent, while the mind is also conscious of being ennobled, by this [reference], above a mere receptivity for pleasure derived from sense impressions, and it assesses the value of other people too on the basis of [their having] a similar maxim in their power of judgment. The morally good is the intelligible that taste has in view, as I indicated in the preceding section; for it is with this intelligible that even our higher cognitive powers harmonize… (Immanuel Kant 1987, 228)
Again as non-Christians, Black Africans had no chance of being morally good, because white westerners considered them to lack logic and reason necessary for Kant’s morality. So again, the objects created by Black Africans could never be considered as moral, revealing moral good, or fine art.
Baumgarten, Hume and Kant are all Enlightenment thinkers, and so the racist ideology of the Enlightenment is found in their work, this ideology continues as western philosophy moves from the 18th to the 19th Century. G.W.F. Hegel remains an influential western philosophy who lived through the turn of the 18th century and wrote about aesthetics and find art (Hegel 1975). Hegel is part of a movement in philosophy which sees human achievement as better than that of nature. Humans were at the top of the evolutionary ladder (with white, cishet, Christian men being at the very top) and were closer to god than nature as god gave humans the distinction of having the ability to use logic and reason and nothing else except god could do this.
Beauty for Hegel is similar to Kant and Plato’s ideas in that beauty is not a physical thing but a recognition of the form of beauty. Because humans grasp beauty through contemplation, one would have to have a human mind and consciousness to recognize art. Hegel also sees that art and beauty must-have moral and real qualities and artwork provides moral education.
Art by means of its representations, while remaining within the sensuous sphere, liberates man at the same time from the power of sensuousness. Of course we may often hear favourite phraseology about man’s duty to remain in immediate unity with nature; but such unity, in its abstraction, is purely and simply rudeness and ferocity, and by dissolving this unity for man, art lifts him with gentle hands out of and above imprisonment in nature. For man’s preoccupation with artistic objects remains purely contemplative, and thereby it educates, even if at first only an attention to artistic portrayals in general, later on an attention to their meaning and to a comparison with other subjects, and it opens the mind to a general consideration of them and the points of view therein involved. (Hegel 1975, 49)
For Hegel, art is necessarily a product of white western culture, as it has the most advanced people capable of producing art. Not only because of advanced skills and technology but because of themselves being able to understand truth and beauty because white believe the myths of primitive Black Africans do not use the proper type of beautiful subjects.
The Ideal is not to be thus understood. For any content can be represented quite adequately, judged by the standard of its own essence, without being allowed to claim the artistic beauty of the Ideal. Indeed, in comparison with ideal beauty, the representation will even appear defective. In this regard it may be remarked in advance, what can only be proved later, namely that the defectiveness of a work of art is not always to be regarded as due, as may be supposed, to the artist’s lack of skill; on the contrary, defectiveness of form results from defectiveness of content. So, for example, the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, in their artistic shapes, images of gods, and idols, never get beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form. They could not master true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought of their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly, and so did not consist of the content which is absolute in itself. Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty; the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought (Hegel 1975, 74).
Hegel sees beauty as reflective of the unity and purity of god. Beauty indicates the Form materialized and pure beauty will produce an objective experience in the viewer and is outside of time and space free from contamination. Only certain people can apprehend beauty, and white people thought the non-white people were not human enough to think with logic rather than be slaves to their senses (Hegel 1975, 111). So nature is essential to Hegel in that it reveals (a la Kant) an abstract form of beauty that contains unity and regularity, symmetry and harmony. All white western beauty standards that for Hegel are self-evident.
Hegel goes further in ranking humans according to their participation in the beautiful because their bodies are better than animal bodies from which evolved. However, this also means that some human bodies are better than other animal bodies.
Now it is true that the spirit finds the whole Concept of natural life completely actualized in its own bodily organism, so that, in comparison with this, the animal species may appear as imperfect in their life, and indeed, at lower stages, as scarcely living at all. Nevertheless, the human organism too is split likewise, even in a lesser degree, split into racial differences and their gradation of beautiful formations. (Hegel 1975, 150)
Inborn genius is a requirement for being able to create art for Hegel like Kant.
