The Aesthetic and the Universal

Author(s): Peter Lamarque

Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 1-17
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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The Aesthetic and the Universal

PETER LAMARQUE

At the end of 1994 a remarkable discovery was made in previously unex-

plored caves in the Ardeche region of France northwest of Avignon. The
discovery was of a large quantity of prehistoric cave paintings at least as
extensive and impressive as those found fifty-five years earlier at Lascaux
in the Dordogne. The paintings have been dated as from about 18,000 years
ago and consist of highly naturalistic depictions of animals: lions, bears, rhi-
noceroses, as well as horses, wild oxen, bison, reindeer, mammoths, ibex,
giant deer, a leopard, a hyena, and, uniquely, what appears to be an owl. A
French expert in cave paintings, Jean Clottes, is quoted as saying: "These
works of art were made by the Leonardo da Vinci of the Ice Age. I felt I was
standing in front of some of the great artistic masterpieces of mankind."1
Certainly the photographs that have been reproduced of these paintings
show a striking beauty and craftsmanship.
The discovery of these works has of course rekindled the long-standing
debate among anthropologists about the purpose of the cave paintings: the
religious or mystical or symbolic or practical function they fulfilled. What is
especially intriguing about these new finds is that for the first time substan-
tial clues as to their social context may now emerge, given how well-pre-
served are the caves in which they are sited, with undisturbed footprints, a
hearth, tools, and implements resting exactly where they were left 18,000
years ago.
Art historians often feel uncomfortable with Stone Age or Paleolithic ar-
tifacts. On the one hand, the surface perceptual qualities of the paintings
naturally invite description in an aesthetic or art-historical idiom. The tech-
niques, pigments, and materials have been studied; the form and texture of
the paintings, the ways that natural features of the cave walls are exploited,

is FerensProfessorof Philosophyat the Universityof Hull and editor

PeterLamarque
of The British Journalof Aesthetics. He is the author of Fictional Points of View, coauthor
(with Stein Haugom Olsen) of Truth,Fiction, and Literature:A PhilosophicalPerspective,
and editor of Concise Encyclopediaof Philosophyof Language.

Journalof Aesthetic Education,Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999

?1999 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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2 Peter Lamarque

the recurring motifs, the fidelity of naturalistic representation (allowing for

the ease with which the subjects can be identified), and the sheer power,
economy of means, and vitality of the depictions have all been remarked
on. On the other hand, the paintings remain a complete mystery; they are
uninterpretable; the role they played in the cultural or social life of the
people who made them is unknown, as are the attitudes, emotions, responses,
and beliefs of the people who viewed them.
At one level, to describe the artist or artists as "the Leonardo da Vinci of
the Ice Age" can be viewed as a theoretically innocent and pleasing hyper-
bole; at another level, it can be thought to invite an entirely misleading or
inappropriate assimilation, with any reference to "work of art" seen as
suspect and anachronistic.
The ease with which the Paleolithic cave paintings can be accommo-
dated into our own artistic preconceptions partly reflects their ready as-
similation into a tradition of naturalistic depiction. But it is worth remind-
ing ourselves how difficult it is to go the other way. If, per impossible, a
configuration perceptually indistinguishable from Leonardo's Virgin and
Child with St. Anne were to be discovered on a Paleolithic cave wall and
dated from the time of the animal paintings, we would literally find it unin-
telligible. We would have no point of reference to identify the characters,
the emotions, the iconic significance, or the purpose. Wittgenstein's dictum
"If a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand him" shows that
even linguistic utterances can be removed from the very form of life that
gives them sense.
Already then two motifs are emerging of great significance to aesthetics
but in tension with each other. The first is the essential embeddedness of
cultural objects-be they artifacts or works of art-in cultural traditions
that both give them their identity and make them intelligible. And the sec-
ond is the ease with which such objects, particularly with respect to aes-
thetic appreciation, can be appropriated by other cultural traditions and as-
similated into contexts far removed from the origins of their creation. In fact
all this is familiar. Is it not anticipated in Karl Marx's famous dilemma
about classical Greek art? Although convinced by his historical materialism
that art and aesthetic consciousness are determined by the material condi-
tions of the society that gives rise to them, Marx is puzzled by what he calls
the "eternal charm" of Greek sculpture and the "aesthetic enjoyment" it still
inspires in the modern capitalist state.

