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British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52 | Number 1 | January 2012 | pp. 6174 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayr046 British Society of Aesthetics 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.

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What ReallyHappened in theEighteenth Century: The Modern

System Re-examined (Again)Peter Kivy

There is much in James I. Porters recent critique o Kristellers Modern System o the Arts that is

true and enlightening. But somethingsome thingso great moment in the history o aestheticsand philosophy o art transpired in the age o the Enlightenment, as badly described, and, no doubt,

in some ways as badly misdescribed, as they may have been by Kristeller in his account. And it would

be a grave disservice to the history o philosophy to reject the whole package rather than to try to

salvage what can be salvaged or repaired. It is that salvage job that I attempt in the present article.

1. Introduction

In 195152, writes James I. Porter, Paul Oskar Kristeller published an article in theJournal o the History o Ideas that proved to be a classic, The Modern System o the Arts: AStudy in the History o Aesthetics.1 By the time I commenced my work on eighteenth-century British aesthetics and philosophy o art, in the 1960s, it had become, as Porterrightly avers, no longer . . . an academic thesis, and not even an orthodoxy, but . . . a

dogma.2

I am as guilty as anyone else in so accepting it then, and or a long time thereater.So I welcome Proessor Porters recent critique o Kristellers dogma, rom which I havequoted above, as a long overdue re-examination o what reallydid (or did not) happen in theeighteenth century as to our conceptions o aesthetics and the ne arts. There is much inhis critique that is true and enlightening.

Butthere is always a but!we must not, to trot out yet again that old clich, throwout the baby with the bathwater. Somethingsome thingso great moment in the historyo aesthetics and philosophy o art, transpired in the age o the Enlightenment, as badlydescribed, and, no doubt, in some ways as badly misdescribed, as they may have been byKristeller in his account. He was on to something: to some things. And it would be a gravedisservice to the history o philosophy to reject the whole package rather than to try tosalvage what can be salvaged or repaired. In the ollowing, then, I am going to deend veclaims about what reallyhappened in the eighteenth century.

What we think o as the ne artsalthough we do not necessarily agree ully on thelistwere rst grouped together as a sel-contained entity, the ne arts (in English) inthe eighteenth century.

1 James I. Porter, Is Art Modern? Kristellers Modern System o the Arts Reconsidered, BJA, 49 (2009), 1.

2 Ibid., 2.


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62 | PETER KIVY

In the eighteenth century the ne arts, so understood as a sel-contained entity, gainedtheir autonomy.

Again, it was in the eighteenth century that the task o dening the ne arts, givingthem something like a necessary-and-sucient-condition denition, albeit tentatively andgradually, became a philosophical project.

It was, as well, at the end o the eighteenth century, that the concept o the aesthetic,and, o course, the word itsel, began to emerge as a philosophical problem, and the con-cept o aesthetic disinterestedness, vital to uture philosophical speculation, was rstramed in recognizable orm, although not so named.

And, inally, it was in the eighteenth century that aesthetics and philosophy oart, as a separate branch o the discipline o philosophy, emerged and became irmlyestablished.

All ve o these momentous developments were causally entwined, one with the other,in an intricate way that makes it, I think, impossible to say, specically, which caused what.For any o them to be in place, all the others must also have to have been in place. That, at

any rate, is how I construe the matter.Now a reader amiliar both with Kristellers original two-part article, and Porters recent

critique, might well have concluded that in deending the above ve theses I intend to oera blanket deence o Kristeller against Porter. But that is ar rom the truth. On the contrary,I believe that a good deal o what Porter has to say in criticism o Kristeller is spot on andwell taken. Furthermore, the theses I deend are not Kristellers; rather Kristellers thesesas reormulated in light o Porters criticism.

Beore, however, I get on with my business, I deem it only air to warn the reader o mylimited qualications or the task I have set mysel.

First, I have no Greek, and thus know the relevant Greek texts only in translation. Fur-thermore, the texts that I do know are limited to the ew amiliar ones: the relevant Pla-tonic dialogues, Aristotles Poetics, and the pseudo-Longinian treatise On the Sublime. Thusanything I say about art-theoretic matters in classical antiquity must be taken with these limi-tations in mind as the proverbial grain o salt. And i, in the event, ancient texts are adducedto contradict what I have said, I will gladly stand corrected.

Second, although I have the right to claim somewhat more impressive credentials as acommentator on eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy o art, I have limitations inthat regard as well: most o my historical work has been devoted to the British writers,rom Shatesbury to Dugald Stewart, with a soupon o Kant thrown in.

In short, I am no classicist or historian o philosophy, but a philosopher o art with amore than casual regard or the history o my discipline. Forewarned is orearmed. And so

I move on to the business at hand.

