ESTHETICS AND CRITICISM 3 Esthetics and Criticism. Criticism is the act of passing judgment, and it implies the possession of a standard or test of beauty by which one knows or feels that a given work is good or bad. There is common ground, therefore, between criticism and esthetics, since both tell us about art products, whether they are good and why. The difference between the two fields would seem to lie in the greater attention which esthetics gives to the discovery and formulation of the standard. The finding of general laws and building of theories of beauty is the affair of esthetics; whereas the tracing out of these laws in their application to particular works of art is more the province of criticism. Criticism may be called the esthetics of particular cases. Criticism is sometimes itself a work of art: thus in Keats's famous sonnet on Chapman's Homer we find esthetic criticism to be a piece of creative art. Esthetics and Psychology. Psychology is the science of mental processes as such. Among these processes are affections, feelings, emotions and moods, and certain of these have to do with objects of beauty. The science which deals with these latter processes and the conditions of their arousal may be considered a part of the larger science of psychology. We shall regard the esthetician as a psychologist who limits his attention to one branch of his subject and so finds time to investigate that part more elaborately; and shall treat esthetics as a branch of an advanced psychology. Is Esthetics 66 a Normative Science "? A norm is a rule or standard to go by. It is quite common to say that there are two kinds of science, positive and norma tive, and that a positive science tells us merely the nature of things, what they are; whereas a normative science' tells us also what things ought to be. Not content with the real, the normative doctrine points out the ideal state of things. Thus we hear that psychology is a science which analyzes mental life as it finds it, not caring whether the mental processes are good or bad, rational or irrational, beautiful or ugly. But logic, we are told, distinguishes a false judgment from a true one, and shows the laws of right reason; ethics shows people what their acts should be; and esthetics points out the proper exercise of taste, and tells us what we ought to find beautiful. Now I believe it to be true that logic, ethics and esthetics are in a sense prescriptive, that they do help us in our thinking, our acting and our feeling, and it is certain that they attempt to set up standards or norms; but I cannot see that this is a point in which they differ from other sciences. Every science tries to establish a norm. Psychology is at work determining a "normal" human mind. (Even in abnormal psychology there are recognized types or norms.) A knowledge of chemistry or biology or even mathematics is the knowledge of what one "ought" to do in order to get results in these fields. To stimulate circulation you "should" apply alcohol in the blood; to get the circumference of a circle you "ought" to multiply 2 πr. this it would seem that positive science is also normative. It is just as true that normative science is positive. Ethics cannot tell in each particular case what a person ought to do; it can only heap up instances of action which, in the past, people have thought to be good. From PURPOSE AND METHODS OF ESTHETICS 5 Logic cannot tell just what conclusion you must draw from certain present circumstances, but it can show in what way valid and useful inferences have been drawn from given data in the past. Esthetics cannot tell precisely which brush-strokes will produce the picture that shall transcend all others, but it can classify and record the elements of beauty in works of art already produced. Esthetics, in other words, is just as practical or normative as other sciences, but no more so. Purpose of Esthetics. To many persons it seems a simple thing to know what they like. They say: "I know what I don't know anything about art, but I like." This is a great mistake. People know very little about their own tastes, and are as often as not disappointed when they get what they thought they wanted. The chief purpose of esthetics is to help us to clarify and to become conscious of our own tastes. Methods. The methods of esthetics are the methods of psychology, namely, observation, introspection and experiment. Up to recent years observation and introspection have been the ones chiefly relied upon. Observation may be regarded as the objective method; it is applicable both to the work of art itself and to the person enjoying it. Thus we may note the facial expression, the posture and gestures of the one who sees or hears something beautiful. Or, again, just as in psychology one way of arriving at the laws of memory is to observe what things are remembered (the recent, the frequent, the vivid, etc.), so we learn something of the laws of beauty by observing the things that are accepted as beautiful. Under this method comes the study of the history of art and the evolution of its forms. Introspection is the subjective method. This must tell what it feels like to find a thing beautiful, and also what the mental process of artistic creation is. Experiment is introspection and observation under controlled conditions. Some writers have distinguished experimental methods, as applied to the feelings, into two main classes, which they call methods of "impression" and of "expression." In "impression" the ingenuity of the experimenter is directed upon analyzing and ordering the material to be presented. The result of the experiment is the mental state of the subject, usually reported in the judgment "pleasant" or "unpleasant," and in an introspective account given by the subject. In "expression" the experimenter starts with the mental state of pleasant or unpleasant, using a known and constant stimulus, and directs his attention toward the exact outcome, usually in physiological terms, of this state of mind. Progress in the development of esthetics as a science will mean an ever-widening application of experiment to the problems of esthetics. Plan of Study. In the study of art one is perpetually discriminating two phases of every art product, namely, feeling and form. The production of a work of art is a progress "from emotion to form"; it is the discovery and arrangement of images which shall express and convey feeling. The appreciation of art is a process of appropriating emotion through the medium of the artistic image or form. To produce, one must have feeling and imagination, and, to appreciate, one must have imagination and feeling. The plan of the present book is to |