Cognitive Aesthetics in Classical German Philosophy 3631794967, 9783631794968

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Andrej Démuth Michaela Rušinová SPECTRUM SLOVAKIA Series Volume 29

Cognitive Aesthetics in Classical German Philosophy

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Authors:

Andrej Démuth1 Michaela Rušinová2

1 Department of Theory of Law and Social Sciences, Faculty of Law, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia 2 Department of Philosophy, Center for Cognitive Studies, Faculty of Arts, Trnava University in Trnava, Slovakia

ISSN 2195-1845 ISBN 978-3-631-79496-8 Ebook: 978-3-631-79497-5 ePub: 978-3-631-79498-2 MOBI: 978-3-631-79499-9 © Peter Lang GmbH International Academic Publishers Berlin 2019

ISBN 978-80-224-1762-4

© VEDA, Publishing House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava 2019

All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin • Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford • Warszawa • Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

www.veda.sav.sk

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-15-0294.

Contents

Aesthetics in Classical German Philosophy (and Current Cognitive Science) ..................

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Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and the Birth of Aesthetics as Gnoseologia Inferior in German Thinking ............................................................................................................... 17 The Focal Point of Modern Aesthetics in the Receptive-Reflective Concept of Immanuel Kant ................................................................................................................................... 33 An Attempt to Defragment an Individual and the Aesthetic Holism of German Romanticism as a Reaction to Kant’s Rationalism ...................................................................... 55 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s Concept of Beauty Viewed through the Philosophy of Identity ................................................................................................................... 75 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Dynamic Aesthetics in Abstracto et Concreto ............ 93 Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche – the Aesthetics of Will ............................................................................................................................ 107 Phenomenology as Aesthetics and Vice Versa ........................................................................... 125 The Heritage of German Aesthetic Idealism – Aesthetics as a Science of the Cognition of the Beautiful, Neuroaesthetics .................................................................. 141 References ................................................................................................................................................ 149 About Authors ........................................................................................................................................ 169

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Aesthetics in Classical German Philosophy (and Current Cognitive Science) Andrej Démuth

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As Joseph Carew and Sean J. McGrath said, “The ‘death’ of German Idealism has been decried innumerable times since its revolutionary inception, whether it be by the 19th-century critique of Western metaphysics, phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, or analytic philosophy” (Carew, McGrath 2016, 1). Classical German philosophy, or German idealism, represents an important and, from an ideological point of view, a very influential part of the history of philosophy, and its heritage has shaped science and especially the culture of the “Western” way of life more than we often realise.1 Kant’s perception of cognition (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), his idea of deontological and categorical morality, his idea of a free and hospitable cosmopolitism and linear history heading towards an enlightened rationality and the eternal peace have influenced society and the legal norms not only in Europe but also throughout the whole world. In a similar way, we can reflect on the influence and heritage of Hegel’s legacy on the perception of the dialectic of history, society and understanding of the objectification of the spirit, Schelling’s understanding of nature and art and the influence of Fichte on the creation of the concept of the German nation, as well as the modern psychological understanding of the subject, psychoanalyses or, from a different point of view, the cultural and nation-awakening influence of the German Romantics. However, the term itself, “Classical German Philosophy” or “German Idealism”, represents a very intricate and controversial topic. As we know, from the 17th to 19th centuries “Germany” did not exist (after the Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648 there was only a loose grouping of larger or smaller territorial units, which formally belonged under the authority of the Sacrum Romanum Imperium Nationis Germanicae).2 It was rather cities that we can speak of as centres of education and culture (the university in Königsberg – today the Russian city of Kaliningrad, universities and academies of sciences in Berlin, Halle, Jena and Weimar). Although a powerful state unit – Prussia3 – originated later on, in Kant’s times, we 1 This also applies in the negative sense. As Espen Hammer states, one of the reasons for the origination of the British analytical philosophy is the rejection of the British Hegelianism (Hammer 2003, 521). 2 On which malicious jokes comment that it was not holy, not Roman, and not a real empire. 3 Historically the name Prussia (monarchy of Brandenburg-Prussia) was used from 1701 to mid-18th century, although in contemporary literature we can find references as far back as 1618. The Prussian state originated as a unification of the Electorate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia and especially comprised the areas of northern Germany, Lithuania (!), today’s Kaliningrad Region (!) and Poland (Masuria) (!). Following the later incorporation of Pomerania (today’s northern Poland) and the Magdeburg Region it became the basis of the German Confederation and later the unifier of the German Empire (from 1871).

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can only speak of Germany as a unified state entity – an empire – from 1871 onwards. Prussia and “Germany” thus included territories and states which today we do not perceive as German (Poland, Baltic countries, parts of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, southern Denmark and a part of Belgium). Hence, by the term “German”4 we do not primarily mean belonging to a certain nation but rather as the language in which many authors wrote, although several of the crucial works from this period (e.g. Baumgarten’s  Aesthetica and Kant’s early works Meditationum quarundam de igne succincta delineatio (1755) and Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (1755)) were still written in Latin. It was from the times of Christian Wolff, who, to use Kant’s words, taught German to the Germans through his philosophical dictionaries, that the German language became a philosophical medium that enabled independent creative and precise thinking. And it is the common language, for some specific topics, as well as certain specialities of “German” thinking that characterise what forms the so-called German classical idealism. The use of the adjective “classical” is likewise questionable and many authors do not even use it. The variety, breadth, but especially the influence which “German” philosophy exercised on  European philosophy and culture from 1781 until 1840 (this the standard delimitation of this period)5 and on the shaping of the “spirit of Germanhood” can only possibly be compared to the golden period of the classical ancient philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle).6 And this is not only because of the chronological, ideological and personal closeness of its main representatives (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel),7 but especially due to the richness of the topics and movements which originated in that period, often as an immediate reaction to the thoughts and critique of opposing points of view.8 The thought movement which, besides others, is represented by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold (populariser of Kant in Jena), Friedrich Schleiermacher, Salomon Maimon, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel, Novalis (Friedrich von

After the World War I and the fall of the monarchy, Prussia became a free state within the new Weimar Republic. It formally existed until 1947, when it was officially dissolved by the resolution of the Allied Control Council (Clark 2006). 4 On the “Germanhood” of the German idealistic philosophy, see: Pinkard 2013, 1–15. 5 On the issue of dating German idealism see: Copleston 2003, ix–xi. 6 Cf. Solomon, Higgins 2005, 1. 7 With similar teacher–schoolmate connections. 8 On the social and political conditions of philosophy in Prussia in the 19th century see: Pinkard 2012.

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Hardenberg), Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin and others cannot be wholly and sufficiently rendered through the philosophy of the mentioned quartet of its leading thinkers. If that happens, there is inevitably a considerable distortion of its image. Under the term “classical” we usually have in mind the philosophy of the “classics” (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.) who worked in the classical period and led a lively dialogue with the Romantics, but also that the majority of the post-Kant thinkers attempted, in their metaphysics, to return to a point before the critical period of Kant – that is traditional metaphysical thinking. That means not only the immediate successors of the “Classical” period – the Hegelian school, neo-Kantists, but also Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and German phenomenologists. In an effort to provide the most comprehensive explanation possible, it is good to also remark on how they dealt with the philosophy of German classical idealism. In our study we shall, as a consequence, step beyond the historical framework of German idealism as delimited by Hegel’s death and we shall also focus on the legacy left behind by this school of thought. Finally, a few words on the understanding of the concept of “idealism”. In the Anglo-Saxon world, idealism is usually linked with the names of George Berkeley and John Stuart Mill as an expression of a certain epistemic scepticism regarding the possibility of the cognisance of something beyond the scope of our perceptions (ideas) and especially on questioning materialism. It seems that in German philosophy this notion draws rather on the tradition of Platonism.9 The concept of idealism in German thinking acquired various forms, from Kant’s transcendental, through Fichte’s subjective, Schelling’s objective, to the absolute from Hegel. What links them all is the conviction that the world as we comprehend it is given to us exclusively in our imagination, in the form of its appearance and ideas. Thus they do not aim to question some metaphysical and material existence of the world per se, but rather to point out that the world is given to our consciousness and for our consciousness; that it is structured by the form of our thinking. Therefore almost all those thinkers who have followed after Kant have attempted to reveal that which may be found more deeply beyond the world as an image (for Schopenhauer, who considered himself a transcendental idealist, it was the will, for Hegel the absolute spirit, for Schelling, Nature initially unconscious but intelligent ...). There is no doubt 9 On the nature of idealism in the German idealism see: Ameriks 2005, 7–13.

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that Nietzsche builds on the foundations of the Kantian legacy, which he disarranges and reconstructs again, just as without Kant we cannot understand Husserl’s and Heidegger’s methodological call “back to the things themselves!” and the return to the revelation of the original phenomenality of things; that is how they appear to us in our consciousness and for our consciousness. The idealism of their philosophy comes from the faith in the reality of appearance, in the reality of our perception and in the fundamentally consciousness-contaminated secularity of the world which we try to get to know. In this book, we shall therefore attempt to focus on an analysis of the main ideas and ideological legacy of the representatives of classical German philosophy or German idealism in the field which characterises this stage in the history of philosophy – aesthetics. This is because aesthetics as a philosophical discipline originated within German idealism. Its name was traditionally derived from the work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Aesthetica, the first volume of which appeared as early as 1750 and, on the insistence of the publisher, was supplemented by a second in 1758 (Guyer 2014a). The history of reflections about beauty as an independent area of philosophical thinking is undoubtedly somewhat older and besides the very beginning ascribed to the Pythagoreans, Plato (Symposium) or Aristotle (Poetica) and their several successors in the medieval period (Boethius (De institutione musica), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), ...)10; its modern roots may be found in the French philosophers (Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos: Réflexzeions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture – 1719) and also in the history of the British School of Taste (the Earl of Shaftesbury: Characteristics – 1711, Joseph Addison: Spectator Essays on The Pleasures of the Imagination – 1712, Francis Hutcheson: An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue – 1725, Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful – 1757, David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste – 1757). The true beginnings of aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline, however, may only be identified as late as the German-language environment of the mid-18th century. The Leibniz-Wolffian tradition together with Gottsched’s considerations of truth and imagination (Johann Christoph Gottsched: Schriften zur Literatur – 1729, Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen – 1730 and the works of his critics: Jacob Bodmer, Johann Jacob Breitinger: Die Discourse der Mahlern – 1721, Breitinger: Critische Dichtkunst – 1740) made 10 Cf. Démuth 2019a.

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Baumgarten consider beauty as an analogy of rational cognition. In his work Aesthetica (1750/2007), beauty is situated in aesthesis (Gr. aesthesis = the sensory) and aesthetics is thus understood as a “science about sensory cognition”. “Aesthetics (the theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the lower capacities of cognition [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogon rationis) is the science of sensible cognition” (Aesthetica, §1). As Paul Guyer demonstrates, “Baumgarten’s Meditations on Poetry conclude with his famous introduction of the term ‘aesthetics’: ‘The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have always carefully distinguished between the aistheta and the noeta’, that is, between objects of sense and objects of thought, and while the latter, that is, ‘what can be cognized through the higher faculty’ of mind, are ‘the object of logic, the aistheta are the subject of the episteme aisthetike or AESTHETICS’, the science of perception” (Meditationes, §CXVI, 86 after Guyer 2014a). Aesthetics thus became an independent science of sensuality, with a specific subject for research, with a methodology and a terminological inventory. Baumgarten’s action would not have been successful had it not found its adherents. Among them was his pupil – Georg Friedrich Meier, who simultaneously with Baumgarten wrote his Anfangsgründe aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (1750) and especially later (1757), Versuch einer allgemeinen Auslegungskunst. In the work Theoretische Lehre der Gemüthsbewegungen, Meier borrowed Baumgarten’s understanding of aesthetics as the science of sensory cognition, but he supplemented it with the dimension of emotionality. “This science concerns itself with everything that can be assigned in more detail to sensible cognition and to its presentation. Now since the passions have a strong influence on sensible cognition and its presentation, aesthetics for its part can rightly demand a theory of the emotions” (Meier, Theoretische Lehre der Gemüthsbewegungen, §7, 7 after Guyer 2014a). Marcus Herz, Kant’s  former student, in 1776 published an essay Versuch über die Ursachen der Verschiedenheit des Geschmacks and another follower of Kant’s – Karl Heinrich Heydenreich – published an extensive work System der Ästhetik in 1790.11 The definitive establishment of aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline, however, came as late as Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790).12 Kant, separating aesthetics 11 Later followed by the work: Aesthetisches Wörterbuch über die bildenden Künste nach Watelet und Levesque. Mit nöthigen Abkürzungen und Zusätzen fehlender Artikel kritisch bearbeitet von K.H. Heydenreich, öffentlicher Professor für Philosophie zu Leipzig. 4 Bände. Leipzig 1793–1795. 12 By the way, as stated by Paul Guyer (in Wood & Hahn 2012, 324), the year 1790 can also

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from logic and cognition on one hand and from the practical and moral considerations on the other – thus determining the three very fundamental disciplines of European philosophy – rendered in his aesthetic work the matter of beauty and aesthetic judgement in such a way that almost all the more important “German” philosophers of the post-Kant period felt bound to express their opinion thereof. Almost every one of them (possibly with the exception of Fichte) wrote his own aesthetics or a philosophy of art, and for many of them it was particularly the issue of beauty and its relevant evaluation that became the cardinal issue for their philosophical reflections. Although in his conception Kant separated aesthetics from the field of higher (i.e., rational) cognition, he nevertheless thoroughly adopted Baumgarten’s understanding of aesthetics as a science on the sensory and the emotion of liking or not liking and further enriched it with consideration of teleological judgement and the purposefulness of beauty as such. Even though from the very beginning representatives of German aesthetics fought for its analytical-rational or emotional-sensitive conception,13 it still left a permanent and inerasable trace in the understanding and problematic issues in the structure of philosophical cognition and its disciplines, which we have to deal with. In this book, we shall thus attempt to focus our attention on two basic factors that stood at the very beginning of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. The first is the presentation of the fundamental historical concepts within the aesthetics of German idealism with some crucial concepts, ideas and constructs highlighted which are characteristic of its leading representatives. Therefore we shall focus on the understanding of aesthetics in its various historical forms – from Baumgartenian lower gnoseology [gnoseologia inferior] and the concept of the hierarchy of cognition, with its lowest level in sensuality and feelings; through the Kantian concept of aesthetics which could lay claim to developing into a science with universally valid and inevitable aesthetic judgements that are based on feelings of liking or not liking of the reflective judgement, disregarding any concepts or other inclinations, through Schiller and Hamann’s holistic concept of emotional aesthetics joined with truth and goodness, with the harmony of reason and feelings, intellect and nature; up to the Schellingian concept of be considered a milestone for aesthetics with regard to the fact that in the same year Archibald Alison published his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, in Scotland, basing them on Humian associanism (see Démuth, Démuthová 2019), which influenced not only Dugald Stewart, but also the later aesthetic interpretation of John Stuart Mill. 13 On the relation of senses and reason in modern philosophy see: Démuth 2016.

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unconscious and reflected creation or judgement in his philosophy of art. We shall also focus on Hegel’s understanding of aesthetics not only as the objectification of the absolute spirit, the taste and expression of feelings, conditioned by the specific period and culture, but also on the voluntaristic solutions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who found beauty in the creation of the genius that expresses their will. Secondly, to conclude (at first sight maybe outside of the definition of German aesthetic thinking but indubitable its heritage) we shall attempt to show how beauty and aesthetics were understood by some phenomenologists who wrote in German (Husserl and especially Heidegger) identifying the appearance with the revelation of being, and beauty with a direct view thereof through individual processes and the mechanism of phenomenological perception. However, as early as in the introduction we have to say that the analyses submitted from the very beginning do not claim to provide a detailed and exhaustive presentation of all the concepts discussed in their full wealth, complexity or even in their complete historical context. What we shall attempt is subject to another goal of the study, that is, to place the historical concepts of German idealistic aesthetics into a lively dialogue with contemporary scientific, neuroaesthetic and cognitive-scientific approaches to the examination of beauty and aesthetic feelings. This is why the individual chapters will focus more on a brief introduction of albeit characteristic, but still only partial issues of the historical understanding of the selected topics in aesthetic perception with an attempt to show the current themes of the specific matter in contemporary scientific discourse. With the arrival of new research, imaging technologies and procedures, possibilities for research have opened up that the original German classics could not have imagined. Notwithstanding this, given their mostly non-empirical and speculative approach to thinking, paradoxically, the contemporary empirically focused studies often correspond with the historical concepts and the theoretical thoughts of the German idealists and often confirm detail or deepen their intuitively acquired knowledge. And that is exactly the second motive for the submission of these chapters – to introduce not only the historical importance of the concepts of German classical idealism in the development of the aesthetic thinking itself, but at the same time to point to their permanency, even when confronted by contemporary scientific research and progress in the field of neurosciences and cognitive-scientific research of perception, feeling and the creation of aesthetic judgements. In this book, we shall therefore attempt to make not only selected historical concepts accessible but also contemporary discussions regarding the structure of sensuality and the sources of feelings of sensory pleasure

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and its relationship to the higher cognitive functions, the penetration of rationality and cognisance into aesthetic judgements, the structure and nature of the neuronal correlates of aesthetic experience, the individual and socially conditioned creation of an ideal, but also the influence of various social beliefs on the formation of taste. We shall particularly focus on the issue of higher and lower art, the role of critics, but also the particularities of genius , and the corporeality of the experience of beauty and art as well. The seven chapters offered thus focus on the reconsideration and reevaluation of the legacy of the aesthetics of German classical idealism and the demonstration of its viability in the contemporary neuroaesthetic and cognitive-scientific discourse, as well as its inspiring discussions on the possibilities and limits of joining of rational and speculative philosophical research (which, nolens volens, still draws on observations and empirical data) with cognitive-scientific research, empirically saturated and focusing on the confirmation of hypotheses (but based on rational beliefs and interpretations). This was, after all, also the main focus of the project: The Cognitive Rethinking of Beauty: Uniting the Philosophy and Cognitive Studies of Aesthetic Perception, which was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract No. APVV-15-0294, under which the book is being published.

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and the Birth of Aesthetics as Gnoseologia Inferior in German Thinking

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A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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In the words of Paul Guyer and the majority of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, “the philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old A. G. Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master’s thesis to mean epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes §CXVI, 86–7)” (Guyer 2014g). This does not mean that exploration of beauty and taste had not existed before; it was that it had not been understood as an independent philosophical discipline, and nor was the name “aesthetics” used.14 Baumgarten is thus often given the title of the father or godfather of aesthetics specifically because he named this discipline15 “at a precisely determined time and place: first of all in the thesis Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, defended at the Prussian university of Halle and published in 1735, later developed in a lecture series at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder and subsequently embodied in two editions in 1750 and 1758” (Hlobil 2009). However, it is less frequently mentioned that his notion of how this discipline should look and how it should operate, or rather what exactly he imagined by the term “aesthetics”, was not positively welcomed or understood by his successors. Quite the contrary: Baumgarten’s concept of aesthetics was not accepted and had it not been for his active defence and its promotion by his student and later colleague, Georg Friedrich Meier, Professor Ordinarius of Philosophy at Halle – and the subsequent work of Immanuel Kant – it is likely that he would not have been acknowledged as the author of the notion of aesthetics as an independent discipline, not even in Prussia, let alone the British Isles. “The definitive international promotion of ‘his’ term, which can be considered to have been adopted by the English philosophical tradition in the nineteenth century,16 had no connec-

14 In the British Isles the name “Criticism” or simply “Taste” had been used for this field until then (Shelley 2017). 15 And as Paul Guyer states (Guyer 2014a, 2016), it was a baptism in adulthood, as already half a century before him this field had been developing in Britain (Earl of Shaftesbury: Characteristics – 1711, Joseph Addison: Spectator Essays on The Pleasures of The Imagination – 1712, Francis Hutcheson: Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue – 1725), also in the continent (Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos: Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture – 1719, Johann Christoph Gottsched: Schriften zur Literatur – 1729, Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen – 1730 and the works of his critics: Jacob Bodmer, Johann Jacob Breitinger: Die Discourse der Mahlern – 1721, Breitinger: Critische Dichtkunst – 1740). 16 For the progressive promotion of the term “aesthetics” in selected European languages, and its transformation in terms of content, see Hans Reiss, “Die Einbürgerung der Ästhetik in der deutschen Sprache des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts oder Baumgarten und seine Wirkung”, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 37 (1993): 109–138, 137–138; Karlheinz Barck and Jörg Heininger, “Ästhetik/ästhetisch”, part 5, in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Histo-

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tion to Baumgarten’s project in terms of content” (Hlobil 2009, 105). The reasons for this were rooted in several factors. The first was the nature of Baumgarten’s aesthetic philosophy itself. Baumgarten based his reflections on the rationalistic Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, which no longer found sympathy with his successors and was wholly incompatible with the empirical and emotional way of thinking preferred in England or Scotland. In addition, in his aesthetic explanations, Baumgarten did not provide clear and distinct notions, concepts and definitions, but rather only a rough terminological and methodological draft and word associations to what he wanted to express. It is therefore no surprise that his immediate successors in the second half of the 18th century critically viewed his project if only due to its outmoded point of departure and lack of terminological clarity. This is how the literary-oriented followers of Johann Christoph Gottsched worked; Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Hamann criticised Baumgarten for ideological anthropological reasons; and the new rising generation of young critics, Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, as well as the mentioned Georg Friedrich Meier, preferred the emotional and sensory understanding of aesthetics and its language. The second important reason that complicated the acceptance and a universal spreading of Baumgarten’s ideas was represented by the form of language used in his writings. Baumgarten wrote all his works in Latin, ringing with scholastic phrasing, which in the upcoming period of Enlightenment was not only an anachronism and a mark of the old school, but also a true ideological and linguistic obstacle. As Daniela Blahutková (Blahutková 2017) says, it was not until the end of the 20th century that Baumgarten’s works were translated into modern languages. The first translation of Aesthetica into German – his mother tongue – was only done in 2007 during the preparations for the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of his birth. The first translation into any modern language (into Italian) only preceded it by a few years, followed by translations into French and English (2000). Despite his immediate successors undoubtedly having knowledge of Latin (and a different classical-philological teaching practice in German schools to this day) in particular, it was the Latin form of Baumgarten’s texts that contributed to a certain remoteness and lack of accessibility of his ideas for the wider public. The third important factor in Baumgarten’s ideas not finding recognition was the role played by aesthetics in his own thinking. At German risches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, eds. Karlheinz Barck et al., vol. 1 (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 342–368 (Hlobil 2009, 105).