2. The Fine Arts

It is the major thesis o Kristellers essay that what he called the modern system o thearts was rst established in the eighteenth century. Proessor Porter advances a numbero objections to this thesis. To have these beore us rst will help us be clear about whatPorter takes Kristeller to be claiming and how his thesis might be modied to meet them.
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Kristeller enumerates the members o the modern system o the arts thus:

[T]he term Art comprises above all the ve major arts o painting, sculpture, archi-tecture, music and poetry. These ve constitute the irreducible nucleus o the modernsystem o the arts, on which all writers and thinkers seem to agree.3

In response to this claim, Porter writes, as to the question whether the system o nearts ever stabilized as an agreed upon entity as such and in a universally acknowledgedorm, as Kristeller claimed it did, the answer is, according to Porter:

On the contrary, it looks as i there was in act no canonical nucleus, but only aloosely dened and ever-changing grab-bag o items that ell under the newly discoveredrubric o ne arts during this era.4

Again, Porter writes:

While the terms beaux arts or ne arts and, the list o ve (or so) associated arts arepassed on, in what sense do they get passed on as a system? Or are they merely a list?5

In the same vein Porter objects:

There is no reason to deny that the concept o ne art existed or that it arose sometimearound the turn o the eighteenth century. That it ever attained the dignity o a systemis disputable.6

And nally: DAlembert added to Batteuxs list not only architecture but engraving.7

What are we to make o all this? For starters, it is clear that Porter has glommed ontothe term system in Kristellers thesis, and made pretty heavy weather o it. Did a systemo the ne arts come into being in the eighteenth century? Well, to get a handle on thequestion we will rst have to get clear what might be meant by a system in the rst place.Here is my proposal.

Let us take as two paradigms o a system the Underground, or Tube system o London,and our planetary system. I will say that what characterizes them both or present purposesis that they are what I will call epistemically closed but metaphysically open.

The London Tube system is epistemically closed in that at any given time, there is completeconsensus (or a way to achieve it) as to what its elements are: how many lines, where theygo, where they intersect, and so on. But it is metaphysically open in that how it is presentlyconstituted is not necessarily how it was constituted or how it will be. There are more linesand more Tube stops now than in 1920; and there may be more (or less) o both in theuture than there are now.

3 Paul O. Kristeller, The Modern System o the Arts: A Study in the History o Aesthetics (I), in Peter Kivy (ed.),

Essays on the History o Aesthetics (Rochester, NY: University o Rochester Press, 1992), 4.

4 Porter, Is Art Modern?, 13.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 14.

7 Ibid.
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Likewise, our planetary system is epistemically closed in that at any given time there is com-plete consensus (or a way to achieve it) as to how many planets there are, how they are relatedone to another, and so on. However, it is metaphysically open in that, or example, the numbero planets thought to constitute our system was eight beore the discovery o Pluto, nineaterwards, and eight again ater the demotion o Pluto to the rank o asteroid (or whatever).

O course the dierence between the two systems is that the ormer is a human arteact,the latter a natural system. Hence the rst changes through human intervention, the latterthrough human discovery.

Now the conclusion o this little cautionary tale is that the ne arts, as rst conceived oin the eighteenth century, and as conceived o now, are not a system in the sense explicatedabove. The word system was a singularly ill-chosen one on Kristellers part. And I take itthat that is what Porters objections, quoted above, have quite convincingly demonstrated.I they were a system, then there could no more be disagreement over whether dance orarchitecture are ne arts than whether Goodge Street is a Tube stop on the Northern Lineor whether Mars is a planet. The ne arts are both epistemically and metaphysically open.

They are not and never were a system. So Kristeller is totally wrong.Totally wrong? But wait a bit. Let us not be over hasty. The system is the bathwater.

Isnt there, though, a baby?Let me redescribe what happened in the eighteenth century. What was ormulated

was not the modern system o the arts but, rather, what I will call the moderngroupingo the arts: epistemically and metaphysically open, to be sure; not, however, a gallimaury;and assuredly not, as Porter describes it, merely a list, or only a loosely dened and ever-changing grab-bag o items. There is a middle way between Scylla and Charybdis.

The evidence Porter adduces or his claim that the group o ne arts, as ormulated inthe eighteenth century, was a mere ever-changing grab-bag, a completely amorphouscollection hardly establishes that. What wouldestablish it would be examples (say) o theoristswanting to include juggling, acrobatics, fy-tying, tightrope walking, conjuring, among thene arts. However, no such examples are adduced or in the ong. What philosophers o artwere not in accord about were totally in-the-ballpark candidates such as landscape gardening,dance, architecture, yes, engraving, and, o course, the most dicult and controversialone o all, pure instrumental music, which, as late as Kant and Hegel, was still not rmlyestablished as a member in ull standing.

