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Beyond Art andBeauty: In Searchof the Objectof PhilosophicalAestheticsAndreas SpeerPublished online: 08 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Andreas Speer (2000) Beyond Art and Beauty: InSearch of the Object of Philosophical Aesthetics, International Journal ofPhilosophical Studies, 8:1, 73-88, DOI: 10.1080/096725500341729

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Beyond A rt and BeautyIn Search of the Object ofPhilosophical Aesthetics*

A ndreas Speer

Abstract

This article deals with the ambigous situation of philosophical aesthetics,which now seems to have lost its proper object. Moreover, Arthur C. Dantohas popularized talk of an end of art, in which he ties that end to the endof any aesthetic master narrative. Comparing modern and medievalapproaches to art, this paper tries to reformulate the question of philo-sophical aesthetics, which has to be understood in a hermeneutical way.Taken in a heuristic manner ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ remain the principal aestheticcategories able to keep the understanding of what belongs to aesthetics opento different historical approaches.

Keywords: art; beauty; aesthetics; Suger

I

The present-day situation of philosophical aesthetics is quite ambiguous.On the one hand, there is an aesthetic boom. A esthetics is no longertreated as a philosophical discipline of peripheral importance, but seemsto be everywhere in various � elds of culture such as communication asexperience-oriented animation, the presentation of reality by the massmedia as an aesthetic construction, styling and design. Moreover, aestheticshas become foundational for philosophizing itself. Wolfgang Welsch, oneof the leading � gures of German post-modern aesthetics, even speaks ofaestheticizing epistemology, which includes the understanding of truth.1

But this Entgrenzung, this expansion of the horizons of aesthetics, leadson the other hand to a fundamental uncertainty about what philosophicalaesthetics really is – or to put it in technical scholastic terms, what thesubiectum of this science might be (if we can consider aesthetics as ascience, that is). So the widespread interest in aesthetics today paradoxi-cally gives rise to the loss of its proper object. Jean-François Lyotard

International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 8 (1), 73–88ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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therefore calls ‘aesthetic’ the mode of a civilization abandoning its idealsand merely cultivating the pleasure of performance.2

The colourful picture of modern art and especially the new museum –as A rthur C. D anto calls it – might seem to underline this question. Thenew museum combines the consumption of art with the consumption offood and with the purchase of goods in gift shops, from which people canwalk away with posters of soup cans or with images of idols such as E lvisand Marilyn. Andy Warhol’s thought that anything could be art was amodel, in a way, for the hope that human beings could be anything theychose, once the divisions that had de� ned the culture were overthrown.A nd Joseph Beuys’s claim that everyone was an artist was a corollary toWarhol’s sweeping egalitarianism, or its pendant. This expansion of whatcan be taken as art leads to a similar consequence: although there is, of course, still a difference between art and non-art, between works ofart and ‘mere real things’, one cannot tell when something is a work of art just by looking at it, for there is no particular way that art has to look.3

In comparison with, let us say, the G reek and Latin terms techne, andtechnites and ars and artifex, the English terms ‘art’ and ‘artist’ – as theyare commonly understood – re� ect a speci� c and restricted meaning, whichrepresents in the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) a minor butpowerful and in� uential tradition. This meaning is de� ned by adding adifferentia speci� ca, namely ‘beautiful’, to the generic term ‘art’, whichincludes all kinds of productive activity. So, one should speak in ourcontext, the aesthetic context, more precisely of ‘� ne arts’, equivalent to– for example – les beaux arts or die schönen K ünste. A lthough one can� nd the � rst attempts to found a philosophical aesthetics in Baumgartenand Kant, it was mainly H egel who restricted the proper object of theaesthetica – de� ned by Baumgarten as ‘scientia cognitionis sensitivae’4 –to the schöne Künste, the � ne arts, and established aesthetics as anautonomous philosophical discipline. Let me quote from the introductionto H egel’s lectures on the philosophy of art, delivered in Berlin in 1828:‘denn die Wissenschaft, die gemeint ist, betrachtet nicht das Schöne über-haupt, sondern rein das Schöne der Kunst. . . . D er eigentliche Ausdruckfür unsere Wissenschaft ist “Philosophie der Kunst” und bestimmter“Philosophie der schönen Kunst”’ (‘For this science treats not of beautyin general, but purely of the beauty of art. . . . The proper expression forour science is “philosophy of art”, and more speci� cally, “philosophy of� ne art”.’).5

‘A rt’ and ‘beauty’ – taken in a transhistorical sense – became the masternarrative, which was driven by the idea that there is a kind of transhis-torical essence in art, everywhere and always the same, but which disclosesitself through history. This means that, for H egel, to speak about art is tospeak about something which is, by de� nition, something in the past. This

I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S

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master narrative is the basis for art history as an autonomous discipline,and, as well, it can be seen as a kind of metaphysical justi� cation – usingthe words of H ans Belting – for the classic art-museum.6 A nd it is notsurprising that this narrative also directs the entries under aesthetickeywords in standard dictionaries and compendia.

O ne has to remember the strength of this model of aesthetics not onlyfor understanding the history of Modernism, which can be seen as a historyof the step-by-step dismantling of a concept of art (understood in the strictsense as � ne art) which had been evolving for over half a millennium,since the very beginning of its conceptualization at the end of the ItalianRenaissance, when one can also � nd for the � rst time the notion and theconcept of the ‘� ne arts’.7 Therefore, I will consider the history of aestheticsby taking our perception of pre-R enaissance art as a test case for thecentral question of the object of philosophical aesthetics. If one refers tostandard overviews of the history of aesthetics, one might have the impres-sion of a clear and homogeneous development of artistic styles and theirunderlying ideas. Because of that let me use an example to show thehermeneutical background of this approach towards aesthetics and itsimplications for our understanding of art.