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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schools Baumgarten was mainly perceived as a metaphysician and ethicist; “Aesthetics played a peripheral role in his positive evaluation, as accentuated by Dagmar Mirbach, the editor of the volume” (Hlobil 2009, 106). Even Kant lectured on metaphysics and ethics with regard to and referring to Baumgarten’s Methaphysics and Ethics, which also became a target for his criticism in his Critique of Pure Reason and morally critical works (Guyer 2014a). It seems that this is also how Baumgarten perceived himself during his work in Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder. In particular, it was Kant’s critical view of Baumgarten’s philosophy as expressed in his famous Critiques that definitively swept away any further, deeper interest in Baumgarten’s ideas and his Aesthetica. It gradually started to appear again to a greater extent in relation to the publication of annotated editions of his texts in modern languages. What was then the subject of Baumgarten’s opinions? Baumgarten begins his considerations with the famous definition of an aesthete. “The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have always carefully distinguished between the aistheta and the noeta’, that is, between objects of sense and objects of thought, and while the latter, that is, ‘what can be cognized through the higher faculty’ of mind, are ‘the object of logic, the aistheta are the subject of the episteme aisthetike or AESTHETICS” (Meditationes, §CXVI, 86 by Guyer 2016). This distinction between aestheta and rational cognition was not essentially new, and Baumgarten referred to it in line with the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition. Leibniz divided the monads based on the level of the clarity of their consciousness. He believed that the simplest monads do not have consciousness, but they do have a certain, very unclear and dark “perception”. Unlike them, the central monad not only possesses clear perception (I know what I perceive) but also apperception (I know that it is I who perceives). At the top of the hierarchy of the monads is God – the monad of monads – with total perception and perfect apperception. It is particularly this hierarchy that seems to be the crucial concept for the correct understanding of Baumgarten. Baumgarten realised that all knowledge could be divided not only according to the level of the awareness thereof (depending on its clarity and distinctiveness) but also according to its comprehensibility. The sensory percepts are subject to perception, and they differ from one another not only by their degree of clarity and complexity, but also their rate of awareness. Some percepts are dark, and although we perceive them, we are not aware of their perception. Their realisation either does not exist, or is very unclear and confused (Metaphysik, §§ 382–383, 115–116). Others are clearer and we are aware of them. But here, too, exists a hierarchy of qualities. “Sensible

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representations can be developed in either of two ways, however: either with the increasing clarity of their component ‘marks’, in which case they acquire ‘greater clarity (claritas intensive maior)’, or with increasing ‘multitude of the marks’, in which case they acquire ‘liveliness (vividitas, claritas extensive maior, cogitationum nitor)’ (Nitor means brightness or splendour)” (Guyer 2014a, 325). The culmination of the realisation of the sensory feelings and images is an intuitively wholly clear, vivid, distinct and delimited image which we fully realise. Nevertheless, in Baumgarten’s opinion, it is still not real (rational) cognition (we perceive images and feelings through the senses and not through reason17) but a play of the senses. Those, according to the modern (not only) Descartes-Leibnizian tradition, render objects partially non-adequately, that we also endow them with qualities which were not contained in them originally (secondary qualities) and in addition they do not have the ability available to render things with inevitable truthfulness, but only randomly. Contrary to that, reason not only reflects the given content but also its relationship to other contents (notions) and thanks to this, we can perceive not only how the thing is, but also whether it could be in a different way or not (logical and contingent truths). Sensory images do not provide us with that. Hence in his Metaphysics he talks about sensuality as a “lower faculty of cognition”, and that aesthetics as a science focused on this faculty is “gnoseologia inferior”. “I cognize the interconnection of some things distinctly, and of others indistinctly, consequently I have the faculty for both. Consequently I have an understanding, for an insight into the connections of things, that is, reason (ratio); and a faculty for indistinct insight into the connections of things, which consists of the following: 1) the sensible faculty for insight into the concordances among things, thus sensible wit; 2) the sensible faculty for cognizing the differences among things, thus sensible acumen; 3) sensible memory; 4) the faculty of invention; 5) the faculty of sensible judgment and taste together with the judgment of the senses; 6) the expectation of similar cases; and 7) the faculty of sensible designation. All of these lower faculties of cognition, in so far as they represent the connections among things, and in this respect are similar to reason, comprise that which is similar to reason (analogon rationis), or the sum of all the cognitive faculties that represent the connections among things indistinctly” (Metaphysik, §468, 146 by Guyer 2014a, 326–327).

17 The remainder of this division may also be found quite clearly in Kant, who strictly differentiates between sensuality and comprehension and between images and notions. Cf. Kant 1998a.

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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From the above divisions, it is obvious that Baumgarten considered sensuality to be a cognitive ability of the subject. However, his student and defender – Georg Friedrich Meier – especially criticised Baumgarten‘s rationalistic concept of aesthetics and how it is situated on the cognitive plane. For Meier aesthetics was a matter of emotions and feelings and hence it should be a subject of the theory of emotionality (Meier, Theoretische Lehre der Gemüthsbewegungen, §7, 7). Baumgarten, however, believed that sensuality was not in contrast to reason but only a less clear and perfect cognition because the material (content) it deals with is ultimately brought to reason, which organises and cognises it more clearly and more distinctly. Thus, sensory reality can not only be clarified through reason but should also be fully explained by reason (analogon rationis). That is how aesthetics can be a real science18 because its processes and mechanisms may be rationally (analogon rationis) explained, as can the content it deals with and the laws it leads to. Baumgarten thus postulated aesthetics as a science, albeit one concerned with the lower levels and contents of cognition, which are not clear and fully reflected, but as a science nevertheless, which has its laws, and which is in its own nature cognitive (about cognition). He believed that sensuality was ruled by similar laws as the logic of reason, and hence it could also be explained analogically. That gradually also led to the elaboration of psychology, which was, after all, also markedly helped by Kant. Experiencing, including experiencing beauty, thus has its own logic, which, however, Baumgarten did not manage to precisely and persuasively elaborate. Baumgarten knew that the object of beauty is a feeling of pleasure in the senses and thus a feeling of liking. Its opposite is ugliness, which he understood as sensory pain. Taking Leibniz’s  and Wolff’s  philosophy as the starting point, he assumed that beauty was a certain perfection of the object which we feel in our senses. That made it possible for him to not only reflect on the adequacy of the representation of the object in our sensuality (we like less adequate depictions of a perfect thing less than adequate and vice versa, but also better depictions of less perfect things may evoke sensory pleasure more than perfect copies of non-perfection19), but also on the actual properties of the things which evoke this feeling in the senses. Beauty thus not only consists in the perfection of the things themselves but 18 According to the famous definition of Baumgarten, “Aesthetics (the theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the lower capacities of cognition [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogon rationis) is the science of sensible cognition” (Aesthetica, §1). 19 Cf. Démuth 2017.

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“in the representation of some objective perfection in a form accessible to our senses, but rather—or also—in the exploitation of the specific possibilities of sensible representation for their own sake. In other words, there is potential for beauty in the form of a work as well as in its content because its form can be pleasing to our complex capacity for sensible representation” (Guyer 2016). Baumgarten thus considers the conditions of the origination of the beautiful feeling and finds it in the existence of a certain harmony of the object and its relation to our senses, but also in the harmony (structure) of the feeling itself that it evokes in us. It is in fact apparent that the existence of this harmony is not a consequence of rational considerations about the relationship of the object and its representation, or its individual features and their mutual ratios, but it is directly experienced, by taste, as a feeling of pleasure at the level of sensuality. What does an impulse need to have in order to evoke feelings of perfection and pleasure in the senses – in order for us to perceive it as beautiful? Although this particular question would likely require the most precise elaboration, Baumgarten himself does not provide a sufficiently clear and detailed analysis of the qualities of the representation of a beautiful object, unless we are to consider as such the list of qualities “wealth, magnitude, truth, clarity, and liveliness” (ubertas, magnitudo, veritas, claritas, certitudo et vita cognitionis) in the first chapter of his Aesthetica. We do not learn much more from Meier’s interpretation, with which he supplements Baumgarten. “For sensible representation to enjoy the greatest possible beauty, the following is required: 1.) the wealth of these representations. A beautiful cognition must represent a great variety in a single image. Variation is pleasing. And the most beautiful cognition is to be considered like a broad region that contains infinitely many and different treasures. 2.) The magnitude of cognition, the noble, the sublime, etc. For the sake of this beauty sensible cognition must not only represent great, suitable, important, noble objects, and so on, but must also represent them in a way that is suitable and proportionate to their magnitude. 3) The truth of cognition. Without truth cognition is mere illusion, and thus the sensorily beautiful cognition must be as truthful as possible. 4.) The liveliness and brilliance of cognition. 5.) Its certitude. A sensible cognition, when it is to be properly beautiful, must not only produce the convention of its own beauty, but also the conviction of the correct representations of its object. 6.) The touching. A beautiful cognition must not only be in itself as delightful as possible, but must also produce a proper gratification of dissatisfaction with the object. 7.) Beautiful order in the entire fabric of sensible representation, and in

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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the interconnection and interweaving of all the individual representations, insofar as a whole is composed out of them. 8.) The beautiful designation of sensible cognition. We can hardly ever or even never think if we do not attach our thoughts to certain signs, which are related to the thoughts as the body is related to the soul. And thus if sensible cognition is to be as beautiful as possible, then so to speak not only its soul but also its body must have the greatest possible beauty” (Meier 1757, 192–193 by Guyer 2014a, 330). The first two categories were particularly crucial for Baumgarten (wealth and variety of information – ubertas and magnitude – magnitudo), whereas Meier preferred more liveliness, which he linked with clarity (claritas). However, all the listed categories are, from the beginning, understood as cognitive, that is as cognitive information graspable by the senses which with taste judgement is implicitly evaluated in the form of an explicit feeling of beauty or ugliness. Variety, informational sufficiency (but nonexplicitness), truthfulness, clarity and liveliness thus for Baumgarten represent the fundamental aesthetic categories, which, however, are linked with a number of other concepts which are not thematised more closely, such as nobleness, dignity, etc. Baumgarten thus (also by thematising the concepts such as memory, fantasy, imagination ...) opened the door to the study of individual aesthetic categories, not only from the viewpoint of the feelings which they evoke in us, but also in the sense of the structure and the size of the informational flows which accompany them. It is thus no surprise that Baumgartenian aesthetics also offered scientists a platform for the examination of aesthetic categories by means of cognitive-scientific research.

Cognitive-Scientific Reactions to “Gnoseologia Inferior” A characteristic feature of the philosophy of German idealism is its openness to various levels of existence and awareness of (not only aesthetic) experience. The roots of this approach may be sought in Leibniz’s conviction of the hierarchy of clarity and wholeness of consciousness of the individual monads, but also in Kant’s thesis that concerns the fact that the mind operates on itself and in a way influences and limits itself, in Fichte’s philosophy of the absolute and empirical “I”, in Schelling and his concept of intelligence initially asleep and awoken only in man, in Hegel and his process of self-reflection (and objectification) of the absolute spirit, but

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also in Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard’s thesis of the sleeping and the nonself-aware spirit. It is these factors which became crucial for the origination of the Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytical psychology, for the Romantic concept of the hermeneutical method and theology. We cannot be surprised then that the crucial idea of the hierarchy and various levels of conscience also became the base structure for Baumgartenian research and that it found adherents who would test it in cognitive research. The thesis of conscious and non-conscious experience has been tested a number of times in cognitive research, in several areas (explicit and implicit memory, grammar ...). In fact, these are often based on wholly different explanatory points of departure and assumptions. One of the most inspiring and interesting studies into emotions and feelings is Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. Damasio asserts (Damasio 1994) that a great deal of the processing of information within us takes place automatically and unconsciously and that the subject is only aware of a relatively small amount of information, that is, it only perceives the results of the processing of these impulses. At the level of feelings, this is the realisation of the states of the body which are necessary for the subject and its function. Somatic markers thus report to us the state in the milieu intérieur when, and if, it is necessary for the organism to change its behaviour or environment. Similarly, according to the widespread versions of Damasio’s assumptions, the organism also processes impulses from the external environment and as a priority sends information into the conscious mind about those which it is “certain” are existentially important to it. In this manner, we possess some kind of hierarchy of processing of impulses and their realisation. One of the directions taken by the theory of unrealised feelings was the theory of the modularity of mind, especially of perception. Jerry Fodor and others (Deroy 2015) believe that the mind has, among other things, modules capable of transforming the signals coming from receptors into representations through a series of encapsulated and dedicated inferences. A characteristic feature of these modules is that they process information separately and often without providing immediate or primary access to the consciousness.20 The question is whether there are aesthetic modules of the mind (Kirk 2011) and if they exist, how they operate. Shao-Min Hung, Chih-Hsuan Nieh and Po-Jang Hsieh from the National University of Singapore have demonstrated the existence of unconscious

20 If we are cold, we naturally cover ourselves without the necessity of realising that we are cold and that we have to cover ourselves. Similarly, if we notice a threatening stimulus, first we are afraid and only then do we examine what it is.

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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processes in the processing of the attractiveness of the human face in three independent ways. In the first of them, they measured the time taken to suspend intraocular suppression.21 The tested individuals observed the visual stimulus (screen), where in one half were human faces which gradually, slowly appeared to their non-dominant eye while on the other half of the screen (observed by the dominant eye) an abstract stimulus moved (a colourful Mondrian picture). “Participants were required to press the space bar when any part of the target face became visible (Detection task), followed by indicating whether it appeared at the left or the right side of the fixation point with the left or right arrow key (Location task)” (Hung et al. 2016). The question of the localisation served as a control which eliminated incorrect or preliminary reactions to the impulse. “The target face stayed at the final contrast (i.e. 75%) for 500 ms after the Mondrians were turned off, which ensured the visibility of the target stimulus” (Hung et al. 2016). Subsequently the participants evaluated the attractiveness of the individual stimuli (58 faces) and determined which of those were the most and the least attractive. “The results showed that attractive faces enjoyed the privilege of breaking suppression and reaching consciousness earlier” (Hung et al. 2016). In other words: attractive faces drew the participants’ attention more quickly than unattractive, despite the fact that the phenomenon of intraocular suppression should apply equally. In another experiment, the same scientists proved “that attractive faces had lower visibility thresholds, again suggesting that facial attractiveness could be processed more easily to reach consciousness” (Hung et al. 2016). And finally, based on the assumption that “if attractive faces could still attract attention unconsciously, one would expect to see differences in the accuracy of discrimination of orientation” (Hung et al. 2016). The third experiment and its results “demonstrated that unconsciously sensed attractive faces still exerted an effect for the orientation of attention, reflected by a significant drop in accuracy in the subsequent orientation discrimination task. Taken together … conscious perception is not a necessary condition for facial attractiveness to be processed, and an unconscious attractive face still yielded a potent effect by directing our attention” (Hung et al. 2016).

21 Motion-induced interocular suppression is a phenomenon that if one eye is presented with a constantly moving visual pattern while the other eye is shown a stationary image, the stationary image is suppressed from awareness for long periods of time (Mendoza & Chaudhuri 2007).

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Other cognitive studies have arrived at similar results. Jie Sui and Chang Hong Liu examined whether an “attractive face presented outside of the foveal vision can capture attention” (Sui, Liu 2009). In their experiment they asked the participants to determine the position and orientation of an object presented in the left or right visual field and at the same time to ignore the influence of the facial image projected outside the centre. It showed that the “presence of attractive faces significantly lengthened task performance” (Sui & Liu 2009). This proves that “facial beauty automatically competes with an on-going cognitive task for spatial attention” (Sui & Liu 2009). These tests confirm earlier findings that the perception of beauty often takes place automatically, unconsciously and quickly (Aharon et al. 2001, O’Doherty et al. 2003, Winston et al. 2007, Palermo & Rhodes 2007) and that unconscious processes for the calculation and comparison of averageness, symmetry and such are part of it (Perrett 2010). Another aspect (regarding consciousness) of the cognitive studies of aesthetic experience is the knowledge that beauty not only attracts attention but also that we hold on to it. Rebecca Hoss and Judith H. Langlois (Hoss & Langlois 2003) have shown that even small children look longer at faces which are generally considered attractive. Itzhak Aharon et al. (Aharon et al. 2001), Judith A. Langlois et al. (Langlois et al. 2000) and Curtis A. Samuels et al. (Samuels et al. 1994) have arrived at similar conclusions. Beauty simply attracts us, and we may not know why, but if possible, we try to seek it out. Another important factor of Baumgartenian aesthetics is the conviction that aesthetic experience in itself bears a lower form of cognition – one unreflected by reason. All cognitive studies endeavour to link to this factor. Cognitive scientists believe that, similar to other feelings and emotions, beauty brings with itself a certain amount of information which the given subject – organism – processes and evaluates in the form of a pleasant feeling. Beauty or a feeling of attraction thus informs the subject about certain qualities of the object, which the subject processes and evaluates (on the basis of implicit algorithms – ones acquired from previous individual or group experiences). All these cognitive operations take place more=or-less unconsciously, but in their essence, they may eventually be brought to light analogon rationis and the hidden sensory algorithms of aesthetic experience will become (thanks to science) explicit. This is the aim of a major part of cognitive research. Devendra Singh et al. (Wilson & Brazendale 1974, Singh 1993a, 1993b, Perrett 2010, Dutton 2010, Buss 2011, Davis 2012, Buss 2014, 2016…) have

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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gradually revealed the laws that dictate why we like an image of an object (figure, face, etc.) structured in such or such a way and why we do not like another. On the basis of their studies, often supported by detailed statistics with a significant level of correlation, they provide a scientific explanation and a rational justification for sensory preferences. Cognitive aesthetics thus fulfils Baumgarten’s ideal for a true science, rationally justifying the gnoseologia inferior and its laws through the rational rendering of the cognitive aspects of sensory aesthetic experience. The third important aspect of Baumgarten’s concept is the notion of perfection in the senses. Beauty, in Baumgarten, consists of the perception of perfect forms which are accessible to the senses and thus in the feeling of beatitude – pleasure – directly in the senses. But how is this feeling even possible? What stands behind it and what causes us to feel “sensory” pleasure? Cognitive scientists researching the processes of perception point out that the notion of pleasure felt directly in the receptors is imprecise or even downright incorrect. The overwhelming majority of perceptive processes include the processing of information both at the level of the receptors and at the level of the sensory cortex – that is in the brain. Experiencing pleasant feelings is at the same time generally caused by the activity of the receptors and from there through the activation of “some hedonic mechanisms which are found deep within the brain (the nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum and brainstem) or in the cortex (orbitofrontal, cingulate, medial prefrontal and insular cortices)” (Kringelbach & Berridge 2010). Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge call these centres in the brain “hedonic hotspots” (Kringelbach & Berridge 2010), and their anatomic structures and neurophysiological functions are relatively well described (Kringelbach 2005, 2009, 2010, Berridge 2008, 2007, Alldridge & Berridge 2010). But the question remains, why we are aesthetically sensitive to certain types of impulses and not to others, or why certain types of impulses evoke a feeling of fancy at all. Here too we may find answers through various cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology. A classic example of this type of consideration is dealing with the question of the existence of sensitivity to simple and basal stimuli such as taste.22 As Paul A. S. Breslin states, “Taste principally serves two functions: it enables the evaluation of foods for toxicity and nutrients while helping us

22 It is symptomatic that in several languages taste as “preference” is etymologically linked with taste as “distinguishing of flavours” and general “fancy” with “liking” in the area of food.

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decide what to ingest and it prepares the body to metabolize foods once they have been ingested…Simple carbohydrates are experienced as sweet, amino acids glutamate, aspartate and selected ribonucleic acids are experienced as savoury (or umami), sodium salts, and salts of a few other cations, are experienced as salty, acids are experienced as sour, and many toxic compounds are experienced as bitter” (Breslin 2010, 409). From this it follows that our tastes are the consequence of an evolutionarily acquired development of the individual receptors that react to impulses from our environment (in the ecological niche). It causes receptors to be sensitive to certain substances and not to others. Processing a certain amount and concentration of these substances evokes a response in the subcortical areas of the brain which supports the consumption of these foods with pleasure, or, on the contrary, rejects them with disgust. Thus sucrose and fructose, which are easily processable sources of energy, generate pleasure, whereas alkaloids (poison) evoke disgust. An evolutionary consequence is that during our development we did meet with such high and pure forms of sucrose in the environment and hence our organism is not used to large doses of pure sugar, which then works as a super-stimulus (Barrett 2010). How does this relate to aesthetics? Baumgarten’s notion of beauty presupposes perfection in the senses. This may be interpreted in two directions: firstly, some impulses saturate our senses in such a way that subsequently we experience pleasant aesthetic feelings. It is simply because our senses have developed in this manner, and we are sensitive to certain visual, audio and social stimuli. Evolutionary philosophers such as Dennis Dutton (Dutton 2010) and neuroscientists such as Edmund T. Rolls (Rolls 2011) explain why we like certain forms and features, and even what takes place in the brain. Basically: aesthetic fancy in the brain is caused by serotoninergic and dopaminergic pathways, “opioid, endocannabinoid, or other neurochemical modulators” (Smith et al. 2010). “The available evidence suggests that brain mechanisms involved in fundamental pleasures (food and sexual pleasures) overlap with those for higher-order pleasures (for example, monetary, artistic, musical, altruistic, and transcendent pleasures)” (Kringelbach 2010). On the other hand, it is obvious that feelings of beauty are often evoked in us by perfection which we imagine or which we seek out. Marco Costa and Leonardo Corazza (Costa & Corazza 2006) examined portraits by 776 artists across the history of fine art and compared them to faces in photographs. They discovered that artistic portraits often depict perfect faces and proportions and even when painting a face by heart or relying on our imagination we have a tendency to improve and emphasise, especially

A l e x a n d e r G o t t l i e b B a u m g a r t e n a n d t h e B i r t h o f A e s t h e t i c s a s G n o s e o l o g i a I n f e r i o r. . .

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the eyes and lips, but also the overall proportions of the face. This also correlates with the peak shift phenomenon as formulated by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999), and also with several other findings that discover beauty in the relationship to averageness and the perfection of the ideal (Démuth 2016, 2019a), although, of course, there are works of art whose idea is based on the exact opposite – the denial of perfection and certain imperfections,23 or even on malformations.24 But even there the feeling of fancy exclusively touches upon sensory feelings and not their rational rendering. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica was considered to be controversial from the beginning (starting with unqualified praise to strict rejection).25 To this day many aestheticians (despite its rather considerable length) consider that it seems more like a draft and an association of concepts and topics than a thorough and precise methodological manual. In this it actually fulfils the requirements for it to be a subject of research which in itself is considered to be methodologically essential. Aesthetic experience, similar to aesthetics itself, is a more-or-less slowly appearing and subsequently reflected (at first unconsciously) experience which is sufficiently clear to allow its conscious identification (inferior) but still imperfectly clear for it to be rendered by reason. However, as Steffen Gross shows, “Baumgarten did not primarily develop his aesthetics as the philosophy of art. The making and understanding of artworks had served in his original programme only as an example for the application of his philosophy. What he really attempts to present is an alternative philosophy of knowledge that goes beyond the purely rationalist, empiricist, and sensualist approaches” (Gross 2012, 403). The divergent26 and gradually appearing cognitive-scientific inspirations that draw on its rich, but conceptually unclear, legacy are thus the truest fulfilment of its ideological heritage: to understand aesthetics as a gnoseology of sensuality and beauty as perfection in the senses.

23 Cp. the Japanese ideal of beauty – wabi-sabi. 24 For example, the works of the British painter Francis Bacon. 25 Cf. Blahutková 2017. 26 In the same way, it also influenced the history of aesthetic research itself.

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The Focal Point of Modern Aesthetics in the Receptive-Reflective Concept of Immanuel Kant

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The Focal Point of Modern Aesthetics in the Receptive -Reflective Concept...

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Kant’s philosophy – encompassing a wide range of topics – starting with the natural-scientific (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte – 1749, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels – 1775) and the philosophical works (e.g. Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen – 1764) of his pre-critical period and continued with the publications of his critical period, inspired a number of discussions between the adherents and opponents of his idealistic orientation, changing the face of philosophical reflection in the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, morality and aesthetics. Before we set out to explain the influence of Kant, primarily on contemporary cognitive-scientific discussions, it is necessary to clarify the position his thoughts held with respect to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The critical philosophy of this central figure of German Enlightenment, on one hand, tapped into the reflections on philosophical tradition, where he linked to ancient philosophy, referring in his works to, for instance, Aristotle, and, on the other hand, the motif of consideration in the so-called ontological transcendental categories – truth, goodness and beauty – weaves throughout his output (especially with regard to his three greatest works: Kritik der reinen Vernunft – 1781; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft – 1788; Kritik der Urteilskraft – 1790). His philosophy nonetheless was particularly shaped as a reaction to the contemporary intellectual climate when he joined the lively discussion of continental rationalism and commented on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc., and at the same time, he absorbed the philosophy of British empiricism and sensualism represented by authors such as John Locke, David Hume and Francis Hutcheson as well as the thought of British rationalist and scientist Isaac Newton. Kant gradually built a reputation as a critical philosopher in the efforts to enrich rationalism on the old continent with innovative elements of insular thinking which did not emphasise pure reason – ergo reason uncontaminated with experience – the eternal truth and axiomatic-deductive method, but endeavoured to implement a more subtle, inductive-empirical study and put an emphasis on the need to establish the importance of sensory cognition, the definition of the limits and reach of the competence of purely formal logical judgements for various domains of the application of the rational approach, including the study of the nature and source of moral feelings, the perception of beauty and the origin of the ideas of reason, etc. To study Kant’s aesthetic conception, it is necessary to clarify the fundamental notions, presuppositions and topics, as he analyses them in the central chapter Analytic of the Beautiful of his work Critique of Judgment.

