Western Aesthetic Thought: A Brief History

“…do not forget the lament of the short lived Achilles, mourning the leaf like change and vicissitudes of the race of men and the decline of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long for a continuation of life, even though he lives as a day laborer.” (Nietzsche “The Birth of Tragedy.” p.43)

If one considers Plato’s analogy of man’s state in his description of the shadow puppets in a cave, one may see this as an analogy of the artist as well. For the artist is one perceiving of a greater dimension, yet constrained to living in three. He intuits the existence of the greater world, but cannot quite see it. In this way, all artists are crippled, yet no more so than man. Still, the artist is one who can give the symbol concrete form. As the symbol is the essence of art, it is a general or abstract idea presented, not directly, but metaphorically. While it is a necessary component of language and of culture, as “culture” is defined in anthropological terms, the symbol and art cannot be removed from culture and culture cannot exist without it. The symbol is the basis upon which all of civilization is built. All human knowledge rests upon this very concept. This idea of the symbol, so integral to human social interaction, was first given description by Socrates and most memorably composed by Plato and Aristotle. But the means to investigate it were founded by the first Greek philosopher and scientist, Thales. He proposed that all matter in the world was composed of a single principle, which he thought to be water. The important factor was not whether he was correct in his assumption; it is that he was making the first leap in formal abstraction of western history: how he deduced an answer and not what he deduced. Whereas, anthropologically, man has recognized abstract ideas in terms of tool-making and the governing principles of nature- as far as how they apply to food-gathering-; this was the first time man tried to answer the question through observation rather than with an abstract disclaimer such as “the gods”; he made the groundbreaking assumption that the world could actually be understood by man. Thus the understanding of an abstract principle was revealed. It is the crossroads of all human knowledge: the search for the universal. Thus the natural conclusion of western man’s first coherent question has driven western culture for over two thousand years. Any such conclusion would throw us into disarray. As I will discuss, post-modernism is the natural conclusion of western thought and by extension western art. Only on the surface though, does science and logic seem to support the precepts of the post-modern conclusion.

I.

“Thales was best known for being the first thinker to propose a single universal principle of the material universe, a unique substratum that, itself unchanging, underlay all change.” (Van Doren, p. 31)

His question may have been motivated by a single universal principle that all human beings know and among other things, defines us from the animal kingdom. It is the knowledge that all creatures are born, and eventually will die. His great question was: since all of the observable world changes, is there something that does not? He reasoned that if there was something recognizable in one “thing” even throughout its change, then there must be something recognizable in all “things” throughout their change. Of course, through thought most people come to the conclusion that there is some unchanging thing, otherwise, how would we recognize things to be the same, only changed? A tree is a tree, though it is different in every season, and there are many different kinds of trees in many different places. The label “tree” is merely a group that we place all of these individual things into because they share similar characteristics. It is a symbol, or abstraction. Thales held that the single defining principle of all things was water; later the stoics held that it was fire, and others held it to be other elements. But, Pythagoras believed that mathematics to be the universal (and even divine) principle which defines all things. Yet what put an end to the cult that sprung up around him was there remarkable insightfulness. Because they held a mystical belief about numbers, one discovery of theirs leads them to complete disillusion. They discovered irrational numbers, which meant that some things could not be quantified in a rational integer. Thus the human mind could not understand all things. There was disorder, and thus, all things did not follow an absolute order. If there is no underlying order then there is only chaos, and so, no hope of divinity. Fortunately their woe has laid the groundwork for the advancement of mathematics after.

A philosopher whom many have ignored throughout the ages seems to have come the closest to the scientific truth. Democritus believed that all matter could be broken down to a single physical principle. This particle he called the Atom, from which the name used in science today, was derived. Yet it was Socrates who began our specific discussion, and could be said to have invented most of the difficult questions in history. He focused mainly on ethics and politics, but he was renowned for his cutting accuracy when asking the right questions. He did not write anything that we know of, but he passed on his method of analysis to his star pupil Plato.

Plato is most well known for his concrete belief in ideal form. Revived around 300 A.D. by Plotinus, the ideal form of neo-Platonism was adopted by St. Augustine as the truest conception of the world in terms of Christianity. He proposed that the truest form was based upon geometry, and was the divine principle of all things. Chiefly, Plato’s ideas rose from the society in which he lived, where the most important god was Apollo, the god of light: clarity, and reason. In Plato we also find the origin of the work of Polyklietos, perhaps the most rigorous of classical artists. Each of his sculptures was formed according to his extremely specific code of geometric ratios and proportions, which no-one after has yet precisely described. Yet through this complex system of geometry, artists have been passed down the tools to more accurately depict human form in a realistic and even individual sense. Each form, in order to create the illusion of reality, must have a degree of proportion and geometry, as well as imperfection.