II

The paradigm I have chosen is the present cathedral and the former A bbeychurch of Saint-D enis, north of Paris. It is commonly treated as the birth-place of Gothic architecture and is the home of the � rst G othic choir; itsconstruction was overseen by A bbot Suger himself. The choir was conse-crated in 1144 – again by Suger, who recorded this landmark historicalevent in his own writings, with their precise descriptions of how thingsproceeded, from the laying of the cornerstone to the consecration of the� nished choir, and with his singular re� ections regarding the goals of themedieval architectus , and the place of a pseudo-D ionysian light-meta-physics within them.

This in� uential picture – which even today provides the dominantparadigm for our understanding of medieval art, and especially for theso-called birth of G othic architecture – was the creation of the renownedart historian Erwin Panofsky. H is edition of, English translation of, andcommentary on the ‘aesthetic’ writings of Suger, and above all, his intro-duction to the text (which has been translated into several languages),served for generations as the authoritative point of reference in this � eld.8

His introduction is a compelling portrait of a twelfth-century abbot in theguise of a Renaissance artist. A recent study by Bruno Reudenbachdiscloses the complex net of intentions and implications in Panofsky’sportrait of Suger.9 A s Reudenbach points out, Panofsky never intendedto portray Suger as a medieval statesman and thinker. Instead, he means

B E YO N D A R T A N D B E A U T Y

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to present him as the exponent of a transhistorical continuity, a viableintellectual tradition born in antiquity and enduring to the present day.Panofsky’s notion of ‘tradition’ was of one existing amid a host of threatsto its existence.10 A gainst the background of the Second World War,Panofsky’s portrait of Suger expressed an alternative to barbarism, theinheritance of Western H umanism.11 The stylization of Suger as a human-istic � gure rests on its placement of him within a timelessly relevantintellectual tradition, bridging diverse historical epochs. Panofsky’sremarks about Neoplatonic light-metaphysics move the same way: G othicarchitecture becomes the transformation of a metaphysical system. The‘architecture of light’ gives expression to an intellectual experience, acreative process within an artist’s mind; it enables us to experience the supernatural divine light in worldly materiality, leading the humanintellect to a knowledge of G od.12 H ans Sedlmayr and Otto von Simson– two reknowned G erman art historians – have offered their own versionsof this kind of analysis, although both remain within the con� nes ofPanofsky’s overarching hermeneutic.13 Von Simson’s attempt in his bookT he G othic Cathedral to demonstrate a formal ef� cient causality betweenNeoplatonic-D ionysian philosophy and G othic architecture14 failed, ofcourse, as did Panofsky’s later endeavour to unite the system of G othicarchitecture with the intellectual character of the High Middle A ges – hisambitious attempt to elucidate the ‘genuine cause-and-effect-relation’between the Scholastic method (above all, that of Thomas A quinas) andthe architectural principles of the G othic cathedral.15

These interpretations are inspired by a still more basic intuition, namelythat the cathedral in some way captures the essence of medieval art andmedieval culture. One cannot deny that all three interpretations assume arather facile congruity between modern and medieval notions of aesthetics.That is to say, each assumes a relation of identity between ars and ‘art’,pulchrum and ‘beauty’, etc.16 O n the basis of such assumptions, the richhistory of Saint-D enis could be accounted for in a way that becomes a claimabout how medieval art and artistry are to be understood.

III

In his little treatise D e consecratione, Suger gives the main reasons forthe decision to rebuild the Abbey church.17 These are found, � rst, in adetailed and urgent report about dangerous overcrowding, particularly on feast days. On these days, the church became so full of pilgrims that,in Suger’s own words, ‘the outward pressure of the foremost ones not onlyprevented those attempting to enter from entering but also expelled thosewho had already entered’.18 This problem obviously arose in the area ofthe transept crossing and the original apse of the old Carolingian basilica– the place where pilgrims entered the crypt. There, on account of the


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narrowness, ‘the brethren partaking of the most holy Eucharist could notstay’ and ‘oftentimes they were unable to withstand the unruly crowd ofvisiting pilgrims without great danger’.19 Therefore, it was for the sake ofthe liturgy that Suger tried to restore the damaged parts of the A bbeychurch, to enlarge and reconstruct others, and to revive forgotten elementsof the ancient cult-tradition (especially those linked to the Merovingianand Carolingian kings D agobert, Pippin and Charlemagne).20

So, a glance at our primary source, Suger’s De consecratione, revealsthat liturgy is the main topic and also the key in which Suger expresseswhat we commonly conceptualize in terms of medieval art. What a modernhistorian of architecture like O tto von Simson � nds ‘disappointing’, namelySuger’s way of reporting and describing architectural structures,21 echoesthe same lack of understanding regarding context that we saw in Panofsky.Both historians, that is to say, overlook the central importance for Sugerof liturgy and cultic history. Contrary to Panofsky’s insinuations, AbbotSuger did not conduct himself like a modern movie-producer.22 H e doesnot relate all that he has written to the overarching goal of building acareer. A s von Simson maintains, he is actually not interested in aestheticsas such, but is – as I would emphazise – much more guided by liturgicalneeds. There can be no doubt about this. A fter all, Suger presents, in hisaccessus, the object of his treatise, his method, his intention and its utility.Thus he closes his prooemium with the following words:

We have endeavored to commit to writing, for the attention of oursuccessors, the glorious and worthy consecration of this church sacredto G od and the most solemn translation of the most precious martyrsDenis, Rusticus and E leutherius, our Patrons and A postles, as wellas of the other saints upon whose ready tutelage we rely. We haveput down why, in what order, how solemnly and also by what personsthis was performed, in order to give thanks as worthy as we can toDivine grace for so great a gift, and to obtain, both for the careexpended on so great an enterprise and for the description of sogreat a celebration, the favorable intercession of our Holy Protectorswith God.23

What can we conclude from this inquiry? Have we really arrived at anew paradigm – one based on liturgy – to replace Panofsky’s paradigm?What role does the D ionysian light-metaphysics play in this? The opera-tive terms commonly connected with the concept of a D ionysianlight-metaphysics and a ‘Gothic abundance of light’ – lux, sol, splendorand clarus – do not constitute a closed metaphorical system which mightjustify discourse about a distinct or characteristic use of the light-motif inSuger’s writings.24 There is indeed no ‘orgy of neo-platonic light meta-physics’,25 no recourse to a ‘de� nite metaphysical system’ inspiring a new


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artistic design.26 O ne can draw a similar conclusion from an inspection ofthe semantic � eld surrounding ‘beauty’: there is no evidence for believingthat Suger conceptualizes ‘beauty’ in respect of the two great medievaltraditions, Augustinian and D ionysian. He nowhere speaks of beauty withreference to the Augustinian model in which ‘beauty’ is de� ned byproportio , harm onia and consonantia. Neither does he speak of beauty inthe D ionysian idiom, lauding its claritas, splendor and consonantia.27 Thelocus classicus for Pseudo-D ionysius’ discussion of beauty is the fourthbook of his D e divinis nom inibus. H e there speaks of beauty as a divinename in the context of a general exposition of God’s goodness. G od iscalled Beauty, Dionysius asserts, because G od confers beauty on all things.He is the cause of the consonance and clarity in all things.28 In the samebook, Dionysius also introduces light as a name by which we can praiseGod. G od is the ever-shining sun which illuminates the visible world andcauses visible things to participate in its own harmony and clarity. This isa true image of God’s goodness.29 The passage in Suger’s little treatise onthe consecration of the A bbey church of Saint-D enis in which one can� nd a certain accumulation of ‘aesthetic’ terminology is linked to hisdescription of the old Carolingian basilica founded by King D agobert.30

The words pulchritudo and splendescere are used here within a commonsemantic context. But it is precisely here where Suger self-consciouslyinverts the traditional relationship between visible and invisible beauty.He describes how ‘the marvellous variety of the marble columns enrichedwith treasures of purest gold and silver and richly adorned with a varietyof pearls’ appears to surpass ‘the ornaments of all other churches’. Itsvery physical, visible beauty ‘blooms with incomparable lustre’; ‘the oldbasilica was shining with every terrestrial beauty and with inestimablesplendour’ (‘inestimabili decore splendesceret’).31

In the same way, the locus classicus for stressing the Sugerian lightaesthetics, his description of the enlarged stained-glass windows, must beread within context. From a grammatical point of view, the phrase in whichSuger speaks about the ‘elegant and praiseworthy extension of the radi-ating chapels (in circuitu oratoriorum ), by virtue of which the whole churchwould shine by the wonderful and uninterrupted light of the most lumi-nous, radiant windows passing through the beauty of the inside’, is a simpleaddition or appendix to the description of the complex space analysedabove, where the transept crossing meets the choir.32 The radiating chapelsare not part of Suger’s crucial effort to balance the m edium by geomet-rical and arithmetical means, by relating the axis of the old basilica andof the new enlargement (m edio novi augm enti) to the dimensions of thenew side-aisles.33 Suger does indeed mention them because of theirenlarged stained-glass windows.34 But let us take the description of theold Carolingian church and its liturgical background; remember that Sugertried to re-establish the old cults of the Merovingian and Carolingian


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kings, including the laus perennis, the perennial praise before the tombsof the Holy Patrons and Martyrs.35 O ne can imagine a monk who ex-perienced the liturgical of� ces year after year:36 the light passing throughthe sanctuary might have impressed him in the same way that it does amodern visitor. But here we can see the difference: our medieval monkat Saint-D enis would never have celebrated a ‘creative artistic event’ withwhich the history of G othic glass may be said to have begun.37 Sugercertainly never did. Perhaps he would have perceived the light streamingthrough the window as a symbol of the perennial liturgical order withinthe changing hours of the of� ce;38 as a representation of God’s own beautyand goodness, to which all creatures are called and in which all are ableto participate.