Just as beauty itself is the Idea made real in the sensuous and actual world, and the work of art takes what is spiritual and sets it out into the immediacy of existence for apprehension by eye and ear, so too the artist must fashion his work not in the exclusively spiritual form of thought but within the sphere of intuition and feeling and, more precisely, in connection with sensuous material and in a sensuous medium. Therefore this artistic creation, like art throughout, includes in itself the aspect of immediacy and naturalness, and this aspect it is which the subject cannot generate in himself but must find in himself as immediately given. This alone is the sense in which we may say that genius and talent must be inborn. (Hegel 1975, 284)
This criterion for the production of art excludes all humans who are not naturally geniuses and therefore asserts that artistic talent is a trait a human may or may not have at birth. Obviously, this brings up the ideas popular during Hegel’s life of genetics, evolution and the natural superiority of whites over the natural inferiority of Black Africans. If artistic genius is considered an innate trait, it is not a leap to say that it is a white trait that Black Africans had not developed because they were too far down on the evolutionary ladder.
Hegel makes this point by discussing how symbols and signs are not art – note that Black African objects consisted of various symbols and signs. He takes up a protestant critique against idols which they aimed at Catholic veneration of Saints in addition to Jesus.
[I]t is a different thing when a sign is to be a symbol. The lion, for example, is taken as a symbol of magnanimity, the fox of cunning, the circle of eternity, the triangle of the Trinity. But the lion and the fox do possess in themselves the very qualities whose significance they are supposed to express (Hegel 1975, 304).
This argument was often used by white protestants to condemn Black Africans veneration of Ancestors and local spirits using sculptures, decorative designs and textiles.
Hegel does speak of the usefulness of non-white western symbolic objects and paintings in terms of showing us the progress of human civilization.
Thus when we first enter the world of the old-Persian, Indian, Egyptian shapes and productions, our footing is not really secure; we feel that we are wandering amongst problems; in themselves alone these productions say nothing to us; they do not please us or satisfy us by their immediate appearance, but by themselves they encourage us to advance beyond them to their meaning which is something wider and deeper than they are. In the case of other productions, on the contrary, we see at first glance that, like nursery tales, for example, they are meant to be a mere play with images and casual far-fetched connections. (Hegel 1975, 308)
The pinnacle of human achievement in art for Hegel is white western art that focused on the glory of the Christian god.
This relation, when art asserts it as the fundamental one for both its content and its form, affords the art-form of sublimity, strictly so-called. Beauty of the Ideal must of course be distinguished from sublimity. For in the Ideal the inner life pervades external reality, whose inner being the inner life is, in the sense that both sides appear as adequate to one another and therefore precisely as pervading one another. In sublimity, on the contrary, external existence, in which the substance is brought before contemplation, is degraded in comparison with the substance, since this degradation and servitude is the one and only way whereby the one God can be illustrated in art; this is because the one God is explicitly without shape and is incapable of expression in his positive essence in anything finite and mundane. Sublimity presupposes the meaning in an independence in comparison with which the external must appear as merely subordinate, because the inner does not appear in it but so transcends it that nothing comes into the representation except as this transcendence and superiority. (Hegel 1975, 372)
Again this means that cultures who do not share the same ideas about god would never be able to create actual art, only “symbolic” heathen representations. If we overlay the discourse at the time concerning the savage pre-religious Black Africans, it is easy to see why Black African objects would not be recognized at art, and never as an art equal to white western art.
Schopenhauer’s ideas about aesthetics also echo the larger ideology present in Europe in the early 1800s. The Victorian era began in 1837, and exhibitions of Black African objects in antique shops and markets had begun. Western philosophers began to turn inward after many centuries of worrying about the validity of the external world and how existence began the human becomes a subject of study in many disciplines. Anthropology is an emerging field which seeks to understand what it means to be human by looking at human development historically. Philosophers like Schopenhauer have almost given up on ever finding the thing-in-itself and instead begin to think of the world as something created by an individual subject and not just found. For Schopenhauer aesthetics must consider the problems of the individual subject who encounters the world through sensation and then contemplates these experiences.