Aristotle was the most famous student of Plato and also the thorn in his side. He proposed an alternative: that reality consisted of observable and quantifiable fact and a principle form, by which we can understand it.

“Matter did not exist by itself, nor did Form. He disagreed with Plato about the latter point, for Plato had posited the independent existence of Forms. Thus the world that Aristotle taught us to understand is the very world we see. It is full of real objects which he called substances, having potential aspects, which allows them to change, and a formal or essential aspect, which makes them intelligible...” (Van Doren, p. 42)

He invented the rules of thought, the scientific method, and is known as the father of modern Science. He concluded that things exist only due to two principles: form and matter. Defined in his terms, Form is the ideal principle which is shared by all things, and Matter is the observed and imperfect reality of individual things. Thus existence consists of a balance between order and disorder. And the system of dichotomous analysis was born. One thing reveals itself only in context with another. This conflict set up the major dichotomy of western culture, which has influenced the path of history since.

All of these thinkers have become the basis for many of our contemporary categories of knowledge: Theology, Physical Science, Mathematics, and Art to name a few. One might conclude in hind sight that Democritus found the true and final answer, and all others must have been wrong. Yet through viewing the applications of these various theories we find that many of them were right in their own context. Further, each has had their peculiar and specific effect on the development of art; Democritus influenced pointillism, Plato classicism, Socrates social realism, Aristotle the Renaissance.

II

In The City of God St. Augustine discusses the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire around 500 A.D. It had been said that Christianity was the reason, but in this single book, Augustine conclusively rejected that statement, brought about almost a thousand years of theocratic reign, and arguably the most profound theological thought in western history. During this time, all of the greatest minds turned towards theology, which is the cause of what we deem the “dark ages”. Yet this term is a conception which we have super-imposed upon the era due to our biases. It is true that the quality of life decreased after the fall of Rome, which was simply because Europe had decided a new path of development. Since the precepts of worldly knowledge had evidently failed. They chose to seek success and reward in the after-life. We define social progress in terms of politics and science, which are the very things that Medieval Europe had precluded from their intellectual focus. Instead they developed beautiful and eloquent treatises on God and built awe-inspiring architecture such as the French Gothic cathedrals among others. The average person did not have the material comforts or freedoms that had been enjoyed in Greece and Rome, but who is to say that their lives were less successful, important or happy? That is a judgment that we cannot objectively make.

“In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, a void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Genesis 1:1)

The God of Abraham originated as one of a pantheon of gods in the early Jewish faith. Jehovah-Jera was effectively the god of war and eventually became the single god of the faith. Through the expansion of the Greek empire by Alexander the great, Greek thought and innovation was spread throughout the Mediterranean, and even as far east as Persia and northern India the influence of Greek philosophy was felt. At some point these ideas became introduced to Judaic theologists, and the characteristics of the Greek Apollo became intertwined with that of Jehovah. Thus, we can understand Genesis in terms of God imposing order, therefore giving law to the universe.

It’s not a great leap of logic to see where St. Augustine was getting his platonic ideas, when we read the Gospel of John, probably one of the most poetic and philosophical tracts in the Bible.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1)

There is a direct reference to Apollo here, in John’s reference to the light. Further, the fact that he so directly correlates the word (logos in the Greek tract) with God reiterates the very concept of form. For what is a word but an abstraction, a symbol of some idea or object? Moreover, the Greek logos has further connotations. In its relation to logics it implies rational order itself, just as in Genesis. The word is representative of Christ, the embodiment of the ideal of sacrifice. It seems that John, living quite a time after Christ’s death, was the first to apply Platonism to the concept of Christ, and through this, he ensured the legacy of Greek thought, at least through Christianity, and sowed a seed which later flourished in western art, giving it such fascinating depth and mystery. St. Augustine continues to identify the concept of Satan with that of the Dionysian, which will be further explored when we come to Nietzsche.

“To them, therefore, let that fabulous theology give place which delights the minds of men with the crimes of the gods; and that civil theology also, in which impure demons, under the name of gods, have seduced the peoples of the earth given up to earthly pleasures, desiring to be honoured by the errors of men, and by filling the minds of their worshippers with impure desires, exciting them to make the representation of their crimes one of the rites of their worship, whilst they themselves found in the spectators of these exhibitions a most pleasing spectacle- a theology in which, whatever was honourable in the temple, was defiled by its mixture with the obscenity of the theatre.” (St. Augustine, Book VIII p. 248)

These theatrical rites of worship which St. Augustine refers to are the Dionysian festivals; notorious for their dramas of mortal sin and the frenzied sexual orgies. For him they belie a characteristic of the carnal nature of man. St. Augustine lays the framework for the later refutation by medieval scholars of Aristotle’s “matter”, which he interpreted to represent the disorder; the irrational frenzy, of man’s corporeal nature.