IV

This difference between the perception of the modern visitor and that ofthe medieval monk regarding what we are accustomed to call ‘medievalart’ raises the following question: can any universal aesthetic paradigmwhich invokes transhistorical categories of beauty and art improve ourunderstanding of medieval art? Let me just point to the fact that moreor less all histories of medieval aesthetics, like those of Edgar de Bruyneor Umberto Eco, are based on equating pulchrum and ‘beautiful’, ars and‘art’, artifex and ‘artist’.39 But let me also recall that this ordinary andeveryday conception of aesthetics, whose subject is commonly taken tolie in the point of intersection between art and beauty, is itself merely aparticular historical model. This raises the question: what then is m edievalart? or expressed hermeneutically, how do we perceive and understandmedieval art? And, expanding the question to our general task, how canwe perceive and understand art at all? There can, of course, be no simpleanswer to this question. On the one hand, we know that our own conceptsand presuppositions are the necessary starting point for understandingwhat medieval art is, as they are for every act of understanding. Thehermeneutic circle does, however, have another side: we are obviously notmerely interested in understanding our own perceptions, but also in under-standing wider horizons, what is unknown, unfamiliar and strange. Whatis needed and what, moreover, may not be avoided, is a careful recon-struction of how a medieval � gure like Suger experienced art and whatexpression he has given to those experiences.40 This is furthermore theonly appropiate methodology for an ‘integrated’ view of artisticphenomena – say of G othic cathedrals.41

A present-day visitor must pay the standard entrance fee at a statemuseum in France to enter the choir and the crypt at Saint-Denis. H ere theperception of medieval art � ts into the aesthetics of the modern museum.That means that our perception is shaped by at least two antiquarian points


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of view: by the ‘culture’ of the museum as well as by the recent popular inter-est in the Middle Ages. A t the same time, our general understanding of thecategory of the ‘aesthetic’ follows a more or less H egelian paradigm. We see,that is to say, ‘a common idea’ underlying particular historical mani-festations – something that we can analyse, which makes art a part of history.The H egelian assumption that to speak about art is to speak about some-thing which is, by de� nition, something past lies at the deepest roots of thediscipline of art history.42 By now we are aware of some of the deeper foun-dations and weaknesses of E rwin Panofsky’s stylization of A bbot Suger asa creative genius – as the father of the Gothic style who stands within thegreat tradition of Western H umanism.

But what has this example of a twelfth-century church and a twelfth-century abbot, which I have treated in greater detail, to contribute to ourgeneral question? In what respect might this example serve as a modelfor understanding modern art? Let me � rst address the latter point. Bothpresent-day art and what we call medieval art are outside any masternarrative at all, and therefore cannot be understood in H egelian terms.43

A s artists today are at the end of a history in which those narrative struc-tures have played a role, so were medieval artists before them. Thereforea speci� c hermeneutic approach is needed if the re� ection on the modernor medieval understanding of art is to be able to go behind the re� ectionson our own perceptions, guided probably by a commonplace aesthetics.What I have introduced for the purpose of Saint-Denis as ‘a reconstruc-tive hermeneutics for experiencing medieval art’ (‘eine rekonstruktiveHermeneutik mittelalterlichen Kunsterlebens’),44 may serve as a workinghermeneutic model also for the more general question of how philo-sophical aesthetics can proceed in dealing with an art world unstructuredby any master narrative at all. The starting point for such hermeneuticsis the entity that one identi� es as art by asking how that entity is perceivedand experienced.

V

This brings us back to the question of the categories by which we are ableto perceive this particular � eld of experience related to the � ne arts in itspeculiarity. If we furthermore accept the structure of the hermeneuticcircle that the necessary starting point for understanding wider horizons,what is unknown, unfamiliar and strange, is our own concepts and presup-positions, we are dependent on concepts which might serve as pathsbridging the different horizons of understanding, and then we rely againon ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ as categories for conceptualizing aesthetic experi-ence. O ne should notice also that the attempts to dismantle a concept ofaesthetics whose object (or subiectum ) is commonly taken to lie in thepoint of intersection between art and beauty has its point of reference in


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those categories. A lso, if art no longer has to be beautiful, one has toknow what beauty signi� es. In the same manner a broadened andexpanded concept of art – what, for example, Joseph Beuys means by‘erweiterter Kunstbegriff’45 – presupposes a certain understanding of arestricted meaning of art in terms of the � ne arts.

What I have put as an abstract hermeneutic question can be easilydemonstrated by a brief look at the history of Modernism. Let me startwith the famous example of Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated work Fountainof 1917, which was nothing but a urinal of that period, disconnected fromthe plumbing which gives it its familiar utility (at least for the men ofWestern civilizations) and turned on its back like an immobilized turtle.It was just a piece of industrial porcelain, produced by a company calledMott Works, and could be replaced by another one of the series if theoriginal was lost – which really happened with the � rst copy, inspiringDuchamp to put out an edition of eight signed and numbered pieces ofthis kind of artwork.46 O r let us take another objet trouvé of D uchamp,a snow showel, which bears the title In A dvance of the Broken A rm . WhatDanto has called the ‘metaphysical homelessness’ of the object is whatone comes to see that no one is going to break his or her arm shovellingsnow with In A dvance of the Broken A rm , just because its promotion tothe status of art lifts it above, or at any rate outside the domain of, themere utensil.47 Speaking of A rthur C. Danto’s, favourite example of thechange in understanding art is A ndy Warhol’s Brillo Box. Moreover,Danto stylizes his visit to a Warhol exhibition at the Stable G allery onEast Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan in the late spring of 1964 as hiskey experience that art had come to an end.48 The Brillo Box does lookso like boxes of Brillo in the supermarket that the differences surely cannotconstitute the difference between art and non-art. That means – as I saidat the outset – that one can no longer teach the meaning of art by example.It means that as far as appearances are concerned, anything can be a workof art and that if you are going to � nd out what art is, you have to turnfrom sense experience to thought. You have – following D anto’s conclu-sion – to turn to philosophy! For the Brillo Box demonstrated that thedifference between art and non-art is philosophical and momentous, byconstituting itself as an example of the kind that always implies a philo-sophical boundary.49 A s the meaning of art cannot be taught by examples,it depends on the concepts of interpretation.