Schopenhauer divergences from Platonic thought which refused to consider experience/sensation as the basis for truth and beauty because it was too individualized. The key to thinkers like Kant and Hegel is that they are still committed to finding the objective view from nowhere, which will illuminate absolute timeless, unchanging truth. Schopenhauer is very aware that humans only have things to think about because they encounter things in the world and need sensation to encounter things in the world. He also recognizes that this means all people have a different experience of the world because no two people can be in the exact same time and space, so no two experiences of the world are exactly alike.
With aesthetics, he recognizes that the individual subject is essential in recognizing beauty, in that the recognition of beauty makes something beautiful.
This theory is almost totally subjectivized in that a thing is said to be beautiful because it is an object of a person’s (a subject’s) aesthetic contemplation. No specific objective character is required for something to be beautiful; an object’s beauty is acquired as the result of being the object of some person’s aesthetic consciousness. (Dickie 1997, 25)
Aesthetics for Schopenhauer is an odd combination of individual will [desire], cosmic will [god] and consciousness of the individual of objects the individual perceives. For humans to detach aesthetic consciousness from the object in the intellectual manoeuvre of removing the object from its physical existence that is sensed and contemplating the object isolated from the world (Dickie 1997, 26). Despite this, he still clings to old ideas about the “aesthetic object in itself” which is why the object must be detached from its physical material existence and enter in the contemplating mind of the subject free from the influence of the world. So the genuine appreciation of aesthetics is in the objective, isolated mind, not sensation.
Again, philosophers in the 1800s are part of the Enlightenment zeitgeist, stressing science, and the need to be objective so humans could understand the Truth of the world. Aesthetics is thus, concerned as well with the need for objectivity for aesthetic judgment, meaning that logic and reason, not emotion, were the only paths to real understanding. The white western obsession with logic and reason shapes part of the narrative which placed Black Africans in the role of primitive pre-humans, white Europeans considered them too stupid for logic and born with about the ability to reason. Beyond that vast amounts of propaganda portrayed the Black Africans as too sensual, too sexual, to tempted by bodily desires and so they would further naturally white westerners’ would disqualify them from having the ability to have aesthetic contemplation. Black Africans were too stuck in their bodies, and their minds were not capable of not being distracted by their emotions and desires.
White western philosophers moved from the individual to society as western institutions were created and expanded during the end of the 1800s. The governments of western nation/states usurped the control of Christian churches took over science, education, medicine and museums. Philosophers likewise began to see the connections between institutions and aesthetics, especially fine art. Instead of relying on an inborn talent, god, or science to explain what made something art, it was up to institutional training at universities and in the world of artistic production and criticism that would allow individuals to know what was beautiful and what was or was not art.
As the industrial revolution swept through various colonized locations, the body became a site of discipline and something that could produce labour to be exploited by capitalism. A great deal of emphasis on the health of bodies, the fitness of mind become tropes that exclude many categories of people. Black people, people of colour in the minds of white people were suspect because white westerners thought they carried diseases as well as being stupid and violent. The same one could say the same of indigenous people global, religiously non-Christian people, non-heterosexual non-cis people. Disabled people are also not able to have aesthetic judgment if they cannot see the painting or hear the orchestra, or see the actors.
As the industrial revolution boomed and the triangular trades of enslaved Black Africans came to an end, the stereotypes about Black people remained, much based on characters of Black African people. Black people in the U.S. had a disjointed experience of Black Africa because of enslavement, and white Europeans separated enslaved peoples into groups which could not speak the same language to discourage revolt. The history that the majority of people in the U.S. have learned from public schools is missing vast swaths of information about the enslavement experience, and many people of all races in the U.S. still believe the degraded stereotypes concerning Black Africa and Black African people.
Not surprisingly philosopher Monroe Beardsley believed that there is only one group which can determine what is or is not art and that is, of course, experts based on their specialized knowledge obtained at competitive western universities, following the long line of western art history and tradition (Dickie 1997, 39). These notions of the need for experts relying on tradition became part of the institutional aesthetic discourse. Expertise requires university education which means that white western men are the majority of people who are able to judge art the best since they are the ones that white culture permits into the universities (remembering that women could not attend universities in the U.S. before 1831 and 1849 in the UK and rarely attended universities [beyond nursing schools and education for teaching] until after the 1950s.