But note well the real signicance o the disagreement and dispute over whether danceor architecture or music was one o the ne arts. There could only be such a disagreementand dispute i the concept o the ne arts, the modern grouping, was in place. As I read theancient texts, no such disagreement and dispute ever took place or couldhave taken place

in classical antiquity. You cannot disagree or argue over whether something is a member oa group unless you believe there is such a group and have some general idea as to what thequalications or membership might be. Thus the evidence Porter adduces against theexistence o a modern system o the arts in the eighteenth century is convincing enough. Itails, however, to be evidence against what I have been calling the modern grouping o thearts in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, it turns out to be evidence in avour.

Surprisingly, despite his claim to the eect that the ne arts had a grab-bag quality in theeighteenth century, Porter, it seems to me, comes very close to recognizing the very same
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phenomenon I have characterized as the modern grouping o the ne arts, where he writes,as quoted above, that: There is no reason to deny that the concept o ne art existed [inthe eighteenth century] or that it arose sometime around the turn o the eighteenth centuryand, again, that the terms beaux arts or ne arts and the list o ve (or so) associated arts arepassed on [in the eighteenth century]. I you admit this much you have, it appears to me,

recognized that something o very great importance transpired in the age o Enlightenment.The ne arts became recognized as a group o entities, albeit a group epistemically open,hence not a system, as described by Kristeller, and a group not arbitrary in character, butsusceptible o a necessary-and-sucient-condition denition. That, I propose, is one oKristellers babies that we do not want to throw out with Porters bathwater. I will nowmove on to the next.

3. Art Autonomy

Both Kristeller and Porter make very heavy weather o what is sometimes called the

autonomy o the arts, the ormer insisting that it became established doctrine in theeighteenth century, as a result o the ormation o the modern system, the latter vigorouslydenying it. I think this confict can be adjudicated by distinguishing between two senses oartistic autonomy, the one that Kristeller assumes in his claim that artistic autonomy

became established doctrine in the eighteenth century, which is, as well, the one that Porterassumes in his quite convincing argument to the contrary, and the other, a sense o artisticautonomy that, i assumed, makes eminently plausible the claim that artistic autonomydid indeed become established doctrine in the age o Enlightenment.

I think I can best explicate the rst sense o artistic autonomy by contrasting two o themost amous denitions o the ne arts to be proerred in the rst hal o the twentiethcentury: Clive Bells ormalist denition and R. G. Collingwoods expression theory.

Early in the century, Bell amously proposed what he called signicant orm as bothnecessary and suicient condition or being a work o the ine arts. And the inallibleevidence o its presence was the aesthetic emotion that it produced.8 All and only workso ne art, on his view, possess signicant orm; all and only works o ne art, thereore,produce the aesthetic emotion. Whatever other eatures they may possess, whatever otherresponses they may produce, are irrelevant to them qua art works. The ne arts are absolutelyunique in what they possess as their dening eature, signicant orm, and absolutelyunique in what response they produce, the aesthetic emotion. Bellsormalism, or that ocourse is what it amounts to, is a denition o ne art that makes it completely autonomous.I will call this absolute artistic autonomy.

Here is another example o the beast. In The Principles o Art (1938), R. G. Collingwoodamously dened art as expression o emotion.9 That may sound like a complete non-starter since my expression o anger, in kicking the cat, seems hardly to qualiy as a worko ne art. But, o course, readers o Collingwood well know that he dened expressionin such a way as to exclude my kicking the cat, and other like expressions o emotion,

8 Clive Bell,Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958),passim.

9 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles o Art (Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1955),passim.
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normally so-called, and to be o such a specialized and unique kind, that it became plaus-ible to claim that all and only works o ne art were, in this special, unique sense, expres-sions o emotion, and anything that was an expression o emotion in this special, uniquesense was a work o ne art. This is an example, perhaps the most distinguished example,o the expression theory o art, and is a denition o the ne arts that makes them out to be

autonomous in the absolute sense.I turn now to a denition o the ne arts that comes out o what is arguably the most

powerul philosophy o art to be produced in the second hal o the twentieth century. Ireer to Arthur Dantos tripartite denition, in his Transguration o the Commonplace (1961),which, expressed briefy, goes like this: (1) Works o ne art are about something (or thequestion o what they are about may legitimately arise).10 (2) [I]t is analytical to the concept oan artwork that there has to be an interpretation.11 (3) Works o [ne] art, in categoricalcontrast with mere representations, use the means o representation in a way that is notexhaustively specied when one has exhaustively specied what is being represented.12Each condition is necessary, and the three together necessary and sucient.

