Abstract
We have seen quite clearly that, when using standard concepts of the nature of the aesthetic, it is difficult to conceive how theological aesthetics could be a sensible, let alone significant, enterprise. For it has commonly been assumed since the time of Kant that part of the point in calling something aesthetic at all is to say or imply that, in this respect at least, it is not to be evaluated in terms of religion or morality (or indeed in the light of scientific or pragmatic considerations). Insofar as something is appreciated for aesthetic reasons, it is to be appreciated for its own sake, not for the good it can do or the understanding or devotion it can enhance. Or so the usual thinking goes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983);
and Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, Diacritics 11 (1981): 3–25.
Cf. George Santayana’s rather different thesis that beauty is objectified self-enjoyment, in The Sense of Beauty, 1896; reprint edn (New York: Dover, 1955) pp. 11–33.
For the classic identification of religion with feeling of a certain kind see Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, first published in German in 1799; English trans., John Oman (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
Cf. Geddes MacGregor, Aesthetic Experience in Religion (London: Macmillan, 1947), esp. pp. 118–19, 200, 227.
See Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Cf. Kendall L. Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, 1970; reprinted in Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 2nd edn rev. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
See also Denis Dutton, ‘Why Intentionalism Won’t Go Away’, in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) pp. 194–209.
See Joseph Margolis, ‘Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities’, British Journal of Aesthetics 14 (Summer 1974): 187–96;
see also Margolis, Art and Philosophy: Conceptual Issues in Aesthetics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1980) pp. 27–49.
See Roman Ingarden, ‘Artistic and Aesthetic Values’, in his Selected Papers in Aesthetics, ed. Peter J. McCormick (Munich: Philosophia Verlag; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1985) pp. 91–106;
and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973) pp. 175–218.
Emile Zola, from ‘Mon Salon’, in A Documentary History of Art, vol. III: From the Classicists to the Impressionists — Art and Architecture of the 19th Century, ed. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1966) p. 383.
Claude Debussy, ‘Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater’, in Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music, ed. anon. (New York: Dover, 1962) p. 49.
The whole idea of an aesthetic attitude is rejected in George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).
See Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 1966; reprint edn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1967);
and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
See Ingarden, Cognition; and Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) pp. 20–2.
See Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, 3rd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 129.
Quoted in Erwin Panofsky, ‘Abbot Suger of St.-Denis’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1955) p. 129.
J. O. Urmson, ‘What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?’, 1957; reprinted in Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 1st edn (New York: Scribner’s, 1962) pp. 13–27.
Etienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful 1965; reprint edn (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976) pp. 160–82, 173.
René Wellek, Foreword to Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Writings, The German Library: vol. 13, ed. Ernst Behler; gen. ed. Volkmar Sander (New York: Continuum, 1986) pp. xi–xii.
For other (and somewhat different) interpretations of Kant on free and dependent beauty see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1975) pp. 42–51;
Francis X. J. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason: A Study in Kant’s Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974);
Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974);
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979);
Salim Kemal, Kant and Fine Art: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986);
and Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’, in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
For further support of this thesis see the arguments and examples in Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Cf. Kant, Section 45.
Copyright information
© 1990 Frank Burch Brown
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, F.B. (1990). Art, Religion, and the Aesthetic Milieu. In: Religious Aesthetics. Macmillan Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10021-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10021-7_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-10023-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-10021-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)