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Before we start, we have to say that Kant’s aesthetics are closely linked with the theory of cognition on one hand and morality on the other, as in this work Kant focuses, inter alia, on the delimitation of the domain of aesthetic judgement versus judgement in which the result is an evaluation with a certain truthfulness as well as versus judgement which leads us to a certain type of behaviour through the determination of will. The topic of beauty, the sublime, taste and aesthetic preference also appears in Kant’s earlier works (e.g., Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen – 1764), but the Critique of Judgment may be considered as essential reading in the study of Kant’s aesthetics. The Critique of Judgment, as Eva Schaper notes, may be read in two ways. The first ascribes the character of a synthesising transcendental study, to this work, with the aim of bridging the rupture between the theoretical and practical use of reason. In the words of Kant taken from his introduction to this work: “A critique of pure reason, i.e., of our ability to judge according to a priori principles would be incomplete if it failed to include, as a special part a treatment of judgment, which, since it is a cognitive power, also lays claim to a priori principles; judgment must be treated, in a special part of the critique, even if, in a system of pure philosophy, its principles are not such that they can form a special part between theoretical and practical philosophy, but may be annexed to one or the other as needed” (Kant 1987, 5). In respect of this, we may perceive the analytics of judgement as Kant’s crucial intention to clarify the origin of the rules of deliberation and reason which apply in cognition as well as in action, moral decisionmaking and the aesthetic evaluation of images. Kant asked, “how do we explain the way in which we are both subject to the norms of reason and yet also the agents who institute those norms?” (Pinkard 2013, 67), and, as such, this corresponds to the project of transcendental philosophy. A different attitude to the interpretation of the third Critique puts a spotlight of the interpretive framework onto the sections dedicated to aesthetic judgement (Analytics of the Beautiful and Analytics of the Sublime) and does not make an attempt to understand it in the context of theological judgement and, more generally, a system of philosophy (Schaper 1992, 367–369). Its goal is, in more detail, to explain the aesthetic considerations themselves in the context of the issues linked with the notions of beauty, taste, art, genius, etc. Reflective judgement, freedom with regard to imagining and grasping the thing in concreto through a determinant notion are among the key ideas for the solution of Kant’s aesthetic dilemma. It is played out through considerations relating to the negative and positive concepts of freedom

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and the framework issue of his work which considers the mutual conditioning of the ability to be receptive to images and the spontaneity of notions (Guyer 2005, 5–7). The primary works which inspired Kant in his considerations about aesthetic experience were undoubtedly the works of British thinkers such as Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1738), Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741–1742), Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), etc. Alongside these, Kant also critically reflected on authors from the continental ambience who followed the cognitive school of philosophical aesthetics. Here we can mention works such as Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750), Meier’s works including Betrachtungen über den ersten Grundsatz aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (1757) (“Considerations on the First Principle of all the Fine Arts and Sciences”, cf. Guyer 2014, 331), in which they took the position that the perception of beauty consists of the recognition of perfection, Mendelssohn’s essay with the analogous title On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences (1757),27 which also links to the analyses by Du Bos, etc. It may be noted that the pre-Kantian aesthetics in both camps, or the theoretical considerations of beauty, the sublime and taste, were developed in the spirit of consideration of the origin, source (Grundsatz; “principle”) and justification for the existence of aesthetics, particularly in the confrontation of emotionality and rationality, which relates to the categorial pair for the distinction between the subjective and objective, and possibly the particular and, contrary to that, a universally binding or universal understanding of beauty. The philosophical questioning of the notion of beauty through history has generally been carried out through grasping of this notion through several topics, either through the moral significance of beauty and art and its rejection (Aristotle contra Plato), the proportionality and symmetry of matter as a decisive aspect in its depiction (Leonardo da Vinci) and the explanation of beauty (Vitruvio), or through transcendent considerations and symbolism (medieval art), but particularly modern aesthetics, which formed in the 18th century, put into relation with the study of beauty, notions such as “taste”, “imagination”, “feeling”, etc. thereby moving considerations on the essence of beauty into a new theoretical plane which included the study of the conscious states of the subject and the nature of subjectivity as a presupposition for the stage of aesthetic experience (Eco 2015, 275). 27 This essay is part of an edition of Mendelssohn’s work which has been published in English under the title Philosophical Writings (1997).

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Kant elaborated a special aesthetic theory which downright rejects a place for cognitivism in the field of aesthetics and thus outlines a historical direction for the consideration of beauty – as an idea of reason, but not such that would have any connection with truth, an adequate expression of a certain image with regard to a specific notion. Along with this, as we will demonstrate, Kant likewise argued against aesthetic sentimentalism, according to which an aesthetic perception was to be accompanied by moral feelings and various effects of a positive or negative character, for example entertainment, pleasure, the stirring of emotions, fear, etc. The epistemic reciprocity of the ability to be receptive to impressions, (presentations) and the spontaneity of notions, conditioned by the ability to consider, with regard to the transcendental application of functions of reason, to cognise, propose and construe ideas, either in pure or empirical opinions, does not act as an eminent principle of aesthetic experience as such, but rather it is seen as important in the expert evaluation of an object, if this is an object of aesthetic evaluation. The activity of reason with its dialectic competence to overstep boundaries enables the perception of the sublime, which is an eminent example of the distancing of rationality from the order of nature, that being in the sense of the ability to freely reflect the contents of one’s consciousness. In addition, similar to his British inspiration, David Hume (Hume 1745, XXIII), Kant is aware of the fact that although general rules for taste exist, prescribed for example by certain canons in art or various intersubjectively familiar patterns for ascribing aesthetic value to an object, at the same time he realises how problematic is the definition, that clearly delimits the content and the universal validity of the criteria of taste. So here space is opened for polemics relating to the possibility of finding the sufficient and necessary condition in the formal constitutional aspects of beauty. Beauty acquires the dimensions of abstractness and unintelligibility; it becomes an idea with hazy contours. We can ask: will beauty continue to be just an ephemeral, relative notion? Or will Kant succeed in justifying the inevitable validity of formal, abstract beauty, which is formed when an image which affects our feelings and prompts our imagination together with our reason to take time over an image which engages the subject in an aesthetic sense? The tension between the pure and empirical content of the subject’s consciousness, and analogously also the difference between matter and form, is also projected into considerations about beauty.

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Aesthetics Free of Cognitive Notions In the interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory, we often meet with the collective name “free play theory” (Atalay 2007, Guyer 2014b, 2016). It is this technical term that represents a clue in the study of the principles of his aesthetic theory. Already in his introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant defined pleasure which ensues from the perception28 of some object through the relationship of this object with the subject; the pleasure is a subjective quality in the sense that it mediates the pure feeling of liking of the object without an aesthetic relationship to the image being conditioned by a logical arrangement of the components of this image in the space of the inductive-deductive implications represented in the configuration of notions and judgements (Kant 1987, 29). In addition, this image does not necessarily have to be incorporated in causal relationships in order for it to be liked or disliked. In other words, the predicate “beautiful” does not follow from any notion. It is based on feelings that legitimise it when it is present/exists, and at the same time, as this happens through reflection, beauty in a transcendental respect is realised as a reflection on the forms of things (Kant 1987, 32). The description of the genesis of an aesthetic experience is outlined in the following way: “the pleasure cannot express anything other than the object’s being commensurate with the cognitive powers that are, and insofar as they are, brought into play when we judge reflectively, and hence I expresses merely a subjective formal purposiveness of the object” (Kant 1987, 29–30). The feeling of fancy (liking) is defined through cognitive abilities, but in a negative way. If we have at our disposal the image of some object which we believe is pleasant to “our eyes”, that is if we experience a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, which is accompanied by an aesthetic judgement about this object at the reflective level, it inevitably happens through the imagination which enables the very viewing of some object; further, through consideration which grasps this image as “something”, that is it enables the creation of a schema of imagination on the basis of the consideration, but not in such a way that it subsumes the opinion under some specific notion but only according to the formal rules

28 The notion of perception in this context denotes the current presentation of “something” that has the status of a mental entity/mental state. In relation to Kant’s philosophy this is the occurrence of some image which is at the same time an object of the subject’s consciousness, either in the form of a sensory opinion, product of imagination, or in the form of a “pure” opinion given by a notion of deliberation or an idea of the reason.

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of the schema of the notion by reason. It would be possible to say that the feeling of liking grows from the object’s harmony with a certain conceptual scheme – this may also be described thus: this object is adequate for the thoughts about it – but, as Kant emphasises, these cognitive abilities are in the state of a play, ergo some voluntary, pleasant activity, connected with the awareness that in this state no demand is being placed on the subject for an objective evaluation of the given image, for example the factual state of things. This play basically has the features of freedom, “in which the subjective conditions of cognition are satisfied apart from the satisfaction of what is ordinarily the objective condition of cognition, namely, the subsumption of an object under a determinate concept” (Guyer 2005, 6), but the pleasure is not directly caused by the notion of freedom in such a way that would, in advance, through consideration, define the reason for liking an image. In this respect beauty may simply startle us, surprise us, and I believe that it also makes it possible for us to modify the measures of our taste. If, when interpreting this free play of the imagination and consideration, we only base it on the study of the introduction to the third Critique, we merely receive a schematic outline of this concept. Although in the section, the Analytics of the Beautiful (§9) Kant speaks about the revival of cognitive powers through their mutual harmony, with the feeling of pleasure being based on the perception of this lightened play, but he does not reveal what this revival consists of (Guyer 2005, 78–79). In the General Remark to the Analytics of the Beautiful Kant says that imagination, as it is free, does not have to depict the image according to the rules of associationism29 but also creatively, and its harmony with consideration is justified by the free law of consideration. In the section Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments Kant further specifies that this free play occurs through the inclusion of imagination in the laws of consideration: “Hence taste, as a subjective power of judgment, contains a principle of subsumption; however, this subsumption is not one of intuitions under concepts, but, rather, one of the power of intuitions or exhibitions (the imagination) under the power of concepts (the understanding), insofar as the imagination in its freedom harmonises with the understanding in its lawfulness” (Kant 1987, 151). With regard to this definition of free play, as (Guyer 2005) says, it is possible to take several interpretive positions. One of the interpretive frameworks offers the so-called pre-cognitive interpretation of Kant’s theory of free play (cf. e.g. Henrich 1992, Craw29 Here we can see a direct reference to the thought of D. Hume.

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ford 1974), according to which all the cognitive faculties, which are placed into mutual harmony in aesthetic perception, fulfil all the conditions under which cognition occurs except for that which produces the subsumption of the given image under the particular notion. The grounds for this approach may also be found in Kant’s famous formulation about the reciprocal conditioning of intuitions and concepts from the Critique of Pure Reason (1998, A74/B50). The problem this attitude faces exists in the clarification of why we should like something in a process which in fact represents incomplete cognition. Another way that Kant‘s aesthetic theory may be interpreted is the socalled multi-cognitive interpretation (Rush 2001, Allison 2001). It is based on the idea that an aesthetic experience feeds/activates a wide range of conceptual schemes of consideration which stand in opposition to the performance of the cognitive act, in the sense that there is not an application of one particular notion (or several in an analogous sense or through a synonymous relationship with other notions). Or, all the conditions of cognition are fulfilled during an aesthetic experience but in an indeterminate sense (Guyer 2005, 80–87). This means that none of these possible notions is the final one, and at the same time they are not sufficiently adequate to allow the image, that presents itself aesthetically, to be grasped, although a number of potentially applicable notional schemes are on offer. It would be possible to say that this understanding of free play implies the possibility that the given image may enter various interpretive frameworks and contexts – historical, cultural, etc. In this respect, Kant may be interpreted in such a way that the ambivalence of beauty enables a work of art or a natural phenomenon to enthuse its percipients across various cultures and historical epochs. Polykleitos’ or Bernini’s sculptures are liked because they provide a formally adequate depiction of our manner of viewing, for example of the symmetry of a human figure. A common manner of the application of criteria for the realisation of cognition is, for instance the ability to recognise an object, for example, as a drawing of a vase, that being in such a manner that the given image, present in the imagination is compared with the conceptual scheme of consideration according to which the consideration subsequently discriminates the impulse, that is, it distinguishes it from a different impulse, categorises it and includes it into the overall conceptual framework. By rejecting the determinant judgement in the constitution of aesthetic experience, Kant, it seems, takes the position that it is not necessary to categorise an object or differentiate it from other objects. But as Andrej Démuth comments, the fact that we can distinguish an aesthetic object from a non-aesthetic one

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signifies that the perception of beauty may also be considered a cognitive process (Démuth 2019a). This argument could likewise concern aesthetic preference. Similarly Paul Guyer argues that both attitudes present a number of problems, and it seems that Kant clearly realised that the object of any aesthetic judgement has to be an object (of art or of nature) which, in order for it to become the subject of an evaluation to establish whether it is an aesthetic predicate, must be distinguishable from an indeterminate variety of formal structures through which it is “offered”, in order for us to be able to evaluate the object, communicate a judgement of taste, and also possibly be able to point to it. Therefore these two interpretive lines do not have to be mutually exclusive, but nor do they have to be sufficient for the clarification of the essence of free play. Hence Guyer argues for the benefit of the so-called metacognitive interpretation. “On such approach, the free and harmonious play of imagination and understanding should be understood as a state of mind in which the manifold of intuition induced by the perception of an object and presented by the imagination to the understanding is recognized to satisfy the rules for the organization of that manifold dictated by the determinate concept or concepts on which our recognition and identification of the object of this experience depends, yet as one in which it is also felt that – or as if – understanding’s underlying objective or interest in unity is being satisfied in a way that goes beyond anything required for or dictated by satisfaction of the determinate concept or concepts on which mere identification of the object depends” (Guyer 2005, 99). Guyer thus assumes that we view the beautiful in a more complex unity than when we apply a particular notion to the content on view. In his opinion, this mechanism also enables us to distinguish the aesthetically pleasing from the unpleasant, because we are capable of viewing and grasping the contents of what we view through the reflection of a feeling of pleasure. It seems, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant adheres to a strict separation of aesthetic and cognitive experience, which he describes on the basis of considerations about purposiveness. Whereas cognitive judgement expresses the need to join an intuition30 with a certain concept, where the concept operates as a rule for the organisation of intuition (Kant 1998b, B176–B189, 271–277), the judgement of taste expresses the competence to contemplate the form of the object in harmony with the formal arrangement of the cognitive abilities of the subject. The formal aspect of any intuition corresponds to “the harmony of its manifold to [form] a unity” (Kant 30 Intuitions, images, presentations or representations – i.e. everything that is given via the faculty of sensibility or via imagination.

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1987, 74). Such variety in unity may be demonstrated using the example of the perception of a work of art – for instance a painting where we perceive lines, the brightness of colours and their hues in the unity of relationships, in a certain juxtaposition; we recognise a certain form, which synthesises these relationships – for instance the depiction of a ruin, but at the same time this perception may stimulate the cognitive abilities in such a way that this painting fits into a different conceptual scheme and does not necessarily have to be joined to, for example, knowledge of architecture. The study of sensuality and thinking through a transcendental approach reveals the a priori forms of sensibility, understanding and reason – and the sensibility presupposes that impressions are conjoined with the ability to perceive images, understanding represents the spontaneity of concepts according to the order of nature and the order of freedom (the determinations of rationality and will), and reason offers the opportunity to overstep the boundaries of possible experiences through the dialectic means of raising ideas (psychological, cosmological and teleological). It is the latter idea – teleological – that provides the key for the closer clarification of purposiveness. The ability to put purposefulness into a synthetic unity (according to the schema of notions of reason) with some image means that we imagine this object is adequate for the notion (forma finalis) (Kant 1987, 60). Kant’s distinguishing of formal and real purposiveness points to a twofold competence of judgement: on the one hand, to evaluate objects on a scale from beautiful to ugly without judgement necessarily having to reach for some notion of a thing with the aim of specifying why the subject considers the given image as aesthetically pleasing, and on the other hand to aim for an understanding of things with the intent of finding one’s bearings in nature and in society (the field of science and morality). With an eye on this distinction Kant differentiates between reflecting and the determining judgement and the corresponding difference between formal and real purposiveness (Kant 1987, 23–33), and he puts the different modalities of how it is possible to relate to the world (nature) and to the mind in opposition. Although through the nature of the architecture of reason and consideration the indeterminateness which exists in the aesthetic judgement of the object forces the subject to “seek” the purpose (sense) of the phenomenon under evaluation, it nevertheless does not prescribe any rules for such an evaluation in advance. Thus in Kant’s opinion we cannot state a clear and final reason for why we consider a particular flower to be beautiful and another not, and if when making an aesthetic judgement we lean on a particular synthetic piece of knowledge about the thing gained on the basis of experience or of knowledge a priori (as in the case of math-

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ematical beauty), the judgement of taste is not pure. A similar situation occurs when we like to see a good deed done or the golden ratio. In such cases a judgement of taste defines the purpose as the reason for the feeling of liking, for example that we appreciate helpfulness and as our close friend helped somebody in need, we evaluate this action as being nice. It has to be noted that Kant did not wholly cut off the aesthetics’ access to the contents of cognition if we take into account the differentiation of “free beauty” (pulchritudo vaga) and “dependent beauty” (pulchritudo adhaerens) (Kant 1987, 76). The reason for this differentiation, it seems, lies in the realisation that we evaluate a number of things aesthetically on the basis of the experience we have had with the objects, as well as the knowledge we have available in relation to them. In the case of the evaluation of dependent beauty, reason enables the creation of an image of perfection of the object according to a certain notion which carries within itself the ability to recognise an object that meets the criteria of the notion. At the same time this liking of an object, which is evaluated on the basis of a notion, is based on a grasp of its internal purpose. Dependent beauty, that is a beautiful object from our imagination (either an empirical phenomenon, or a product of the imagination) or consideration (e.g. the viewing of the perfection of a theory) implies that we like the image or property of an object for the reason that is what it is, and Kant refers to such a judgement of taste as applied and the purpose which is thus perceived through a determining notion relates either to the utility (in a pragmatic sense) of the object or its perfection (especially in its moral aspect). The image of perfection falls under the category of objective purposefulness and either it is perfection viewed qualitatively (a variety of images that correspond with the notion of something and adequately represent this notion) or quantitatively (the wholeness of each thing in its species) which serves as a measure for the evaluation of the acceptability of the object – its identity with the form of its viewing (Kant 1987, 73–74). Kant’s concept may resemble to us an intuitive vision of beauty, which, so to speak, “renders” something meaningful, provides an indeterminate subjective sense for the organisation of images in the consciousness of the subject which reflects the contents of its mind. This corresponds to a feeling that something delights us, we like it, we appreciate its value. A joke may be a good example of the “playfulness of the mind”, which (if aesthetic experience is necessarily joined with reflection) realises the creativity of the imagination and the variability of the possible forms of grasping the image – a good joke should have a punch line and make sense even if we did not originally expect precisely this culmination. The formal purposiveness of the object detracts

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from the pragmatic or normative goals of viewing an image and these forms of purposiveness when experiencing beauty par excellence (that is the pure, disinterested perception of an aesthetically pleasant object) appear to be redundant. Beauty understood as purposefulness without an image of the purpose creates a single demand on the object – to hold the existence of the given image in itself. Its only sense or purpose is for it to be liked, nothing more. In addition, Kant describes the intellectual or ideal status of aesthetic experience on the basis of the distinction between the idea and the ideal of beauty (Kant 1987, §17). The ideal is inevitably joined with one of the previous forms of perfection of the object of our image according to some notion and as such this ideal is always tied to an empirical property, in the form of the adequate depiction of some image through the imagination. The creation of a particular ideal has its own mechanism, the description of which Kant partly borrows from David Hume (Hume 1741–1742/1985). The construction of an ideal is carried out through a comparison of the images and shapes of the given object as perceived until now, and “the imagination projects, as it were, one image onto another, and from the congruence of most images of the same kind it arrives at an average that serves as the common standard for all of them” (Kant 1987, 82). The imagination thus creates standards – norms for the judgement of taste with regard to the notion of perfection (that is, whether the object corresponds to the ideal or not) through averaging and the creation of some “middle” notion. Thus in this sense the ideal, in Kant’s opinion, will never have grotesque or minimalistic features although finding the ideal as it is “incarnated” in a particular image from an empirical view will be quite rare rather than common and frequent. On the contrary, an aesthetic idea, which is the counterpart of rational ideas, corresponds to a notion of the imagination and rouses the cognitive abilities to become active, but despite enabling a synthetic unity of diversity, it remains indeterminate from the viewpoint of its definition. The existence itself of a  rational notion of the idea provides for and justifies the possibility for the construction of some ideal which then may serve as a criterion for aesthetic evaluation (but always with regard to the notion of perfection, ergo to the notion of purposiveness). Under aesthetic ideas Kant understands “a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it” (Kant 1987, 182). From this quotation it is already clear that the idea transcends the borders of rationality, because no notion or language is able to articulate the wholeness of it but at the same

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time we may assume that it also exceeds the borders of empirical experience, although it is rooted in imagination. The reason for this assumption consists in the abovementioned ability of the imagination to be creative; it is not determined exclusively by contents of the receptivity of impressions. From what has been said to now, beauty seems to be, at the very least, an ephemeral notion, which is defined in a negative way throughout nearly the whole of the third Critique. If it is true that the boundaries of the idea of beauty are unclear, it is justifiable to ask, how can the judgement of taste even be possible? An assumption of the very existence of laws of experience, consideration and reason entitle Kant to assume that despite the subjective nature of aesthetic experience, that is, feelings rather than notions, the judgement of taste may be universally valid for all subjects. What remains questionable is the manner of the articulation of these criteria, as they would have to be an object of cognition par excellence, which Kant essentially rejects. Despite the abovementioned arguments par excellence about the impossibility to fully notionally contain the idea of beauty it seems that the understanding of beauty corresponds to contemplation and the activity of the intellect, because the subject possesses the ability to view the formal purposiveness, through reflective judgement. Expertise, that is a  learned evaluation of an aesthetic object, in Kant’s opinion, may only be achieved as an evaluation of the cognitive abilities themselves and their subjective purposefulness clarified through examples. This is the direction in which artistic critique should also be led, where the expert is capable of demonstrating using examples this harmonising ability of our mind (and thus dividing artistic styles and artistic works into those which are aesthetically more valuable and, on the contrary, those in which the unity of imagination and consideration is absent) from a physiological and psychological point of view. It points to rules which are universally present in both, although they may not be recognised, despite being implicitly present in aesthetic perception. The role of critique as a science thus is not to introduce new rules, norms and prescriptions for taste, but to only explicate the implicit (contents of the mind) and hone judgements of taste31 (Kant 1987, 149–150). In Kant’s opinion, due to the very nature of judgements of taste the critic is unable to provide a justifiable explanation for a certain aesthetic preference. If we, however, were to think about what follows from these considerations about expertise, would 31 In this context it may not be a mistake to assume that aesthetic feeling – the perceptibility of objects – would be honed simultaneously by it.

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we not be stuck in a paradoxical situation? Does it not therefore follow that expertise is in fact nothing more than empty speculation? We might allow for this variant, if it were true that aesthetic experience refers exclusively to the receptivity of impressions. However, analysis of Kant’s theory shows that the judgement of taste should be valid a priori and a posteriori. The expectation of universal agreement with the judgement of taste of the evaluator would seem to indicate the possibility that there might be laws of the mind (its formal structures) which are liked regardless of age, education, experience, or the individual’s  level of knowledge. Maybe the symmetry and proportionality of depiction are examples of this. The “eye” of the critic, an expert in the field of aesthetics (and even more so in the case the critique of art) should judge independently of the accompanying cognitive contents, the emotional aspects32 and various determinants of evaluation – from the historical and social context up to individual taste preferences – but maybe this is only an ideal to which the experts should aspire but which in practical terms is not achievable. With his aesthetic theory Kant took beauty out of the materiality of objects and situated it exclusively in the subjectivity, which represents one of the aspects of his famous Copernican revolution in philosophy. The reach of his ideas co-formed many new approaches (neo-Kantianism, classical German phenomenology, partly also constructivism, etc.) and inspired discussion on various topics. Among such topics is included, for example, the study of issues concerning the nature of cognition, the conditions of its existence as well as the boundaries and limits of rationality related to the question of the ability to grasp things-in-themselves (Ding an sich), truth, goodness, God, beauty and the sublime. Through transcendental study Kant unlocked the autonomous and authentic, namely a critical road to the examination of experience, cognition, being, as well as the validity of moral and aesthetic judgements. And surprisingly he inspired the cognitive-scientific and empirically oriented disciplines to verify, or test some of the theoretical foundations of his aesthetic theory. The assumption of the existence of universal rationality enabled considerations related to universal bindingness33 within cognition (science), morality and aesthetics. A serious epistemological problem which arises from this assumption concerns the possibility of objectivity. It is possible 32 With the exception of a disinterested interest consisting of a feeling of liking and in the link to the causality of the formal purposefulness of the image (or images) which represents the reason for the existence of this image, if it directs the cognitive images to the effort to “hold” this image (Kant 1790/1987, §10). 33 Epistemic a priori.

