45.384.201/301
Philosophy of Art and Beauty
Fall 2009 TR 1:00-2:15
R. E. Innis
Office hours: Olney 102C M 12:00-2:00, TR 2:30-4:30
Robert_Innis@uml.edu ext. 2532
“To aesthetic experience ... the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.” (John Dewey)
“Aesthetic experience is the awareness of the possibility of meaning; that is, the awareness of recognizable feelings.” (John K. Sheriff)
“Culture is not about pretty things or even ‘beautiful’ things. It is about those things that make life human: meaning, value, and importances.” (Joseph Grange)
This course, relying on many examples, will study the various ways art and beauty engage us and the various ways we have developed to think about this engagement. By ‘art’ we will mean everything that has gone under that rubric (music, dance, sculpture, architecture, painting, literature, drama, and so forth) and by ‘beauty’ we will mean any phenomenon, natural or artefactual, that manifests a distinctive quality, however we ultimately come to define it.
We will see that ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ are what philosophers call ‘essentially contestable’ concepts. That is, there is no universal agreement on the status and validity of these concepts. Our task will be to examine central features of the ‘inner spaces’ of these concepts, their ranges of application, and the relations they have to one another. We will see that the attempts at clarifying them involve us in many fateful twists and turns, conceptually, personally, and socially. The ways we (should) think about ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ are not peripheral to the deepest concerns of human life. We will attempt to chart the conceptual options that are brought into play when we not only think about the meanings of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ but also their values and their functions.
The course will not proceed in a ‘linear’ fashion but will ‘spiral’ around a set of topics and themes, ‘rotating’ them, so to speak, in such a way that the problems and issues recur in novel contexts:
(a) the historical and conceptual variability and complexity of our ideas and ideals of beauty, encompassing both artistic and natural beauty
(b) the types of ‘meanings’ borne both by art objects and by natural objects and the indispensability of interpretation
(c) the relation of art works to ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘the world’
(d) the role of ‘taste’ and ‘judgment’ in establishing the ‘values’ of art and beautiful objects
(e) the relative ‘value’ and ‘powers’ of the different art forms, especially the relations between visual art and music, and the interconnections between different works of art and their mutual relations to, and transformations of, common themes or sources
(f) the rhetorical, or persuasive, and the symbolic functions of art and natural beauty, especially religious art with its focus on ‘the sacred,’ as well as the notion of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘numinous’
(g)the contribution of art and beauty to our self-understanding and to our ways of being in the world
The following websites contain many illustrations that we will be talking about in the course of the semester and that are mentioned or reproduced in our texts.
www.artchive.com (Mark Harden’s Artchive)
www.wga.hu (Web Gallery of Art)
www.moma.org (
www.mfa.org (Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
Required texts:
Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty. Routledge
John Armstrong, The Secret Power of Beauty. Penguin
Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness. Pantheon
The Art Book. Phaidon. This text must be brought to all classes.
Recommended text:
John Armstrong, Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
(out of print, but used copies can be found at www.abebooks.com and www.bn.com). A most interesting and readable work.
The course will be divided into the following sections, each devoted to the reading and discussing of issues raised by our three main texts and their bearing on our topics and themes. These readings will be supplemented by the set of images collected in The Art Book, which is a kind of portable museum that is essential to the discussions and reflections we will be engaged in during the semester.
Forms of
Beauty, or Beauty in Experience
Crispin Sartwell explores six aspects under which humans experience beauty:
(a) as an object of longing, that is, as filling a ‘lack’
(b) as glow or bloom, that is, as sensuous appearing
(c) as holiness, that is, as striving for or participating in ‘the sacred’ in some form or other
(d) as idea or ideal, that is, as ‘order and rational structure’
(e) as humility and imperfection, that is, as embodied in ‘everydayness’
(f) as health and harmony, that is, as an ‘encompassing environment’
Art and
the Secret Power of Beauty
John Armstrong passes in review traditional theories about the power of beauty and reflects upon their power to uncover why beauty affects us the way it
does. He raises the question of whether there are as many styles and forms of beauty as there are ‘visions of happiness.’
The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
explores the idea that “where we are heavily influences who
we can be … and argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent
reminder of our full potential.” He asks the question, What is a beautiful
building?, with the intention of changing “the way we
think about our homes, our streets and ourselves.” Architecture is used as an exemplar to
explore beauty itself and to enable us to become more aware of the aesthetic
importance of the permanent structures in which we live our lives.
Course requirements and assignments:
They will normally be in the form of take-home examination essays and critical, reflective essays. Students are expected to attend all classes and to participate in the discussions. Participation will be factored into your final grade. You have to be on time for class. Plan accordingly. If you miss a class you must give me an index card specifying the date and the reason for your absence. Unreasonable absences will impact your grade. Do not make travel arrangements during the examination periods. No examination will be administered either early or late to accommodate you. The classes are the primary work-space for the course and you should avail yourself of this valuable time. Late papers, if accepted, receive no comments or consultation meetings.
PLEASE NOTE THAT BECAUSE I HAVE TO
BE OUT OF THE COUNTRY THERE WILL BE NO CLASS ON THE 22ND AND 24TH
OF SEPTEMBER AND THE 24TH OF NOVEMBER. I WILL ANNOUNCE EXTRA OFFICE
HOURS AND CONSULTATION PERIODS TO COMPENSATE FOR THESE NECESSARY ABSENCES.