II

Before we explore the issues that underlie this tension, let me set out some
markers for the direction I want to take in this essay. I have two general
aims: the first, to try to bolster the credibility of philosophical aesthetics at

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 3

the end of the twentieth century; the second, to explore the possibilities and
limits of universalism, as I shall call it, within aesthetics. By universalism I
mean the appeal both to universal human experiences and to patterns of
thought that transcend specific artistic and cultural traditions. I will also
need to say what I take aesthetics to be, for even the subject matter is not
beyond contention.
There are undoubtedly sceptics for whom both my aims will seem hope-
less and doomed to failure. So let me begin with this scepticism. It is not
unusual to hear aesthetics derided for being totally out of step with modern
intellectual and artistic trends. One common line of attack is from the
historizers, as they might be dubbed-often, but not exclusively, of the
Marxist school-who see aesthetics as a purely ideological product em-
bodying assumptions that have been overtaken by historical, economic, and
social change. Such is the attitude, for example, of Terry Eagleton and
Pierre Bourdieu. Eagleton, however, while adopting an avowedly Marxist
stance, is of two minds about the value of the aesthetic; he describes it as an
essentially contradictory concept serving to define "dominant ideological
forms," as he puts it, through its links with the "subject," "autonomy," the
aestheticizing of morality, but also in other respects offering a "powerful
challenge and alternative to them," notably in its emphasis on the sensory,
the irreducibly particular, and the unregulated.2 Historizers will point out
that aesthetics grew and flourished in the eighteenth century and that the
central conceptions of aesthetic theory at that time-like taste, sensibility,
refinement, genius, the sublime-strikingly mirror the interests of a lei-
sured class, filtered through a philosophy of idealism and Romanticism.
When Hegel turned aesthetics into the philosophy of art in the nineteenth
century, the result, on the historicist account, was simply a metaphysical
tour-de-force to consolidate and rationalize the tradition of European high
art (elevating it to the pinnacle of Spirit's self-awareness). But, so the argu-
ment goes, that bourgeois conception of high culture is now no more than a
historical relic.
Aesthetics is under attack not just from this historicist reduction but
from the challenge of contemporary postmodernism, theorists and artists
alike. Characteristically postmodernist theory rejects, as based on spurious
"metanarratives," any intellectual enterprise-that of aesthetics par excel-
lence-that aspires to universal application; the very concepts of truth,
meaning, value, reality, and reason, which have been thought to provide
foundations for theorizing, are radically relativized or dismissed as repres-
sive and authoritarian; the realm of art is "deconstructed" from most tradi-
tional notions connected with it-beauty, depth, emotion, expressiveness,
truth, representation, or autonomy. Postmodernist artists also self-con-
sciously turn against the aesthetic; they have made ironic self-reflection
their principal mode, they delight in the ephemeral and the fragmented,

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4 Peter Lamarque

they eschew the easy consolation of the aesthetically pleasing experience,

they mix artistic media (video, sculpture, sound, performance), provoca-
tively flouting categories and styles, they engage spectators as fellow cre-
ators, they denounce the false reverence of the art gallery or museum,
above all they reject the distinction between "high art" and "popular art." If
aesthetics, as the historizers claim, is essentially a rationalization of high
culture, then aesthetics and postmodernism are mutually contradictory.
All this is a bird's eye view, of course; I have generalized wildly. But
rather than arguing directly against postmodernism and historicism, both
of which I acknowledge as part of a real cultural backdrop for any defense
of aesthetics, I hope to present the positive case in its own right. It is cer-
tainly a serious question how a plausible or coherent conception of aesthet-
ics can survive in this intellectual climate. But one point worth stressing at
the outset is that the issues in contention-the validity of the high art/
popular art distinction, the essentiality of particular constellations of fea-
tures, the historicity of the concepts, and so forth-far from being ignored,
are integral to modern debates in aesthetics, without apparently destroying
it.

III

What is aesthetics? The concept "aesthetics" with an "s" is not identical to

that of the aesthetic. Roughly speaking, aesthetics-with-an-s is the name of
a kind of inquiry, while the aesthetic is the subject matter of that inquiry (or
part of it). The aesthetic encompasses applications of the adjective "aesthetic,"
as when we speak of aesthetic experience or aesthetic qualities or aesthetic
judgment. To pursue the inquiry of aesthetics is not in itself either to have
an aesthetic experience or to make aesthetic judgments. Different again is
aestheticism, the name of a particular stance or attitude to aesthetic matters,
as exemplified by the fin-de-siecle "art for art's sake" movement and the
writings of Oscar Wilde, James Whistler, George Moore, Clive Bell, and oth-
ers. You can pursue aesthetics as an inquiry and recognize certain experi-
ences as aesthetic without subscribing to aestheticism.
Aesthetics as a kind of inquiry takes different forms according to what
broader discipline it is located in, be it psychology, sociology, educational
theory, ethnology, or of course philosophy. What are the theoretical issues
at the core of this inquiry? The answer is dictated by the meanings of the
term "aesthetic," but that has had a surprisingly chequered history. Etymo-
logically, from the Greek aisthesis, the term is linked to perception. Thus
what Kant labels the Transcendental Aesthetic in his First Critique is an in-
quiry into the fundamental conditions of sensory experience, the forms in
which the mind is able to receive the manifold of intuitions. Kant resisted
the move initiated by Baumgarten to extend the term "aesthetic" from the