But note that in sharp contrast to the denitions o Bell and Collingwood, Danto doesnot make o the ne arts completely autonomous entities; rather, they possess, qua workso art, characteristics that they importantly share with other human arteacts. Philosophytexts, moral treatises, political speeches, news reports, and so on, possess aboutness,have subject matter, and are subject to interpretation. And works o art, qua artworks, canhave philosophical or political or moral content. That is why, o course, the third conditionis necessary to complete the denition, and mark artworks o rom the rest.

The denition is a traditional necessary-and-sucient-condition denition o the nearts. But it does not imply the absolute autonomy o the ne arts, as do the dentions o Belland Collingwood (and others). It does, however, uniquely dene them as a class. And thatis a orm o autonomy. I shall call it denitionalautonomy.

Kristeller seems to be claiming that, in the eighteenth century, the ne arts came to beseen as exhibiting absolute autonomy, mainly through the emerging concept o the aesthetic.Porter has roundly criticized him or this, and rightly so:

While [Kristellers] essay oers itsel as a straightorward descriptive and historicalaccount (and has widely been so received), it remains emphatically partial to aestheticautonomy in its modern orm, inasmuch as it stresses that the progress o the artsinvolved their steady emancipation rom their background contexts, which is to say,their becoming autonomous rom religion, morality, and other structures.13

Porter is right on the money here. I cannot but think that anyphilosopher or critic writing

about the ne arts in the age o Enlightenment would be utterly dumbounded by thesuggestion that the ne arts were autonomous in the absolute sense: that they were devoid

10 Arthur C. Danto, The Transguration o the Commonplace: A Philosophy o Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1981), 82.

11 Ibid., 124.

12 Ibid., 147148.

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o religious or moral or philosophical content. The idea would have seemed to them absurd,as it would have to the ancients (and to me or the matter o that).

Again, though, there is a baby as well as bathwater here. The bathwater is, o course, thenotion that philosophy o art in the eighteenth century was aiming at the establishment othe ne arts as autonomous in the absolute sense; and that we can throw out, as Porter is

indeed arguing. There is, however, denitionalautonomy: that is the baby. Lets give it abath, by all means. But then put it to bed.

I am urging, then, that what was established or the ne arts in the eighteenth century wasdenitionalautonomy. That the ne arts came to be grouped together as an autonomous, sepa-rated-o class o entities naturally generated the question o what constituted theirmembershipin that class and excluded rom membership other possible candidates. In other words, whatwas wanted was a denition o the ne arts in terms o necessary and sucient conditions.

Now I am not suggesting that the task o dening the work o art became immediatelyexplicit with the modern grouping o the ne arts, which was already in place in the earlyeighteenth century. It did not spring, ully armed, like Athena rom the head o Zeus, but

developed gradually. My own reading o events is that we do not nd a really out-rontdenition o the ne arts until the very end o the century, when Thomas Reid came veryclose to producing something like an expression theory o art,14 and Kant produced, inthe third Critique a denition o ne art heavily emphasizingorm, although not an out-and-outormalism.15

But I want to concentrate here or a moment on the case o Batteux, who plays aprominent role both in Kristellers account and in Porters critique o it. For, in short,although Kristeller may perhaps overestimate his importance, I think Porter errs in theopposite direction. And in this regard I am rather more in Kristellers camp than in Porters.

In 1746 the Abb Batteux published his Les beaux arts rduits un mme principe, which I willconstrue as the ne arts reduced to a single principle. But what project does that reallysignal?

The single or same principle is, o course, the principle o imitation, or mimesis,or, better, representation. And Batteux, clearly, is at least saying that it is common to allo the ne arts; as well, presumably, at least a necessarycondition.

Porter writes o what Batteux has done in this regard:

True, Batteux does organize the ne arts around a principle (the imitation o nature)and he does limit membership in their club by virtue o the same principle. . . . Evenso, there is nothing remarkably modern about these claims, which are explicitly drawnrom Aristotle, Horace, and Plutarch.16

Butpace Porter, there is something remarkably modern about this claim that Porter hasmissed. O course there is nothing new in characterizing poetry, painting, sculpture, and

14 On this see Peter Kivy, Reids Philosophy o Art, in Terence Cuneo and Ren Woudenberg (eds), The Cambridge

Companion to Thomas Reid, (Cambridge: CUP, 2004).

15 On this see Peter Kivy,Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music (Oxord: Clarendon Press,

2009), ch. 2.

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the rest as representations o beautiul nature. That is ancient history. It is howBatteux usesthe concept that, I would argue, is remarkably modern (although there were others, Ithink, in the eighteenth century, who did close to the same thing).