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only as an understanding between subjects, from which it follows that objectivity is constituted as an intersubjective agreement. The basic assumption for the justification of achieving objectivity in cognition, action and aesthetic evaluation (explanandum) resides in the principle that it is we who put purposefulness, as such, into the world (explanans). Simply said, we perceive only our perceptions, not the world “out there” (that is, we do not perceive and do not cognise beyond the borders of our possible experience). All viewing and cognition is subjective, because it is determined by the arrangement of the mind. The designation of the psychological grasp of the constitution of aesthetic experience, in Kant’s concept in the historical line of idealistic manner of thinking, represents an ideological heritage, which, as we will show, has also found its justification in cognitive-scientific research. A great number of cognitive psychologists agree that reality is construed in the mind of the percipient (Kalat 2002, Zaidel 2016). Neuroaesthetics, a relatively young scientific discipline, attempts, within its theoretical assumptions, for the common use of several approaches (from evolutionary biology, through empirical and experimental psychology, computational sciences up to philosophical conceptions). In studying some of the more comprehensive works in neuroaesthetics, a number of people might discover, with surprise, that some of the theoretical starting points of neuroscientific explanation have been directly inspired by the ideas of Kant or other representatives of German classical philosophy. Across the neuroscientific research of the foundations of cognition it is possible to consider the thesis on variability and commonality in the organisation and functioning of the brain as one of the central assumptions (Zeki 2009, Kandel 2016). In his work Splendors and Miseries of the Brain (2009) Zeki states: “All knowledge is brain knowledge. Although Kant thought about the mind when he wrote, ‘The Mind does not derive its laws (a priori) from nature, but prescribes them to her’, he might as well have been writing about the brain” (Zeki 2009, 21). The ambition to describe and explain the mechanisms of the architecture of the brain, in Zeki’s opinion, resides in the search for an organising principle, that being a direct reference to Kant, which appears in an earlier eponymous article (Zeki 1999, 2044). In the modern cognitive-scientific discourse this research corresponds to the question of the mental constitution of cognition, which is grasped in cognitive neuroscience through an assumption on the functional specialisation of the brain (Zeki 1999, 2044). Further Zeki, similar to Kant, assumes, that with these organising principles there are concepts in the brain that organise the incoming signals and instil meaning into these signals that can be divided into two types, inherited and acquired (Zeki 2009). Whereas

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inherited concepts correspond to the evolutionarily acquired mechanisms of detection, evaluation and processing of impulses, acquired concepts are gained over the course of experience and unlike inherited concepts they can be modified, which aligns with the thesis on the plasticity of the brain, which is that the brain is modified and reconstructed by each individual experience. It is possible to notice that this division has a striking resemblance to Kant’s distinction of notions into a priori (pure) and a posteriori (empirical) (Rušinová 2016). The assumption of the existence of inherited concepts forms an explanatory starting point for the thesis on commonality in the organisation of the brain. On the contrary, the presence of acquired concepts in the brain at a theoretical level justifies the variability in brain organisation. Zeki, in addition, assumes that among the inherited concepts we may include not only notions (that is rules for organising images/impulses) related to the processing of information from the receptory apparatus (colours, contrast, brightness, distinguishing of hues, etc.) but also rather more abstract notions such as love or beauty. In addition, in the light of these considerations Zeki distinguishes the idea of beauty, which, similarly in Kant, represents an idea that despite its indeterminateness serves as a regulative principle in the sense that each subject is capable of experiencing the feeling of pleasant/beautiful and to evaluate the stimuli (images) on a scale from beautiful to ugly; and in contrast to the idea of beauty Zeki considers the ideal of beauty which changes on the basis of individual experience, the individual’s cultural environment and other factors (Zeki 2009). Francis Galton, an important English scientist at the turn of the 20th century, whose goal was the creation of a prototype face of a criminal, invented the method of composite portraiture. By averaging facial features on the basis of a collection of photographs it transpired, despite expectations that the typical face of a delinquent would be aesthetically unpleasant or even scary, that the average face of a criminal is “at first sight” rather more attractive than the faces of the individuals in the photographs (Galton 1877). With the development of computer sciences and psychological research this method could later be applied to a substantially larger sample of the population. Numerous studies into the attractiveness of human faces have shown that an important criterion for the evaluation of facial attractiveness is symmetry (Rhodes et al. 1988, Perrett et al. 1999, Perrett 2010) and averageness (Penton-Voak & Perrett 2000). The degree of attractiveness proportionally decreases as asymmetry and deviation from the average increases. Although the reasons we tend to prefer symmetry may be rooted above all in evolution, and thus physical beauty may have its

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biological purposefulness in the selection of a partner, it seems that the mechanism through which the mind construes an ideal corresponds to Kant’s considerations in his third Critique. A number of contemporary cognitive-scientific studies in the field of neuroaesthetics and neuropsychology have attempted to map the influence of various types of damage to the cortical areas of the brain on aesthetic perception and artistic creativity (Sacks 1995, Chatterjee, Amorapanth, & Hamilton 2006, Zaidel 2016, Chatterjee 2017 a. o.). It is particularly research into various forms of brain damage that has helped to clarify, in more detail, the mechanisms which underpin, so to speak, the phenomenology of experience at the level of mental representations. The abovementioned works have arrived at the conclusion that brain lesions may influence aesthetic preferences, judgements and even inspire the subject to artistic creation, although they had not previously shown any artistic inclinations; or that they may contribute to a change of artistic style. In the Kantian understanding this may be interpreted as a modification of the arrangement of the mind, and this has subsequently influenced the evaluation of the formal purposefulness of the images. The very search for the neuronal correlates of various types of experience and forms of the possible relationship of the mind to the world (environment) suggests that the study of this relationship with a focus on the architecture of the brain could represent the other side of the coin. This is also documented by Zeki’s abovementioned words, that we may replace the notion of the mind with the notion of the brain. Although in the wider context of the evolutionist paradigm it is assumed that nature possesses an autonomous status of existence, still a large proportion of authors suppose that cognition has, if not wholly, at least in many aspects, anthropomorphous features. The study of biological, psychological or various social and cultural determinants of cognition provides us with a more objective image of ourselves. In Kant the relationship of nature and art does not operate in an objective unity, as it was later defended by Schelling, in whom it is possible to find a philosophical justification for the theory of the identity of the mind and brain. Kant rather assumed that we create a concept of “nature” as a construct, and that cognition is limited to the sphere of phenomena, not things-in-themselves.34 A similar theoretical starting point, focused on 34 In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant allows for the logical possibility of the existence of the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), but some of his followers consider its fundamental incognisability as a metaphysical scandal (Schopenhauer 1818/1819, 1844) and many philosophical movements which react to Kant’s concept attempt to deal with the problem of the thing-initself (voluntarism, phenomenology, etc.).

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the examination of the subject of cognition and way in which it views phenomena, can also be traced in cognitive sciences. Although inter-species comparisons and the study of the “brains” of other animal species provide a certain amount of data from the third-person perspective, it is nevertheless primarily an analogous way of thinking based on a comparative and inductive-deductive approach and depicting methods (fMRI, PET a. o.) which allows us to get a picture of how the minds of other animals work (Skov & Vartanian 2009). For authors such as Zeki, Ishizu and others, Kant’s transcendental philosophy is an inspiration in their efforts to reveal the neuronal correlates of aesthetic experience, for example, in ascertaining whether there exists a different functional specialisation of the cortical areas for the experience of beauty as opposed to the experience of the sublime (Ishizu & Zeki 2013). Many authors from the field of neuroaesthetics focus their experimental and empirical research on the study of the neuroanatomic centres responsible for aesthetic experience together with the neurobiological processes which physiologically condition it (Livingstone 2002, Kandel 2016 a. o.). One of the aspects of visual beauty which researchers around Zeki have tested empirically is the question “whether there are brain areas that are specifically engaged when subjects view paintings that they consider to be beautiful, regardless of the category of painting (that is whether it is a portrait, a  landscape, a  still life, or an abstract composition)” (Kawabata & Zeki 2004, 1699). By comparing data gathered by scanning the brain activity using fMRI imaging while the subject is exposed to paintings which the participants had, as part of the preparatory phase, sorted into beautiful, neutral and ugly, it showed that the judgement of a painting as beautiful or not correlates with specific brain structures, principally the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (Kawabata & Zeki 2004). The orbitofrontal cortex, as has been discovered, is engaged during the perception of rewarding stimuli (Francis et al. 1999). Morten Kringelbach states that feelings of pleasure, which are thought to be one of the basic components of aesthetic experience (Marković 2012), include activity in several cortical structures in the brain such as the orbitofrontal, cingulate and insular cortices and several subcortical areas such as the nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, the amygdala, as well as the ventral tegmantal area in the brainstem and the hypothalamus (Kringelbach 2010). A study by Kawabata and Zeki showed that during the perception of paintings that have previously been judged as either beautiful or ugly activates the OFC) and the motor cortex in different ways. “Not only do the results suggest a reciprocal interaction between the motor and OFC, but the widespread cortical connections that

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each of these areas has with other cortical regions makes it likely that each can influence, and be influenced, by widespread regions of the cortex” (Kawabata & Zeki 2004, 1703). A  different study by Tomohiro Ishizu and Zeki dealt with the examination of whether any common core exists in the distribution of brain activity for aesthetic experience with visual and audible impulses. After the comparison of the activation of brain areas in the perception of paintings and when listening to music it was found that only one cortical area of the medial OFC (area A1) was activated, which prompted the authors to formulate a  brain-based theory of beauty: “We propose that all works that appear beautiful to a subject have a single brain-based characteristic, which is that they have as a correlate of experiencing them a change in strength of activity within the mOFC and, more specifically, within field A1 in it. Our proposal shifts the definition of beauty very much in favor of the perceiving subject and away from the characteristics of the apprehended object” (Ishizu & Zeki 2011b, 8). This definition of beauty is based on the conviction that independently of the modality of beauty which we experience, the experiencing of a  feeling of aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically identical. This belief corresponds to Kant’s persuasion that a feeling of pleasure (or a feeling of fancy concerning the object of aesthetic experience) is the same, independent of “what” is currently being evaluated as beautiful (purity of aesthetic judgement), whether it be the perception of a portrait, delight from a gift of flowers or listening to a favourite symphony. But there are also some authors who react critically to the proposed brain-based theory of beauty. One of the main arguments is the objection related to the identification of the strength of the activity in the medial OFC with the intensity of the experience of beauty, that being that the activity of the mOFC represents a neuronal correlate to the experiencing of pleasure, but pleasure has another scale of judgement (from hot – to cold) than beauty (Chatterjee 2014), and that is why these findings do not concern the aesthetic experience any more than the pleasure from delicious food or work well done. Besides, Chatterjee argues that beauty resists a simple definition: “Beauty is a mongrel. It is a collection of different properties that engage different parts of the brain. Beauty produces different responses and evolved within us from different reasons. Beauty engages our sensations, emotions, and meaning flexibly” (Chatterjee 2014, 68). This argument leaves the issue of the essence of beauty and the possibility of its unambiguous definition open further. The Canadian psychologist Paul Bloom contributed to the discussion regarding expertise and its justification in the evaluation of aesthetic value

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or artistic critique with his sceptical approach. Many empirical and experimental studies from cognitive-scientific research have attempted to prove a better explanation, improved sensory discrimination skills (Valentin et al. 2011) and motor-control adaptations (Takahashi 1995), superior memory capacities, which relate to the enhanced conceptual abilities of experts in comparison to novices (Mag Uidhir & Buckner 2014). However, similar to Kant, Bloom in his book questions the relevance of expertise concerning the ability to distinguish more precisely and in more detail the impulses from various sensory domains as well as the ability to ascribe to artistic objects an aesthetic value, etc. His argument is based on the fact that behind aesthetic preferences35 stands a certain type of story about the evaluated object which we have available in the given moment of evaluation, which subsequently influences our preferences. Expertise in a certain area should provide for a more objective and reliable classification of mental contents or images/objects (in the field of aesthetics the specialist, as many believe, should be well versed in the rules of taste, various artistic styles, canons, etc.), but Bloom argues that “there is no evidence that supertasters, despite the super- in the name, are better at discriminating different flavors than the rest of us” (Bloom 2010, 29). He even points to the fact that sommeliers, for example, are less likely to enjoy wine, because they dislike acidity and astringency. Imaging methods that enable to scan brain’s activity has shown, in the case when people when tasting the same wine, but it was described as costing either $10 or $90, the overall pattern of brain activity was influenced by flavour expectations, while some parts of the brain were insensitive to these expectations, but only at a brute sensory level (Bloom 2010, 48). A similar case also occurs when we ascribe aesthetic value to a work of art. If the percipient is told the “story” that the artist spent a few days or a few years creating a particular work, his aesthetic preference will be oriented towards work on which the artist spent more time. Similarly, if somebody possesses the information that some work of art is unique, the value of this work in the eyes of the evaluator increases. These and many other examples listed by Bloom question the competences of experts at least in the plane of the ability to evaluate some object more objectively than an amateur. Kant believed that the judgement of taste should be pure, ergo independent of the perception of purposes with the exception of viewing formal purposefulness (harmony of the imagination

35 Under aesthetic preference in this context we understand seeking impulses on the basis of the rate of their pleasantness and pleasure/delight which these impulses mediate to the subject.

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and consideration), but he denied the justification of expertise namely with regard to the fact that the expert is not capable of prescribing the rules of taste, as the aesthetic experience depends on feeling (Empfindung) and, in Kant’s opinion, does not mediate any cognition about things.

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An Attempt to Defragment an Individual and the Aesthetic Holism of German Romanticism as a Reaction to Kant’s Rationalism

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Kant’s philosophy sparked a wave of reaction from the very beginning (Pippin 2012). On one hand, it found numerous supporters who strongly advocated it and elaborated on it (e.g., Karl Leonhard Reinhold, who popularised and advocated Kant’s philosophy and used it as the basis for his concept of “the new university” in Jena),36 but on the other hand, his criticism and transcendental idealism that postulated the limits of cognition and things as they are also met with a wave of disagreement on the part of his contemporaries and followers who saw a need to correct them. This was also true in the case of Kant’s aesthetics. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason found many supporters who accepted it as a canonical text (Fichte takes on virtually all of Kant’s elements of ethics and aesthetics and, therefore, does not specifically thematise it).37 However, the German romantics saw a biased rationalism in Kant’s philosophy – his hypostatisation of reason to the detriment of faith, feelings and language. Hence they rejected Kant’s strict distinction between cognition and will and feelings. Their primary motive was an effort to recover the unity and wholeness in the feelings of man, including the sphere of aesthetics. It is not entirely possible to describe German romanticism as a unified movement. The plethora of exceptional, yet often self-centric thinkers such as August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleirmacher, Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Mendelson Veit Schlegel, Caroline Michaelis Bohmer Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (writing under his pseudonym Novalis), Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, with a large number of interpersonal or even family bonds, different personality traits, different interests or points of departure makes a unified definition of this movement impossible, perhaps, with the exception of their opposition or rebellion towards the reason of the age of enlightenment. Among the main representatives of their theoretical-aesthetic philosophy Hamann, Schleiermacher, Herder and Schiller were especially important, although there are others who were also undoubtedly significant (e.g., Goethe or the Schlegels).

36 Cf. Pinkard 2013, 96–104. 37 Considering the influence of Fichte on the romantics as well as their closeness during his work in Jena, he is often classified as a romantic, although his orientation is different in many aspects from the sources of romanticism. Cf. Pinkard 2016, 131–172.

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Hamann and Schleiermacher – the Incarnation of Beauty and the Rebirth of Faith and a Sense of Religion If anyone attempted to map out the topics of the reaction of German romanticism to Kant’s philosophy, they should not probably forget to mention the effort to reintroduce sense (of religion, aesthetics or morale38), their profound interest in language, history, the relationship between an individual and their nation, as well as the acceptance of the presence of God and an effort to understand him. What unites and characterises the diversely and incompletely fragmented romantics is the effort to shed light on the aspects ignored or unnoticed by Kant and to reunify the image of a man. “Body and mind, senses and reason, reason and passion are not truly opposed. These are contrasting elements of the same unified – unified but not homogenous – reality” (Griffith-Dickson 2017). And they are such in several of the abovementioned areas. One of the most immediate and most important responses to Kant was religious philosophy. Not only was Kant’s transcendentalism from the very beginning understood prima facie, but naively and erroneously taken to be a philosophical movement that supposedly referred to what is beyond the limits of natural experience, but even less experienced readers could quickly understand that Kant wholly consciously gave up on the possibility of proving the existence of God.39 His understanding and religious faith was placed beyond the scope of plausible understanding. Thus, understandably, a group of dogmatic thinkers felt threatened, hence after the first publication of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant was the target of objections and complaints from the theological and political circles who defended the sanctity of religion. Critical religious thinkers presented a different type of reaction. Johann Georg Hamann – The Magician of the North (born in Königsberg, where he, just like Kant, attended the local university) – refused the “tyranny” of Wolffian discourse on reason (Coplestone 2003, 136), and equally he criticised the result of Kant’s abstraction – the identification of man with his reason. In Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft he condemned Kant’s separation of reason, understanding and sense or the

38 Cf. Démuth 2008. 39 Even despite the fact that Kant continuously and even obstinately kept returning back to the topic of the (im)possibility of proving the existence of God, as if he tried to cure himself of the trauma caused by abandoning his theological studies. Cf. Démuth 2010.

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distinction between the content and the form of sensuality and attempted to point out that the given abilities are only different activities of the same being, organism or person, which will always remain unified. Furthermore, Hamann believed that reason is not the sole or the fundamental prerequisite for cognition, quite the opposite, he claimed that faith (Glaube) does not limit cognition, but rather enables it. He asserted that all of our knowledge stands and falls with a certain form of faith, which lies in the essence of our cognition. After all, this is also proved by the affirmative nature of language. “Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it” (ZH 7, 165: 7–11 by Griffith-Dickson 2017). “Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind [Geist] nor bond of society” (N III, 231, 10–12 by Griffith-Dickson 2017). Hamann believed that “Every phenomenon of nature was a word, – the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas. Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word” (NIII, 32: 21–30). Beauty is thus a mystical sign of the divine language which has already revealed three of its aspects: firstly, beauty is the true incarnation of God40 in nature and humans. Therefore, it is not only its arbitrary trait (a subjective feature), but, on the contrary, its objective feature – a true incarnation (revelation, emanation) of God in nature. And it at this moment of incarnation as a creation that is the key for its theology and aesthetics. Secondly, Hamann realises that the experience of beauty is accompanied by a sort of divine value, honour, the experience of encountering something which exceeds us.41 An aesthetic experience is thus a form of mythical experience, which can be characterised by its sensuality, rationality, as well as certain degree of ecstasy – the elevation from the realm of ordinary experiences. And thirdly, Hamann uses the metaphor of a writer to describe God as the creator. In his book Aesthetica in nuce (1760) Hamann states that God’s works of art should be understood 40 Paul Guyer showed, that the connection between the beautiful and the God was so strong, that can be used as the highlight for whole German Aesthetics since 1790 to 1870 (see Guyer 2012). 41 Hamann explains this using the example of the painting Versuch einer Sibylle über die Ehe, and he plays with the Christian idea of God as a Trinity to depict a trinity of womanman-God in the moment of lovemaking (Griffith-Dickson 2017).

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as images, signs and ciphers, which he uses to speak to us (Dahlstrom 2005, 81). It is therefore important to pay close attention to his language and the understanding or interpretation (translation) of the Bible, or nature or a piece of art. This is what connects Hamann with Scheiermacher. Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (one of the founders of hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation or understanding) shares Hamann’s view on the priority of faith as opposed to knowledge. “Whereas Kant, in his own words, wanted to ‘deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’, Schleiermacher and his fellow Romantics (under the influence of Jacobi) seemed to want to deny (or limit) knowledge in order to make room for mystery, for a re-enchanted view of the word”42 (Pinkard 2013, 150). Schleiermacher does not situate the essence of religion or aesthetics in logic, metaphysics or morale (as explained by Kant and Fichte), but rather in religious or aesthetic feelings, which he also calls intuition. In his understanding, intuition is a sudden holistic insight (“one and all”) – a feeling which cannot be reduced to mere logical understanding, although it may be explained by it. In his concept, the role of art and beauty is to support religious feelings and the revelation of God, as well as his role in the real world. “This is an important part of the project of On Religion (1799),43 where he criticizes the sort of elevation of art above religion that Goethe and Schiller had begun and the romantics had then accentuated, complains of the trivial nature of modern art, and argues that art ought to subserve religion, as Plato had thought. (The early Schleiermacher was in a way strikingly successful in achieving his goal: after 1799, largely under his influence, the leading romantics increasingly turned away from art toward religion, and to some extent the same was also true of German culture more generally)” (Foster 2017b). Schleiermacher understood art as an expression of the mutual experience of religious feelings, and he considered only this definition to be its full explanation. Albeit in his lectures on aesthetics (1832–1833) he realised, taking hermeneutics into consideration, that as opposed to religion, to which he attributed universal features, art is more-or-less of a national and individual nature. This is where he elaborated on Herder.