The Real
Industrialization created new problems for aesthetic theory. As technology advanced, it became easier and easier to produce multiple copies of art through printmaking, as the photography developed (during the late 1800s) a more massive threat came into existence. Why create a drawing or painting when one could photograph beauty and move and store the prints with ease. If one print is the same as the next print and if all things can be reproduced photographically, who do we distinguish real art from a copy? Authenticity is a problem that looms large in western art theory.
Lithography marked a fundamentally new stage in the technology of reproduction. This much more direct process-distinguished by the fact that the drawing is traced on a stone, rather than incised on a block of wood or etched on a copper plate-first made it possible for graphic art to market its products not only in large numbers, as previously, but in daily changing variations. Lithography enabled graphic art to provide an illustrated accompaniment to everyday life. It began to keep pace with movable-type printing. But only a few decades after the invention of lithography, graphic art was surpassed by photography (W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility and Other Writings on Media 2008, 20).
In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project 1999) he looks at the relationship between Empire and commodity and its effects on culture and art. Arcades are the earliest version of European shopping malls, modelled in part after Northern African markets lined with stalls under cover from the elements they provided entertainment as well as sold goods. In Paris, the shopping experience was also a chance for marketing and propaganda to be spread amongst the masses. The arcades during the Victorian era were constructed of iron and glass, filled with long lines of individual shop windows that the public would promenade past. The creation of Arcades is not a happy development for aesthetics.
Benjamin also comments on World’s Fairs popular in the late 1800s. Exhibitions like the Chicago and Paris world’s fairs included the display of Black Africans and other “primitives”. Black people, not always directly from Africa, would dress in costumes of loincloths and sit in huts cooking food over open flames to demonstrate the remote past from which white western civilization escaped. The fairs spread white supremacist ideology about the role of white people in bringing humanity into its most perfect form and also was a tool of the commodification process. White organizers designed fairs to attract lower class people. The fairs were viewed as educational opportunities seeing displays concerning science, medicine, the newest technology showed them how advanced a civilization they were living in. Underneath this, Benjamin sees the creation of commodity culture.
[They] glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value becomes secondary. They are a school in which the masses, forcibly excluded from consumption, are imbued with the exchange value of commodities to the point of identifying with it: “Do not touch the items on display.” World exhibitions thus provide access to a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. Within these divertissements, to which the individual abandons himself in the framework of the entertainment industry, he remains always an element of a compact mass. This maps delights in amusement parks… in an attitude that is pure reaction. It is thus led to that state of subjection which propaganda, industrial as well as political, relies on. (W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project 1999, 18)
The arcades housed merchants who relied on industrialization to create the merchandise in bulk to increase the speed of production and reduce cost. Industrialization means that what machines produce is not single individual crafted items, but as close to perfect as possible copies. Advances in technology gave the industry the ability to print artwork and mass-produce copies of photographs which were as good as the real thing to the lower classes who could never afford an original of their own. Benjamin sees the difference between authentic art and an elusive aura that is not present in the copy. ” For the decline of the aura, One thing within the realm of mass production is of overriding importance: the massive reproduction of the image. (W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project 1999, 337)”
Here the problem was not so much what is beautiful and what is not, but the copies are lesser than original unique works, as evidenced by their lesser value as a commodity of exchange. Authenticity for artworks in the white western context has to do with also with Truth. How does one know who actually painted the masterpiece? The turning to the subject meant that aesthetics became concerned with the artists who created and their ability to create glimpses of purity and truth. Anything that did not represent the truth of beauty would not be considered art, but artists might have different ways to express the truth of beauty.
The shift to mechanical production during the industrial revolution continued a process of mass production since the printing press was used the west (though the Chinese had presses before Europe]. The increasing pace of production and the way in which crafts and artistry were replaced by large scale business enterprises (such as how pottery and textile factories took over and replaced small individual shops that created unique pieces). The same became true of art. The ability to mass-produce graphic images replaced fine art in the homes of the middle class and this also allowed them to remain exposed to the essential moralistic property of white western art in the form of propagandist imagery.