To make out my case I will simply contrast what I construe Batteux to be doing withwhat I understand Plato and Aristotle to be doing in describing what we understand, and

what Batteux understood, to be the ne arts.Plato, as I construe him, thought poetry, sculpture, painting, and music to be mimetic,

or as I have been saying, representational. But whereas he thought the latter three to beteachable crats, he thought poetry to be essentially dierent in that respect: it was not ateachable crat but an inspirational git or endowment, along with prophecy and (at leastin the Meno) virtue. Thus, although they were all mimetic, they were not a group. SoPlato could not possibly be described as reducing them to a mme principe, which is to say,mimesis. There was nothing to reducethere were no them.

What about Aristotle? Certainly, like Plato, he understood poetry, painting, sculpture,and music to be mimetic. Were they a group or him? Well or one thing, he explicitly

states in a passage that Porter quotes rom the Rhetoric that there are other orms omimesis besides the above mentioned, or he writes o painting, sculpture, poetryandevery product o skillul imitation.17

Did Aristotle, like Plato, also think that poetry was an essentially dierent practice romthose other practices o skillul imitation? I rather suspect so. As ar as I know he neverexplicitly said so, as Plato had done. But there is at least circumstantial evidence. A treatiseon poetry, the Poetics, is part o the Aristotelian canon. There is no extant treatise on musicor sculpture or painting (although perhaps they were written o in the lost portion o thePoetics or in lost texts we know not o).

The bottom line here is that or Batteux the concept o an integrated, namedgroup oentities, the ne arts, was epistemically prior, and a common principle was sought orthem, which o course turned out to be mimesis. For Plato and Aristotle mimesis was theepistemically prior concept, which what we call the ne arts, Batteux the beaux arts, wereexamples o, among other things. Thus Plato and Aristotle could no more entertainthe project o reducing the ne arts to a mme principe than they could entertain the projecto deining the scientiic method. And that is what Batteux et alia were doing in theeighteenth century that was remarkably modern.

But why did Plato and Aristotle mention specically and talk about what we call the nearts, at least some o them, rather than other mimetic things, when they talked aboutmimesis? And when they did talk about them, were they really not doing philosophy oart? Fair questions! And I will get at least to the latter one by and by.

For now I want simply to conclude by driving home the point that what was achievedor the ne arts in the eighteenth century was the idea oautonomy, in spite o Portersundoubtedly correct observation that Batteux permits morals and utility to operate at the veryheart o his conception o the beaux arts.18 It ought to go without saying that Enlightenment

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 12.
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commentators on the ne arts would have ound the absolute artistic autonomy implied byBells ormalism or Collingwoods expression theory utterly bafing and completely othe wall. And this goes or Kant as well, who is requently, and mistakenly, taken or pro-posing a ormalist theory o the ne arts in the third Critique. That the ne arts, in theirnature, were necessarily divorced rom deep human concernsreligious, moral, philo-

sophicalwas a kind o artistic autonomy that, so ar as I know, was never entertained byanyone in the eighteenth century, least o all Batteux, as Proessor Porter is perectly cor-rect to insist.

Recognizing that, however, leaves untouched the conclusion that the denitionalauton-omy o the ne arts was an idea brought into being in the eighteenth century. Was Batteuxsreduction o the beaux arts to a mme principe an attempt to provide necessary and su-cient conditions: in other words, a denition? It hardly seems likely. For at the time, eventhough non-representational ne arts would have been unthinkable, as now, the class othings representational was known to be wider than the class o things artistic. So mimesis,though a necessary condition, it would have been thought, or the beaux arts, could hardly

have been thought by Batteux necessary and sucient, which o course would have to havebeen the case i the mme principe was to be the deningprincipe.

I do not think a clearly discernible, out-ront attempt to dene art can be ound in Bat-teux. And as I said beore, I do not think such can be ound until the end o the eighteenthcentury, Reid and Kant being my candidates or the honour. But I do think Batteuxs pro-

ject, as announced in his title, and pursued in his book, was highly suggestive o the deni-tional quest. For, clearly, to reduce the ne arts to a single, common principle is the rststep in an Aristotelian, genus/dierence denition: genus, representation. The rest was yetto come.

4. Art and the AestheticAs is well known, and uncontroversial, the word aesthetic was coined in the eighteenthcentury, 1735 to be precise, by the German Leibnizian, Alexander Baumgarten, and wasadopted by Immanuel Kant in his Critique o Aesthetic Judgement, in a penetrating analysis o

beauty, sublimity, genius, ne art, and taste. The question is: whats in a word?It is easy, perhaps, to read more into the word, in contemporary hindsight, than is really

there. The modern idea o the aesthetic, either in the orm o the aesthetic attitude, theaesthetic experience, or Frank Sibleys aesthetic concepts, which is to say, special qual-ities o works o art (and other objects) that are distinctly aesthetic (in a way still a mattero dispute among philosophers) are none o them implicated either in Baumgartens or

Kants use o the term. For Baumgarten meant by the science o the aesthetic the scienceo perception uberhaupt, and Kant meant by aesthetic judgement anyjudgement based oneeling rather than concepts, neither o which comes close to modern usage.