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 5

conditions of sensibility to the "critique of taste" or, in Baumgarten's

words, the "science of the beautiful." However, in his Third Critique, while
still rejecting the idea of a science of beauty, Kant went some way toward
Baumgarten's usage in equating aesthetic judgment with what he called
judgments of taste. What made judgments of taste "aesthetic" for Kant was
precisely the fact that they were subjective and noncognitive. It was not un-
til the 1830s that Baumgarten's sense of "aesthetics" became established in
Britain.3 The great eighteenth-century British aestheticians (as we would
call them)-Hume, Reid, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Edmund Burke-
never described what they were doing as "aesthetics," though terms like
"taste," "genius," and "criticism" were common in their writings. The third
connotation of the aesthetic, after bare perception and the Kantian judg-
ment of taste, directly relates it to art, notably fine art. The association prob-
ably stems primarily from Hegel. In the twentieth century, the sense of
"aesthetic" meaning "perception" has more or less vanished (save through
the medical notion of "anaesthetic"). And increasingly philosophical
aesthetics has become the philosophy of art.
The first step in my argument is to reject this identification. Although the
philosophy of art, an investigation into the ontology of art and the prin-
ciples of art criticism, might be encompassed by the philosophical disci-
pline of aesthetics, it is not coextensive with it. The connection, if there is
one, between the aesthetic and the artistic is a matter of substance, not
merely of definition.
The starting point in aesthetics is not art but a certain kind of attention
directed to objects or phenomena of any kind. When we speak of attending
to something from an aesthetic point of view, we mean attending to those
features of its design or appearance, its shape, proportions, color, or texture,
its sensuous qualities, which can be isolated from other more utilitarian as-
pects like its physical composition, the function it fulfils, its ownership, its
monetary value, the practical benefits that can be derived from it. The phe-
nomenon is familiar enough, even if the account is still vague. Significantly,
it is often easier to recognize and describe the aesthetic features of artifacts
that are not works of art-a table lamp, a fountain pen, an item of furniture,
the workings of a clock-than of those that are. Adopting an aesthetic point
of view or giving aesthetic attention to an object does not in itself involve,
pace Kant, making a judgment or an evaluation, nor does it require a special
kind of perception, nor distinctive powers of discrimination or taste or sen-
sibility, nor is it necessarily associated with any particular sensation or
emotion. It merely calls for selective attention. Whether someone is or is not
taking an aesthetic interest is often a straightforwardly objective matter; it
will be plain from the kinds of comments he makes. The person who per-
sists in marvelling at how expensive the Rolex watch is and how his friends
will envy his possession of it is not regarding the watch aesthetically.

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6 Peter Lamarque

Of course it is not always so straightforward, as apparently the very

same property of an object viewed in one way can elicit an aesthetic re-
sponse while viewed in another, a nonaesthetic response. We might, then,
wonder whether the property itself is aesthetic or not. The size or propor-
tions of a Queen Anne wardrobe might now, for its new owner, be the occa-
sion of aesthetic delight; now, for the furniture remover, a matter of dismay.
In fact there is nothing unduly mysterious about this, although it can lead
to quite complex philosophical problems about the nature of properties. A
further point to note is that aesthetic attention is usually marked by a dis-
tinctive vocabulary or set of concepts (so-called aesthetic concepts), which
include terms like "graceful," "balanced," "harmonious," "powerful," "mov-
ing," and most generally "beautiful" and "sublime." It is an integral part of
aesthetics to inquire into the meaning of such terms and the truth-conditions
of statements employing them.
Adopting an aesthetic attitude to an object is usually, and naturally, the
occasion for an estimation of the aesthetic worth of the object, arising from
the feelings of pleasure or displeasure it affords. There is no more vexed
and contentious issue in aesthetics than the exact nature and status of such
judgments. Again, though, I would want to insist on keeping apart ques-
tions about aesthetic value in general from the question of the values im-
puted to works of art, even if there is inevitably an overlap. One crucial
notion associated with a distinctive aesthetic pleasure is that of "disinterest-
edness." Here we look to Kant for the definitive account even if he did not
initiate the concept, which had been a central ingredient in Shaftesbury's
aesthetics and implied in Hume's discussion of the standard of taste. It is
unfortunate that Kant's position is so often distorted and misappropriated.
By disinterested pleasure Kant meant that pleasure derived from the
contemplation of an object as it immediately appears to us, without regard
to what kind of object it is or any desire on our part to make practical use of
it. It is on the basis of such pleasure that we judge the object beautiful; and
we take the judgment to be normative, demanding, as he puts it, universal
assent. We do not simply record our own gratification, according to Kant,
when we make an aesthetic judgment; but because of the disinterested,
nonegotistic grounding of the judgment, drawing on perceptual and imagi-
native faculties possessed by all, we expect that others taking the proper
contemplative stance will concur. It is important to Kantian disinterested
contemplation that it does not rest on a concept of the object or, as he rather
obscurely puts it, it is independent of the real existence of the object. In
other words, we can judge an object beautiful without knowing anything
about it or what kind of thing it is -its nature might be a complete mystery
yet still be pleasing (here we can recall the cave paintings). Also, aesthetic
judgments are singular: we say this flower is beautiful on the strength of

