Chapter Two: Aesthetics
—The term ‘aesthetic’ is taken from the Greek word meaning ‘of the senses’, which are knocked out by an ‘anaesthetic’. According to Plato, the senses present us with an ever-changing flux, so they are intrinsically unreliable and offer no basis for knowledge. Since knowledge was the philosopher’s ultimate goal, Platonists have generally been ill-disposed towards the senses and the world of appearances reported by them. …Then [a university philosopher] decided that the ancient distinction between perceived things [aisthêta] and things known to the intellect allowed for an independent science of perception – aesthetics. Rational perfection was identified by reason, but another perfection existed in perceived phenomena, which strikes us as beauty.— The Truth about Art, p. 21
These speculations were summarised by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), which turns out to be the main source for many of our assumptions about Art. Kant (fig. 2.1) had sought to explain why everyone should agree on a judgment of taste, whose object was beauty. This was a futile undertaking, since no intellectual construct can pin down beauty. Beauty like quality eludes definition because it is not independent of the observer. Since academics aspire to objectivity, the benchmark of science and scholarship, they shy away from issues of quality, which is neither objective nor quantifiable. Yet nor is it subjective, for the merits of Michelangelo or Mozart, a luxury car or a delicious meal, are not fabrications of the observer, audience, driver, or diner. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig found Quality in the union of subject and object: Quality is the response of an organism to its environment. (He used a capital Q to indicate the complete subject–object experience.)
Pirsig (fig. 2.2) further returned Quality to the philosophical mainstream by tracing it back to the discipline’s founding fathers. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates repeatedly challenges his interlocutors to define aretê, the word traditionally translated as ‘virtue’, and more recently rendered as ‘excellence’. Quality is an even better word for the value that unsettled Socrates’ rationality. Since the experience of Quality is dynamic and preverbal, the sophists he challenged to define it were all bound to fail. Aretê will not be pinned down by words, though its presence is palpable, and an art historical canon is made up of its myriad manifestations. Indeed the Latin word ars and the Greek aretê share a common Indo-European root.
This chapter also considers image-making, which is what Gombrich had meant by [fine] art. One of Gombrich’s greatest achievements was to show that sculptors and painters do not imitate nature, as Plato had claimed. They imitate the works of their predecessors, adjusting those models by trial and error to achieve – so Gombrich argued – an ever closer correspondence with nature. That goal, of course, was adopted only in particular periods and places, notably in early Greece and Renaissance Italy. What artists everywhere have always sought is excellence, which they attain by adjusting their inherited tradition to the needs of the present. This synthesis of Pirsig and Gombrich’s profound insights supplies the book with its thesis.
Reference: Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values (1974; 1999)