Although it is usually the end of the eighteenth century
that monopolizes the discussion of aesthetics in philosophy, it is a book from
the beginning of the century – Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, etc. –
that shaped the terms in which art was discussed by Enlightenment philosophes. In
the same sense in which an allergen shapes a sneeze, it is also these terms
that shaped the massive rejection under which we still live – that reaction we
call modernism, romanticism, postmodernism, etc.
Shaftesbury did not directly talk about entertainment and
art, because the concepts and their hostility one to the other had not
crystallized in his time. But he does give us some notion about what art was
about. Or, rather, he constructs two points of view by which to look at it.
From the first point of view, art is thoroughly social. Shaftesbury writes of how the poet’s work is
an “entertainment for himself and others.” The possibility that it could only
be for himself is cast into doubt, however, by the whole structure of his
theory of taste.
Our … endeavor, therefore, must appear this: to show that
nothing is found charming or delightful in the polite world, nothing which is
adopted as pleasure or entertainment of whatever kind can any way be accounted
for, supported or established wiouth the pre-establishment or supposition a a
certain taste.”
The separation between pleasures and entertainment is about
Shaftesbury’s recognition that much of entertainment is about the “foils and
contraries” that befall human actors, whether in poetry, or theater, or song,
or visuall depiction. However, for Shaftesbury, the moments of degredation,
pain, grief and defeat – of, in fact, ugliness, the lineaments of unhappiness -
are moments in a larger scheme to depict, in full, the “beauties of the inward
soul.”
This gives us our second point of view. Shaftesbury is not a
puritan by any means, but he still harks after, or at least is haunted by, the
old distinction between the sacred and the profane – which is now transferred
to a the duality between outward show and inward beauty. If the artist is
always working with the materials of outward show, he is always motivated by
the impulse of inward beauty.
The model for inward beauty comes not from art: it comes
from the beauty of the human form. And not any human form – rather, the
paradigm is the beautiful woman. That beauty, Shaftesbury claims, is always a
symbol of inward beauty. Subtract the latter, make the woman an idiot, and the
outward beauty flees.
We know how this play of comparisons arises. We’ve seen this
number dialed before, over and over again.
Bit by bit, entertainment – like the beauty of women – becomes a threat
if it is not moralized, or held to some standard. But for Shaftesbury,
entertainment is still, in the end, the kind of outward show that art does not
transcend so much as use for a transcendence beyond art – into being a wholly
fit member of society.
Shaftesbury’s aesthetics of taste made a good target for
those who reject the surrender to taste as an ultimately servile gesture, a
relic of the system of patronage. Those, that is, who were contemporary with or
came after the French revolution.
It is at this point that the plot thickens; the divide, such
as it is, between entertainment and art becomes a modern project.
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