Theses defining the developmental tendencies of art can therefore contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to un- (p. 19) derestimate. They neutralize a number of traditional concepts-such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery-which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism. In what follows, the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art [Kunstpolitik]. (W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility and Other Writings on Media 2008, 19-20)
Art, however, is not equal to propaganda in that there is a unique singularity to art that copies of any type can never share. Authenticity is only present in an original and requires a history. Again Benjamin is placing the existence of all authentic art within a framework of white western art and intellectual history from which white westerners exclude all other aesthetic pieces. The historical lineage of the artwork contributes to the artworks’ aura giving the work a narrative and a feeling of importance to the viewer. The works singularity also contributes to the aura, giving the viewer the sense of seeing something unique and therefore rare and irreproducible.
The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it. Since the historical testimony is founded on the physical duration, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical duration plays no part. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object, the weight it derives from tradition. (W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility and Other Writings on Media 2008, 22)
Here again, we see another argument that white Europeans used to denigrate Black Africans and their culture. White Experts convinced white westerners that Black Africa was habited by people so primitive that they had very rudimentary forms of communication and no written language. Because of the lack of written documentation, it white Europeans assumed that these people had no verifiable real history that white people could study. Since white westerners did not understand the languages and symbols of Black African peoples, they assumed there was no history nor tradition in these cultures. So any objects that Black Africans created could never be considered by white western thinkers as products of a history and tradition that could describe them authentically. With no history, it meant that white western thinkers could make up histories and traditions to explain the objects in their cultural context without any verification from Black Africans.
Once in Europe and the U.S. Black African objects were displayed to prove that lack of civilization in the colonies before white Europeans arrived. They also became propagandist tools that emphasized the horrors that order, law, god and government-provided protected against. The phantasmagoria was originally dioramas that morphed into lantern shows of glass slides. Black African objects and people served as phantasmagoria that was circulating in travelling exhibitions and show in arcades with photo viewers. The images and objects were considered shocking, dangerous, and erotic to the hundreds of people flocked to see them. The people who ran the lantern shows and arcades profited greatly from a public that was looking for excitement. Here we see an instance of propagandist use of Black Africa to scare the public and warn them what an ending of western civilization would look. Clearly, white experts displayed Black African objects as the opposite of white western art, which was beautiful and ordered and civilized.
Clive Bell builds on Benjamin’s ideas in that he describes art as giving the viewer a particular emotional experience – something the artworks aura provides. The way to discover what the definition of art is or the requirements for art to exist would be to take all the objects that generate and “aesthetic emotion” and look for their commonality (Dickie 1997, 54). Bell’s emphasis on the viewers’ experience of “aesthetic emotion” for the authenticity of art does leave an opening. He does not link this strongly with history and tradition for the excitement of “aesthetic emotion” which means that non-white western objects might induce “aesthetic emotions” for non-white viewers. Bell was a fan of post-impressionism and brought Cezanne to the English public (Dickie 1997, 58).
One of the most influential artists in the history of modern painting, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) has inspired generations of artists. Generally categorized as a Post-Impressionist, his unique method of building form with color and his analytical approach to nature influenced the art of Cubists, Fauves, and successive generations of avant-garde artists (Boorhies 2004).
Bell’s connection to Cezanne is significant because Cezanne had an “African” period, and Black African objects influenced him in his work. As the predecessor of the Cubists, he is one of the first white western artists to incorporate Black shapes, designs and sculptural figures into his own painting. We will return to this in a later chapter. However, it is essential to note that as the 20th century progressed attitudes towards Blacks and Black Africa were also shifting. Furthermore, exposure to Black African objects impacted white western ideas about design and aesthetics.
Power/Beauty
The idea that the concepts of what is beautiful and what counts are real art contain political ideology. Culture is not an accident but something that is cultivated, invested in, protected, rooted in history and mythology; it serves to help bind people together against outsiders who might change things. As capitalism rose in the west and new ideas about citizens and rights became subjects of political life. When most of the population were moving from a feudal quasi enslaved life of production for the nobles’ questions about how one should act in society become prominent. It was easy to get people to behave when one could kill them with no consequences. In philosophy, we see this transformation in political philosophy, but equally as crucial in aesthetic philosophy which began to centre around questions of taste, and morality ever since art has been part of that which makes the world right and civilized (Eagleton 1988).