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 7

our immediate experience, not as a conclusion from a premise about what

all flowers, or even flowers of this kind, are like. Similarly, because there is
no concept presupposed, there are no rules that compel us to recognize
something as beautiful.
Kant's account of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment has a spe-
cific and limited purpose: to capture the logic of one kind of judgment, that
such-and-such is beautiful. He is not speaking of the appreciation of works
of art, far less saying anything about the nature of art criticism. In fact when
he comes to talk of works of art, he denies that the "pure aesthetic judg-
ment" is either appropriate or even possible; a crucial difference is that in
the aesthetic appreciation of art we do need to know what kind of object we
are looking at, the object must fall under a concept, and furthermore we
need a conception of the purpose and "perfection" of the object. What little
Kant does say about the appreciation of fine art-most of his attention is
given to the genius that inspires art-implies the need for "reflective," even
cognitive, judgment well removed from judgments of beauty alone. This
needs to be emphasized because Kant's position has become inextricably,
though unfairly, bound up with extreme forms of aestheticism in art criticism
that are often used to discredit it.
We now edge closer to the difficult question of universalism. For it
seems pertinent to ask whether, or to what extent, the phenomena of aes-
thetic attention and aesthetic pleasure (i.e., the pleasure gained from the
disinterested contemplation of the appearance of objects, regardless of their
practical function or usefulness) are universal human characteristics or how
far, as the historizers might have it, they are merely a product of a particu-
lar culture at a particular stage of its history. First of all, it seems pretty clear
that we should be much more inclined to the historicist view if we accepted
the inextricability of the aesthetic attitude and artistic formalism. For the ex-
treme aestheticist conception, which cuts art off from all social, moral, or
intellectual concerns, is patently not universally valid of all artistic tradi-
tions. We must reject this connection. When Clive Bell magisterially asserts
that "in order to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing
from life, no knowledge of its ideas or affairs, no familiarity with its emo-
tions ... nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-
dimensional space"4 he is not only misappropriating the Kantian aesthetic
judgment, but he is at odds with virtually all cultural traditions of art, in-
cluding the dominant strand of European aesthetics from Aristotle and
Aquinas through to Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Heidegger.
We should of course be wary of claiming universality in any matters of
human psychological or cultural life. In fact it is not clear even what such a
claim might mean. To say that aesthetic pleasure, defined roughly along
Kantian lines, is a universal part of human experience would seem a rash

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8 Peter Lamarque

and unsupportable empirical generalization. However, it seems less rash

and more plausible if construed merely as implying that there are no intrinsic
features of aesthetic experience that presuppose specific cultural attitudes
as against more general qualities of human mental life or experience. When
Kant speaks of the universal validity of aesthetic judgments, he grounds his
claim on two facts, as he sees them: that any idiosyncratic or personal inter-
ests and desires have been set aside, and that only shared perceptual facul-
ties are involved without the need for agreement on matters intellectual or
conceptual. The ability to take a disinterested stance toward artifacts or the
natural world, to view things as intrinsically valuable or as ends in them-
selves, is for Kant an essential gift of rational beings. Kant is not saying that
everyone must agree about judgments of beauty either because of some
shared subjective intuition of the kind postulated by, say, Shaftesbury or
Hutcheson, or because there are objective marks of beauty inherent in ob-
jects themselves. In fact Kant, quite sensibly, recognizes that people are just
as likely to disagree as agree in their estimations of beauty. He is concerned
only with the commitments taken on by someone making an aesthetic judg-
ment. We should follow him, I suggest, as least this far and in acknowledging
the distinctively human capacity to reflect aesthetically on objects.
What reservations I have about making too strong a claim for any uni-
versal human experience stem from deeper worries about the subjective/
objective distinction. Kant is no doubt right that aesthetic pleasure is ulti-
mately subjective in the sense of being rooted in a subject's experience
rather than in objective features of the world. But philosophers as varied as
Wittgenstein and Gadamer have presented a powerful case against taking
subjective experience to be an entirely private internal realm; rather, they
argue, it is affected at its very core by social and cultural norms. A not dis-
similar view, applied directly to art history, is taken by Ernst Gombrich
who argues that there is no "innocent eye" through which painters see the
world, the deliverances of which are then transcribed into their art. The
world they "see" in their subjective experience is shaped by culture-laden
expectations, not least those arising from the artistic tradition itself. It is not
that the Impressionists finally captured the world that we really see (as they
claimed), but that Europeans came to see the world as captured by the Im-
pressionists. To the extent that the whole subjective realm becomes infected
in this way and the border between the inner and outer gets blurred, even
the most disinterested aesthetic attention is unlikely to escape this rela-
tivizing perspective. However, we cannot let this argument undermine the
fundamental insights in Kant's position: that attention to objects in the
world, in particular their sensuous qualities, is sometimes disinterested,
that is, not driven by selfish desire or practical need; that such attention is
universally accessible to human beings; and that an examination of this
phenomenon is central to aesthetics.

