Aesthetic Order

“an impressively far-ranging and thoughtful study”

Kendall Walton, University of Michigan

In spite of its centrality in human experience, beauty has in the last century been ostracized from philosophical discussions and its bond with art severed. Aesthetic Order not only revives interest in beauty and brings it back into the limelight of aesthetic discussion, but also recrowns it as a vital and central concept that reigns the understanding of art.

Ruth Lorand explains beauty in terms of a lawless order, one that captures the complexities of beauty and its inherent paradoxes. Art is then the product of the attempt to master this order and create beauty.

The book begins with a detailed discussion of the notions of order, disorder, and their mutual dependence. It proceeds with an analysis of interpretation. The notion of asesthetic order is presented as a complementary notion to the traditional, discursive concept of order, which is quantitative in its approach. Aesthetic order, as both quantitative and qualitative, interprets experience and expresses values, cultural and individual preferences, and a sense of necessity. Lorand draws from an impressive breadth of philosophical material from Plato to Spinoza, Kant, and Wittgenstein, as well as contemporary aestheticians such as Goodman, Mothersill, Ingarden, Danto, Margolis, and others. She also draws from recent research in experimental aesthetics and Information Theory.

Aesthetic Order challenges contemporary theories of aesthetics, offering beauty as a form of interpretation that integrates both quantitative and qualitative aspects of experience. It will be of importance to anyone interested in aesthetic theory.

Ruth Lorand is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy

1The Story of Analytic Philosophy

Plots and heroes

Edited by Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar

2Donald Davidson

Truth, meaning and knowledge

Edited by Urszula Zeglén

3Philosophy and Ordinary Language

The bent and genius of our tongue

Oswald Hanfling

4The Subject in Question

Sartre’s critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego Stephen Priest

First published 2000 by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

© 2000 Ruth Lorand

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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ISBN 0-203-46894-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-77718-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-23602-9 (Print Edition)

To my friend

Giora Hon

To those who are awake, there is one ordered universe common (to all), whereas in sleep each man turns away (from this world) to one of his own.

Heraclitus

Acknowledgements xi

could not convince him, he made me realize that the issue is not as simple as I believed it to be. I am grateful to my colleagues Professor Oded Balaban and Asnat Balaban, both dear friends, for the long discussions we had into the late hours.

My friends in Ann Arbor helped me take my first steps on this long journey. Zane Olukalns edited the preliminary draft and suggested some helpful examples. Tom Beukema, Lori Parshall, Dave Aderente, Kris Kourtjian and Chris Ellinger had to listen to my meditations over and over again and gave me their friendly support throughout my stay in Ann Arbor. Mick Stern and Glendir Sacks edited different versions of the manuscript and contributed comments and good illustrations of several points.

Giora, my friend, colleague and most devoted reader, wasted endless hours in his attempt to clarify my thoughts and improve my style. He encouraged me throughout these years in moments of despair and shared with me the beauty of philosophical adventures.

Dorit Barchana-Lorand advised me on a number points and suggested instructive examples to strengthen some of my arguments. Her love and support have compensated me for failing to protect her from the trepidation of philosophy. To Dorit and Gaddy I owe my sense of reality: the appreciation of what is most important in life.

Last but definitely not least I want to express my gratitude to my beloved granddaughter, Ella, for honoring my work by using the drafts of the book for her drawings—wonderful exemplars of lawless orders.

2 Introduction

normative ethics (first-order theory) and (3) meta-ethics (second-order theory) is widely accepted and applied in the literature. Normative ethics, no matter how one conceives of its origin and validity, is effective in everyday life as well as in philosophical analyses. When it comes to aesthetics, a level seems to be missing between the (first) level of aesthetic experience and the (third) level of philosophical reflections. The philosophical inquiry into the nature of art and beauty, by the very analogy with ethics, ought to be, in fact, called “metaaesthetics”.

The philosophy of aesthetics thus finds itself in the awkward position whereby a second-order theory has no first-order theory upon which to reflect. Metaaesthetics has to address the level of experience without any intermediary theory. The feeling that something essential is missing here may partly explain why the fortune of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy has never been glorious. However, the “absence” of normative aesthetics does not justify the claim that aesthetics (or meta-aesthetics) has no subject matter, or that it has to be dreary, or that it must be limited to methods of criticism.1

The difference between ethics and aesthetics concerning the normative level constitutes one of the primary issues of meta-aesthetics. This difference may serve as a key to the problematic nature of the aesthetic domain in general and the concepts that define its range in particular. Being caught in the clutches of analytical philosophy, many current aesthetic theories have been very impatient with any idea that is suspected of having been contaminated by essentialism. Analytical philosophy has encouraged fractured discussions of art as a series of separate issues and abstained from comprehensive theories.2 Avoiding “essences” resulted in a confusing situation in which it is unacceptable to inquire into the essence of art or beauty, but it is acceptable to discuss the different implications of these concepts.

The theory of aesthetic order is a meta-aesthetic theory. It does not offer norms or methods of aesthetic appreciation, but searches for the fundamental concepts that may elucidate the aesthetic experience and associate it with non-aesthetic experiences. Paradoxical and problematic as it may be, the aesthetic experience is still a part of human experience and it needs to be understood as such. It must have, therefore, beside its peculiarities also a common ground with other aspects of life. This common ground is order.