But hasn’t this always been the case? Let me recall how closelyconnected the idea of the classic art-museum was – historically and system-atically – to the H egelian master narrative, just as the new museumdepends on the expansion of aesthetics and the broadening of the concep-tualization of art. But in the same way, a medieval cathedral can be seenas a context for singling out the artwork which became part of it, forpromoting that artwork by elevating it above the domain of the mere


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utensil and raising the meaning through interpretation. Similarly, one can see Suger’s treatise on the consecration of the Abbey church and its liturgical exegesis as a powerful narrative of its own, by which a context of interpretation is established for understanding the art-treasuresof Saint-Denis that Suger is talking about. Incidentally, if a present-day visitor treats the cathedral like a museum without participating in the liturgy, what is he or she able to understand of what medieval art might be, of what a medieval abbot like Suger has intended? Ourmodern visitor is missing the true narrative – or to put it in hermeneu-tical terms, he or she remains a prisoner of modern aestheticpresuppositions.

VI

Within this context of interpretation – taken in a wide sense – thecategories of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ play an important role, because – as wehave seen – they seem to be in an af� rmative or in a negative sense anundeniable point of reference. Let me add two observations with respectto the medieval experience of art. My � rst observation concerns the under-standing of ‘beauty’, which in the Middle A ges is not primarily related toart or human culture. The medieval accounts of beauty belong to ontologyor theology. The context for Thomas A quinas’s so-called ‘formal de� ni-tion of the beautiful’ – better characterized as analysis of the threeconditions of beauty in the Summ a theologiae, for example – is the doctrineof the Trinity. A quinas there asks whether the property ‘beauty’ is correctlyascribed to the second Person of the Trinity, the Son.50 H is analysis is notintended as an aesthetic theory. In the same manner the teaching of beautyas transcendental – as Jan A ertsen has clari� ed – does not offer a startingpoint for the reconstruction of a medieval aesthetics.51

O n the other hand – and this is my second observation – one can � nda � rst important move towards the modern scheme of � ne arts within thereformulation of the ars-concept occasioned by the thirteenth-centuryreception of the A ristotelian philosophy. Through its association with the ancient educational programme of the septem artes liberales, ars hadbeen understood as encompassing the entire spectrum of human knowl-edge. The differentiation of the complex ars-concept undertaken in thethirteenth century understood the term as mediating, on the theoreticalplain, between experience (experientia/em peiria) and knowledge (scientia/episteme). Consequently, an artifex became distinguished by his � eld-speci� c expertise, directed towards certain particular subjects. Thedifferentiation of meanings within the ars-concept known, for example, toThomas Aquinas followed upon another epochal change: the loss of thenotion of a theory of the sciences encompassing all human knowledge andactivity, as well as of the speculative certainty, af� rmed well into the twelfth


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century (most tellingly in the D idascalicon of H ugh of St Victor), of thedeep unity of the technico-productive, scienti� co-philosophical and theo-logical bodies of knowledge.52 O n this older view (which is, by the way –if one looks at it in a kind of historical abstraction – very close to JosephBeuys’s claim of a broadened and expanded concept of art, his ‘erweiterterKunstbegriff’53), all human knowledge was seen as ordered uncondition-ally to the one highest wisdom. Beauty is in this respect an expression ofthe anagogical character of the artes of this period, as well as of theirobjects.

The relative independence of ‘artistic knowledge’ (ars) and scienti� cknowledge (scientia), as articulated by Thomas, led on the one hand tothe loss of the conception of beauty in this sense of an ‘anagogical way’(mos anagogicus). Nevertheless a more restricted ars-concept is one ofthe presuppositions of theoretical re� ection within the speci� c domain of a particular art. With this re� ection, which is of such a nature as to becapable of grounding its judgments, the meanings of aesthetic notions asso-ciated with individual arts began to grow. This development led � nally tothe modern scheme of the � ne arts, which itself saw further theoreticalelaboration in the Renaissance.54

Such an understanding of aesthetics is not to be found in the MiddleA ges; the statements of Thomas Aquinas about ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ mustnot be taken in this sense. Paul Oskar Kristeller rightly suggests that theattempt to conceptualize an aesthetics in accord with Scholastic principlesis a modern projection.55 The multiple meanings of artistic activity in theMiddle A ges, each deriving from particular and diverse conceptions ofbeauty, can only be understood when read with a general hermeneuticalreservation. This does not amount to a general denial of the category ofthe aesthetic, whose function certainly does not consist in the manifesta-tion of supra-temporal properties of being, but is rather heuristic; itconsists in an encounter across diverse horizons of understanding, whichthemselves are located in this diversity of interests. It is in this respectthat the enterprise of developing an aesthetic paradigm which mustproceed reconstructively and is faithful to the medieval understanding –as well as to the understanding of art at all – proves valid.

