BMCR 2009.07.09: Harbsmeier on Buettner, Antike Aesthetik. Eine Einfuehrung in die Prinzipien des Schoenen

Stefan Buettner, Antike Aesthetik. Eine Einfuehrung in die Prinzipien
des Schoenen.  Muenchen:  C.H. Beck, 2006.  Pp. 211; 14 ills.  ISBN
3-406-54092-9.  EUR 12.90.

Reviewed by Martin S. Harbsmeier, Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany
([email protected])
Word count:  2642 words
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Ever since Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten first coined the term and
founded the philosophical study of aesthetics in 1750, a perennial
problem of this discipline has been to define its subject-matter. Some
contend it to be the study of beauty, others the study of art, and
still others the study of beautiful art.

In his introduction to ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics, Stefan
Buettner acknowledges that Baumgarten's own concept of aesthetics as
the science of perceptual beauty was unknown in antiquity.[[1]] Yet by
arguing that our ancient sources feature theories of beauty as well as
theories of perception, Buettner (hereafter B.) argues that one might
speak of a "double ancient aesthetics" (9) and he thus decides to keep
the term "aesthetics" in his study of ancient theories of beauty and
art. Using this somewhat problematic terminological approach of
combining different ancient fields of study into one equivalent to
modern aesthetics, B. at first glance appears to be establishing an
artificial similarity between ancient and modern thinking on
aesthetics. But as it turns out, despite the somewhat anachronistic
terminology and the strongly generalizing subtitle of the book
("Introduction to the Principles of Beauty"), B.'s aim is not so much
to search for ancient counterparts to modern aesthetics in a
conceptional sense, but more specifically to examine ancient theories
of the nature of beauty and of (beautiful) art in their own right. This
clearly stated scope of his book notwithstanding, the ancient theories
in these fields may, as B. concludes in his brief introduction, indeed
contribute to clarify or enrich our own thinking and theorizing about
art, beauty and aesthetics. That this ought, in fact, to be the case,
seems evident, when one considers that, despite major differences
especially concerning the status of the arts, a great deal of our
thinking about aesthetics ultimately derives from Greek and Roman
reflections on these matters.[[2]] The book's focus on theories of art
and beauty also means, as the author states in the introduction, that
one should not expect to find discussions of, e.g. Homeric poetics
except in those cases where such topics are touched upon by ancient
thinkers. Aimed at a general readership, B.'s introduction can be
studied without prior knowledge in Classical or Aesthetic Studies, but
the advanced student of either field may certainly profit from reading
it.

Following the introduction, the book's first section aims to
reconstruct "Plato's aesthetics" with a main focus on the Republic, the
Symposium and the Sophist. The second section on Aristotle is primarily
concerned with the Poetics, and the third section comprises three
individual chapters dealing with the aesthetics of the Hellenistic
philosophical schools (Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics), Vitruvius' De
architectura, and various rhetorical and poetological treatises of the
Roman imperial period (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian,
Ps.-Longinus' De sublimitate, and Horace's Ars poetica). The book's
last section deals with aesthetics in the thought of Plotinus, and a
short general reflection on the importance of ancient aesthetics
concludes the volume.

The layout of  B.'s introduction thus mirrors several of his
predecessors.[[3]] All chapters contain brief historical presentations
of the authors treated in them, and the volume's brief bibliography
includes essential editions, commentaries, and (mainly German and
English) translations of the relevant Greek and Latin texts. It also
lists some selected works on the authors and schools treated in the
book as well as several, primarily German, monographs on ancient
aesthetics. Finally, the volume features a short index of persons and
of some central aesthetic concepts. Being designed as an introduction
to the general reader, the book contains no footnotes and no references
to modern works and only occasionally engages in explicit scholarly
discussion. References to ancient sources are given somewhat randomly,
which makes it rather difficult for the reader and especially for the
student who is not already familiar with the relevant texts to trace
the specific sources of individual statements and positions that  B.
discusses.