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 9

IV

As we move from aesthetic experience in general to the more specific realm

of art, we move unequivocally into the realm of cultural relativity or, as I
earlier called it, embeddedness. We also move, so I claim, away from the
Kantian pure aesthetic judgment. What connection might there be between
adopting the aesthetic attitude to an object and creating and appreciating
works of art? The intermediary, I suggest, the tertium quid, is the further,
perhaps more compellingly universal, human capacity to assign meaning
and value to objects of experience. How often we are told that the roots of
art lie in myth, religion, ritual, play, totemism. But a common and deeper
element is what Arthur Danto has called "the transfiguration of the com-
monplace," the extraordinary human ability to transform otherwise com-
monplace physical properties into bearers of magical, religious, or aesthetic
significance. Danto has illustrated this with his repeated explorations of
perceptual indiscernibles, as he calls them. What initially inspired him in
the 1960s was, of all things, an exhibition containing Andy Warhol's Brillo
Boxes; this is a work of arguably dubious artistic merit consisting of boxes
made by Warhol identical in appearance to ordinary Brillo boxes. But it is a
work that strikingly illustrates, according to Danto, how two objects could
be perceptually indistinguishable yet radically different in their art-related
properties. An Andy Warhol Brillo box might appear identical to a com-
mercially manufactured Brillo box, yet consider how they differ: while the
former is a work of Pop Art, an ironic comment on the consumer society, an
object for display and contemplation, the commercial Brillo box is sim-
ply... well, a commercial Brillo box. Warhol's object, as well as being a
physical object, is also an intentional object, in the sense that it embodies a
thought, has a content, expresses a meaning, while the other object has no
meaning and does not stand for anything, even though it too is a human
artifact, has a function, and conforms to a design. No description of the
mere physical properties of an intentional object can explain what significance
it has as a cultural artifact.
Thomas Nagel's characterization of scientific objectivity, in its ideal
form, as the "view from nowhere" patently fails to apply to cultural phe-
nomena-including works of art-precisely because these are intentional,
not merely physical, objects. It makes no sense to ask of an intentional ob-
ject what it is in itself apart from any human perspective, because it is just
its perspectival nature that makes it the kind of object it is. Intentional ob-
jects are such that what they are is determined by what they mean. A work
of art is not a natural kind-an object, sound, or performance that just hap-
pens to have properties people admire. A painting conceived as a work of
art is not just pigment on canvas or a retinal image or a depiction with rep-
resentational properties, nor is a literary work constituted merely by the

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10 Peter Lamarque

semantic or rhetorical features of its sentences or indeed by the moral con-

tent of its themes, a musical work is not just a set of pleasing sounds. Works
of art are institutional objects defined at least partly by their intentional, as
well as their intrinsic, properties; they are actions or artifacts that acquire
what meaning and value they have only within an institutional or cultural
setting and relative to a classification within an appropriate category of art,
which in turn makes possible a distinctive range of aesthetic qualities. Works
conceived in this way encourage a certain kind of perception or interest or
evaluation. It is an empirical matter what categories or classifications or
evaluations a particular culture or a society at a particular stage of its his-
tory actually postulates for the special status of art. We should not suppose
that all cultures have categories like realistic or expressionist painting,
tragic drama, or symphonic music, or that they seek to exhibit their art in
museums or stately homes.
Ever since Wilhelm Dilthey (at the turn of the century) developed the
distinction between explanation and understanding in the human sciences
(a key moment in hermeneutics) and Max Weber introduced the method of
verstehendeveloped by Collingwood in his theory of historical reenactment,
it has been a central tenet of humanistic study that cultural phenomena are
amenable to two distinct perspectives, internal and external, or the insider's
view and the outsider's.5 The internal perspective is that of the participant
for whom the phenomena are endowed with meaning, their values cher-
ished; the external perspective that of the detached observer for whom the
phenomena are instances of sociological laws, their values noted but not
shared. The distinction is often illustrated with reference to primitive ritu-
als, religion, or magic, where a vivid contrast is drawn between, on the one
hand, the rich web of beliefs through which the participants make sense of
their actions or artifacts and give them their identity as art or symbol within
the culture, and, on the other, the scientific explanatory models used by an-
thropologists, with their vocabulary of "social stratification," "patriarchal
dominance," "rites of passage," and so forth, unintelligible often to those
whose actions they describe.
Artistic traditions in all cultures lend themselves to internal and external
perspectives. The internal perspective is that of participants in the institu-
tions of art, including artists themselves and all those, critics and apprecia-
tors alike, who engage with the works, recognize their value, seek meaning
and inspiration from them, and identify to some degree with the purposes
and aspirations they exhibit. An external perspective is characteristically
adopted not by participants but by observers from a more detached stand-
point, perhaps that of a different cultural tradition like that of the anthro-
pologist; this perspective need not be unsympathetic nor necessarily fail in
understanding, but the values and meanings studied need to be recon-
structed by seeking evidence and explanation rather than by a process of