In the Medieval world, the image held an awe inspiring power to begin with. Firstly, the written word and the graven image represented a means to immortality, as both of these were means of recording one’s thoughts and experiences so that they may carry on past one’s death. Secondly, most of the population was illiterate and had to learn about the bible through the imagery in the church, and so the nature of the immortal record and the message of promised immortality being communicated through them created a mystical view of art. The predominant icons of the time were not merely representations of divinity, they were considered actual incarnations of the ideas which they represented- almost an exercise in Form. These icons, like The Man of Sorrows included, were believed to have the power to incite actual visions. The cathedrals represented the form of the holy city on earth, just as the The Man of Sorrows was the embodiment of Christ’s sacrifice. One can guess, with the proliferation of private icons after the iconoclasm died down, and the great cathedrals being erected all across Europe (the largest of all buildings at the time), why the church was the dominant arbiter of all thought and culture for almost a thousand years.

III

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” (Michelangelo)

There was a gradual, but dramatic shift in thought. Its roots began about the same time as the medieval period but did not fruit until around the 14^th century. Boethius translated Aristotle’s Organon, or works on logic, into Latin, so future generations could access it. He is most famous for one phrase, which is his conclusion to a solution of the holy trinity.

“As far as you are able, join faith to reason.”

As simple as this phrase seems, it set forth a bee’s nest of anger in the church, for it assumed that man could reason with faith, and therefore understand God. Though this may fit with St. Augustine’s doctrines, it was an extremely unpopular idea. A solid defense of observation and reason did not reappear until a man named Peter Abelard was born in 1079. He argued that sin consisted not in the act, but in the consent of the mind to what it knows is wrong. In terms of the direct idea of our polar philosophies, Boethius and Abelard do not directly contribute, but they are extremely important for the development of St. Thomas Aquinas, who finally brought back the importance of the Aristotelian observation of the natural world as a valid means of understanding it. This was an important step in equalizing the balance of the polar concepts of form and matter, which were necessary as a point of tension for the emergence of the Renaissance.

Leonardo Da Vinci arguably recorded more human knowledge from observation than any single person in western history. He was one of the first and foremost to appreciate the application of Aristotle’s matter. He was fond of saying that nature held the answers to all questions. Not only did he make great contributions to nearly every field, he understood the basic concept of polarity, and how it could be applied to everything. In the case of art, he was the first to articulate the effects of atmospheric perspective. He understood the tenants of linear perspective (laid down by Massaccio, but also Brunelleschi) so well, that he even pointed out problems with the system. With the tools of dichotomous analysis first rationalized by the Greeks, he set up other polarities of formal language with which to compose a painting: warm and cool, light and dark, soft and hard edges, curvilinear and straight. All of these are integral to create dynamic tension within the picture plane. It’s important to note, that many other cultures, especially non-Christian based, throughout the world do not use a system of dichotomous analysis. For example, eastern thought (as a generalization) tends to conceive of things as a unity of parts and though it may recognize certain polar ideas, it does not tend to expand upon their principles. It is a simple, but extremely effective (for our purposes) method of analysis. But it is among the many kinds of knowledge that is often suppressed by tyrannical governments, which is why its development was so geographically and temporally limited.

IV

“One has to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world.” (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo)

In the development of modernist thought, there is one pre-eminent philosopher who influenced nearly every thinker of the twentieth century. Nietzsche started his career with a book entitled The Birth of Tragedy discussing the formation of Greek tragedy and its influence on art. In this brilliant book, he isolates the cultural influences of the Greeks and qualifies certain characteristics as either Dionysian or Apollonian, where the Dionysian is expressly the influence of tragedy, and as he argues, the inherent influence on creative thought. This piece marks an important shift in intellectual discourse, where for the previous four hundreds years were governed by the tenants of rationality, which is a result of Aristotle’s matter, he departs from popular thought to lay down a foundation for the importance of the primitive, the mystical, and emotive qualities associated with the Dionysian, or his re-interpretation of form, but in a different manner. Form became an immeasurable and disordered force: the mystical creative desire for ascension of the human spirit.