42 Kant 1998a, BXXX; Schleiermacher 1958, 29. 43 Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799).

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Herder and Linguistic-Historical Holism Johann Gottfried von Herder took over some of the elements of Hamann’s philosophy, however, he placed them into a slightly different context. Herder, a  direct student and admirer of Kant (although they later entered a dispute), was influenced by Goethe, who in the 1760s and 1770s published several major manuscripts, even earlier than Kant’s third Critique. It was Goethe who sparked Herder’s interest in folklore, and together they compiled a collection of folk songs in Alsace. Herder and Kant understood that language plays a key role in the understanding and classification of the world. However, as opposed to Kant, Herder did not believe in any a priory structures and the universal character of language, but rather in the necessity for its individual and empirical study. Hence, equally he rejected Baumgarten’s notions of an a priori, hierarchical and deductively constructed aesthetics. However, initially he believed, just as Baumgarten, that music is a matter of sensory experience (of listening and feeling) and especially of the Kantian succession of objects in time and that painting and sculpting are expressions of observing (seeing) the dimensionality. Within this system, poetry is not only situated at the level of sensuality but it also interferes with rationality, since it focuses on meaning. It may thus seem that Herder and a number of aestheticians before him,44 would attribute a higher value to linguistic rather than non-linguistic forms of art. However, in the fourth part of Kritische Wälder. Oder Betrachtungen, die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen betreffend (1769) Herder realised that the hearing and vision are too contaminated and created by higher functions, memory, imagination, beliefs, convictions and especially by terms – the linguistics structures of classification. It is thus necessary to focus on that. Herder’s analyses of language led him to the conclusion that thinking in its various forms always directly depends on language. It is not possible to think outside of the language and thus the analysis of the structures of thought should in fact be the analysis of language.45 Yet, Herder ar44 For the parallels and mutual effects of the observation of the relationship between language and non-linguistic art in Schleiermacher and Herder see Foster 2017b. 45 This idea is often erroneously attributed to Hamann and his Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft, although Hamann postulated similar ideas in his work (finished in January 1784) and it is assumed that he did more than merely inspire Herder’s manuscript Verstand und Erfahrung. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799) – Herder and Jacobi had access to the manuscript before it was published in 1800, as stated by Herder

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gues that the fundamental component of language is not a word but the meaning. As opposed to the Platonian concepts, terms or meanings are language-dependent entities. They only exist in relation to other terms and the meaning of the terms is determined by its use within the language. Moreover, Herder believed that the meaning of the term is tied to a sensory experience, although there are undoubtedly also terms not directly related to sensory experience. These terms serve as extensions of the initial, sensorily experienced terms and meanings. This brings him back to the Locke-Hume understanding of ideas and thus he becomes a predecessor of the empiric (e.g. Wittgenstein’s) theory of meaning. However, what should be noted in Herder is that terms in various languages do not have identical meanings, since different languages work with different schemes of classification. “What we mean by words depends on an irreducible sense of normativity in their use, and our grasp of such normativity itself depends on our immersion in a way of life (a ‘culture’), which functions as a background to all more concrete uses of language. Since meaning and the expression of meaning is critical to understanding agency, and meaning is irreducibly normative, no third-person, pure objective understanding of agency is possible; one must understand both the agent’s culture and the agent himself as an individual from ‘inside’, not from any kind of external, third-person point of view” (Pinkard 2013, 133).46 In this sense, Herder influenced the Humbolds, Schleiermacher and his understanding of hermeneutics, as well as Sapir-Whorf’s linguistic-relativistic hypothesis. But there is even more to it. In the field of aesthetics, the second and third hypothesis on language implies that no normativity exists a  priori and universally. A  norm, and thus also a norm of taste, is always merely the result of an individual’s experience, formed by sensory input and the conceptual schemes of language. These are the sediments of historical knowledge – Herder deems language to be a result of historical knowledge – of what the romantics later referred to as Volksgeist. Herder thus realised that all experiences are affected by terms and convictions, and therefore the so-called non-linguistic forms of art are also affected by knowledge and language. Sculptors are thus the poets of mate-

when he attempted to defend himself against accusations of plagiarism – cf. Dahlstrom 2005, p. 78 – Herder, however, postulated his thesis about language several years earlier, in the mid-1760s (Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur – 1766–1767) and subsequently in the manuscript Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache from 1772. 46 Cf. Taylor 1995, 79–99.

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rials, they utilise their previous experience and knowledge,47 and so do the percipients of their art. Therefore, an aesthetic experience depends on the expression of artistic devices by an artist, their meaning in the given cultural context, our sensitivity to those expressions and their understanding by a percipient. And all of this changes within different eras. This is why it is only possible to assess an aesthetic experience “from the inside” – from the percipient’s  perspective in the specific, understood and experienced temporal and cultural context. Beauty etymologically derived from schön [beautiful] and Schein [shine, appearance], has since been extended from that original definition to cover virtually “everything that has a pleasurable effect on the soul” (Forster 2017a), and aesthetic norms are the products (the realisation) of the historical context, thus it cannot be assessed universally – outside the specific cultural context. This is the reason that beauty and art are always considered with their era and genre. For the genre represents the artist’s understanding of the artistic devices in the specific cultural context in which they live. A Greek artist made use of artistic advices, terms and forms characteristic of and appropriate for his time, while a romantic artist chose the devices he understood and which he expected to affect his percipient in a different way. Thus Herder assumes that, for instance, a classic Greek tragedy and a Shakespearean play are two complete opposites, yet in their aesthetic nature equal genres, just as Greek sensitive or modern abstract poetry. This means that our taste, our sensitivity to impulses, their understanding, and the experience of beauty changes over the course of history. Beauty is closely tied to feelings and affections, yet despite the identical nature of, for example fear or pleasure throughout history, the way these are expressed at specific times and what effect this has on us is not always the same. Therefore, Herder assumes the incommensurability of individual aesthetic eras and their equality, just as he does in the case of language and culture. However, what the entirety of art shares throughout all periods is its role. According to Herder, it ought to communicate certain values, especially moral values, in a historically and culturally appropriate manner. In this sense, beauty and art ought to cultivate and educate people, and this assertion connects Herder with Schiller and his ideal of a beautiful soul.

47 “The sculptor stands in the dark of the night and gropes toward the forms of the gods. The stories of the poets are before and in him”. (G4:317) as stated by Forster 2017a.

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Schiller and the Connection between Beauty and Goodness Although Friedrich Schiller had already written several of his theoretical works in the early years of his work, most of his influential works on aesthetics were written in a relatively short period between 1793 and 1795, thus almost immediately after the publication of the third of Kant’s critique (Guyer 2012, 344). Schiller’s main theoretical-aesthetic work was his book Kallias oder Über die Schönheit – Briefe an Körner, which was not published and its content is nowadays known as Kallias-Briefe or Briefe an Körner. Schiller begins his reflections on beauty by introducing a remarkable typology of theories of beauty. He considers both objectivist and subjectivist concepts in the history of philosophy, and also another classification of beauty according to whether it is the subject of sense or rational contemplation. Hence Schiller defined four basic types of the understanding beauty, two common ones – sensual-subjectivist (this type is represented, for instance, by the theory of Edmund Burke), or rational-objectivist (Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Moses Mendelson). A less common understanding of beauty is the one formulated by Immanuel Kant. According to Schiller, Kant understood beauty as being subjective, yet rational.48 On the other hand, Schiller postulates his own theory whereby beauty is seen as sensual, yet objective. The reason for Schiller’s view was that he believed he could erase the differences between Kant’s pulchritudo vaga and pulchritudo fixa – free and the intellectualised beauty. According to Schiller, the subject of the experience of beauty is the free game (the freedom) of imagination yet observing the objective appearance of objects. Therefore, beauty lies in a phenomenon, but the phenomenon is freely understood (autonomously). By the autonomy of its understanding he means that one needs no other explanation to understand it. Such a phenomenon is self-determining. We may thus say that beauty is a form which needs no other clarification or which is clarified without words. As an example of this form he proposes a wave, which clarifies itself based on its form, without the necessity for any other intellectual clarification. It is possible to feel a flow, spontaneity and regularity without the need to understand the laws and rules of mathematics. This leads Schiller to the definition of beauty by means of freedom, which he sees as naturalness. 48 One must agree with Guyer’s observation that Schiller abuses Kant’s understanding, by deriving subjectivity only through a reaction to an impulse, although its objectiveness is proven through the condition of being generally applicable and rational. Cf. Guyer 2012, 346.

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In a letter from 23rd February 1793 entitled “Beauty Is Freedom in Appearance” he defines freedom as the determination of itself – from within. This is, in his opinion, the definition of naturalness. He understands naturalness as the “pure harmony of the internal being with the form, the rule imposed by the object on its own and by which it is governed” (Schiller 1992, 54). And, of course, its synonym is non-violence. For Schiller, beautiful objects are those in which we do not sense any tension, strict rules, artificiality or roughness of the material or violence of reason. He claims that nature is beautiful if we are able to identify the rule it has imposed on itself. We like art if the technique and the rules which govern it are not forced but give a natural impression. In his reflections, Schiller refers to Kant’s citation from the Critique of Pure Reason, according to which “Nature is beautiful because it looks like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature” (Schiller 1992, 55). This reflection became the principal motive for Schiller’s next work – Über Anmut und Würde. In his contemplations of grace, he started by distinguishing between the natural – architectural beauty and its moral realisation. To exemplify this, he tells a mythological story about the Roman goddess of beauty Venus and the Graces (Charites). While Venus represents architectural and natural beauty, the Graces are not part of this representation. However, there is something that can bestow some of Venus’ beauty on them – the sign of her beauty – the girdle of Venus. The goddess of beauty may give up part of her beauty and transfer the strength of her grace to someone less beautiful or even someone ugly. However, this does not reduce her beauty because beauty is her essence. So, what is it that Venus can lend to the Graces? According to Schiller, Venus lends her grace to the Graces. “Grace is therefore not an exclusive prerogative of the beautiful, rather it can also pass, although only from the hand of the beautiful” (Schiller 1992, 72). Schiller understands grace as a characteristic of the voluntary and thus moral aspects of the object – especially movement. While fixed – architectural beauty is an expression of the structure and architecture of the figure (of the matter and the nature) and lies in the object itself, grace lies in its expression, provided that the expression is related to activity – the will of the given object. Grace thus lies in movement. But not just any movement. Beautiful objects do not necessarily have to move in a beautiful way. This happens, for instance, when their movement is not natural but forced by some circumstances. The natural movement of beautiful objects (e.g. Venus) is beautiful in its very essence. It is the expression of the harmony

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of their essence and their expression. Yet, Schiller realises that architecturally unimpressive objects may under certain circumstances borrow the beauty of beautiful objects by their movement. But movement is determined by a voluntary action, which, if governed by reason, may enter into conflict with the bodily material – with the nature within us. In such a case, the movement seems rigid, forced or unnatural, and it is no longer the subject of sensory experience – of grace. However, people can learn to move gracefully. It is possible to do so if their impulses of will, governed by reason (by learning and educating), influence the body in a way which we do not see as forced. In other words, when our mind and our body (feelings) are not in conflict but instead create harmony which results in an unforced, almost entirely natural movement. A person without the gift of movement can after some time, by learning and practicing, also become a good dancer. However, it is necessary to let the steps, the arm and body movements be governed by reason – to learn to dance as a naturally gifted dancer does. The movements of such a person will certainly be rigid, clumsy, rough and forced at the beginning, but after some time – as reason takes the bodily movements more into its own hands and the body gives in to it, the movement may become so automatic that it will become the second nature – even though driven by the mind, but spontaneously appearing naturalness. This, in the view of Schiller, is the essence of grace. Schiller understands grace as the second, acquired naturalness, in which our reason controls our will and our bodily naturalness in an unforced manner. And since beauty lies in expression, a graceful movement is one which does not appear to be acquired but rather to be almost natural, although it is obvious that it is governed by learning and thus by reason. The key idea of Schiller’s understanding of beauty thus is harmony between the object – its expression – and naturalness. And thus it is the harmony and wholeness (unity) of a man that has become the fundamental concept of Schiller’s romantic understanding of aesthetics.49 One of the major criticisms of Kant from the perspective of the romantics was his alleged fragmentation of man into reason and nature (the instincts, feelings, body). In this spirit, Schiller criticises Kant for his understanding of morality, which claims that the only and key criterion for the assessment of morality or immorality of conduct is whether the individual acted in accordance with the categorical imperative of reason, which he 49 On the unity of reason and the diversity of life (the idea of a system in Kant and in 19thcentury philosophy, see: Horstmann 2012.

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honours. Thus, if we save a small drowning child for other reasons – fear of punishment, love of its mother, sympathy towards the child, a reward, etc., our conduct is in accordance with moral law, but did not happen because of it, and, according to Kant, this is not wholly moral. It would only be wholly moral if the sole impetus for the action was the imperative of practical reason and its morally binding nature. Schiller is not very fond of this formalistic, strict and emotionally ascetic definition of morality, he literally dislikes it, even taking into regard the friendly and jovial nature of Kant himself. He states that “In Kant’s moral philosophy the idea of duty is presented in such a harsh light that all beauty is frightened away and the weak-minded could be easily tempted to seek moral perfection by means of a dismal and monastic ascetism. However much the great philosopher sought to protest against this misinterpretation, which must cause greater outrage to his free and serene spirit than it does to others, he has himself, it seems to me by the severe and startling opposition of the two principles which both affect human will, given a strong impetus to this misinterpretation (although this is perhaps scarcely avoidable, given his intentions)” (Schiller 1992, 103). “Never again may reason repudiate as unworthy of itself affections that the heart embraces with joy, and from now on that part of man which is supposed to be morally low cannot but rise in his own esteem... The will is to all extents more closely linked to the ability of perception than to the ability to learn, and in many cases it would be wrong to use pure reason. I cannot have a good impression of a man who lacks trust in his intuition so much that he is forced to listen to it firstly from the perspective of morale; on the contrary, we tend to value it if he succumbs to this inner voice with some degree of certainty and without the threat of it alluring him” (Schiller 1992, 106). In other words, Schiller finds the man who does good only because he must (sollen), against his will, more suspicious than the one who does good because he wants to. Hence his opposition to Kant’s fragmented ideal of beauty and morality is in the form of the concept of a beautiful soul. “One refers to a beautiful soul when the ethical sense has at last so taken control of all a person’s feeling that it can leave affect to guide the will without hesitation and is never in danger of standing in contradiction of its decisions... The beautiful soul has no other merit besides being. It carries out humankind’s most exacting duties with such ease that they might simply be the actions of its inner instinct, and the most heroic sacrifice that it exacts from natural impulse appears to the eye as a free operation of this impulse... It is in a beautiful soul that sensuality and reason, duty and inclination are in harmony, and grace is their expression as appearance (Schiller 1992, 107).

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Schiller’s ideal of a beautiful soul is thus the ideal of the unity and harmony of reason and feelings, affection and obligation, cognition and naturalness. It is an expression of freedom (in the form of a spontaneous internal desire) and form (as an expression of organisation and reason). Moreover, in Schiller’s understanding, beauty cannot be divided from truth and morality. What is beautiful must be good and vice versa, we like the good – it evokes feelings similar to those of an aesthetically positive experience. And it is perhaps the symbiosis of the beautiful, the good and the truth (the old ideal of Antiquity reborn in German romanticism) which is the most inspiring moment in contemporary neuroaesthetic and cognitivescientific studies.

Testing the Ideas of Romanticism in Neuroaesthetic and Cognitive-Scientific Research Variety, diversity and divergence of the theses and inspirations of the German romanticism offer a plethora of possible neuroaesthetic studies. Here, we must be reminded that one of the most remarkable features of the predominantly rationalist thinking of German idealism, including the anti-rationalism of German romanticism, is that it is almost exclusively based on speculative thinking. Neither Kant, Fichte, Schelling50 and Hegel,51 nor the German romantics were in favour of detailed and profound empirical explorations of their theories. Their conclusions were often drawn from sheer intuition or a rather speculative method of study. Hence it is undoubtedly surprising that despite this they often managed to postulate theories and claims which were not only later testable empirically, but often empirical research managed to discover facts and mechanisms that support their initial intuitions and has suggested that their philosophies may in various aspects be truly relevant and legitimate. The present introduction of certain inspiring cognitive-scientific aspects of German romanticism will only focus on the three basic facets (faith, cultural determinism, the link between beauty, goodness and truth). 50 Although frankly, the knowledge and interest of these representatives in natural sciences and empirical studies would often differ – from the biology-enthusiasts Goethe and Schelling to typical examples of rationalism such as Fichte. 51 Hegel allegedly made this well-known remark in reply to the objection that the facts refute his biological theory: “Umso schlimmer für die Tatsachen”.

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Hamann’s thesis about faith and mystical experience from the perception of beauty in an aesthetic experience does not, of course, allow us to verify whether it is the incarnation or revelation of the God in nature or in art. However, it allows us to consider and study the relationship between religious faith, or its neurophysiology and neural correlates on the one hand, and the aesthetic experience of beauty on the other. There are several observers who truly speak of a trance, fascination, of feeling a transcending value,52 the elements of a “mythical” experience when perceiving beauty. Slobodan Marković mentions fascination with an aesthetic object, and a strong feeling of unity with an object of aesthetic fascination and aesthetic appraisal as components of aesthetic experience (Marković 2012). These elements are also characteristic of a  mythical experience. Furthermore, they do not tend to be present in the case of other – common types of non-aesthetic (e.g. cognitive) experiences. Cupchik et al. (Cupchik et al. 2009) have shown that distinct cortical areas were activated when the observers were oriented to the pragmatic (right fusiform gyrus) and aesthetic aspects of the same paintings (left and right insula and left lateral prefrontal cortex). On the other hand, the neurosciences have demonstrated a number of important ideas about the experience of mysticism and beauty. Modern imaging technologies allow us to map, not only the neural correlates of a mythical experience or of the brain specificities of a religious person as opposed to an atheist, but also, which specific brain parts are activated when perceiving beauty and the aesthetic experience connected with it or any other cognitive or other processes happening in different brain gyri and networks. According to one of the most cited studies in this field (Harris et al. 2009), the brains of Christians and atheists display different activity in different brain areas, depending on the nature of the religious or ordinary non-religious experience. “For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgements of ‘true’ vs. judgements of ‘false’) were associated with a greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behavior. This region showed a greater signal level whether the subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with those regions of the brain that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks” (Harris et al 2009). In other words, religious 52 Fascinating, eternal, and unspeakable (Marković 2010).

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faith is linked to a higher activity in the prefrontal lobe, the reward area and the limbic system, while an ordinary experience does not generate increased activity in these areas. The experimental work of Kawabata and Zeki (2004) and Ishizu and Zeki (2011a) shows that the experience of beauty is accompanied by the activity in the “medial and lateral subdivisions of the OFC as well as the subcortical stations associated with affective motor planning (globus pallidus, putamen–claustrum, amygdala, and cerebellar vermis), whereas the motor, premotor and supplementary motor areas, as well as the anterior insula and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex” (Ishizu & Zeki 2013). In his studies, Zeki particularly highlights the importance of the medial-orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and its increased activity when perceiving and assessing beauty, as well as the activity of the limbic and reward systems. Coincidentally, these are the very same brain areas activated during a religious experience, feelings of ecstasy or a mythical experience. In addition to the indisputable differences in the extent and the structure of the neural correlates of individual religious and aesthetic experiences (which undoubtedly have different contents as well – not all aesthetic experiences are necessarily “mythical”), neurological research (Newberg 2010) has discovered certain agreements between the neural correlates and mechanisms of both types of experience. This enables us to think in analogies, as well as in functional correlations between both types of experience, which tend to be described from the first-person view by a phenomenologically similar or even identical language. However, the reason for such similarity does not necessarily have to lie in the metaphorical and analogical nature of language, but also in the identity of the neural components contributing to both (normally different) types of experience, which lead Eugene G. d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg (Aquili & Newberg 2000) to postulate the theory of the Aesthetic-Religious Continuum. The gradual establishment of neuroaesthetics and the particularly lengthy development of neurotheology are thus a promising step that leads to the empirical and cognitive-scientific testing of Hamann’s and Schleiermacher’s theses on the connection between faith and aesthetic feelings. The second important field for potential cognitive-scientific research inspired by the ideas of German romanticism is related to the cultural and historical determination of our aesthetic feelings and assessments. The romantics demonstrated how specific languages, just as specific cultures, approach the world in different manners and lead percipients to different perceptions as well as to different expressions of their knowledge and experience. This is also true for aesthetic assessments. Nowadays, it

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seems that it is already generally accepted that aesthetic taste is culturally and historically determined, although evolutionary aestheticians still indicate the existence of universal – especially biologically and evolutionary-acquired preferences (e.g. for the female body and facial attractiveness – Wilson & Brazendale 1974, Singh 1993a, 1993b, Perrett 2010, Dutton 2010, Buss 2011, Davis 2012, Buss 2014, 2016…). But the generally prevailing opinion is that individual aesthetic preferences are constructed both by biologically acquired evolutionary experiences (which may not be entirely universal either)53 and by social learning, and thus are a culturally-dependent individual experience (Rolls 2011). The task that is yet to be completed by cognitive scientists is the mapping of cross-cultural differences and an explanation of the historical context of the changes in individual or social preferences. Another scope for potential research is to discover the impact of the repeated exposition and the cognitive penetration of taste and aesthetic judgements by knowledge and convictions about the subject of the aesthetic assessment. As stated by Paul Bloom (Bloom 2011), it is very clear, both in the case of experts as well as ordinary non-educated assessors, that the result of an aesthetic judgement is often influenced by our beliefs with respect to the object of assessment, or rather what we think about it and its context. The Kantian ideal of a pure aesthetic judgement uncontaminated by anything cognitive or non-aesthetic, just as the phenomenological ideal of the radical epoch, which allows us to see pure aesthetic phenomena deprived of any personal or socio-historical burden (prejudice) is more of a fervent wish rather than a realisable phenomenon. This leads us to the third and possibly most important level of cognitivescientific research – the connection or separation of beauty and aesthetic values with/from aesthetic or cognitive values. Schiller’s idea of a beautiful soul requires harmony between beauty and moral perfection. Beauty and goodness are inherently connected, although in real life we may be able to find beautiful things which are not moral, as well as moral things which are not entirely beautiful. Yet we like good things and we tend to consider beauty as good – valuable. The existence of the phenomenon “beautiful is good” explains why beautiful people tend to be seen as good54 (Shahani-Denning 2003; Dion et al. 1972). And that is not everything. As suggested by other studies, attractive people usually find a (better) job more easily (Hosoda 53 See the differences in preference related to the female body depending on the nutritional sufficiency of the given ethnicity. Cf. Freedman, Carter, Sbrocco et al. 2004, 2007, Fisher & Voracek 2006, Dixson et al. 2007b, Marlowe 2001, Marlowe et al. 2005. 54 Interestingly, the opposite is not true (“Good is beautiful.”), or at least not directly. Despite the fact that we “like” the good (see below).

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et al. 2003), are more praised (Malouff & Thorsteinsson 2016), or receive milder punishment in the case of sanctions, to the extent that certain experiments show how lookism (an approach which assesses non-aesthetic qualities based on aesthetic qualities) and discrimination based on looks can be dealt with legally (Toledano 2013; Faigman, Dasgupta, & Ridgeway 2008, Démuth & Démuthová 2018). It may seem that the reasons that beauty is interchanged with goodness are a consequence of uncritical thinking or the influence of psychological or social factors such as the halo effect or other types of prejudice. However, the Schillerian confusion between beauty and goodness and vice versa has more profound – cognitive-scientific and neurophysiological reasons. As mentioned above, the neural structures that display increased activity when experiencing or assessing beauty include (inter alia) mostly the prefrontal cortex, mOFC, the limbic and reward systems. Yet, a large number of neuroethic studies indicate that assessments of moral or good conduct significantly match certain aspects of the activity in the very same functional and neuroanatomical structures. The “moral brain” composed of an extensive functional network, including the cortical and subcortical anatomical structures, activates the same areas as the “aesthetic brain”, in other words, both types of experience (aesthetic and moral judgement) employ the same mechanisms and brain structures. As proved by the research of Pascuala and his colleagues “Orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortices are implicated in emotionally-driven moral decisions and play a key role in encoding the emotional value of sensory stimuli” (Pascual, Rodrigues, & Gallardo-Pujol 2013, Shenhav & Greene 2010, Rolls 2000).55 Takashi Tsukiura and Roberto Cabeza proved that when assessing the attractiveness of an aesthetic impulse, the activity of the medial orbital cortex increases, while activity in the insular cortex decreases. However, the mOFC reacts in the same way when making positive moral assessments of hypothetical situations, which equally results in the lowering of the insular cortex activity (Tsukiura & Cabeza 2015). Other studies (Mendez 2009; Marazziti et al. 2013) have also reached similar conclusions (that moral evaluation is in particular tied to the activity of the left mOFC as in the case of aesthetic experience). Thus, this means that when evaluating the morality and rightness of conduct, our brain employs identical areas as 55 This area is equally involved in the online representation of reward and punishment (O’Doherty et al. 2003, Shenhav & Greene 2010). It has been shown that the right medial OFC was activated during passive observation of moral stimuli as opposed to the observation of immoral stimuli (Harenski, Hamaan 2006), whereas the left OFC is activated when processing emotionally significant citations with a moral value (Moll et al. 2002).