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 11

self-awareness or self-analysis. More rarely participants themselves can

adopt the external perspective on their own artistic tradition, although that
should not be confused with the mere urge to innovation that arises within
the tradition.
Aesthetics in the form of the philosophy of art can, I believe, pursue both
internalist and externalist roles, though these are not mutually exclusive,
and the dividing line is not always clearly drawn. Internalist aesthetics, in
the sense in which one might speak of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or Euro-
pean aesthetics, explores the discourse associated with a particular artistic
tradition; it examines the concepts that underpin that discourse, it provides
a rationale for the critical evaluations and interpretations that mediate be-
tween the canonical works and their audience, and it identifies and ana-
lyzes, in the manner of Hegel, significant stages in the history of the tradi-
tion. Internalist aesthetics is not the same as art criticism or indeed art
history, though again in a philosopher like Hegel, who proposed an evalua-
tive hierarchy among art genres and who saw a metaphysical pattern in the
history of art, they can become especially closely intertwined. In our own
Western artistic tradition, from Hellenistic Athens to modern Los Angeles,
art, art criticism, art history, and aesthetics have been creatively bound to-
gether in a remarkably close-linked and self-conscious procession. There is
a post-Hegelian critical tradition of art history, including Semper, Riegl,
Wolfflin, even Panofsky, who identify a strong inner dynamics in the his-
tory of art, where the chronology of change and what is possible at any
stage are determined by factors from deep within the tradition itself.
It will not always be obvious to those writing aesthetics from an
internalist perspective that that is what they are doing; they might mistake
their analyses for universal truths about art in all traditions. Perhaps, for
example, that is the case with Kant on genius. Yet it is clear that the concept
of genius, of which Kant once again gives the definitive account, although
deeply and essentially involved with the European artistic tradition, is not a
central component in all traditions. Genius, as Kant defines it, is the talent
for producing original and exemplary works of art for which there are no
definite rules and which seem to arise, as he puts it, from nature itself, not
from science. The idea of the untutored genius epitomizes Romanticism yet
is anticipated in Plato's conception of divine inspiration. However, that it is
not a universal or necessary adjunct of art is in effect noted by Plato himself
when he describes, with both admiration and amazement, the ancient
Egyptian practice, which, as he saw it, prohibited innovation and rigorously
applied the same artistic rules to produce an artistic uniformity lasting ten
thousand years (The Laws, bk. 2).
Kantian or Romantic genius is not a key concept either in the internalist
aesthetics of Japanese art (to take another example), where of much greater
significance than originality are the ideas of perfecting a technique, as in

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12 Peter Lamarque

calligraphy, flower arranging, and Noh acting, and realizing an appropriate

state of mind. Japanese aesthetics in fact provides a paradigmatic example
of an internalist philosophy of art closely tracking a distinctive artistic tradi-
tion, with its own finely developed aesthetic vocabulary, often refined from
Buddhist thought, underpinning characteristic art forms: mono no aware (the
sadness of things) in Waka poetry, yugen (mysterious beauty) in the Noh
theater, or even the shadow, as praised by Tanizaki.
When Aristotle discusses tragedy in the Poetics, he also is adopting an
internalist perspective, as I would conceive it, both articulating the underlying
principles of Sophoclean drama and laying down norms for tragedy within
the tradition, drawing on concepts like mimesis, catharsis, and hamartia
from the surrounding philosophical context. But isn't Aristotle defining
tragedy also in its universal aspects? No, for tragedy conceivedas an art form
(in contrast to an objective state of affairs) is not a universal phenomenon.
As an art form tragedy is grounded in a specific artistic and philosophical
tradition. Even when Hegel and Nietzsche tried to redefine tragedy beyond
its Greek philosophical mode, they retained the deep roots of that tradition.
Perhaps only Schopenhauer's contribution on tragedy could be called
externalist, and that just to the extent that he emphasized its metaphysical
rather than artistic nature.
What, then, is aesthetics or, more accurately, philosophy of art that
adopts an external perspective, not tied to any one particular tradition of
art? Clearly there are different forms this might take. There is, for example,
the approach of the anthropologist applying a scientific vocabulary to re-
mote artistic practices; but although that enterprise is no doubt externalist,
we might hesitate to call it aesthetics (or philosophy of art). Also, against
that approach, it is now widely assumed that to study unfamiliar practices a
crucial first step is to seek out the internalist participant vocabulary in an
attempt to understand the practices from within.
Two other externalist perspectives are more common, though funda-
mentally different: one is motivated by scepticism, the other by universal-
ism. Sceptical externalist perspectives would include both that of the
historizers and the postmodernists. What they share is a deep questioning,
even rejection, of the whole system of values on which an art tradition is
based and which is broadly taken for granted by participants. Post-
modernists, in their more extreme manifestations, go farther in trying to
step outside the very intellectual framework within which debates about
human practices are conducted, challenging notions like reason, rationality,
argument, and truth; there are obvious limits to how far such an endeavor
is even intelligible.
The externalist approach I prefer to promote, one which runs in tandem
with the internalist approach, is that motivated by universalism. This is a
perspective that acquires an intellectual distance not because of unfamiliar-
ity or hostility, but because it seeks out those universal features of art in all