To be sure, with the emergence o the categories o the beautiul, the sublime, and thepicturesque, in the eighteenth century, a large step towards the notion o Sibley-like aestheticqualities was taken. And although Kant never gave it the name o the aesthetic attitude,his (so described) attitude o disinterested perception, which characterized his pure

judgement o taste, was surely theons et origo o that concept.
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The concept o the aesthetic is, indeed, another high road to another kind o artisticautonomy, namely aesthetic autonomy, which, although it does characterize the ne arts, doesrender them autonomous in the sense o content irrelevant, does not, however, separatethem o rom other orms o human experience, nature, and other human arteacts. Thusone might dene artworks as bearing, qua artworks, only aesthetic properties, their

moral, religious, philosophical, or other content inessential and, qua artworks, irrelevant.Or one might dene artworks as those human arteacts essentially designed to acilitatethe attitude o aesthetic disinterestedness and aord the aesthetic experience, theirmoral, religious, philosophical, or other content inessential and, qua artworks, irrelevant. Thiswould make them autonomous in the sense o ree rom propositional or representationalcontent, qua artworks. But it would not uniquelycharacterize them. For nature, as well asarteacts other than artworks possess Sibley-like aesthetic qualities, are susceptible o sustainingthe attitude o aesthetic disinterestedness, and productive o the aesthetic experience.

In any event, it seems not to be the case that the eighteenth century produced any suchtheories o the ne arts as aestheticallyautonomous. Or, at least, as Porter concludes, the

presence o the doctrine oaesthetic autonomy or the ne arts, in the century, remainshighly doubtul (despite Kristellers assurances to the contrary).19

Thus there has been more emphasis on use o the term aesthetic in the eighteenth centurythan, I think, is warranted by the acts. And this brings us to my nal claim, that aestheticsand philosophy o art, as a separate, sel-contained subdiscipline o philosophy, rst cameto be in the eighteenth century. This claim I take to be unqualiedly true, and deserves theemphasis it has received in the past by me and others.

5. The Philosophy o Art

That aesthetics and the philosophy o art as a separate subdiscipline o philosophy rstemerged and was rst vigorously pursued in the age o the Enlightenment seems to be soapparent and well attested to that I will not spend too much time trying to prove it. Onemight simply begin with the obvious.

The eighteenth century witnessed a veritable explosion o separate, sel-contained workson the subjects o the ne arts, beauty, sublimity, taste, criticism, the standard o taste, andmuch moreworks unprecedented in Western intellectual history that absolutely demandedto be shelved as aesthetics and philosophy o art.

In France, there were, among many other works, Du Buss Critical Refections on Poetry,Painting, and Music, translated into English in 1748, Batteuxs Beaux Arts, the aestheticalwritings o Diderot. In Germany, Baumgartens Refections on Poetry, and theAesthetica, the

aesthetical writings o Moses Mendelssohn, and, o course, Kants Observations on the Feelingso the Sublime and Beautiul, and Part I o the third Critique. But Britain outdid them all.There was Shatesbury at the threshold o the eighteenth century, Addisons collection oSpectatorpapers on what he called The Pleasures o the Imagination, Hutchesons InquiryConcerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, Humes O the Standard o Taste, Burkes Philo-sophical Enquiry into the Origin o our Ideas o the Sublime and Beautiul, Alexander Gerards

19 Ibid., 18.
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Essay on Taste, Kamess Elements o Criticism, Reids essay on taste and his Lectures on the FineArts, Archibald Allisons Essay on Taste, various essays on aesthetical issues by Duggald Stewartthe list goes on and on.

The point is that there just is nothing like this in any other period in the history o Westernthought, beore the eighteenth century. The above-mentioned volumes, and many, many

more that it would be otiose to mention, constitute, then, the rst substantial body o workin aesthetics and philosophy o art, its reason or being, at least in large part, the establishmento artistic autonomy, which is to say, the modern grouping o the ne arts as a (possibly)denable class in terms o necessary and sucient conditions. (Or is it the other wayround?)

But that having been said, two gnawing questions persist. I aesthetics and philosophy oart, properly so-called, did not come into being until the eighteenth century, then whatwere Plato and Aristotle, two o the greatest philosophers in the lexicon, doing when theywrote about epic poetry, tragedy, music, and the rest? And i the concept o the ne arts asa denable concept did not come into being until the eighteenth century, what were the

Greek tragedians and epic poets doing when they composed their great plays and poems?Could they have been making works o art without knowing it, which they would have tohave been doing i the extant tragedies and Homeric epics are works o art? And itheyarenot works o art, what is? Can you make works o art without having the concept or thename?