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those used during the experience and observation of beauty (Greene, Nystrom, Engell et al. 2004). A particular role is played by the activity of the reward system. The reward system represents the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop (Yager et al. 2015) and includes structures such as the ventral tegmental area, ventral striatum (i.e., the nucleus accumbens and olfactory tubercle), dorsal striatum (i.e., the caudate nucleus and putamen), substantia nigra (i.e., the pars compacta and pars reticulata), the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex, hippocampus, hypothalamus, subthalamic nucleus, globus pallidus, ventral pallidum, parabrachial nucleus and the amygdala. It is assumed that dopamine is assigned the role of neural mediator with a motivational significance, while the hedonic aspects of rewards correlate better with the opioidergic, gabaergic endocannabinoid activity in the individual brain areas. An important role in the reward system is played by the nucleus accumbens which releases the dopamine produced from the ventral tegmental area (VTA). It was long believed that the activity of this nucleus and the effect of dopamine causes feelings of pleasure and thus liking. However, today we know that for the most part the feeling of pleasure is produced by the non-dopamine-based mechanisms of the system and that dopamine rather plays a part in the anticipation of rewards and the motivation to search for them (Berridge et al. 2009). It is important to note that the nucleus accumbens releases dopamine as a reaction to situational impulses, as a motivator to continue to seek them. This means that when we like something, dopamine (we want a reward) as well as neurotransmitters of pleasure (liking) are released into the reward system which encourage the further search for rewards. In the case of primary rewards from biologically programmed needs (nutrition, sex, etc.), pleasant feelings are produced automatically. Secondary impulses abstractly derived from the original primary rewards require the activity of more extensive cortical and subcortical structures (learning, thinking…) and more complex processing. As shown by a large number of studies, the experience of beauty and moral judgements are both linked to the activity of the reward system. An attractive face or body as well as the morally valuable behaviour of a partner are a promise of future potential rewards for the brain. The beauty of a partner brings a higher probability of healthy and more successful progeny, an attractive environment evokes its higher ecological or economical quality and pro-social and morally good conduct, naturally brings a more effective and comfortable coexistence or cooperation. The situation is also similar in the case of the attractiveness of intelligence (Démuthová & Démuth 2016) and knowledge, which is the

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promise of successfully coping with the potential problems in the relationship or related with the offspring (Démuth 2019a). Perhaps this is also the reason why solving a problem and its understanding (the aha-effect) often comes with a feeling of satisfaction and intellectual liking (Muth & Carbon 2013) and activity in the reward system (Tik et al. 2018). The experience of satisfaction and liking of aesthetic objects or moral behaviour – goodness or understanding – the truth – is undoubtedly accompanied by a large variety of different aspects and details. On a phenomenological level of the description of the given experience, these may have significantly different meanings and often hardly associable contents. However, neuroscientific research suggests that despite the differences, variety and indisputable plasticity of the aforementioned experiences, it seems that liking or the assessment and experience of the value of “beautiful”, “good” and “true” things may, at the neural level, be derived from highly analogous or even identical mechanisms and neural correlates that accompany these types of experience. This, together with the previous argument on the uniqueness of isolated and non-holistic (e.g. aesthetic) experiences, implies that the initial Platonian concept, which was also later highlighted by Schiller, of the unity of beauty, goodness and truth has not only metaphysical, but also even neurocognitive reasons, and is not thus a linguistic mistake or the lack of thoroughness in thinking. Let us hope that further neurocognitive studies will enable us to have a more profound understanding of the associations as well as the fundamental differences of the abovementioned aspects of individual experiences and thus verify or reject the rightness or wrongness of the romantic holistic intuition.

F r i e d r i c h W i l h e l m J o s e p h v o n S c h e l l i n g ’s   C o n c e p t o f B e a u t y V i e w e d . . .

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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s Concept of Beauty Viewed through the Philosophy of Identity

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The successors to the transcendental idealism of German classical philosophy56 developed Kant’s  philosophy in a  critical and to a  great extent transformational manner. The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism, whose authorship remains in dispute,57 states that “the idea which unites everyone, the idea of beauty, the word taken in a higher, platonic sense. I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are only siblings in beauty. (...) The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy” (Bernstein 2003, 186). The aesthetic idea, joined with the search for harmony and links between fields of possible cognition, represent the horizon of thinking for German idealism – at least according to the way the Oldest Programme puts it. Notwithstanding the disinterest of Johann Gottlieb Fichte in thematisation of aesthetics, in the case of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel it is possible to rank the philosophy of art along with aesthetics among their central topics, as is also testified by part of their writings. The whole post-Kantian tradition of German idealism (as well as other directions building on Kant, such as Schopenhauer’s voluntarism or Husserl’s phenomenology) makes an effort to logically deal with the realm of noumenon (thing-in-itself, Ding an sich). Kant also outlined the idea of philosophy as a system, and this was transformed into considerations on a system of transcendental idealism, inspiring the authors to re-think the possibility of legitimately overstepping the boundaries of experience by means of dialectical thinking with the goal of the revelation and justification of the conditions for possible cognition, to defend the possibility of the synthesis of categorial opposites of nature and consciousness58 and bridge their dialectical opposition. It is necessary to realise that, when they created their philosophical systems, these authors had in their minds that they had to find the absolutely unconditioned principle59 and thus as a conceptual point of departure60 they 56 Terry Pinkard dates this period to the span of the years 1760–1860 (Pinkard 2013). 57 Jay M. Bernstein is inclined to ascribe the authorship to Friedrich Hölderlin, as the ideas expressed in this manifesto are closer to Hörderlin’s and Schelling’s thinking, notwithstanding the fact that this systemic programme is in Hegel’s handwriting (Bernstein 2003). 58 Epistemologically and ontologically the notional pair of “matter” and “form” has represented, from the times of antique classicism in philosophy, one of the fundamental explanatory frameworks for realistically or idealistically oriented concepts. In German classical philosophy it is thus nature (Natur) and spirit (Geist) that stand in opposition to each other. 59 The primary cause which is valid without the need for proof, as it is viewed intuitively. 60 In the thinking of these authors we may note that the theoretical foundations of their philosophical explanations are rooted above all in a priori deduction.

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prefer some of the fundamental metaphysical bipolar categorial pairs (subject – object, nature – spirit, matter – consciousness, relative – absolute, etc.), they move from the analytical towards the synthetic and vice versa and systematically develop the possibility for their indifference and immediate identity. This motion of thought, structured by dialectical discourse, establishes a possibility for unity and indifference conditioned by the validity of the logical principle of identity as a fundamental condition of cognition, which was also proven by Schelling’s work, System des Transzendentalen Idealismus (1800). Schelling defines cognition as an identity between the subjective and the objective – the image in the subject and the reality in the sense of the natural being; it is possible either to base it on the objective and justify the way in which the subjective joins it (that is, how in nature, intelligence can arise which cognises this nature) or establish the subjective as a starting point for considerations and explain how something objective can approach (that is, how the spirit gradually materialises, objectifies and the nature becomes intelligent), and at the same time in both cases to show the possibility for their mutual identity (Schelling 1990, 203–205). This may be considered to be the basic direction of the temperamental and experimental thinking of Schelling (Pinkard 2013, 172). His works tend to be classified according to which of his creative period they belong to, those being: transcendental philosophy, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of identity, followed by the philosophy of freedom, and lastly positive philosophy (Rockmore 2016). The chronology of Schelling’s works gradually reflects the influences of various authors. At first Schelling wrote in the light of Spinoza’s monism and Fichte’s absolute I – he published the writings Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795) and Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (1794–1796). Here Schelling ponders whether the difference between the subjective (activity and the notion of I) and the objective (the establishment of that which exists as non-I) is relative with regards to the third member: the absolute. The evidence of this principle has the status of “intuition” (Pinkard 2013, 175). The fact that the natural world manifests itself in the experiences of the subject is derived from the nature of the view of the absolute I itself (“intellectual intuition”, Anschauung) as the difference between the empirical I and nature, the world – meaning all that is different from I. In addition, the “aspect of philosophizing in principle cannot be a matter of ‘argument’ but a matter of ‘seeing’” (Pinkard 2013, 176). This attitude, as Schelling admits, dissolves the issue of the justification of the existence of Ding an sich.

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The subject views himself as one who stands on the boundary of the subjective and the objective, the one who draws the line between them. The fundamental conviction in his philosophy embodies the opinion that we do not possess enough arguments to sufficiently justify the existence of the absolute. If viewing the absolute is a matter of intellectual intuition, then its evidence in the consciousness of the subject cannot be mediated by determinant notions. Thus Schelling unifies the spontaneity and receptivity of cognition. Schelling, however, gradually departs from Fichte’s explanatory framework and along the lines of Spinoza he justifies the possibility of the adequacy of images with things-in-themselves on the basis of the identity of the mind and the nature as a pre-reflective unity – intuitively viewable, but not able to be articulated reflectively. By the publication of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature in 1797, and subsequently, in 1799, with the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, he established the so-called Naturphilosophie in German philosophy, a discipline which attempts to find an a priori grasp of the idea of nature with which natural sciences can work implicitly. In these works, he reacts to Newton’s mechanistic model of the universe, and through the prism of Kant’s teleology from the work Critique of Judgment he attempts to find a justification of nature as an organic whole (Pinkard 2013). He advocates a reworked version of the explanation of nature through the concept of the forces of attraction and repulsion and is inclined to the idea, which is transposed into his philosophy of art, that the concept of nature should be explained with regard to nature’s purposefulness. Thus nature does not represent “dead matter” and, following Spinoza’s  example, he assumes that behind “natura naturata” (natured Nature) there works “natura naturans” (naturing Nature).61 The fact that nature is an organised whole leads Schelling to the assumption that nature at its very core possesses a potential spirituality on various levels in different manners. Schelling remarks that if we are to be capable of thinking of ourselves as free and natural beings, then we cannot think in this way if we continue to perceive nature in a purely deterministic manner (Pinkard 2013). Matter possesses its own purposiveness without purpose, it gradually creates wholes of an inorganic and organic character, thereby creating for itself an “interiority” analogous to the way the human spirit (Geist) organises itself in history. The consciousness of man, according to Schelling, represents the highest goal in the transformation of nature 61 We can find the differentiation of the naturing and natured nature in Spinoza’s work Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677).

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from an unreflected form (matter) to intelligence (spirit). In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling writes: “Nature’s highest goal, to become wholly an object to herself, is achieved through the last and highest order of reflection, which is none other than man; or, more generally, it is what we call reason, whereby nature first completely returns into herself and it also becomes apparent that nature is identical from the beginning with what we recognize in ourselves as intelligence and that which is conscious” (Schelling 1990, 204–205). Man is an integral part of nature and it is through man that nature reflects herself. It may not be a mistake to say that by postulating the existence of a continuity between the material and the spiritual Schelling bridged the Kantian issue of the inability to cognise things-in-themselves, as nature is an autonomous being (reality) directed towards self-awareness. In other words, noumenon, that is matter, object and nature. The natural sciences describe the laws of intellect, which reflect the forms of contemplation, but those are products of nature, and that is why we cognise the purposefulness of nature per se, not only its phenomenal aspect. In the second part of the Critique of Judgment, the Critique of Teleological Judgment, Kant puts forward the opinion that nature is not an intelligent being and that the natural order which we cognise as a purposefulness of the individual objects of nature pertains to the reflective judgement – albeit as an objective (pertaining to nature) rather than a subjective purposefulness, but nevertheless in Kant’s opinion the cognition of the causality of nature as natural laws only concerns the area of “phenomena” as things-for-us (Kant 1987). The differentiation of nature (Natur) and spirit (Geist) and more specifically, the view and the notion, act rather distinctly in the discussion of aesthetic experience in Kant’s  understanding, and these categories preserve a certain tension in his system. The harmony of feelings with the form of viewing does not result in any objective cognition but rather gives us a certain image of our mind’s function in relation to the objects being viewed. Contrary to that, Schelling, as Hegel writes in his essay, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, “had implicitly brought to light what was the real upshot of Kant’s three Critiques, namely, that the sharp distinction that Kant seemed to be making between concept and intuition was itself only an abstraction from a more basic, unitary experience of ourselves as being already in the world” (Pinkard 2013, 219). When discussing the issue of the understanding of aesthetic experience in the way that Schelling conceives it, we shall limit ourselves to the System of Transcendental Idealism and his collection of works released under the title, Philosophy of Art (1802–1803). In the area of aesthetics, Schelling

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adopted the cognitivist view of the Romantic, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, who proposed a concept of beauty as an objective characteristic of an object which is the subject matter of aesthetic pleasure. In this way, he transforms Kant’s  explanation of the universal, albeit the subjective validity of aesthetic judgements of taste, by the statement that objectivity belongs to the essence of beauty. “Only the universally valid, enduring, and necessary – the objective – can fill this great gap; only the beautiful can stand this ardent yearning. Beauty (...) is the universally valid object of an uninterested pleasure, which, independent of the constraint of needs and laws, is at the same time independent, free, and necessary, entirely purposeless and yet unconditionally purposeful” (Schlegel 2001, 35 by Guyer 2014c). As Guyer notes, here the influence of Kant’s concept is not insignificant, but Schlegel does not consider the universal validity of judgements, if they concern universally valid experiences. The universal character of beauty belongs to the universal validity of the object as such – to its truthfulness (Guyer 2014c, 29). The goal of artistic creation is the depiction of a certain truth in a work of art, which stands in contrast to Kant’s assumption that artistic activity is a matter of the expression of the free play of the imagination and rumination. In other words, the purpose of a work of art is not only to satisfy the subjective feeling of liking and non-liking for he who creates and he who receives, but to depict an image sufficiently in line with the harmonious arrangement of nature. Aesthetic experience thus unites freedom and inevitability, purposelessness and purposefulness. When considering the issue of art joined with reflections on aesthetic emotions, Schelling perceives art as an organon and instrument of philosophy (Schelling 1800, 1990, 212). Similar to Schlegel, Schelling also made an attempt to rework Kant’s aesthetic concept of the free play of cognitive abilities into a theory of aesthetic experience as a form of cognition, in general. From the abovementioned analyses of the definition of cognition from the System we can see that the truthful makes a claim related to the adequacy of the notion in the subject with the object as such and the purpose of the philosophy of art is to show how unconscious and conscious activity can occur in the consciousness in the same moment. It is namely through art that the subject is able to recognise this dual tendency of consciousness, this duality of a lack of clarity and instinctiveness on one hand and clarity and distinctiveness on the other. “Through this constant double activity of production and intuition, something is to become an object, which is not otherwise reflected by anything” (Schelling 1990, 213). In his concept of nature, Schelling already outlined the image of nature as a “tendency”, an unlimited force directed towards creation, production. But it is not before

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the System that he ascribes the ability to reflect on the absolutely unconscious to the aesthetic act of imagination. The Oldest Programme states that philosophy should be aesthetic, that is creative, not repetitive. In this context philosophy is equivalent to art, and whereas philosophical reflection focuses on grasping the contents of the consciousness themselves and translates them into the form of an intellectual opinion, art makes these contents of consciousness, which also contain unconscious mechanisms, real and definite in its creations. The laws of nature are the results of – initially unconscious – tendencies of nature towards their development into the intellectual, the laws of human cognition are the product of conscious thinking, “while only art, as the product of both unconscious and conscious thought, reveals the unitary and active character of the thought that underlies all reality” (Guyer 2014, 41). The original indifference to the subjective and objective in human consciousness is displayed as the notional opposites of the ideal and the real, the natural and the intentional. This unity of opposites acts most distinctly in an artist’s creation, to which he is often led by some kind of impulse, that is, he is not capable of articulating why he creates the way he does. Of course, he may be inclined to a certain artistic style which he considers inspiring, but the reasons themselves for the origination of a particular canon may not be necessarily clear to him. Schelling believes that nature creates “on behalf of the artist”. Nature may be supplemented by reflection and purposeful intention, when the sculptor or painter stands back from his creation and adjusts it. In addition, during artistic activity the artist and the object which he creates act in unity, as the object contains the form of the artist‘s thoughts and that, in its turn, is a form of natural arrangement in the given configuration (Schelling 1800). Later, in the Philosophy of Art (1802–1803), Schelling identifies the immediate identity of the opposites present in the absolute with God. However, what is more important for our study, beauty, as Schelling indicates, consists in the free play of nature, which is fully realised in the medium of art. Through the synthesis of nature and spirit by means of a work of art an unconscious infinity is revealed – what Kant called the aesthetic idea of reason, which, despite resisting rational comprehension in its completeness, still has its origin in reason. In Schelling’s concept, this manifestation of objective infinity through the final product of artistic activity leads the author and the percipient of the work of art to a feeling of peace. He characterises aesthetic pleasure from a piece of art as the tranquilisation of negative emotions joined with tension which is rooted in the paradoxicality of a human standing on the threshold of the uncertain infinity of unconscious instinctiveness and the final character of the mind cognising through certain notions and particular

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images. In the author’s words: “The mystery of all life is the synthesis of the absolute with limitation” (Schelling 2007, 265). Later, Schelling’s concept had an influence on the irrationalistic concept of art in the thoughts of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Evolutionism in Aesthetics (and Its Relation to Schelling’s Understanding of Beauty and Art) An important factor in Schelling’s aesthetic concept is represented by the cognitive content of aesthetic experience. It offers knowledge of the solution to the paradox of the coexistence of the abovementioned contradictions, independently of the style of art that mediates this knowledge (Schelling 1800). In the Philosophy of Art Schelling defines beauty in the following way: “Since our explanation of beauty asserts that it is the mutual informing of the real and the ideal to the extent that this informing is represented in reflected imagery, this explanation also includes the following assertion: beauty is the indifference, intuited within the real, of freedom and necessity. For example, we say a  figure is beautiful in whose design nature appears to have played with the greatest freedom and the most sublime presence of mind, yet always within the forms or boundaries of the strictest necessity and adherence to law. [...] Accordingly, art is an absolute synthesis or mutual interpenetration of freedom and necessity” (Schelling 2007, 254). However, it remains questionable what exactly Schelling meant by the solution of the subject’s paradoxical situation. Besides, the cognitivist approach to aesthetics is also manifested in Schelling in the conviction that the beautiful and truthful are, according to the idea but also in themselves, one – ergo in the transitivity of these ideas which are in the same degree joined by the idea of goodness (Schelling 2007, 255–256).62 That could

62 The influence of Platonism and neo-Platonism may be clearly seen everywhere in the Philosophy of Art. The true nature of art exists in the depiction of archetypal images, thingsin-themselves, which are as strange forms contained in the absolute. That is in itself an indifference. The artistic creation itself has various degrees of expression. Depending on the rate of adequacy of the depiction of a certain archetypal image it then corresponds to the quality of the work of art and the rate of truthfulness of the expression of a certain idea in the real, ergo material realisation of the idea. “Particular things, to the extent they are absolute in that particularity and thus to the extent they as particulars are simultaneously universes are called ideas” (Schelling 2007, 261).

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mean that from study in the area of aesthetics we can derive knowledge that not only describes the way the human mind and its cognitive abilities function (laws of sensing, understanding, imagination, memory, artistic creativity, genius, taste and many other mental processes and contents) but also knowledge about the laws of nature which also operate beyond the borders of subjectivity. Last but not least, as it seems, Schelling may be interpreted as an evolutionist, if we take into account his thesis on the process of spiritualising nature. This concept could serve as a theoretical justification for why subjects with a more intellectual character have the tendency to prefer expressions of art that have greater demands on our understanding. Included in this type63 of art, we can consider the abstract and conceptual art in general, which requires a certain accompanying interpretation so that the subject is able to grasp the meaning of the work. The paintings of Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock enjoy popularity among that part of the audience who like to search for meanings. Similarly, in the case of poetry, we can consider analogous intuition, according to which, if the subject does not understand a particular form of art, he cannot like it either. According to a study carried out by researchers grouped around Rolf Reber, the hypothesis which assumes that the more fluently the subject is capable of processing the object, the higher the rate of the aesthetic response has validity (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman 2004). Psychological studies which attempt to map the relationship between the level of intelligence and aesthetic preference in the domain of artistic creation indicate the existence of a correlation between the type of personality, the intelligence quotient and art judgement (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham 2004). Using a sample of 120 university students whose IQ was measured using Wonderlic and Raven scores it transpired that those participants who displayed a higher intelligence quotient scored better in art

63 Art may be divided according to several categories, but one of the basic divisions we work with is the division into figurative and non-representative art. From the viewpoint of the recognition of the structure, composition and content of the work, representative or figurative art seems to be less demanding for the process of the identification of what is depicted, because, to a great extent, it imitates or displays something that is part of the natural or social (cultural, religious) reality. From the perspective of evolutionary aesthetics, it may be said that art copies the principles of the natural adaptation of cognitive mechanisms for the recognition of properties, objects and events. Such mechanisms should be responsible for an effective and relatively quick and precise processing of information. On the basis of experimental research, Christoph Redies in the article, A Universal Model of Esthetic Perception Based on the Sensory Coding of Natural Stimuli (2007), attempts to demonstrate that visual works of art are created in such a way that they induce a particular resonant state in the visual system, which is a result of adaptation.

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judgement and, in addition, that the type of personality may also influence the judgement of taste in the field of art. Empirical testing of evolutionary theory applied to the area of aesthetics also focuses on the question of the aesthetic preference for works of art depending on the personality type of the subjects. One of the indices for the determination of personality type is the openness to experience, which is related to the propensity for awe-like experiences (Silvia et al. 2015). Openness to experience represents one of the factors which may affect the preference for a particular type of art. A study on a sample of 104 university students showed that when the participants were asked to evaluate 15 realistic, 15 ambiguous and 15 abstract works of art from the viewpoint of preference, the more open participants did not have a dominant preference for any one kind of art, but “this difference increased as the art became more abstract” (Feist & Brady 2004, 77).64 Nils Myszkowski and Franck Zenasni consider the introduction of the socalled aesthetic quotient (AQ) which consists of several indices, including artistic knowledge, aesthetic empathy and sensitivity to complexity. The aesthetic quotient is defined “as the  global capacity to identify, explore, understand, seek stimulation in and respond to the elements, composition and meaning of art and aesthetic objects”, and it could represent a reliable concept for the prediction of the measurement of aesthetic sensitivity and creative potential (Myszkowski & Zenasni 2016). One of the consequences which arises from Schelling’s concept is the fact that we are not fully conscious at every moment and deeper, unconscious, processes of various kinds may often stand in the background of aesthetic experience and aesthetic preference, either acquired evolutionarily or conditioned historically, socially or culturally. Hegel in particular dedicated himself in his work to the three latter aspects of aesthetic perception. In Schelling, we can find the conviction that the task to point to those mechanisms which, although not part of conscious experience, still form content in our minds, still belongs to philosophy. It seems that this task has gradually been taken over, in the main, by the psychoanalytical approach inspired by the works of Sigmund Freud (Ehrenzweig 1949, 1953; Kihlstrom et al. 1992, Bishop 2009) and presently especially in the cognitivescientific discourse which attempts to describe these often unconscious mechanisms that work in the foundations of experience (common, aes64 A more detailed study of those forms of art which delimit themselves against meaning in an anti-tendential way might be all the more interesting. The absurd drama Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett or Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting depict the imaginary boundary between the granting of sense (meaning) to images and uncertainty, an infinite space for possible interpretations, perspectives, meanings, etc.