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 13

traditions that do not depend essentially on any one tradition. The vocabu-
lary of externalist philosophy of art is not an explanatory vocabulary in a
scientific sense but more an enabling vocabulary grounding the human
institution of art itself. Its terms will characteristically be of a logical, psy-
chological, or semantic character, its focus of interest on such matters as
imagination, representation, fictionality, expression, meaning, symbolism,
intentionality, truth, moral value, and perhaps the concept of art itself
shorn of its relativistic accoutrements. Clearly many of these notions will
also figure in internalist philosophy of art where particular applications and
meanings are examined. What is notable is that these externalist concepts-
including that of art under an austere definition6-all have a place in wider
philosophical contexts, in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language,
in ethics.
What begins to emerge, however, is a dangerous dilemma for philo-
sophical aesthetics which might partly explain its precarious position
within philosophy. The externalist interest in art can indeed attain a kind of
universalism, rising above the parochialism of individual artistic practices,
but perhaps at the cost of losing the specific application that makes philoso-
phy of art a distinctive area of concern; the internalist role, in contrast,
serves the important function of supporting and articulating a cultural tra-
dition and its attendant concepts, but forfeits the claim to speak universally
of the institution of art per se. If that is right, we can see something of the
force of the historizers' case; for when aesthetics is substantially about art
rather than about concepts of a broader philosophical base, it necessarily
adopts an internalist or culturally specific standpoint laying it open to the
charge of ideological parochialism.

The position, though, is not as stark as these remarks suggest, and in this
final section I will pull together some threads so as to allow a more positive
reappraisal of philosophical aesthetics to take shape. First of all, the paro-
chialism, as I have called it, of internalist philosophy of art is mostly of a
benign kind; after all, mapping the central concepts and principles that
have animated an artistic tradition as long and rich as that of European
culture, especially where those concepts are intimately connected with
moral, religious, and philosophical ideas, is an enterprise of considerable
scope; and it can be carried out with some degree of universal application,
even within the relativized framework, in the sense that, being philosophi-
cal rather than historical, it can largely transcend local or temporalized
idiosyncrasies.
More interestingly, must we suppose that externalist philosophy of art
loses touch with the specific animating principles within individual artistic
traditions? What are we to make, for example, of those familiar claims, from

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14 Peter Lamarque

the external perspective, that the great works of art from all traditions share
a common human appeal and transcend their cultural origins?
Shakespeare, Dryden tells us, had "a universal mind, which comprehended
all characters and passions," and Aristotle famously praised the poets for
giving universal, not merely historically particular, truths. And do not the
great works of literature from different traditions-the Oresteia, the Tale of
Genji, the Marahabat,the Norse sagas, The CanterburyTales-treat the same
themes, birth and death, love and conflict, duty and desire, hope and fail-
ure? Jung's work on universal archetypes or symbols, which saw them as
stemming from a shared unconscious rather than culturally instilled con-
ventions, has popularized the view that the content and even the forms of
art have a common innate basis.
At one level, I think, such claims must be treated with caution. For one
thing, it has been suggested, against Jung, that recent discoveries of prehis-
toric trade routes show that distinct cultures were somewhat less isolated
than originally supposed. However, at another level the postulation of un-
derlying commonalities in human art should not be too surprising, espe-
cially where meanings are concerned; it would be more surprising if we
were not to find the same kinds of fundamental human interests (as just
listed) recurring in different manifestations, just as they do in religions and
myths. If Donald Davidson is right, there can be no deep disparity among
human conceptual schemes. Also, the human capacity to assign meaning
and value to physical and perceptual properties, which I have suggested is
one of the bases of art, is itself universal and likely to be constrained by
common aspects of human psychology.
What we need to hold on to from internalist philosophy of art is the par-
ticularity of the intentional object and what Kant called the singularity of
aesthetic judgment. Intentional objects, including works of art, are, as we
have seen, those that express a thought or embody a meaning; but the
thoughts and meanings are not accessible independently of the beliefs and
attitudes of those who directly engage with the objects. Similarity of theme,
even commonality of symbol, will not eradicate the particularity of the
work or the specificity of its meaning. Removed from the practices that as-
sign them significance and value, cultural objects literally lose their identity,
they become objects of a different kind.
It is for this reason that we should, I think, be sceptical of the idea of an
applied aesthetics in any way akin to applied ethics, that is, as a genuine
branch of philosophy rather than just another name for art criticism. As
Kant insisted, aesthetic appreciation demands a specific experience, it is not
deducible from rules and past instances. There is no a priori access to par-
ticular aesthetic or even critical judgments, no reasoning from first prin-
ciples, no conclusions to be drawn from universal premises. Judgments of
aesthetic value are different from those of moral value, not because the