Art serves those in power as a means of control; nations use art and symbolism to rouse patriotic sentiment in the public. The powerful seeking to make sure the public found the right things as good and tasteful, properly aesthetic and beautiful constructed the criteria for good and evil.
Pierre Bourdieu links aesthetics with western systems of economics, social hierarchy and institutions in his work Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (Bourdieu 1984). Aesthetics for Bourdieu is one part of the control apparatus the elite use to maintain order. Good taste was a mark of good manners and therefore good morals, anyone who wished to be good must also develop good taste. Taste for Bourdieu is not a natural desire born out of the view from nowhere but rather is cultivated through education, social pressure, public institutions and media.
Bourdieu in his discussion of Aesthetics raises the notion of how objects become thought of as beautiful, or artistic and the relationships between taste ( the ability to judge well) and race, economics, social hierarchy all undergirded by economic structures and western institutions like museums and universities. Bourdieu uses sociological surveys to show how occupation and education relate to taste in cultural products like film and literature.
As theories of aesthetics developed in the west throughout the colonialization of Black Africa, white people designed them to exclude those whom they did not consider fully human. The objects that Black Africans were not created by humans, according to white western theories, but proto-humans. The ability to distinguish who counted as human became more complicated as more people became literate and gained capital. We see in U.S. museums the anxiety of a nation trying to reaffirm the status quo of white supremacy and the rights of the ruling class. With the influx of non-white migrants and newly made Black citizens colonization tactics reestablished boundaries to maintain “social order”.
There is a tendency in western theory to understand the aesthetic phenomena of artwork as a problem which is separate from the common struggles of day to day life, politics and oppression. White western philosophers argued over the attributes of beauty, what could be called art, what distinguished art from nature, what was the moral implications of art, as well as what someone who is viewing art objects experience. We see in white western philosophy an embedded ideology which promised a methodology for understanding universal, eternal truths about any given subjects and so the quest to define and understand aesthetics and art sought to isolate art objects from the context of life.
Most notably, theorists have left out critical components in the analysis of concepts of aesthetics and art objects. One cannot ignore the ties between economic value and artistic value, as cultures embrace the production and consumption of art objects. As Bourdieu shows us, the creation of art objects does not occur in a vacuum, and the recognition of art objects by humans is limited by the viewers’ education, social status, economic class, and personal history. For example:
The rate of non-response the question on favorite painters or pieces of music is also closely correlated with level of education, with a strong opposition between the dominate class on the one hand and the working classes, craftsmen and small tradesmen on the other (Bourdieu 1984, 14).
Bourdieu reveals that the role of capital economics produces divisions to create hierarchy and social order while maintaining the status quo. This split becomes evident when looked at through the lens of “caste”. In a society arranged around a “caste” system, your ancestry determines your status and types of work you can do in society and thus determines your economic and social power. The lower caste is determined to pull themselves up by the bootstraps into a higher caste with more power and to aid in their transformation they seek to emulate the upper castes ability to buy valuable things like artworks.
The naive exhibitionism of ‘conspicuous consumption’, which seeks distinction in the crude display of ill-mastered luxury, is nothing compared to the unique capacity of the pure gaze, a quasi-creative power which sets the aesthete apart from the common herd by a radical difference which seems to be inscribed in ‘persons’. (Bourdieu 1984, 31)
Also, the ruling class can maintain power by shifting the value of artworks as not giving humans values but as sorting out who has the proper morals and values as evidenced by their taste and understanding of art.
The apprehension and appreciation of the work also depend on the beholder’s intention, which is itself a function of the conventional norms governing the relation to the work of art in a certain historical and social situation and also of the beholder’s capacity to conform to those norms, i.e., his artistic training. (Bourdieu 1984, 30)
The role of norms and values is important because different cultures would not have the same value for different aesthetic types and would not understand art in the same way. The beholders’ intention while viewing Black African objects is shaped by collectors and museums still seems to be the attempt to show Africa as primitive and tribally anonymous and sensationalize the public for profit.
Modernist white artist and collectors were counting on the presence of Black African imagery and symbols or objects to shock the moral public. Mythology linking Black Africa to Satanism, uncontrolled sexuality and violence shaped the way in the public seen, understand and value the objects and artwork referencing Black African objects. The spectacle of exotic, erotic and dangerous on display in fairs, museums and public tours, lured the money paying public with titillation.