O course one can speak prose all o ones lie, can one not? Would it really bealse tosay that Molires amous character was really speaking prose, in the absence o the conceptor the knowledge that he was so doing? That would be hard to credit.

A recent and insightul writer on this subject, David Clowney, insists that i one claimsolks are creating artworks without possessing the concept o the ne arts, one needs to

claim that they were making art works without knowing what they were doing, and thismakes no sense.20 Spelled out more ully, at least as I understand it, Clowneys argumentgoes something like this.

For starters, Clowney stresses that it is impossible to make art without making musicor painting or sculpture or poetry or one o the other things on that open-ended list.Furthermore, it is impossible to make those things without doing so intentionally, whichis to say, knowing what you were doing. But, Clowney queries, sceptically, is there somesubstantive sense in which they [i.e. pre-eighteenth century olks] might, while knowinglymaking music (or example), have been unknowingly making art?21 The point, o course,is that anyone who wants to claim that pre-eighteenth-century artists were making artunintentionallywould be committed to the seemingly inconsistent belie that they could not

make music, poetry, et alia, unintentionally.The argument continues, pre-modern, which is to say, pre-eighteenth-century olks

made music, dances, paintings, and the like, but they had not the concept o the ne arts.We, at least some o us, want to say they were making ne arts, even though they could not

20 David Clowney, Denitions o Art and Fine Arts Historical Origins,JAAC, 69 (2011), 316.

21 Ibid., 312.
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know that was what they were doing, because they lacked the concept o the ne arts. Weknow something they did not know. They were doing something else besides making music,dances, paintings, and the like, that is, they were making ne art. But, Clowney argues, wehave no clear notion o [the] something else they were doing. Thereore, it does not makesense to say that pre-modern people made art without knowing what they were doing.22

O course the initial sense o a reductio ad absurdum is conveyed by the suggestion that iyou claimed (say) that in writing theAntigone, Sophocles was making ne art, you would becommitted to the absurd claim that in writing theAntigone Sophocles didnt know what hewas doing. For surely the writing o theAntigone by Sophocles is a paradigm instance osomeones knowing exactly what he is doing. So Sophocles couldnt have been making awork o ne art in writing theAntigone because i he had he would not have known what hewas doing, namely, making a work o ne art.

Now a natural response to this argument, rom the direction o common sense, is topoint out ordinary cases in which, in ordinary discourse, someone is described as havingmade something o a certain kind without knowing it while nevertheless having acted

intentionally. Thus, or example, suppose a boater is messing about with two kayaks, botho which have proved quite prone to capsizing. All o a sudden she gets the bright idea oconnecting the two hulls together with a board in the middle. Eureka! A stable vessel! Sheshows her invention to a riend and he says: You know what you have done dont you?You have made a catamaran A what? she replies. Never heard o it. Surely commonsense tells us she has made a catamaran without knowing it or possessing the concept, andhas acted intentionally. So why can we not say, by parity o reasoning, that Sophocles, inwriting theAntigone, made a work o ne art without knowing it, and in doing so actedintentionally?

I I have laid out Proessor Clowneys argument accurately, I surmise his reply might be thatthe two cases are signicantly dierent. We can produce a necessary-and-sucient-conditiondenition o catamaran, whereas we notoriously cannot, at least at present, produce sucha denition o art. For, as Clowney observes, no one has yet produced a clear and generallyaccepted account o what art is.23 And without such an account we have no grounds orcallingAntigone a work o ne art rather than something else.

However, to make such a response would be to place a very severe condition on humandiscourse. Is it really the case that we require necessary-and-sucient-condition denitionsto identiy the urniture o our world? I so, ordinary discourse would be knocked on itsear. For surely we lack such denitions o unnumbered ordinary concepts that we employevery day. We do not have such a denition o science, or example. Are we oreclosedthereore on describing what Euclid and the Pythagoreans did as science? Or Kepler and

Newton, or that matter? For surely they no more had the concept o science in our senseo the word than Sophocles had the concept o art in our sense o the word.

Furthermore, we are not in possession, at least to my knowledge, o necessary-and-sucient-condition denitions o the individual arts: o music or tragedy, poetry

22 Ibid., 313.

23 Ibid.
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or dance or sculpture, or, to appropriate Clowneys way o putting the thing, no one hasyet produced a clear and generally accepted account o what they are. So i we accept thissevere restriction on ordinary discourse we are not even in a position to identiy whatSophocles was doing in writingAntigone as making poetry or making a tragedy. And since,ex hypothesi, thereore, Sophocles did not have a necessary-and-sucient-condition deni-

tion o poetry and tragedy and nor do wehe didnt know what he was doing inthat regard when he wroteAntigone, and, indeed, could not have been, thereore, makingpoetry or tragedy, not to mention ne art.