Some of the chapters (such as those on Quintilian, Vitruvius, Horace,
and -- in part -- Aristotle) consist primarily of summaries of the
relevant texts. These chapters will be of some value as basic
introductions to the non-specialist; the advanced student, however,
will find them less rewarding as they contain few or no controversial
interpretations. Moreover, one might ask, as  B. himself admits,
whether authors such as Quintilian or Dionysius of Halicarnassus can be
said to contribute significantly to a survey of ancient theories of
beauty and art.

To this reviewer, the book's prime merit consists in B.'s attempt to
contextualize the concepts of beauty and art that we find in the texts
of the various ancient philosophical schools. This approach is
especially fruitful in the chapter on "Plato's aesthetics", which
together with the chapter on Aristotle comprises half of the book.
B.'s wide-ranging and detailed account does not permit an in-depth
engagement within the scope of a review. I shall therefore focus on a
few aspects that seem particularly important to the author.

In order to assess the role of art and beauty in the Platonic
dialogues, B. begins this chapter with a discussion of psychology and
epistemology in Plato. Most interpreters, B. states, have diagnosed in
Plato's dialogues a contradiction between a rigorous condemnation of
the arts and a genuinely positive attitude towards them. This
contradiction, however, B. argues, is caused by an anachronistic
imposing of modern psychological concepts on Plato's thought. Only if
we realize, he claims, that the modern dichotomy of psychic processes
between pre-conscious, perceptual, and emotional experiences on the one
hand and "cold", conscious, rational reflexion on the other does not
apply to Plato, will we be able to grasp what he says about art.[[4]]
Contrary to the modern Cartesian tradition,  B. stresses, consciousness
plays no role at all in the Platonic conception of cognition. To Plato
(and other ancient thinkers), every process of perception is a
cognitive process. Plato, thus, does not differentiate between
conscious and non-conscious processes, but between different modes and
levels of cognition according to the qualities being perceived and
discerned. Basic visual perception, for instance, is not an immediate,
non-rational process, but rather an act of distinguishing various forms
and colors from one another. Visual perception alone, however, is not
capable of identifying a given set of colors and forms as a specific
item, because this identification requires cognition of something one
cannot see, namely the item's function, which is what lends it its
specific identity. To identify, e.g., something white and rectangular
as a door (B.'s example), thus requires a combination of seeing and
thinking. Most importantly though, this implies that the function or
"idea" of a particular item does not depend on visual input, a
consequence that -- in the present example -- becomes evident, when the
same white rectangular item is placed upon four legs, thus becoming a
table instead of a door.

Epistemological considerations such as these, B. contends, are crucial
to understanding what Plato says about art. To mention but one of the
consequences that follow from the cognitive model just outlined,
meaning and content in art do not come into being on the basis of sense
perception but exclusively through thinking. What lends structure and
meaning to every set of sensible particulars are not the particulars
themselves, but the ideas. The same holds true of beauty, which,
likewise, is not an inherent quality of the world's particulars but is
bestowed upon these by the idea of beauty. The quality of an artwork,
thus, is determined by the cognitive level of the artist's knowledge
about the subjects he is treating. What Plato, then, is condemning, is
not art in general, but only those works of art which do not comply
with his own philosophical standards.

Stimulating as his arguments are,  B.'s treatment of Plato contains
some methodologically problematic features. Given the author's laudable
intent of contextualizing what is said about beauty and art in the
Platonic dialogues within a larger framework of psychology and
epistemology, one might have expected a similar ambition to
contextualize the relevant statements as well as the framework itself
within the dialogues from which they are extracted. Yet B. makes no
such attempt. When introducing Aristotle, B. draws attention to the
fact that, due to the dialogue form, we can never be sure about what
Plato really thought. This retrospectively voiced insight, however, has
no consequences for the treatment of the Platonic texts in the relevant
chapter. On the contrary, Plato's dialogues are here treated as if they
were Aristotelian treatises and their content traditionally compiled
into Platonic theories. Thus, when B. sets out by stating that the
relevant utterances in Plato's dialogues contain statements which seem
to contradict each other, there is no hint at the possibility that this
might also have something to do with the fact that Plato's texts are
not direct statements of the author's views let alone of a coherent
theory of art, but semi-fictional dialogues in which different
characters are discussing a wide variety of subjects.