VII

Looking back to this hermeneutic switchback comparing modern andmedieval approaches to art, what is the philosophical return of thisinquiry? There is, � rst, the probably surprising proximity of medieval andmodern art concerning the dif� culty in understanding either from the pointof view of what I have called the classic H egelian master narrative. Butthe parallelism does not consist only in the need for methodological sensi-tivity that I have spoken about in extenso. There is also in many respects


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an astonishing parallelism concerning the conceptualization of thosecontexts which are singled out from the surrounding reality by a certainincrease of meaning and which are mainly called aesthetic or artistic. Letme just recall the complex ars-concept of H ugh of St Victor and theexpanded concept of art of Joseph Beuys as an equivalent starting pointfor artistic expression and liturgical performance. A nd, last but not least, there is the context of interpretation, which points to philosophy –or shall we say more precisely to philosophical aesthetics? But what isphilosophical aesthetics? A n answer cannot be found by means of onemajor narrative or by expanding the horizons of aesthetics quite arbi-trarily. This paper cannot present an exhaustive answer either, but ourcross-historical attempt to answer this question has shown some pathsalong which to reformulate the question of philosophical aesthetics – andthat (to quote a title of A rthur C. D anto’s) ‘beyond the Brillo Box’.56

Major paths still remain the categories of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’, insofar asthey point to the articulation of those objects and interpretations whichare considered and singled out at different times as artwork and artisticproductions of particular importance. Taken in a heuristic manner bothcategories are able to keep the understanding of what belongs to theaesthetic horizon open for different historical approaches without losingthe proper object of a philosophical aesthetics, which does not always liein the same point of intersection between ‘art’ and ‘beauty’, but some-times beyond them.

Universität zu K öln

Notes

This paper is a revised version of my Thursday Lecture delivered at the HogerInstituut voor Wijsbegeerte of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven on 22 January1998. I would like to thank the president of the Hoger Instituut, Professor CarlosSteel, for the honour of this invitation and the participants of this session for theircomments.

1 Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Das Ästhetische – ein Schlüsselkategorie unserer Zeit?’,in Wolfgang Welsch (ed.) Die A k tualität des Ä sthetischen (München: WilhelmFink Verlag, 1993), pp. 1–47, see p. 34.

2 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘A nima minima’, in Welsch (ed.) op cit., pp. 417–27,see p. 417.

3 Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual A rts in Post-HistoricalPerspective (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), pp. 4–5.

4 Alexander Gottlob Baumgarten, A esthetica (Frankfurt, 1750; repr.Hildesheim: W. Olms, 1961) §1: A E ST H E T IC A (theoria liberalium artium,gnoseologia inferior, ars pulchre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientiacognitionis sensitivae.’

5 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ä sthetik I, Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 13 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 25.


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6 H ans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren(München: C. H . Beck, 1995), p. 138; see also Hegel, op cit., vol. 13, p. 25.See further Arthur C. D anto, A fter the End of A rt: Contemporary A rt andthe Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. Ch. 3(‘Master Narratives and Critical Principles’), pp. 41–58.

7 See Wilhelm Perpeet, Das Kunstschöne: Sein Ursprung in der italienischenRenaissance (Freiburg–München: Karl Alber, 1987). I will especially point to the‘paragone’ and to the canonization of the � ne arts by Giorgio Vasari; see BerndRoggenkamp, Die Töchter des ‘Disegno’: Z ur Kanonisierung der drei bildendenKünste durch Giorgio Vasari (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 1996); see also B.Roggenkamp, ‘Vom “Artifex” zum “Artista”: Benedetto Varchis Auseinander-setzung mit dem aristotelisch-scholasitschen Kunstverständnis 1547’, in J. A .A ertsen and A. Speer (eds.) Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter,Miscellanea Mediaevalia 24 (Berlin–NewYork: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 844–60.

8 Erwin Panofsky, A bbot Suger on the A bbey Church of Saint-Denis and its A rtTreasures (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1946; 2nd edn by GerdaPanofsky-Soergel, Princeton, 1979) .

9 Bruno Reudenbach, ‘Panofsky und Suger von St. Denis’, in BrunoR eudenbach (ed.) Erwin Panofsky: Beiträge des Symposions Ham burg 1992(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), pp. 109–22.

10 Ibid., pp. 118–19.11 Panofsky, who was forced to leave his chair in Hamburg in 1933 under pres-

sure from the Nazi regime, had planned the publication of his Suger editionfor 1944, intending to mark the 800th centenary of the consecration of thechoir at St Denis. Unfortunately, history intervened. Panofsky wrote in a letterto Tarkington on 20 September 1945: ‘the bomb, incidentally hit Suger, amongother things: the Princeton Press prints untold numbers of the Smyth reportand had to shelve everything else for the time being’. See Panofsky’s letterfrom 20 September 1945, in Dr. Panofsky and Mr. Tark ington: A n Exchangeof L etters 1938–1946, ed. R . M. Ludwig (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1974), p. 83; see also Reudenbach, op cit., p. 111.

12 R eudenbach, op cit., pp. 115–20; see also A . Speer, ‘Abt Sugers Schriften zurfränkischen Königsabtei Saint-Denis’, in: A . Speer and G. Binding (eds) A btSuger von Saint-Denis. A usgewählte Schriffen: Ordinatio, De consecratione, Deadministratione (Darmstadt: Wiesenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), pp. 13–66.

13 H ans Sedlmayr, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (Zürich, 1950, 2nd edn Graz:A kademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1988); Otto von Simson, The G othicCathedral: Origins of G othic A rchitecture and the Medieval Concept of O rder(New York: Bollingan Foundation, 1956, 2nd edn 1962); concerning Saint-D enis, see in particular Part II, Chs 3 and 4.

14 Von Simson, op cit., esp. pp. 21–58 (Part I, Ch. 2); cf. the critical discussionof von Simson’s thesis by Günther Binding: ‘Die neue Kathedrale: Rationalitätund Illusion’, in Georg Wieland (ed.) A ufbruch – Wandel – Erneuerung.Beiträge zur ‘Renaissance’ des 12. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Frommann-H olzboog, 1995), pp. 211–35.