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thetic, moral, etc.) and the foundations of cognition (theory of perception, theory of information, neuroaesthetics, cognitive psychology, etc.). One of the central ambitions of cognitive sciences is to explain these mechanisms, originally inaccessible to the consciousness. On a meta-theoretical level, it may not be erroneous to perceive the cognitive sciences as an approach which integrates the subjective and objective poles of cognition. It focuses on the examination of the transcendental conditions for cognition on the part of the subject, which, however, then reflects on in the wider context of realistically oriented epistemological approaches. Focusing on aesthetic experience and art, there are a number of studies which dedicate themselves to the unconscious processes in aesthetic and art perception (Kaplan 1987, Dessender & Bussche 2012, Kandel 2012). Another consequence which can be derived from Schelling’s concept points to the option of viewing the issue of aesthetic experience through the prism of an evolutionary explanation. Schelling’s assumption of the gradual spiritualisation of nature laid the philosophical basis for the understanding of evolution as a blind mechanism of nature which spontaneously produces, or creates multifarious organised wholes (of an inorganic and organic nature), corrects its own mistakes and imperfect forms with the aim of self-cognition and self-reflection. Although this form of purposefulness, which should head towards its culmination in a full understanding of nature, remains in the plane of speculative assumption, we may observe its parallels with Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories. The evolutionary perspective has become successfully established in the area of research into aesthetic experience on various levels – from the description of evolutionarily conditioned mechanisms for the assessment of the physical attractiveness of the human figure and human face (Brewer 2009, Perrett 2010), through the description of affective states and somatic theories of emotions (Damasio 1994, LeDoux 1998), up to the search for neuronal correlates and mechanisms for the origins of aesthetic experience and aesthetic evaluation (Chatterjee 2014, Kandel 2016), etc. As stated by Randy Thornhill in the chapter Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics of the book Evolutionary Aesthetics: “Beauty is a promise of function in the environments in which humans evolved, i.e., of the high likelihood of survival and reproductive success in the environments of human evolutionary history. Ugliness (which evolutionary psychologists seem to prefer as a counter-thesis rather than the sublime) is the promise of low survival and reproductive failure” (Thornhill 2003, 9–10). The evolutionary paradigm presupposes that a certain type of beau-

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ty65 may include cognitive contents. Aesthetic pleasure may represent the reasons and benefits of various different kinds to provide our orientation in the world, and at the same time may not be part of conscious reflection, as it may be conditioned by unconscious processes. Or, pleasure that is accompanied by behavioural responses may be mediated via unconscious processes (Aldridge & Berridge 2010, Dickinson 2010). Deviations from Kant’s aesthetics are displayed in the fact that pleasure and liking may not only exist as pleasure in the mind derived from introspective reflection and may not only represent the components of conscious experience. The traditional definition of pleasure as a conscious feeling of liking (enjoyment) is usually connected with the understanding of aesthetics in the context of fine art. The classical notion of art as a medium of the beautiful and aesthetically pleasant came to an end with the onset of the avant-garde, ready-mades, pop art and conceptual art which loosened the link between the art and aestheticism. We may not necessarily like art and beauty may not necessarily be present in every work of art. Art may shock us, evoke terror, or negative aesthetic emotions (Démuth 2019a). Some controversial works of art by Andres Serrano, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and others may be artistically valuable but they provoke a rather negative aesthetic impression – they are not liked and we are not inclined to ascribe aesthetic value to them. Empirical and evolutionary aesthetics expand the notion of beauty with potential properties other than those derived from modern aesthetics as elaborated by critics of art and philosophers (DuBos 1718, Ruskin 1843, Bell 1914, Danto 2009 a. o.). For example, the thematisation of beauty, or aesthetic experience, through aspects of pleasure enables beauty to be considered in the context of hedonic experience, desire, mating strategies, physical attractiveness, reward systems and others. In this regard we can also find discussions on the ontological status of pleasure, its mechanisms, the relation of hedonic liking to motivational wanting and others (Kringelbach & Berridge 2010). It is generally known that evolution has produced feelings of pleasure in man, joined with some sensations from various other sensory domains, for example in the case of taste we are highly sensitive to sugar and fat, whose presence in food indicates its positive nutritional potential, and hence when we consume them we mostly feel pleasure. Analogously we may ask whether aesthetic pleasure derived from the perception of some object we consider to be beautiful brings information that tells us something or other about unconscious mechanisms which are evolutionarily conditioned and to what 65 Aesthetically pleasant feeling.

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extent it differs from other forms of pleasure or hedonic experience. As Anjan Chatterjee says, from the evolutionary perspective: “The pleasure we derive from aesthetic experiences is rooted in but not restricted to basic appetites. The pleasure of gazing at a beautiful person or an enthralling painting is not the same as the pleasure of sugar on our tongues. Aesthetic pleasures stretch beyond basic appetitive pleasures in at least three ways. First, they extend past desires by tapping into neural systems that are biased toward liking without necessarily wanting. The second, aesthetic pleasures are nuanced and encompass admixtures of emotions more complex that simple liking. Third, aesthetic pleasures are profoundly influenced by our cognitive systems. They are colored by the experiences and knowledge we bring to aesthetic encounters” (Chatterjee 2014, 111–112). We can see that aesthetic pleasure is not wholly reducible to hedonic experience but represents an intricate complex of emotional states. Further, aesthetic experience may not be conditioned by immediate sensory impulses (sensation) but in many cases aesthetic experience in fact occurs with the participation of higher cognitive functions – it presupposes our understanding of the assessed phenomenal content of consciousness. When studying aesthetic experience through the prism of evolutionism, the key notions which initially explained the origin of animal species are transposed into the field of aesthetics. One of the key presuppositions of this theory is the hypothesis according to which adaptations have evolved to solve problems that are caused by survival and reproduction (Buss 2016). We can ask whether, for example, artistic behaviour depends on evolutionarily conditioned mechanisms which are supposed to bring benefits to the ability to survive or to increase the chances thereof or whether it is rather a by-product of the mind which only incidentally carries cognitive contents. This question may be applied analogously to the notions of beauty and pleasure. We can find authors who assume that art represents a non-functional by-product of adaptations (Gould & Levontin 1979, Pinker 1997). Such adaptive mechanisms are, for example, the experience of aesthetic pleasure upon encountering adaptive objects and environments, the hunger for status and the ability to create artificial objects in order to reach the ends we desire (Pinker 1997). Art can mediate the pleasure from the play of contrasts, colours, tones, rhythm, etc., but without a further functional relationship between the evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation and the mental abilities which are activated in aesthetic experiences. The contrary, art-as-instinct, position argues in favour of the adaptive function of art and aesthetic pleasure. It is based on, for example, the universal presence of artistic behaviour, that has features such as ritualiza-

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tion, making something special (Dissanayake 1988), the preference for one strategy versus another even at the price of danger,66 where art represents a manner of sexual adaptation (Miller 2000). Dennis Dutton (2009) realises that art may be defined through a complex of properties (clusters), which may not form the necessary or sufficient conditions for the definition thereof. It is possible to consider the notion of beauty in an analogous way. Another type of the modelling of semantic content of the notion of beauty corresponds to its depiction in a conceptual space by means of the dimensions of the properties (Gärdenfors 2000, 2014). A similar attitude to the modelling of the conceptual domains of aesthetic emotions is represented by the so-called aesthetic semantics of Georg Hosoya et al.: “The authors used cluster and network analyses to draw up a highly granular conceptual map of the selected emotion terms. This map offers new information on the categorization and strength of associations between emotion terms that helps inform future conceptualizations and measures of specific aesthetic emotions. The analyses further revealed that complex and mixed emotional experiences of captivation, enchantment, and cognitive engagement are differentiated from emotions with purely negative or positive valence early on. The former emotions, which are regarded as typical of aesthetic experience, were found to lie at the heart of the conceptual domain of aesthetic emotion terms” (Hosoya et al. 2017). Pleasure, delight, attractiveness, etc. are often connected with aesthetic experience. On the other hand, it is necessary to note that depending on the degree of universality of the given aesthetic theory, or its specification, it is possible to expect a slightly different manner of the grasping and thematising of beauty.67 Physical beauty will rather be related to bodily proportions, attractiveness, masculinity and femininity, etc., which play a role in preferential behaviour. Contrary to that, intellectual beauty (or pleasure) will be bound more to the formal composition of properties, the structure of the content or organisation of the given object depending on the type of object that is assessed. Some aesthetically valuable works of conceptual art to a great extent depend on the ability to “read” the beauty through the

66 In the case of the widely discussed example of the peacock’s tail Miller explains that the sexual selective mechanism has prevailed over natural selection, since it disadvantages him when he wishes to hide (Miller 2000). 67 For example, if we focus on the perspective of the evolutionary paradigm, then, in the wider theoretical framework of behaviouristically oriented empirical aesthetics, that which we consider beautiful may represent a type of information in the scheme of input (recognition and selection of information) – processing (information concerning mental processes and contents) – output (behaviour).

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prism of understanding and knowledge. The same is valid for beauty in mathematics. However, it seems that cluster analysis provides a relatively suitable method for, at least, the preliminary clarification of the properties which are characteristic for the particular notion without us necessarily having to base it on a certain theory assumed in advance. One of the key assumptions of evolutionary aesthetics is the definition of beauty in the plane of its biological conditioning. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871/1981), Charles Darwin puts contemporary philosophical aesthetics into the referential framework of evolutionary conception and, in the context of sexual selection, develops his aesthetics of ornament within which he emphasises naked skin and its role as the primary ornament. As Winfried Menninghaus remarks, this aesthetic aspect of the human body was a means of expression already used in classical Greek sculpture. The tendency to embellish one’s body with drawings, tattoos, jewellery or other decorative elements is designated to bring ever greater emphasis to the attractiveness of the skin (Menninghaus & Skinner 2009). From the perspective of Darwinian concepts, nudity should attract attention, increase the attractiveness of the subject and evoke aesthetic pleasure. However, if we look at the phenomenon of covering nude skin, that could, with reference to the Freudian analytical psychology, indicate a “hidden” attraction which would ensue from the very image of the skin hidden under clothes. The explicit transfers into the plane of the implicit, which could multiply aesthetic pleasure. In other words, that which is not fully explicit attracts us more than what is understandable without any great effort. Empirical studies of biological beauty from the evolutionary psychology viewpoint bring a wealth of data about universal and trans-cultural criteria for the assessment of physical attractiveness which should signalise health, youth, and fertility in mating strategies (Streeter & McBurney 2003, Fink & Penton-Voak 2002, Little et al. 2011 a. o.). Similarly, the study of facial attractiveness has shown the important role of symmetry, which should represent a fitness indicator. That should have its evolutionary reasons and act as a factor in mating strategies. The mating strategies of women, as well as men, significantly rely on the symmetry of body shape and facial features (Buss 2003). Symmetry also fulfils its role in the waist-to-hip ratio, which in the case of masculine sexual preference is partly evolutionarily conditioned and to a certain extent also culturally and socially. As Buss says, the mechanisms of sexual preference, which depend on an evaluation of physical beauty, do not require them to be an object of realisation (Buss 2003, 91). We could say that these fitness indi-

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cators make themselves known implicitly through the perception of the attractiveness of their bearer. Similarly, in a study of preference concerning paintings depicting landscapes, it transpired that a painting resembling a savannah is cross-culturally preferred to a painting which depicts inhospitable conditions for humans, which again may have an evolutionary explanation – a landscape with trees, a source of water, flowers, etc., promises sources of nutrition and increases the chances that an individual will survive (Komar & Melamid 1993). Another experimental study in this field of figurative art has shown that individuals in general prefer a landscape which displays a moderate degree of complexity. A landscape with a high density of growth, as well as a plane without any points of reference, represent extremes which are perceived as aesthetically the least pleasant. A reason for this may be, for example, the assessment of this environment as one in which the subject might find it more difficult to be oriented, or the perception of this environment does not indicate a  wealth of information, for example nutritional potential (Stephen & Kaplan 1992). The subject may not be aware of these links with the evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, but nevertheless they co-form the aesthetic judgement of taste. In this context Chatterjee goes as far as to assume, that for example, the visual system of the brain may not only recognise and categorise the impulses. On the basis of the data available from scans of brain activity it cannot be ruled out that the visual system simultaneously evaluates this information. It has been discovered that at the same time that there is activity in the visual cortex the reward systems are also displaying increased activity (Chatterjee 2014). Denis Dutton also interprets aesthetic experience, especially through the prism of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In his book The Art Instinct he attempts to defend the conviction that aesthetic instinct and an artistic nature represent an inevitable and to a certain degree also purposeful part of human nature. In general, “Darwinian aesthetics will achieve explanatory power by neither proving that art forms are adaptations nor by dismissing them as by-products but by showing how their existence and character are connected to Pleistocene interests, preferences, and capacities” (Dutton 2009, 96). In Dutton’s opinion, the role of evolutionary aesthetics consists in finding a justification for aesthetic preferences, artistic styles and works from the viewpoint of their purpose in the process of natural and sexual selection with the objective to discover a functional continuity with an older period of the Quarternary. That then means that aesthetic and artistic preferences of contemporary man may be understood as an expansion of feelings, values and attitudes of the people of the Pleistocene.

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In Dutton’s words: “History and culture give us the artistic forms (epics, novels, paintings, poems) within which we evaluate skill and virtuosity, but our admiration of skill and virtuosity itself is an adaptation derived from sexual selection off the back of natural selection” (Dutton 2009, 175). The basic argument for Dutton’s hypothesis for the existence of artistic instinct is based on the fact that art is present in all cultures although the forms for the expression of artistic instinct show no common identity neither from the viewpoint of historical continuity nor from any mutuality between the individual cultures.68 The artistic instinct is displayed for example in the cross-cultural presence of fictitious stories which make it possible to imagine alternative situations and in that way to improve our ability to adapt to various situations. Analogously we may consider other forms of art. Dutton believes that beauty is explicable as well as other types of pleasure, for example food or sex, because some forms of beauty (for example the natural beauty of a lake surrounded by trees) have their origins in the process of natural selection. Other various forms of experience with something we consider beautiful (waist-to-hip ratio, and others) are related to sexual selection. Aesthetic experience thus does not only exist in the contemplation of the given object, and according to Dutton it often deviates from the Kantian concept of disinterestedness because it “forces” us to follow a certain form of behaviour – appetitive, protective, imitative, etc. Evolutionary aesthetics especially focuses on the universal (objective) aspects of the perception of beauty which form some kind of “matrix” for aesthetic preferences across individual cultures. This relatively young empirical discipline could be perceived as a promising aspiration for the detailed documentation of the unconscious (natural) mechanisms which stand in the background of the conscious perception of the beauty of people, natural objects or works of art. Aesthetic experience does not necessarily have to consist of exclusively subjective feelings without any cognitive content. On the contrary; it seems that aesthetic emotions possess a “rational core” which could thus be likewise accessible for the humanities- and nature-oriented research.

68 Universality, as the British modern philosopher John Locke remarked in his work (1690/1975), does not necessarily have to imply innateness. On the other hand, however, the non-existence of proof of innateness (of artistic instinct and aesthetic feeling in this case) is still not proof of the non-existence of such innateness.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s  Dynamic Aesthetics in Abstracto et Concreto

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The systematisation of philosophical thoughts of the German idealists during the post-Kantian reverberation among the representatives of classical German philosophy culminated, in Hegel’s thinking, in a form of the logical arrangement of being, which is documented by Hegel’s works Wissenschaft der Logik (1812) and Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817). The notion of reality relates to the sphere of the thinkable, that is, only that which can be thought is real. Therefore Hegel in the Encyclopedia states that being is merely a notion in itself and if it is to be determined, then its determinations will be mutually differentiated and they will cease to be being in itself, but will become entitative. The being which may be perceived along the lines of the Neoplatonic “Hen” (“One”) and the Platonic “ontos on” (“that which exists in truth”) is conceived as the metaphysical absolute (Hegel 1992, §84–85, 163). At the same time it is true that the metaphysical determination of being, as the absolute, an undifferentiated unity – simple non-determined immediacy – is not the only manner in which it may be conceived. This also occurs through logical (and dialectical) determinations. To determine what is being itself is not possible, because any definition requires another notion or image to act as an intermediate. Being, in order for it to be definable, flows into action – becomes objectified in the temporal-spatial plurality of the variable objectification, but within dialectics, implicitly it remains indifferent on its original level of existence without having to wholly deny its determination as pure consciousness/being. Being, insofar as it exists in different forms – in the modalities of its expressions – possesses a logic for its existence, because it is to that extent that it is cognisable and articulable (Hegel 1992). The abstract universal is transformed into a particular diversity. That which is originally being in itself (God) is materialised in its expression, which Hegel denotes as the materialisation of what is godlike. Hence, an important point of reference in Hegel’s system of philosophy is represented by the development of the self-realisation of the spirit (Geist), which conditions the movement of history and the gradual realisation of the abstract in the material. The spirit attains various levels in the corresponding modality – it is gradually objectified in the subjective, objective and absolute consciousness. The preference of the ideal to the real, that is the notional to the sensory, considering it with regard to the whole of his system of ideas, could be interpreted, quite appropriately, through the prism of the Neoplatonic structure of thinking. The one (being itself) transfers into plurality as a multiplicity (being in diversity), but always as a multiplicity of a certain unity (individual, culture, society, nature, etc.), and subsequently returns into itself enriched by self-experience and self-

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reflection (being in itself and for itself).69 The work Phenomenologie des Geistes (1807), with which Hegel gradually gained reputation in the academic sphere, outlines the skeleton of reality in the following way: “Spirit is the content of its consciousness at first in the form of pure substance, or is the content of its pure consciousness. This element of thought is the movement of descending into existence or into individuality. The middle term between these two is their synthetic connection, the consciousness of passing into otherness, or picture-thinking as such. The third moment is the return from picture-thinking and otherness, or the element of self-consciousness itself” (Hegel 2015, 514). We can see that historicity takes place in the process of enrichment of the consciousness by material contents, which in an overview of history show a certain degree of self-reflection of the spirit. As Frederic Beiser notes, historicity in fact represents a crucial concept in Hegel’s philosophy, which is based on two fundamental presuppositions. The first one is an understanding of society as the organic whole of its parts (Beiser 1993). The other presupposition links to Herder’s emphasis on tradition, which connects the present and past, and the adoption of the presupposition of the atomic understanding of history as a history of individual nations and their cultural expressions, conditioned by the language of the particular culture/nation as a specific and individual manner of rendering the world (Herder 1766–1767, 1772). Historicity and the triadic division of the process of realisation of the absolute spirit is also manifested in Hegel’s aesthetics. In his works dedicated to the examination of beauty and art (Vorlesung über Ästetik – 1821, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst – 1823) Hegel criticises Kant’s aesthetic concept of free play and most of the 18th-century authors who dedicated themselves to aesthetics, for example Du Bos, Heydenreich, as well as his contemporaries, such as Wordsworth or Shelley (Guyer 2014, 120–121). Hegel believes that taking the attitude towards art according to which art is purposeless from the viewpoint of cognition or morality would provide “only an empty form for every possible kind of content and worth” (Hegel 1975, 56). The highest purpose of art is to give moral instruction, to correct and ennoble, but at the same time to reveal the truth in a perceptible configuration of sensory images. In Hegel’s opinion man lives in a state of permanent tension between the temporal and the eternal, the 69 In particular, Hegel’s systematic structure of metaphysics may also be formally interpreted through the prism of the Neoplatonic principle of the emanation of one and returning to oneself through the plurality of its hypostastes (essences). Werner Beierwaltes believes that, starting with Proclus, the static-dynamic character of the arrangement of reality may also be viewed as a triad with the structure duration–departure–return (Beierwaltes 1996).

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natural and free, which flows into a formal opposition between viewing things “as they are” and “as they should be”, which could be overcome, not by consideration, but instead, by art. In Hegel’s words: “art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configurations, to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned, and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling” (Hegel 1975, 55). The goal of education through art is to make it possible to realise the spiritual content of reality, although it is always a sensory opinion that remains the medium of art. In this respect Hegel makes a link with the aesthetic concept of Friedrich Schiller, who emphasised the educational role of art. It exists in the assumption that art ennobles man, who exist at the time, into the idea of man and reconciles the opposition of the spirit and nature – the spiritual is to become sensorily perceptible and naturally reasonable (Hegel 1975, 64, Schiller 1974).70 As does Schelling, Hegel also goes in the direction of the cognitivist understanding of art, which mediates the truth about reality and for Hegel the essence of reality basically has a rational form. Contrary to Schelling, whose philosophy of identity he criticises for its denial of the opposition between nature and spirit, Hegel takes the position that reality is fundamentally rational, and irrationality, unconscious mechanisms and tendencies, are only a partial expression of the incarnation of the idea in itself into the material world, through which it may be fully reflected as an originally given spiritual being, but enriched with self-rendering and self-understanding. This structural moment of Hegel’s concept of history affects the possibility of the positive evaluation of the uniqueness of the subject. The subjective spirit (man) represents only a means for the realisation of the absolute in history, primarily in the form of the objective spirit (culture, society, nation with which law and ethics are connected) and subsequently as the absolute spirit (art, religion, philosophies). The equalisation of the individual is given by the apersonal image of the history of the spirit (Hegel 2015, 541). In his concept Hegel revitalises Baumgarten’s concept of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition (Baumgarten 2007). In Hegel the ideal of beauty acts as a form of perfection which denotes the realisation of purpose, that is reaching the goal in the process of the gradual self-realisation of the spirit. Perfection, as Wicks says, may be defined as the self-corre-

70 Wicks assumes that Hegel does not like the emphasis put on feelings and sentimentality in art by the Romantics (maybe with the exception of Schiller), as such an understanding does not conform to his teleological understanding of metaphysics (Wicks 1993).

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spondence between “what it is” and “what it ought to be”, and therefore the aesthetic judgement, despite being an evaluation, remains in the sphere of identity judgements, because it evaluates whether the current conditions are sufficient to meet the conditions of the ideal (Wicks 1993, 361–366). Truth is expressed as a form of perfection and it is explicated in art as the adequacy of the depiction of the idea of beauty through the ideal of beauty, which represents the sensory form of the depiction of the idea. That idea remains truthful to itself in its generality, whereas the ideal is subject to historicity. That means that ideal varies over time, from which Hegel also derives the individual historical forms of artistic style. Before we present Hegel’s triadic division of art, it is necessary to note that the natural beautiful is insufficient in its essence, as it is shown in the immediate reality, which is finite, limited and cannot cross the border of feelings, which is represented by organic nature with the exception of man. Therefore Hegel postulates the necessity for the artistic beautiful, which unlike the natural beautiful is internally free and infinite (Hegel 1975, 152). The truthfulness of the art then acts autonomously from the viewpoint of the depiction of beauty and develops as an external reality (sensory opinion), which makes the internal reality of the self-determination of the idea accessible and materialises it, that is, it assigns its adequate content. However, the exclusively figurative character of art shows varying degrees of assignments of the formal to the material. The historical movement from the sensory to the intelligible may be rendered in two different planes. The first, more general one, concerns the unveiling of three modi existendi of the absolute spirit – art, religion and philosophy. Those are capable of, in different ways, mediating the metaphysical cognition. The other, more material plane, is concerned with the internal, differentiated expressions within each of the three mentioned forms of the absolute spirit. In the  wider context of Hegel’s  concept, art, religion and philosophy serve the same purpose that is “they give form to a civilization’s constellation of intrinsic values” (Wicks 1993, 351). In a particular historical era and phase of development, one of these external forms of the expression of values, attitudes and opinions (which are an expression of the respective culture in its history or are an expression of a particular stage of that civilisation) dominates. As its means of expression, art, uses sensuality, religion uses imagination, but religion, unlike art, can more clearly and distinctly express its spiritual content, which points to “what is godlike”. In the case of art and religion the spirit does not yet fully reflect itself as spirit. Hegel particularly deals with the issue of religion in the work Philosophie der Religion (1832). In religion the absolute initially acts as polytheism and gradu-

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ally heads towards monotheism, whereas the truth of the religion consists in the clarification of the relationship between man and God (Dickey 1993, 309). Alongside art and religion, as independent expressions of the absolute spirit, Hegel distinguishes philosophy, whose domain is the area of notions. It is only within philosophy that the spirit gradually comes to fully reflect itself, and philosophy in its final form cognises the self-laying of the absolute spirit in the form of pure reflection without any materiality (Hegel 1988). The purely conceptual plane of philosophising grasps the notion of the notion. In other words, the spirit views itself and in this modality it is simultaneously aware that it is the absolute spirit, as the subject and object, of its own reflection. All three domains have their social and historical context. Within the philosophy of history (cf. e.g. Philosophie der Geschichte – 1837) Hegel differentiates three historical moments of civilisation – preGreek, Greek and Christian epochs, and this scheme of the individual levels of the historical development is also applied to the consideration of art. Hegel realises that from the viewpoint of the expression of the ideal, a work of art has three aspects: 1) an abstract exterior, for example spatial location, time, colour, regularity, symmetry, etc.; 2) harmony of the work of art with the subjectivity of the percipient situated in their surrounding area and the work of art is expected to point to the mutual belonging of the external being (nature) and the interiority of man; 3) an appeal to the audience to reach harmony with the subject depicted in the work of art (Hegel 1966, 203). The work of art should render the contemporary feelings of man and his “reading” of reality, in order to put man into a harmonious relationship with the world which surrounds him. If we were to characterise the significant features of individual artistic expressions with regard to the particular era in history, we could do so through a more general scheme of transition from the material to the spiritual. On the basis of the three abovementioned historical periods Hegel distinguishes three fundamental artistic forms or artistic styles within the history of art: symbolic, classical and romantic. Each one of these styles of art is characteristic of a certain period in history. The symbolic style of art was typical in the ancient civilisations of the Orient, where the material dominated over form. The manner of expression of the spiritual content of symbolic art is “crude” and vague in comparison to later forms of art, as a symbol in its essence remains ambiguous (Hegel 1975, 306). “The symbolic, that is to say, in our meaning of the word, at once stops short of the point where, instead of indefinite, general, abstract ideas, it is free individuality which constitutes the content and form of the representation. For an individual it is himself and his own self-explanation which

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is significant. What he feels, reflects, does, accomplishes, his qualities, his actions, his character, are himself; and the whole range of his spiritual and visible appearance has no other meaning but as the person who, in this development and unfolding of himself, brings before our contemplation only himself as master over his entire objective world. Meaning and sensuous representation, inner and outer, matter and form, are in that event no longer distinct from one another; they do not announce themselves, as they do in the strictly symbolic sphere, as merely related but as one whole in which the appearance has no other essence, the essence no other appearance, outside or alongside itself” (Hegel 1975, 313). Whereas in the symbolic form of art that which is divine has the form of natural forces, or the symbolism of the divine is manifested through natural meanings, that which gradually comes to the foreground in the classical art is man’s subjectivity itself, and his spiritual individuality begins to show more clearly. The full expression of classicism in art is the identification of the natural and the spiritual, which is shown in the Greek depiction of the human body as a form of perfection. The beauty of the human figure as depicted in the sculptures by Greek artists renders the ideal of beauty in the form of the internal cohesion of the spirit and body of man, who knows what he wants; who knows the means and abilities he requires to reach his goals. This moment is obvious from the technical skill of the classical artist with regard to the sensory material he works with (Hegel 1966, 235–237). In Hegel’s words: “this form did not remain, as it did at the first stage, purely superficial, indeterminate, and not penetrated by its content; on the contrary, the perfection of art reached its peak here precisely because the spiritual was completely drawn through its external appearance; in this beautiful unification it idealized the natural and made it into an adequate embodiment of spirit’s own substantial individuality” (Hegel 1975, 517). In Hegel’s opinion, however, the anthropocentrism of classicism in art resulted in anthropomorphism, that is the depiction of the divine as essentially human, which resulted in the re-evaluation of the classical artistic style in history; with the onset of the Christian historical epoch the image of the divine is modified. It is no longer the divine which is the exposition of the human, but the divine which is eternal in its essence and which, so to speak, cognises its eternity through man and his artistic creations.71 71 It is necessary to bear in mind that within individual historical epochs, religious and philosophical conceptions have likewise developed simultaneously with art and to a certain extent they influence one another. So for example in the case of Greek classicism the polytheistic religion operates and philosophy develops, which begins to emphasise the notion of a single divine principle standing above polytheism.

