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page058from Building Ideasby the individual’s experience. It is this interest in the psychology of beauty and the process of aesthetic experience that set the pattern for the work on aesthetics within the British Empiricist tradition.
The Empiricists believed that knowledge derived directly from the sense, that ideas were built up out of the sense-data of experience. This contrasts with the view of the European Rationalists, like Descartes who, as described in Chapter 1, thought sense experience unreliable and began with the innate capacities of the disembodied intellect. It was only later in the eighteenth century, in the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that a resolution of these two positions produced another significant advance in the history of aesthetic thinking. In the meantime the term “aesthetics” had been coined, in the writing of another German called Alexander Baumgarten. He derived the word from the Greek Aisthesis, meaning sensory perception, betraying the influence of the Empiricist preoccupation with knowledge based on experience. In fact there was at this time a crossover between British and German philosophy through the influence of Shaftesbury and his successors, Hutcheson and Burke. Edmund Burke is perhaps most noteworthy for his idea of sublime, which he formulated in opposition to the concept of the beautiful. He proposed these as two separate categories of aesthetic experience and he also described them in psychological terms. In all these developments the emphasis is shifting – from the object to the subject of aesthetic experience. Instead of seeing art as simply a means to an intellectual end, where beauty merely provides an image of the underlying principles of order and perfection, the new ideas suggested that art provided a unique form of “knowledge”, a realm of specifically sensory awareness which could not be obtained by any other means. The Aesthetics of ”Genius” – From Kant to Nietzsche It was Kant who perhaps most famously pursued this intriguing inside, incorporating the notion of aesthetic judgement into his overall philosophical system. Kant’s first two great critiques covering what
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page057from Building IdeasMan is all symmetry
Full of Proportions, one Limme to another, And all to all the world besides: Each Part may call the furthest, Brother: For Head with Foot hath private Amitie, And both with Moones and Tides.8 George Herbert died in 1633, the year that Galileo was tried for heresy by the Church and the same year that Descartes had abandoned his plans for an ambitious treatise entitled The World. The world was, however, rapidly changing, with the rise of the new sciences mentioned in Chapter 1. It was in response to these developments towards the end of the seventeenth century that the philosophy of Plato was once again reassessed. The signs of impending acceleration in the growth of technology, as well as the philosophical trend towards the construction of “systems”, was met in England by opposition from various Neoplatonic philosophers – most notably, in the final decade of the century, by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. For Shaftesbury, the focus of aesthetic investigation was also directed towards the beauty of nature, particularly the relationship set out in Plato’s philosophy between the true, the beautiful and the good. As he wrote in the first volume of his Characteristics, published originally in 1711: For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true proportions the beauty of architecture; as true measures that of harmony and music. In poetry, which is all fable, truth still is the perfection.9 While this statement reiterates the Renaissance view of the divine origins of underlying order, Shaftesbury is actually more concerned with the effect of beauty on the mind of the observer. He considers the contemplation of a beautiful object to be creative act in its own right, as the sensibility towards the quality of beauty is being “constructed” 8 Geoge Herbert, ”Man”, quoted in Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Arcitecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, pv . 9 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, quoted in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (eds), Philosophies of Art and Beauty, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964, p 241.
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page055from Building IdeasThe beauty of bodies does not consist in the shadow of materiality, but in the clarity and gracefulness of form, not in the hidden bulk, but in a kind of luminous harmony, not in an inert and stupid weight, but in a fitting number and measure. Light, gracefulness, proportion, number and measure, which we apprehend by thought, vision and hearing.6
The architects of the Renaissance tried to demonstrate these principles in the many depictions of the famous “Vitruvian” figure. With arms extended in a “crucified” posture the body would usually be shown inside a circle and a square. Leonardo da Vinci produced perhaps the most memorable version, although Cesariano and Francesco di Giogio both used a similar illustration (see Figure 1 below). The link was the notion of a set of timeless ordering principles, which Vitruvius had maintained could be discovered in the architecture of the ancients. As he described it himself, in the chapter on the layout of temples: Therefore if it is agreed that number is found from the articulation of the body, and that there is a correspondence of the fixed ration of the separate members to the general form of the body, it remains that we take up those writers who in planning the temples of the immortal gods so ordained the parts of the work that, by the help of proportion and symmetry, their several and general distribution is rendered congruous.7 By the time the model of the Renaissance treatise was first imitated in England, in the shape of Henry Wotton’s book The Elements of Architecture(1624), the harmonic correspondence between the body and the cosmos had also appeared in the writings of the metaphysical poets. George Herbert in particular, in his poem “Man”, described an identical fascination with harmony and proportion: 6 Marsilio Ficino, letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, quoted in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (eds), Philosophies of Art and Beauty, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964, p 204. 7 Vitruvius, On Architecture, translated by Frank Granger, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, Book III, Ch. I, p 165-7
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page054from Building IdeasThis notion of the artist having access to divine harmony became a powerful notion for later thinking in aesthetics. Besides the question of the status of art as a “unique” form of knowledge – the issue of whether philosophy could ever replace aesthetic experience – it is here also where the later debate between the Classical and the Romantic has its roots, in the arguments over the role of the artist. In the Classical tradition the artist is constrained by historical precedent, which acts as a repository of the timeless ideals forms. Romanticism, on the other hand, holds the creative individual to be supreme, with the artist as a “genius” inventing freely from within. Of course, within both traditions art many still be seen as subservient to rationality, and it is this question which forms the background to the debates going on the aesthetics today. Before addressing these more contemporary issues and their implications for the theory of architecture, there are two other contribution from the history of aesthetics which should be briefly considered. The first is from the Renaissance and the revival of Classical ideas and the second happens in the eighteenth century and provides the background to the rise of Romanticism.
The Renaissance is so called due to the rebirth of Classical ideas, whose influence spread rapidly thanks in part to the new technique of printed text from moveable type.5 After Gutenberg’s famous Bible appeared in 1456, a proliferation of printed books appeared during the following hundred years. In addition to the new editions of Vitruvius’ ten books on architecture written originally at the height of the Roman Empire, in the first century AD, the writings of the ancient philosophers were also subjected to reinterpretation. In both instances an aesthetic doctrine was developed around the notion of a universal harmony and in both the definition of beauty was based on intellectual rather than physical qualities. This was evident in the commentary on Plato’s Symposium written by Marsilio Ficino in 1475,although it was in a letter to his friend Cavalcanti that Ficino best sums up the basic principles of the period’s Platonic preoccupations: 5 In fact moveable type had been used in China since the eleventh century AD. See George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p 169-95
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