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 15

former are subjective and the latter objective, but because aesthetic objects
owe their identity far more tightly to the practices that give them meaning
than is the case with human action in general. Actions (action-types) can
acquire morally relevant descriptions that are not bound inextricably to the
contexts in which their instances (action-tokens) occur, even though of
course context-dependent descriptions do contribute to the identity of ac-
tions. In contrast, works of art can never be identified or understood as art
except when grounded in the contexts of their origins.
So we can return at last to the cave paintings and the tension I identified
between, on the one hand, the ease with which we appropriate them as aes-
thetic objects-objects of pleasure and fascination-and, on the other, our
total mystification about their cultural meaning and purpose, their nature
as objects embedded in human practices. The tension partly reflects the two
distinct branches of inquiry I have noted within philosophical aesthetics.
First, there is the need to account for a certain kind of human experience,
the attention to objects for their own sake, the way they appear apart from
any concept, and the pleasures they afford from this outlook. This experi-
ence, I have suggested, is not unduly culture bound; it does not presup-
pose, as is sometimes claimed, any attitude to art, either aestheticism, for-
malism, or any view about autonomy; nor does it presuppose particular
skills of discrimination, taste, or refinement in judgment. We do not know,
of course, and have no way of discovering, whether the Paleolithic cave
dwellers took up such an aesthetic stance to their own work, but it is clear
that viewers from any historical period could admire the depictions for
their appearance alone.
The second branch of aesthetics is the philosophy of art which can adopt,
I suggested, both an internalist, participant perspective, linked to an artistic
tradition, or an externalist perspective which encompasses all traditions,
not only through comparative ethnology but through intellectual abstrac-
tion and detachment, which tends to move the inquiry into other realms of
philosophy. We have no access to a participant philosophy of art for the
cave paintings. Because we do not know what practices they were embed-
ded in or what meanings, if any, they express, we are literally in the dark as
to what intentional objects they are; this should make us wary of importing
an artistic vocabulary in our attempts to understand or explain them. They
are works of art only as appropriated into our own tradition. Perhaps the
most we can do, in an aprioristic spirit, is lay down in advance of further
empirical work what considerations might lead us to give them the classifi-
cation "art," rather than some other classification, for the people who made
them.
The tension between appreciating objects aesthetically and understand-
ing them as cultural objects runs deeply through the subject. It is antici-
pated in such dichotomies as the sensory and the intellectual, appearance

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16 Peter Lamarque

and meaning, experience and judgment. A form of it is even manifested in

Kant's so-called antinomy of taste-the contradiction between the particu-
larity of aesthetic experience and its claim of universality. Aesthetics oscil-
lates between the two sides, but the tension is mitigated, if my suggestion is
accepted, by recognizing a clear divide, without setting one against the
other, between aesthetic experience per se and the more culturally embedded
response to art.
Let me end with a small plea, specifically with regard to the cave paint-
ings but with wider implications; that is not to let the ease of appropria-
tion-disinterested aesthetic delight-overwhelm that much deeper sense
of mystery and incomprehension we have when faced with these remark-
able phenomena. As we approach the end of the twentieth century, we are
confronted by an increasing internationalization and homogenization of art
which, depending on your point of view, can seem invigorating or depress-
ing. If it is a move toward universalism, it is of only the most reductive
kind. Art galleries round the world seem more and more alike. Familiarity
makes us gaze complacently at artifacts from every remote corner of the
world; we are blase about pre-Colombian pottery, tribal arts, aboriginal
sandpainting, African masks, Chinese scrolls, Polynesian carvings. And all
these now jostle for our attention in an undifferentiated aesthetic experi-
ence, along with the European Old Masters, the Impressionists, and post-
modernist ephemera. Tourists on their travels can pick up "authentic" arti-
facts from Papua New Guinea, Peru, North Queensland, from the Inuit, the
Yoruba, the Nepalese, the Outer Mongolians; and the makers of these in-
digenous crafts (or their agents) have not been slow to exploit a craving
for the "authentic" and the "primitive," both now so effortlessly repro-
duced. What gets lost in each case of course is meaning. The intentionality
that gives cultural objects their identity and is embedded in cultural prac-
tices is being sacrificed for an easy, unreflective surface pleasure. If this
slide is to be halted, what we need is an active critical tradition, but equally
an active philosophy of art to provide its rationale.

NOTES

1. Jean Clotte,The Independent,Friday, 20 January 1995, p. 21.

2. Terry Eagleton, The Ideologyof the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 3.
3. T. J. Diffey, "A Note on Some Meanings of the Term 'Aesthetic,"' British Journal
of Aesthetics 35, no. 1 (1995): 61-66.
4. Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), p. 20.
5. 1 am especially endebted to Casey Haskins for showing me the importance of
this distinction in aesthetics. I have learned much from an unpublished paper of
his, "Cold War Aesthetics," which develops the distinction in this context. (A
revised version has appeared as "On the Sources of Aesthetic Scepticism," Philo-
sophical Forum 27, no. 2 [Winter 1996]: 89-126.) Another influence is Roger

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 The Aesthetic and the Universal 17
Scruton who applies the distinction to aesthetics in a number of works, includ-
ing The Aesthetic Understanding(London: Methuen, 1983), chap. 13. It is not to be
confused with, though is not entirely unrelated to, a distinction between inter-
nal and external perspectives on fiction that I discuss in my Fictional Points of
View (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
6. Richard Wollheim criticizes formulations of George Dickie's institutional defini-
tion of art for giving only an "externalist" answer to questions like "What is
art?" and "What is painting?" See Painting as an Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1987), pp. 15-16.
The text of this article is substantially that of an Inaugural Lecture I gave at the
University of Hull on Monday, 26 February 1996.

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