“Mans ability to traverse the earthly and supernatural in spirit as opposed to his physical impotence is the original human tragedy: the tragedy of spirituality. The consequence of this simultaneous impotence of body and mobility of spirit is the dichotomy of human existence. Half captive, half winged, each part becomes aware of the tragedy of its incompleteness through recognition of its partner.” (Paul Klee)

I think that Klee very eloquently described Nietzsche’s duality of human spirit and beautifully illustrated this concept in his Hero with a broken wing. It is not only an obvious extrapolation of out plurality, but also an interesting modern interpretation that hinges on social discourse in the same manner as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The thing about the modernist era is the direct influence of all fields on all other fields. This has always been the case, but because of the proliferation of knowledge due to the ease of printing, the increase of the middle class and general mediation of education, there has been an unprecedented increase in the cross-pollination of ideas, and the introduction of sciences such as psychology has increased the awareness of the relativity of perception.

The importance of science on contemporary philosophy and culture has not been adequately explored, in my opinion. First, if one takes the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which describes the motion of sub-atomic particles and states that no measurement, due to the fallibility of the tools of measurement, can be absolutely accurate. Thus, nothing can be perfectly quantified. Secondly, a particle in motion can not be measured in velocity as well as in position, meaning that if one attempts to measure the exact position in space of say an electron, the act of observation gives the electron more energy, thereby influencing its velocity. Further, when one attempts to measure the velocity, one cannot find its exact position. One can conclude that there is some influence imparted by the observer on the object observed, which logically leads to the individuals influence of perception on matter, the ability of perception to alter reality. This was a phenomenal discovery for science, but an equally phenomenal discover for philosophy. And in the last thirty years a new theory has developed: String theory answers Thales’ great question with even more accuracy than Epicurus. It proposes, and to a certain degree supports, that at the most minute level, all matter consists of energy vibrating at various frequencies. The one principle which underlies all things could be described as change itself, for what is energy, in physical terms, but the potentiality, or actuality for motion and change. Is this the universal form which makes up all things? Does this form exist without matter? One can no longer be certain if the original polarity upon which all western knowledge was based, is an accurate description of existence. When one peers deeper into matter one finds order, yet deeper into sub-atomic particles; one finds disorder and uncertainty, for change is disorder. All things tend towards entropy.

Physics has come to the point of philosophy itself (string theory), and philosophy after the 20^th century has become an extension of mathematics and science (comparative logic). But the overwhelming difference between our current society and those of the past is the cult of individuality. For the first time we are encouraged to think our own viewpoint is just as important, if nor more so, than others. Whereas the modernist period was characterized by this movement towards universals and the avant-garde, Post-modernism is characterized by the deconstruction of all knowledge of the past. Now, everything is considered to be relative, devoid of hierarchy, and fragmented by individual interpretation. The era of the pillars of dichotomous analysis has ended and we are left with nothing but scattered pieces: bits of irrelevant thought in a confused consciousness. Does society need structure to direct thought?

Just as at any time in history, not all things held to be true continue indefinitely to be held true. All “fact” is simply our best educated guess, so far. The essential problem with postmodernism is a simple one, but an important one nonetheless. If all things are relative and all things are subjective; the power of the individual is absolute in his own view. This relies on an extremely self-centered view of the universe. Yet, if one understands its vastness, then, and only then, can one truly see how minute and inconsequential our actions and views are to the grand scheme (if there is one), or simply the machinations of the cosmos. So an answer to the universal is that there is an unchanging, defining form, and that is the observer.

I will not be so bold to say that the twentieth century has finally and conclusively answered that age old question (or any question for that matter). But it has done so to a degree that is sufficient enough for most people. Most assume that we have reached the pinnacle of all societies, when in fact, our only significant progress in knowledge is in how to manipulate our environment through technology and the ability to access a great wealth of knowledge produced in the past. Otherwise, we are essentially the same as our preceding cultures, and know as little about human nature and what constitutes happiness. The Greeks arguably had as much knowledge in the areas of politics and ethics as we, they had reached a great understanding of observation in terms of art, and they made impressive musical accomplishments and were great students of human nature. The idea of progress is dependant upon a system of hierarchy. It depends upon a change towards an ideal goal, which is superior. Yet if everything is relative, then there is no progress, for no state of being or understanding is better than any other. A human being is merely more complex than an amoeba, but not necessarily superior. “Progress” serves self perpetuation, but objectively, is not an altruistic measure of change.

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” (Oscar Wilde)

Bibliography

Van Doren, Charles: A History of Knowledge Ballantine Books, NY 1991

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Thus Spake Zarathustra Dover Publications, NY 1999

St. Augustine: The City of God Random House, NY 1950

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy Modern Library, NY 2000

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Ecce Homo Modern Library, NY 2000

Unlisted quotations derived from quotations.com