15 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic A rchitecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, 1951), esp.pp. 27–35; see my critical remarks: A . Speer, ‘Vom Verstehen mittelalterlicherKunst’, in G. Binding and A. Speer (eds) Mittelalterliches Kunsterleben nachQ uellen des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993) ,pp. 13–52, in particular pp. 13–16 and 40–1.


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16 Regarding this question, see in detail A . Speer, ‘Kunst und Schönheit: KritischeÜberlegungen zur mittelalterlichen Ästhetik’, in I. Craemer-Ruegenberg andA. Speer (ed.) Scientia und ars im Mittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 22(Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 945–66.

17 For the analysis of the archaeological situation, see Jan van der Meulen andAndreas Speer, Die fränk ische Königsabtei Saint-Denis: O stanlage undKultgeschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988) .Concerning the thirteenth-century church, see Caroline A . Bruzelius, TheThirteenth-Century Church at St.-D enis (New Haven: Yale University Press,1986) .

18 De consecratione 10, 83–87 (pa. 86, 27–31): ‘[. . .] ut sepius in sollempnibusuidelicet diebus admodum plena per omnes ualuas turbarum sibi occurentiumsuper� uitatem refunderet et non solum intrantes non intrare, uerum etiam quiiam intrauerant precedentium expulsus exire compelleret’.

I quote the Latin text from the new edition of A . Speer and G. Binding (eds)A bt Suger von Saint-D enis. A usgewählte Schriffen (see n. 12). I will give alsothe reference to the Panofsky edition (see n. 8), introduced by ‘pa.’, and, inthe absence of a revised translation based on a new critical text, I will followin general Panofsky’s standard translation.

19 Ordinatio 36, 129–204 (pa. 134, 11–17): ‘Huc accessit nostram rapiendo deuo-tionem, quoniam infra sancti sanctorum locus ille diuinitati idoneus, sanctorumfrequentationi angelorum gratissimus tanta sui angustia artabatur, ut nec horasancti sacri� cii in solemnitatibus fratres sacratissime eucharistiae communi-cantes ibidem demorari possent nec adventantium peregrinorum molestam fre-quentiam multociens sine magno periculo sustinere ualerent.’

In De consecratione 46, 270–4 (pa. 98, 22–7) Suger again mentions this dan-gerous overcrowding as the main reason for starting with the rebuilding cam-paign in the eastern part of the Abbey church, but without repeating thedramatic description.

20 William W. Clark speaks accurately of Suger’s enterprise as a ‘religious pil-grimage through the history of the abbey’ and sees the category of continuityalso expressed in the ‘reuse and repositioning of actual architectonical ele-ments’; see William W. Clark, ‘The Recollection of the Past is the Promise ofthe Future.’ Continuity and Contextuality: Saint-Denis, Merovingians,Capetians, and Paris’, in V. Chieffo Raguin et. al. (eds) A rtistic Integration inGothic Buildings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 92–107, inparticular pp. 94 and 98. See also van der Meulen and Speer, op cit., pp. 267–71and 302–7.

21 Von Simson, op. cit., pp. 123–4.22 Panofsky, A bbot Suger on the A bbey Church of Saint-Denis, pp. 14–15.23 De consecratione 7, 47–58 (pa. 84, 23–34): ‘[. . .] in medium proferentes glo-

riosam et D eo dignam sancte huius ecclesie consecrationem preciosissimorummartirum dominorum et apostolorum nostrorum Dyonisii, R ustici et Eleutheriiet aliorum sanctorum, quorum prompto innitimur patrocinio, sacratissimamtranslationem ad successorum noticiam stilo assignare elaborauimus, qua decausa, quo ordine, quam sollempniter, quibus etiam personis ad ipsum actumsit, reponentes, ut et diuine propitiacioni pro tanto munere condignas pro possenostro gratiarum acciones referamus et sanctorum protectorum nostrorum tampro impensa tanti operis cura quam pro tante sollempnitatis adnotatione opor-tunam apud Deum optineamus intercessionem.’

24 Concerning the hermeneutics of the medieval understanding of the motif oflight see the introduction of Klaus Hedwig: Sphaera L ucis: Studien zur


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Intelligibilität des Seienden im Kontext der mittelalterlichen L ichtspekulation,BG PhThMA N.F. 18 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1980), pp. 1–22. NeverthelessH edwig treates the so-called light aesthetics in the traditional way (seeconcerning Suger ibid., pp. 193–5).

25 Panofsky, A bbot Suger on the A bbey Church of Saint-Denis, p. 21.26 Von Simson, op cit., p. 102.27 See Jan A. Aertsen, ‘Beauty in the Middle Ages: A Forgotten Transcendental?’,

M edieval Philosophy and Theology 1 (1991), pp. 68–97; Jan A. Aertsen,‘Schöne (das)’, II. Mittelalter, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie VIII(Basel: Schwabe/Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch-gesellschaft, 1992), cols1351–6; A . Speer, ‘Schöne, das’, L exikon des Mittelalters VII/7 (München:A rtemis-Verlag, 1995), cols 1531–4; concerning the wider semantic � eld of pul-cher see also M.-M. Gauthier, ‘Pulcher et formosus, l’appréciation du beau, enlatin médiéval’, in Colloques internationaux CNRS 589, pp. 401–19.