Apart from these methodological scruples, B.'s rendering of the views
expressed in the dialogues does not always seem convincing. To give one
example:  B., like numerous interpreters before him,[[5]] claims that
Plato "defines" all art as mime^sis (35), but it is, at least,
debatable whether such a claim is, in fact, made in the dialogues. The
passage that comes closest to such a definition is Republic 600e4-6
where Socrates concludes that "from Homer on, all the poets are
imitators (mime^tai) of images of excellence" (cf. also 599b9-c2). Yet,
one might ask whether this conclusion in fact amounts to defining art
tout court as mime^sis or whether Socrates is just summing up his
preceding critique of Homer and the tragedians (= "all the poets") as
lacking true knowledge. It is true that in Book 10 of the Republic
Socrates speaks of what appears to be a "quarrel" between philosophy
and poetry in general (607b5), but he begins the discussion of mimetic
poetry with an explicit description of the subject as "so much of
poetry that is mimetic" (595a5 <greek>o(/sh</greek> [sc.
<greek>au)th=s</greek>] <greek>mimhtikh/</greek>), and, moreover, after
the alleged universal definition in 600e4-6 he continues to talk
specifically about epic and tragedy, whichseems to militate against an
interpretation of 600e4-6 as a general definition of all poetry as
being mime^sis. A further obstacle to this interpretation is that Plato
in the Republic does not provide a direct answer to the question in
which way all poetry is supposed to be subsumed under the category of
mime^sis.[[6]] In order to answer this question, B. picks up the
Sophist's universal concept of mime^sis as the making of any kind of
image, i.e. of a product that is made to be similar to something else
(240a, 265b). With reference to the reconstruction of Plato's
epistemology mentioned above, he then argues that Plato in Book 10 of
the Republic condemns only those mimetic products which fail to be
based on knowledge of that which they are modeled upon. A drawback of
this solution, however, is that there is no mention of such a
subdivision of mime^sis into qualified and unqualified imitation in
Republic 10. On the contrary, mimetic poetry seems to be condemned qua
mimetic (see, e.g., 595b6-7: "I think that all such [sc. mimetic]
things impair the mind of those who hear them"). Moreover, the
possibility of a mime^te^s having any true knowledge is explicitly
ruled out in Socrates' argument on the nature of "mime^sis in general"
(595c7, 597e10-98b5). As to the exact scope of Plato's discussion of
mimetic poetry in Republic 10, then, B.'s treatment raises some
important questions yet to be answered.

The chapter on Aristotle's aesthetics touches on a lot of interesting
topics, especially concerning questions about the interpretation of
single passages of the Poetics, to which, as the author notes, no
universally accepted answers have been given. The most prominent
example is probably the question about how to interpret the notorious
passage in ch. 6 of the Poetics on the emotional purging, katharsis,
which a good tragedy according to Aristotle is supposed to induce in
its spectators (or readers).  B. discusses different solutions and
pleads for the objective reading of the genitive clause (1449b27-28
<greek>tw=n toiou/twn paqhma/twn ka/qarsin</greek>) taking it to mean
that the spectator's suffering with the characters on stage will
contribute to a positive forming of the spectator's emotional habitus.
Given the book's aim of being an introduction to the general reader,
many of B.'s interpretations of the Poetics are, of course, not new.
The chapter on Aristotle, however, in combination with the
reconstruction of Plato's aesthetics forms an informative and
illuminating background to later aesthetic thought as detailed in the
subsequent chapters on Hellenistic and Neoplatonist philosophy.