Thus the easiest, and so the most frequent and most spectacular way to ‘shock’ (ȇpater) the bourgeois’ by proving the extent of one’s power to confer aesthetic status is to transgress ever more radically the ethical censorships (e.g., in matters of sex) which the other classes accept even within the area which the dominant disposition defines as aesthetic. Or, more subtly, it is done by conferring aesthetic status on objects or ways of representing them that are excluded by the dominant aesthetic of the rime, or on objects that are given aesthetic Status by dominated ‘aesthetics’. (Bourdieu 1984, 48)
Bourdieu attacks the very heart of western aesthetics search for a universal art divorced from the materiality and political landscape of everyday life.
‘Art for art’s sake, as it has been called, not having its legitimacy within itself, being based on nothing, is nothing. It is debauchery of the heart and dissolution of the mind. Separated from right and duty, cultivated and pursued as the highest thought of the soul and the supreme manifestation of humanity, art or the ideal, stripped of the greater part of itself, reduced to nothing more than an excitement of fantasy and the senses, is the source of sin, the origin of all servitude, the poisoned spring from which, according to the Bible, flow all the fornications and abominations of the earth . . . Art for art’s sake, I say, verse for verse’s sake, style for style’s sake, form for form’s sake, fantasy for fantasy’s sake, all the diseases which like a plague of lice are gnawing away at our epoch.’ (Bourdieu 1984, 49) quoting P. J Proudhon, Contradictions Economiques (Paris, Riviere, 1939), p. 226; italics mine.
The ability to appreciate artwork is something granted to only certain people within economies of capital.
The ethical indifference which the aesthetic disposition implies when it becomes the basis of the art of living is in fact the root of the ethical aversion to artists (or intellectuals) which manifests itself particularly vehemently among the declining and threatened fractions of the petite bourgeoisie (especially independent craftsmen and shopkeepers), who tend to express their regressive and repressive dispositions in all areas of practice (especially in educational matters and vis-a-vis students and student demonstrations), but also among the rising fractions of that class whose striving for virtue and whose deep insecurity render them very receptive to the phantasm of ‘pornocracy’. (Bourdieu 1984, 46)
The aesthetic disposition, understood as the aptitude for perceiving and deciphering specifically stylistic characteristics, is thus inseparable from specifically artistic competence. The latter may be acquired by explicit learning or simply by regular contact with works of art, especially those assembled in museums and galleries, where the diversity of their (p 50) original functions is neutralized by their being displayed in a place consecrated to art, so that they invite pure interest in form. This practical mastery enables its possessor to situate each element of a universe of artistic representations in a class defined in relation to the class composed of all the artistic representations consciously or unconsciously excluded. (Bourdieu 1984, 50-51)
The white western art world is self-referential and built on long-standing systems of knowledge that seek to promote white supremacy.
Attribution is always implicitly based on reference to ‘typical works’, consciously or unconsciously selected because they present to a particularly high degree the qualities more or less explicitly recognized as pertinent in a given system of classification. (Bourdieu 1984, 52)
The western art world since the Romantic period sought to create pieces that could connect to universal human understanding—using the subjects and styles of older western epochs like the Greeks to try and expose the universally recognizable aesthetics long sought after by aestheticians while maintaining a definition of art that was firmly rooted in western ideology and culture.
<p value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">[T]o understand why the early Romantic painters returned to primitive art, one would have to reconstitute the whole universe of reference of the pupils of David, with their long beards and Greek costumes, who, 'outdoing their master's cult of antiquity, wanted to go back to Homer, the Bible and Ossian, and condemned the style of classical antiquity itself as " rococo", "Van Loo" or "Pompadour". (Bourdieu 1984, 52) [T]o understand why the early Romantic painters returned to primitive art, one would have to reconstitute the whole universe of reference of the pupils of David, with their long beards and Greek costumes, who, ‘outdoing their master’s cult of antiquity, wanted to go back to Homer, the Bible and Ossian, and condemned the style of classical antiquity itself as ” rococo”, “Van Loo” or “Pompadour”. (Bourdieu 1984, 52)
melungeon mullins 