28 Ps.-Dionysius Areopagita, De divinis nominibus, cap. IV, §7 (PG 3, 761–6).29 Ibid., cap. IV, §4–6 (PG 3, 753–62).30 D e consecratione 9, 67–80 ( pa. 86, 10–24).31 Ibid., 9, 67–74 (pa. 86, 10–17): ‘Quam miri� ca marmorearum columpnarum

uarietate componens copiosis purissimi auri et argenti thesauris inestimabiliterlocupectasset ipsiusque parietibus et columpnis et arcub auro tectas uestes mar-garitarum uarietatibus multipliciter exornatas suspendi fecisset, quatinusaliarum ecclesiarum ornamentis precellere uideretur et omnimodis incompa-rabili nitore uernans et omni terrena pulcritudine compta inestimabili decorespendesceret [. . .]’.

32 Ibid., 49, 295–302 (pa. 100, 14–22): ‘Prouisum est sagaciter, ut superioribuscolumpois et arcubus medis, qui inferioribus in cripta fundatis superponeren-tur, geometricis et arimeticis instrumentis medium antique testudinis ecclesieaugmenti noui medio equatur nec minus antiquarum quantitas alarumnouarum quantitati adaptaretur excepto illo urbano et approbato in circuituoratoriorum incremento, quo tota clarissimarum uitrearum luce mirabili et con-tinua interiorem perlustrante pulcritudinem eniteret.’

33 Ibid.34 See Madeline H. Caviness, ‘Suger’s Glass at Saint-Denis: The State of

R esearch’, in A bbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium , ed. Paula LieberG erson (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), pp. 257–72.

35 See Anne Walters Robertson, The Service Books of the Royal A bbey of Saint-D enis: Images of R itual Music in the M iddle A ges (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1991), pp. 13–23, 37–8, 220, 224–5; van der Meulen and Speer, pp. 137–8 and375–7.

36 A good example is an annotated breviary from the early twelfth century,Vendôme, B ibliothèque Municipale 17C; see Robertson, op cit., pp. 435–6.

37 Von Simson, op. cit., p. 100.38 See Hanns Peter Neuheuser, ‘Die Kirchweihbeschreibungen von Saint-Denis

und ihre Aussagefähigkeit für das Schönheitsemp� nden des Abtes Suger’, in G. Binding and A. Speer, Mittelalterliches Kunsterleben, pp. 153–62, esp. pp.154–7.

39 I have done so elsewhere; see Speer, ‘Kunst und Schönheit’, pp. 945–66.40 Concerning this hermeneutical approach see my article ‘Vom Verstehen mitt-

alterlicher Kunst’, pp. 34–49.41 Bernard McGinn, ‘From Admirable Tabernacle to the House of God: Some

Theological Re� ections on Medieval A rchitectural Integration’, in ChieffoR aguin et al., pp. 41–56, here p. 43.


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42 Speer, ‘Kunst und Schönheit’, pp. 945–7.43 I am aware that my portrait of Hegel is sketchy, and points to a more or less

everyday understanding of aesthetics. I agree with Arthur C. D anto that thissimple picture (not the sophisticated one) is still the major paradigm and atleast the silent point of reference in many of the discussions on aesthetictopics as well as for our ordinary thought on aesthetics. That there could alsobe a productive way of understanding modern art from a sophisticated readingof the Hegelian aesthetics is beautifully shown by William Desmond in hisA rt and the A bsolute: A Study of Hegel’s A esthetics (A lbany: SU NY Press,1986) .

44 See Speer, ‘Vom Verstehen mittelalterlicher Kunst’, pp. 37–8 and 49–52.45 See Volker Harlan, Was ist Kunst? Werkstattgespräch mit Beuys (Stuttgart:

Urachhaus, 1986); A . Speer, ‘D er erweiterte Kunstbegriff und das mittelal-terliche “Kunst”-Verständnis’, in Joseph Beuys und das Mittelalter, ed. HiltrudWestermann-Angerhausen (Köln: Cantz Verlag, 1997), pp. 166–75.

46 See Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of A rt (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 13–14 and 32–3.

47 Ibid., p. 31.48 Danto, A fter the End of A rt, pp. 13 and 24. One should be aware that Danto

and Hegel understand the phrase ‘the end of art’ very differently.49 Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 7; D anto, A fter the End of A rt, p. 13.50 Summa theol. I q.39 a.8 c; cf. Summa theol. I q.5 a.4, ad 1. See A. Speer,

‘Aquinas, Thomas, in: Encylopedia of A esthetics, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kelly(New York-Oxford: O xford University Press, 1998), pp. 76–79.

51 See A ertsen, ‘Beauty in the Middle A ges: A Forgotten Transcendental?’, pp. 68–97; Jan A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: TheCase of Thomas A quinas, STG MA 52 (Leiden–New York–Köln: E. J. Brill,1995), pp. 335–59.

52 See in comparison Hugo of St Victor, Didascalicon II. 1 (ed. C. H . Buttimer,Washington: The Catholic University Press, 1939, pp. 23–5; PL 176,751A–752B) and Aristotle, Metaph. I.1–2 (980a21–983a23); Eth. N ic. VI.3–6(1139b14–1141a8). Concerning the change in understanding art and sciencessee Craemer-Ruegenberg and Speer op cit.

53 See n. 45 above.54 See A. Speer, ‘Jenseits von Kunst und Schönheit? Auf der Suche nach dem

Gegenstand einer philosophischen Ästhetik’, A llgemeine Z eitschrift fürPhilosophie 20(3) (1995), pp. 181–97, esp. pp. 192–5. See also n. 7 above.

55 Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Das System der modernen Künste’, in his Hum anismusund Renaissance II: Philosophie, B ildung und Kunst (München: W. Fink, 1976) ,pp. 164–206, esp. p. 175.

56 See n. 3 above.


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