The principal claim of the theory of aesthetic order is that order appears in two basic types: discursive and aesthetic. These types of order share the general characteristics of order: complexity, necessity and other quantitative features.

1These arguments were raised in articles by Hampshire, ‘Logic and Appreciation’; Passmore, ‘The Dreariness of Aesthetics’; and Gallie, ‘The Function of Philosophical Aesthetics’, all in Elton (1954). These authors, among others, formulated analytical criticism of traditional aesthetics and influenced the development of aesthetics particularly in the Anglo-American philosophy.

2Passmore advises aestheticians to withdraw from generalities and confine their discussions to particular properties of particular works of art, which, in his eyes, are the proper subject matter of aesthetics. Joseph Margolis assures us that “Passmore’s advice […] has been followed.” Margolis (1993:134).

Introduction 3

However, discursive order consists of a priori principles that are typically associated with the conventional concept of law and predictability. By contrast, aesthetic order cannot be captured by a priori principles. It is a lawless order—a kind of necessity that is not dictated by general laws. Discursive order expresses the general, the common and the reproducible; aesthetic order expresses the individual, the unique and the search for the innovative. Discursive order expresses the need to regard the particular as an instance of the general and the individual as a member of a group. Aesthetic order, by contrast, expresses the need to conceive of the individual as unique and yet lawful. Both types of order are indispensable, irreducible and mutually dependent—in a word, they complement each other.

The book is divided into three parts:

I Understanding order: the general analysis of order and disorder

II Two types of order: the distinction between discursive and aesthetic order

IIIAesthetic queries: central issues pertaining to beauty and art in the light of the theory of aesthetic order

I Understanding order

The first part of the book analyzes the general concepts of order and disorder. In spite of their centrality to human experience, these concepts have been given very little attention in philosophy. Order and disorder are not only the prerogative of science, they are relevant to every field of human interest, including beauty and art. The general analysis of order in Chapter 1 furnishes basic notions and justifications for the possibility of aesthetic order and its affiliations to other forms of order. Disorder, as the complementary concept of order, receives similar attention in Chapter 2. It plays an important role in understanding the origin of beauty and artistic merit.

II Two types of order

The second part of the book constitutes the main body of the aesthetic theory. It begins (in Chapter 3) with a detailed analysis of discursive order, the order that is expressed in logic, mathematics, scientific theories, moral theories and everyday general and systematic thinking. On the basis of the results obtained in the first part of the book, Part II continues with the argument that discursive order cannot, for logical as well as pragmatic reasons, exhaust all types of order.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the argument that beauty and art cannot be explained in terms of discursive order. Chapter 5 examines Bergson’s contribution to the theory of order. Although Bergson’s view is criticized on some crucial points, it is acknowledged as the seminal inspiration for the distinction between the two orders presented here.

Chapter 6 exhibits the quantitative characteristics of aesthetic order compared with discursive order. Whereas discursive order expresses a tendency towards high indifference, low informative value, high redundancy and predictability, aesthetic

4 Introduction

order is sensitive, informative and exhibits a tendency towards low redundancy and predictability.

Chapters 7 and 8 present an analysis of the qualitative aspect that has no analogy with discursive order. Aesthetic order, according to this analysis, consists of a special kind of interpretative relations among its elements. The discussion opens with a general account of interpretation. Again, from the general concept, through the examination of its various types, the analysis arrives at a detailed account of the specific kind of interpretation required for understanding aesthetic order. This analysis provides the basis for understanding art as a form of interpretation. A work of art, from this perspective, is the product of an interpretation that the artist gives to materials taken from various aspects of life.

Chapter 9 examines various relations and interactions between the two types of order and various types of disorder. These relations are important for the understanding of the dynamics governing the aesthetic realm. The analysis explains, for instance, how it is possible for a typical “non-aesthetic” object to acquire aesthetic interest (and vice versa), or how a change in knowledge and non-aesthetic values affects aesthetic evaluation.

III Aesthetic queries

The third and final part of the book applies the theory of aesthetic order to central problems of beauty and art. Chapter 10 considers beauty and Chapter 11 focuses on art. Kant’s theory of beauty, for instance, is criticized in terms of the relations between the two orders: Kant regarded pure beauty as non-conceptual and detached from interests; according to the analysis presented in Chapters 7, 8, and 9, such a detachment is impossible. Mothersill’s view, which offers an understanding of beauty in terms of individuality, is criticized for focusing on pleasure and ignoring the qualitative aspect of beauty. The chapter concludes with an account of the opposites of beauty; these opposites are presented in terms of discursive order and different types of disorder.

Chapter 11 examines and criticizes current definitions of art and argues that a work of art is the product of an attempt to create beauty. In the final analysis, beauty is a complementary interpretation of raw materials (as explained in Chapters 7, 8, and 10), an interpretation that attempts to express their hidden potential. A work of art offers a new interpretation of its constituting materials and thereby a new understanding of them. The work is therefore evaluated by this standard, that is, to what extent has the work succeeded in providing a new and significant understanding of its materials.

A work of art is evaluated on two levels that are theoretically distinct but hard to separate in actuality: (1) the choice of materials that express the preferences of the artist as well as cultural and natural constraints; and (2) the processing of these materials that results in the new interpretation, a new aesthetic order. The first level involves non-aesthetic evaluation (moral values, political beliefs, individual preferences, cultural motifs, natural resources, and such like); the second level is a purely aesthetic evaluation—the evaluation of the interpretation itself. The first