Perhaps it might be replied that although Sophocles did not possess knowledge that, hedidpossess knowledge how(in Gilbert Ryles sense o those terms).24 But that still leavesus in the position o not knowing that Sophocles wrote a tragedy since we do not have anecessary-and-sucient-condition denition o tragedy.

We are in very deep waters here. And in the absence o a knock-down philosophical ar-gument to the contrary, I am going to assume, as I think G. E. Moore once said, that youdo not need a denition o reality to tell gems rom paste; in other words, I am going to

assume the common-sense stance that the ancient Greeks knew what they were doing,were acting intentionally, in relevant respects, when they composed their music, and wrotetheir epics and tragedies, but, in the process, unknowinglymade works o art. They madeworks o art in act.

What then o the philosophers? I the epic poets and tragedians were making works oart in act, were Plato and Aristotle, when refecting on the epic poems and tragedies, notdoing philosophy o art in act? I am condent that they were; and that is why, like my con-rres, I begin my courses in introduction to the philosophy o art with Plato and Aristotle,not Hutcheson and Hume. What happened in the eighteenth century, then, and its import-ance is not to be underestimated, is not that philosophers rst began to do to philosophy oart, in act, but that they rst started to do it in ull realization that that was what they in actwere doing. It had become, as our graduate students would list it in their job applications,an area o specialization.

Now why, the reader may begin to wonder at this juncture, have I argued at such length,and so vigorously, that art, and philosophy o art, were produced in antiquity at least in act,though not sel-consciously? It is because I detect just a smidgen o paranoia in Portersarticle which I would like to allay. And, to be even-handed about it, I will, in conclusion,lay on the table a paranoia o my own to go with it.

6. A Pair o Paranoiacs

In the concluding sentence o his article, Proessor Porter writes o the term aesthetics,its absence rom the ancient Greek vocabulary in the modern sense is not an argument

24 The distinction between knowing how and knowing that can no longer be taken or granted. It has become a can o

worms that I have no intention o opening here. The interested reader can see, in this regard: Jason Stanley and

Timothy Williamson, Knowing How,Journal o Philosophy, XCVIII (2001); Stephen Schier, Amazing Knowledge,

Journal o Philosophy, XCIX (2002); and Michael Devitt, Methodology and the Nature o Knowing How,Journal o

Philosophy, CVIII (2011).
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against seeking out its earliest impulses, which also happen to be our own.25 I am in ullagreement here, and independently reached a similar conclusion that, as I put it: Indeed, I

believe Plato did have at least a vague concept o the aesthetic, even though he did not havethe word.26

The paranoia I detect here is this. Porter, I think, a classical scholar, is earul that in pla-

cing such emphasis on the origins o the modern concept o art, the aesthetic, and the phil-osophy o art itsel, in the eighteenth century, we will orget or overlook the enormouscontribution to the ormation and to our understanding o these concepts made in classicalantiquity, in particular, by Plato and Aristotle. Porters concerns, as he puts it, stem roman interest o my own in recovering the traditions o aesthetic refection in Greece andRome, which Kristellers position eectively prohibits rom the outset. He continues: Iart and aesthetics, conceived as quasi-autonomous activities, are modern constructs, howcan we go about treating these phenomena in antiquity?27

Perhaps Porters paranoia is justied. But there is no need, in recognizing the revolutionin our thinking about art and its philosophy in the Enlightenment, to denigrate in the pro-

cess the ground-breaking accomplishments o classical antiquity in this regard. Anyonewho writes about, and teaches, the philosophy o art, and does not nd Platos and Aris-totles refections on art as resh and provoking today as they were in Athens, has, it seemsto me, chosen the wrong occupation.

So much or Porters paranoia. Now or my own.I rst discovered the eighteenth century, without in act knowing it, as a toddler, when

my mother introduced me to the music o Haydn and Mozart. That was my music until theage o twelve, when I discovered the oboe and Bach. Now my ate was sealed. The eight-eenth century was mypersonal property. So when I went on to university I wanted to knowwhat else was going on in the century that produced my musical heroes. Eighteenth-centuryphilosophy ollowed hard by; and I wrote my honours thesis in philosophy on eighteenth-century British philosophy o art.

So just as classical antiquity is Porters bailiwick, the Enlightenment is mine. And so asKristellers article may have seemed to Porter to diminish, perhaps, the accomplishmentso ancient Greece and Rome, Porters article may have seemed to me to diminish, perhaps,the accomplishments o my eighteenth century. That is myparanoia.

But we should each put his respective paranoia aside. In gloriying the Enlightenment weare not diminishing the glory that was Greece. There is glory enough or all.

Peter KivyRutgers University

[email protected]


26 Peter Kivy, Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 15

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