The widespread early modern idea of good art being an exact copy of
reality, to pick out one of the more interesting (and not
uncontroversial) claims in the chapter on Hellenistic philosophy,
ultimately derives from Stoic physics. The Stoic contention of a purely
material world,  B. argues, precludes the Platonic and Aristotelian
idea of something immaterial being the cause of beauty, which,
therefore, has to be "in nature". In order to find and subsequently
represent beauty, one thus needs to contemplate "nature" or "reality"
as thoroughly as possible. Yet, as becomes clear in  B.'s treatment of
the later Stoics, though Stoic materialism may in a certain sense be
said to form the foundation of the early modern concept of beautiful
art as the copy of perceptible beauty, this is not the conclusion the
Stoics arrived at themselves. In accordance with their idea of the
kosmos as a whole ordered by logos, physical beauty is described as the
congruity of all particulars with one another and with the whole;
beauty of the soul, correspondingly, is defined as a harmony between
the virtues of a person as well as a kind of concord and consistency of
that person's opinions and judgments combined with a certain general
psychic strength. These ideas of harmony and symmetry are to some
extent related to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, whence they
ultimately derive. The Stoics, however, as  B. points out, differ
significantly from these predecessors as well as from their alleged
early modern heirs in that they are neither interested in beauty as a
purely intelligible quality nor in a theoretical derivation of
perceptible beauty. What matters to them is the manifestation of beauty
in the above defined sense in a beautiful, that is morally good life.

The book's final chapter on Plotinus, not surprisingly, focuses on this
Neoplatonist's relationship to his ancient master. In Book 6 of Plato's
Republic, Socrates illustrates his own philosophical enterprise of
sketching an imaginative ideal city by looking towards the ideas of
justice, beauty, etc. with that of a painter painting "the most
beautiful picture" (500b-501c; cf. 472b-473b). This is the artistic
ideal,  B. contends, which Plotinus picks up when claiming that the
ideas, not the sensible world, ought to be the paradigm of true art.
Using Phidias to illustrate his point, Plotinus emphasizes that the
Athenian sculptor certainly did not create his famous statue of Zeus in
Olympia on the basis of empirical data, but rather by discerning what
the god might be thought to be like (<greek>oi(=os a)\n
ge/noito</greek>), should he appear before our eyes.[[7]] Plotinus,
thus, according to  B., does not represent a new aesthetic paradigm, as
many interpreters have claimed, but shows himself to be a true follower
of Plato, just as he purported to be.

Though one might not always agree with  B.'s treatment of the relevant
ancient sources, this does not detract from the fact that this slim and
well-written volume with its numerous straightforward examples and
occasional humorous anecdotes is a stimulating and enjoyable book on a
vast and fascinating topic.

The reviewer detected only a few misprints (pp. 56, 77, 129, and 207)
and one invalid reference (p. 43: reference to Pl. Rep. 500b).


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Notes:


1.   Cf. Glen W. Most, Art. "Schoene (das)", in: J. Ritter et al.
(edd.), Historisches Woerterbuch der Philosophie, vol. VIII, Basel
1992, 1343-51.

2.   See e.g. Ernesto Grassi, Die Theorie des Schoenen in der Antike,
Cologne 1962.

3.   See e.g. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, London -
New York 2005 (Polish original 1962-67).

4.   For this comparative approach to Platonic epistemology and
psychology, cf. Arbogast Schmitt, Die Moderne und Platon, 2nd rev. ed.,
Stuttgart 2008. For a full treatment of the poetological views
expressed in Plato's dialogues in the light of Platonic epistemology
and psychology, see  B.'s own Die Literaturtheorie bei Platon und ihre
anthropologische Begruendung, Tuebingen 2000.

5.   See e.g. Penelope Murray (ed.), Plato on Poetry. Ion, Republic
376e-398b, Republic 595-608b, Cambridge 1996, 207.

6.   For further discussion of these matters, see Christopher Janaway,
Images of Excellence, Oxford 1995, 126-132.

7.   Enn. 5.8.31. A similar phrasing, as  B. notes in his section on
Aristotle's aesthetics, recurs in ch. 9 of the Poetics but with quite a
different meaning.