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The onset of the romantic form of art is linked to the conviction that the external reality tied to the sensory domain does not represent an adequate manner of expressing the spirit. The spirit returns from external expression back to intimacy that is to its most inherent content. Spiritual beauty becomes more essential than sensory beauty. In this respect Hegel emphasises that humanity represents the real subjectivity of the spirit, because it best expresses self-realisation and moral freedom. Humanity as the ideal of artistic beauty at the same time contains the moment of good and truth in itself and the perfection of the depiction resides in the ability to make the principles of humanity perceptible. It is necessary to step beyond the physical aspects of men, in order for his spiritual values to shine. Romanticism in art depicts, for example, the incarnation of God in man (Jesus Christ); the meaning of death changes, through the beginning of the afterlife, topics such as heroism, sacrifice, love, salvation, etc. dominate (Hegel 1966). At the same time, through the romantic artistic style, art reflects the notion of art. The second part of Hegel’s Aesthetics is dedicated to a tighter specification for fine art. He analyses it from the viewpoint of the proportionality of matter and spirit, starting from those forms of art in which the idea is embodied in matter and ends with those forms of art in which the idea is expressed in a notional way and the material dimension is gradually lost. He divides fine art into five categories: architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. Architecture works with all three dimensions of matter. On the contrary, in sculpture, despite of its using a specific material, it is still the shape and the detail of the depiction that comes to the foreground. Painting aims to depict three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane, consequently the imagination is involved in the process to a far greater extent. Music, which uses the medium of sound, and poetry, which uses language as its means of expression, are, in Hegel’s opinion, non-spatial forms of art. In particular poetry represents the ideal of beauty as an intelligible content unified with the form of its expression, as it is based on a conceptual dimension (Hegel 1975). Hegel’s aesthetic conception may be interpreted as the development of his metaphysical concept of the non-personal objectification of the absolute spirit. Julia Peters, on the contrary, assumes that equalisation of the individual does not occur, because in her opinion the purpose of art in Hegel’s aesthetics is the self-understanding of man (Peters 2015). However, if we take into account the autonomy of the spirit, which originally existed as pure consciousness in itself and has arrived at self-reflection through sensory, volitive and rational objectification, then considerations about

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art allowing the individuality, originality or genius of an individual to be seen maybe merely represent man’s self-deception. With his ideas Hegel inspired many authors to re-think his aesthetic conceptions (e.g. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Adorno).72 Art, the ideal of beauty, aesthetic judgement, taste and aesthetic preferences have their historical, cultural and social contexts. In other words the era, society and culture condition the manner in which we approach the issue of beauty, aesthetics and artistic value. The society contributes to the formation of an aesthetic ideal which will not be the result of a free aesthetic “decision” by an individual. He always understands and views reality through the prism of the historical and cultural horizon in which he finds himself. Herder’s perspective which Hegel incorporates into his aesthetic project converges towards the relativisation of aesthetic or artistic criteria which are formulated in a particular historical period or within a particular aesthetic theory. Every historical era then shows a specific understanding of the issue of aesthetic emotions and taste judgements. Due to this it appears to be most problematic to find universal criteria for the definition of beauty, as they will never be sufficient to provide a total understanding of all the manners of its expression in all the individual historical periods, or, to a certain degree, even between individual cultures of the same historical period. It may not be a mistake to state that Hegel’s aesthetics eventually legitimised the variability and diversity of notions of beauty and enables a focus on the relative aspects of beauty in a synchronous and diachronous respect even despite the fact that such a perspective offers a final list of the possible artistic styles from the viewpoint of their form. Last but not least, Hegel remarks that aesthetic perception may be influenced by the understanding of the ideological and moral context of the artistic work or aesthetic object and at the same time that aesthetic perception may also be determined by education (Hegel 1975, 215–216). Thus the question of the nature of the contemporary culture is raised, indirectly and linked with it are also questions of whether and to what degree, for example, the process of globalisation is reflected in the perception of beauty from the viewpoint of cultural values which are identified as being important by society. The social context of aesthetic experience may refer to a wide range of factors including economic, political or fashion

72 A special topic, which acts as a stimulus for extensive discussions on art-theory and philosophy, is Hegel’s thesis about the end of art which relates to grasping the notion of art through romantic artistic style (Hegel 1975, 10–11). For more detail see: Adorno 1997; Danto 2003.

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trends which are present in the social space. It is then questionable to what degree individuals identify for instance with the ideals of beauty presented in the media. We can see that Hegel prepared the theoretical groundwork for empirical research into cultural evolution as well as into the abovementioned determinants of aesthetic perception.

Empirical and Cognitive-Scientific Research into the Social and Cultural Context of Aesthetic Experience Evolutionary psychology and cognitive-scientific research into the biological roots and determinants of aesthetic experience focus particularly on the universal, biological aspects of beauty, but one of the questions that researchers ask, especially in the field of social psychology, concerns the cultural, historical and social factors which may influence aesthetic perception and the evaluation of beauty (Jacobsen 2010). Specialist literature also often mentions the differentiation between nature and nurture (Mackinnon 1962, Cross 1990, Tomasello 2000, Feist 2010). Cultural influences may build upon biological preconditions and may boost or weaken their influence on the evaluation of beauty and attractiveness. For example, the universal preference by men for female figures meeting the waist-to-hip ratio of 0.70 varies depending on economic conditions. In poorer countries men prefer more rounded, chubbier figures, whereas in countries which are economically prosperous, slimmer figures are considered more attractive (Chatterjee 2014, 64–65). It is possible to arrange research into the cultural conditioning of aesthetic experience into two different aspects. The first approach focuses on a synchronous viewpoint and studies the aesthetic evaluation of a stimulus, by different cultures at the same time, or applies the so-called isochronous research which compares the differences between participants with different cultural background over a relatively short time span. The other approach, which applies the diachronous viewpoint, focuses attention on historical changes in the aesthetic perception within a particular culture. As Mark W. Baldwin notes, the self-understanding of an individual cannot be defined in isolation from the relationship schemes and understanding of the subject in the interpersonal space. He defines relational schemas as “cognitive structures representing regularities in patterns of interpersonal relatedness” (Baldwin 1992, 461). This scheme contains an interper-

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sonal script for an interaction pattern, a  self-schema that expresses understanding of the self in interpersonal interactions and a scheme for the other person in this interaction (Baldwin 1992). The subject understands himself through his relationship to others, with whom he identifies or, on the contrary, in his opposition to those he does not agree with, and thus the social context cannot be wholly separated from the self-understanding of the individual. Christoph Redies proposes a model of aesthetic perception which might be a suitable supplement to Baldwin’s concept of relationship schemes. In his study Redies combines formalism and contextualism in art. The perception of the form of a work of art is the result of bottom-up mechanisms in the brain, with bottom-up processing being universal and trans-cultural. He also calls this phase, perceptual processing. In addition, aesthetic perception also depends on the context in which the work of art is presented; it is linked with the author’s intentions, etc. In this case, Redies speaks about cognitive processing, which is partly conditioned by top-down mechanisms of information processing and is specific to the individual dependent on the percipient’s  cultural experience. The aesthetic experience originates when both processes (aesthetics of perception and aesthetics of cognition) fit together, although both systems work in parallel. At the same time he believes “that this combinational mechanism has evolved to mediate social bonding between members of a (cultural) group of people” (Redies 2015). Cultural determinants, including economic or political factors, have a  diverse character and relate to various areas of aesthetic experience, for example sexual preference, creativity, manner of dressing, etc. Mating strategies may be markedly specific cross-culturally and the criteria for the selection of a partner may change over the course of time within a particular culture. The study of Chang Lei et al. studied the view of Chinese society on the requirement for virginity in the search for a partner. In the 1980s an overwhelming majority of men and women did not consider the possibility of entering into marriage if the potential partner had had a sexual relationship in the past. Over the course of three decades Chinese culture has adopted a more liberal view, but the requirement for virginity has not altogether disappeared (Lei et al. 2011). David Buss compares the view of Chinese culture with the Scandinavian states, where the criterion of virginity is not decisive in partner selection. He justifies it with the high divorce rate in these countries and at the same time he believes that the environment in which the child is raised later influences their preferential strategies in partner selection. Children who grow up in a stable family environment have a tendency to seek a stable romantic relationship in adult-

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hood, whereas individuals who grew up in unstable environment are not inclined towards long-term relationships (Buss 2016, 341–343). Gidi Rubenstein in his research focused on the comparative evaluation of the influence of political convictions on the creativity of students of design, behavioural sciences and the law. He compared authoritative and liberal political attitudes in a sample of 108 students at a university in Israel. According to the Tel-Aviv Creativity Test, which evaluates the ability, in a limited time, to list the number of possible uses of everyday objects and the manners of interpretation of abstract paintings, those students who held conservative political opinions manifested a lower level of creativity than the liberally oriented students. At the same time their political preferences showed a linear relationship with their selection of study specialisation. Students with liberal political opinions studied design, those less liberal, behavioural sciences and most students of law identified with conservatism (Rubinstein 2003). The studies of Stephen Dollinger confirmed the results of Rubinstein’s study on a sample of 418 university students (Dollinger 2007). A field where the influence of social norms and the convictions held by an individual on what constitutes beauty can be seen very clearly is undoubtedly fashion. Depending on the adoption of a particular conviction or value, the character of the aesthetic experience with regard to the same object may also change. Marcia M. Eaton states that in comparison with the period during World War II the ideal prototype of a  female fashion model has changed. In the forties, a markedly slimmer prototype of the ideal female figure gradually began to assert itself in Western culture, which has persisted to this day and corresponds to the ideal measurements of the circumference of the breasts, waist and hips expressed by the numbers 90-60-90 (in centimetres). Under the influence of this trend, many young women battle bulimia or anorexia to achieve these ideal measurements (Eaton 2010). It seems that in fashion, beauty enters the context of current trends, which are promoted by the fashion industry. Angela McCracken thematises the beauty industry along the lines of the global political economy of beauty. She notes that the globalisation of beauty does not mean the simple spread of Anglo-American ideals of beauty beyond the borders of Western culture. The global economy of beauty is not monolithic but shows complex properties, such as: “beauty as a trade, fashion cosmopolitanism and global branding, the imperative to be considered beautiful, fashionable, and thin, and historically new forms of sexual dance” (McCracken 2014, 3). That, however, does not mean the adoption of one static ideal of beauty but rather that this global economy of beauty influences

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its consumers and vice versa. Digital technologies have in fact made such globalisation of fashion possible. One of the consequences of the beauty industry is the feminisation of beauty, which, according to some authors, especially those among the promoters of feminism, has resulted in the impossibility of the achievement of gender equality between women and men (Wolf 1990). In this regard, for example, recently a so-called unisex fashion has started to appear. Daniel Hamermesh attempts to show how man “trades” beauty and physical appearance in order to acquire various social benefits, financial or otherwise. Similar to McCracken, he also speaks about the so-called economics of beauty, within which beauty does not exist in some disinterested contemplation, but enters the social game of interpersonal relationships, benefits, serves as a criterion for the evaluation of work performance, influences the possibility of gaining an important work position, a higher salary evaluation, etc. (Hamermesh 2011).

A r t h u r S c h o p e n h a u e r, S ø re n K i e r k e g a a rd a n d Fr i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e. . .

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Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche – the Aesthetics of Will

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A r t h u r S c h o p e n h a u e r, S ø re n K i e r k e g a a rd a n d Fr i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e. . .

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Hegel’s totally rationalistic, systematics-subjected and subject-annihilating aesthetics provoked a wave of disagreement and resistance immediately after its publication. Hegel understood art as a sensory expression of the historical objectification of the absolute spirit and ignored the real importance of the individual. It is perhaps then only understandable that his aesthetics especially appalled those who perceived the subjective facets of beauty and importance of the individual, but also those other than only rational factors in art. Probably the most distinct wave of reaction to Hegelian aesthetics came from the irrationalist aesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. From this trio Arthur Schopenhauer undoubtedly had the greatest influence on philosophers and artists.73

Schopenhauer and the Aesthetics of the Anaesthesia of Will Schopenhauer – the ideological rival and enemy of Hegel – criticised Hegel’s concept and was inclined more towards Kant and his interpretation of the world. However, as the tendency, to criticise the enemy often imprints upon the critic the categories and ideas of his opponent and following a teacher often leads us to overcome him. Thus we may also find elements of Hegel’s system in Schopenhauer’s thinking, as well as disagreements and deviations from Kantian aesthetic thinking.74 In the third volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung Schopenhauer begins his aesthetics with a return to the Baumgartenian thesis on sensory and non-conceptual viewing. Unlike Kant, who says that “[t]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A50–51/ B74–75), Schopenhauer believes in the existence of pure cognition, which is 73 Kai Hammermeister identifies Schopenhauer’s influence on the works of Friedrich Hebbel, August Strindberg, Thomas Hardy, Emil Zola, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Edgar Alan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Stephané Mallarmé, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, Jorge L. Borges, Thomas Bernhard and Arno Schmidt, the painter Eugene Delacroix; the composers Richard Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergey Prokofiev, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov as well as numerous others (Hammermeister 2002, 111), whereas Sandra Shapshay adds also Friedrich Nietzsche, Johannes Brahms, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Horkheimer, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Gustav Mahler… (Shapshay 2018). 74 For a better understanding of the differences between Schopenhauer’s and Kant’s thinking, see Guyer 2012.

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not contaminated by concepts and reason. And it is particularly this pure sensory cognition, “intuitive cognition” [intuitive Erkenntniß], “knowledge of perception” [anschauliche Erkenntniß] or “feeling” [das Gefühl] that is the foundation of his aesthetics. The world which we view and cognise is, according to Schopenhauer, only an idea which is inevitably produced by the cognitive apparatus we possess. That necessarily results in two things. The first is that we do not view the world as it is, but only as it appears to us, or, how we imagine it. Schopenhauer, however, does not overcome this Kantian factor with a deeper subjectivism, or the absolute reason, but instead finds the conquest of the Ding an sich in the Spinozan and Schellingian path that heads towards the more primeval foundation of being – towards nature. Unlike Schelling, however, Schopenhauer does not remain anthropocentric and realises that the objectification of the will in nature had taken various directions and that human existence is only one, equally valuable as others. This is the other factor which Schopenhauer also applied in his ethics. In addition, the basis of everything, in Schopenhauer’s opinion, does not exist in a  hidden and unconscious intelligence, but rather in a  blind and existence-wanting will and intelligence is only one of the means through which, will ensures its being. In its objectification, the blind will to exist makes way for itself in all directions and one of those was the creation of the Kantian subject, with a view in space and time and through the unity of aperception. The problem with this type of view is that it is bound by the architecture of its own rationality and subjectivity. And it is namely the subject and associated laws that represent a problem for Schopenhauer which he tries to overcome. The traditional cognitive notions of the world are in essence pragmatic – focusing on the fulfilment of the demands of the individualised will, and that is why they always contain not only spatial and temporal viewing forms but also the awareness of one’s own subjectivity – self – and in the sense of “the principle of sufficient reason” also the appetency of the egoistic will. But the aesthetic view is not like that. Schopenhauer noticed that in art, or when viewing the beauty of the world, a strange phenomenon occurs. The object of an aesthetic view has to have the ability to attract the subject to such an extent that it can engulf and wholly annihilate them. In other words, if we like something, then our attention is wholly focused on the object we are viewing, to such an extent that we stop viewing ourselves and we even partly forget ourselves, thanks to the beauty of the object. According to Schopenhauer, it is through this mode of viewing that we become a “pure cognitive subject” which is no

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longer in the service of will, but on the contrary, it examines things as they are and focuses on them for their own sakes alone. In that way, it returns to the Kantian ideal of pure aesthetic judgement, although not on the level of judgement, but now on the level of viewing and experience. Aesthetic experience does not ask the questions what? why? how? ... but rather dissolves the subject in the object it is viewing. The more we are engulfed by the object, the less time we have for self-perception. Schopenhauer’s aesthetics are thus subject-asubjective; they pay attention to the description of the aesthetic experience from the subjective perspective, but their ideal is the dissolution of the subject in the object. They have this concept in common with some oriental religions (Buddhism). But the speciality of Schopenhauer’s concept is his nearly Platonic faith in the ability to view ideas as forms, which the will in nature, or the individualised will in an individual, wants to objectify. The genius thus does not only see things the way he finds them but through them also views the true forms which they should assume in their perfection. And that is exactly what distinguishes him from a common person. A common person is able to view a thing and might also be able to acquire an aesthetic experience which suppresses his will. But he usually does not see its forms themselves. Unlike the common people, a genius is distinguished not only by a heightened degree of sensitivity, but also by an exceptionally well-developed intellect which enables him to grasp these forms and mediate them to others. The genius sees more than others. And that is because his seeing is intuitive – it is a sudden and impersonal flash of viewing – but not only that; it is enriched by fantasy, which enables him to complete what nature or the spirit could not wholly form or formed imperfectly. The fantasies of a common person are focused on his entertainment and are mixed with practical associations. The fantasies of a genius are, however, impersonal and focus on the grasping of ideas. His intuitions and fantasies are hence a unique type of pure and non-conceptual cognisance of ideas – forms which Schopenhauer understands in a way similar to Plato: timelessly. Likewise, Schopenhauer also has a timeless understanding of aesthetic insight itself, which occurs instantaneously, outside any temporal or spatial relationship. Also this is why the pure form of intuitive viewing does not relate to the practical use, or reason. An increased sensitivity and the ability to see are, however, not enough on their own. A genius gifted only with such a faculty remains misunderstood, because he cannot communicate that which he has seen to anybody in an understandable way. Another important component of genius is the ability to bring forward the contents of what has been viewed to others in

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such a way that they might view it and intuitively understand it as well. The problem of the genius, however, is that whereas a talented artist always receives acknowledgement from his contemporaries, as they can understand his talent relative to the times they live in (and from the known logic of the expression of ideas), the genius does not receive acknowledgement, as he has overtaken his time.75 Genius is proven over time when others learn to see what the genius saw and brought forward. Hence intellect and faculty of expression represent a substantial component of genius (also artistic). Schopenhauer, however, emphasises that what makes a genius a genius is the fact that he uses his intellect for the benefit of the cognisance of ideas as such and not as a service to his or somebody else’s will. Schopenhauer’s theory of beauty distinguishes between two basic categories – the beautiful and that which resists aesthetic contemplation. Beauty is characterised by the abovementioned viewing of forms and a pure, subject- and its will-annihilating viewing. This evokes pleasure which manifests as either: “First, there is the tranquillity of will-lessness (this is the predominant pleasure of the beautiful); second, is the pleasure of the self-conscious exaltation over the will to life; and a third kind of pleasure that derives from the perception of Ideas” (Shapsay 2018). However, everything which stimulates our appetency, either positively or negatively (foods, sexual motives, property, or distaste and disgust), resists aesthetic contemplation. Also, on the contrary, do objects and scenes which to an extent exceed the boundaries of our perception (Kantian sublime) so that the aesthetic subject perceives “a hostile relation to the human will in general, as manifested in its objectivity, the human body” (Schopenhauer 1969, 218) and a will which resists it. From the logic and hierarchy of the objectification of will follows also Schopenhauer’s division and hierarchy of arts. Like Hegel, Schopenhauer begins with an architecture in which the forms are as yet non-animated and ideas are embodied in matter, space and substance. A higher level of architecture is landscaping which adjusts the live matter and its forms or ideas. Given the lesser control of the author over the arrangement and nature of the matter that expresses ideas in this plane of the will’s objectification, a higher expression of purity of forms is represented by sculpture and painting, recording the forms of life in a formally purer form. Over this classical art stands poetry, so eulogised in German idealism and theatre

75 In distinguishing talent from genius, Schopenhauer helps himself with the example of a talented shooter, who can hit a target which no one else can hit, as opposed to a genius who hits a target no one else sees yet (cf. Schopenhauer 1997, 287).

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with its culmination in tragedy. Nevertheless, in all these forms of art an imitation and presence of the will still occurs. Hence, in Schopenhauer, the peak of all the arts is music, which, as he believes, does not depict anything from nature, but on the contrary is a pure idea of will itself. In his opinion, music is where the subject is most completely engulfed by the melody, tact and tone; where the elimination of spatiality and temporal viewing, and the grasping of timelessness or pure presence in its most impressive operation take place. And it is particularly within music where the annihilation of will occurs which lets itself be wholly carried and surprised by the object, unable to dictate to it or otherwise influence it.

Kierkegaard and the Aesthetics of Appetency The direct opposite of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic doctrine was, to a certain degree, Kierkegaard’s aesthetic effort. Similarly to Hegel and Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard classifies aesthetics among the lower forms of objectification or reflection of the spirit-will. Like Hegel he actually considers this to be the first, the least perfect stage of the grasp of one’s own existence. “The aesthetic existence is one of sensuality; it is characterized by an immediacy in which man exists as a being governed by drives and sensuality, determined exclusively by his nature and driven by the search for pleasure as his highest principle” (Hammermeister 2002, 150). Unlike Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard does not aim to put the will to sleep but on the contrary, to wake it up and thus to master one’s own existence. Kierkegaard particularly dedicates himself to aesthetic considerations in his work Either/Or. In this work he plays out a story of aesthetic seduction in the form of the art of Don Juan, who attempts to gain a number of women and any of the women. Don Juan seduces womanhood and does so in order to gain the greatest amount of aesthetic and erotic experience possible. The motive for his actions is passion and aesthetic experience, appetency and the will to win the heart of the subject of his efforts. This is similar to Johannes and Cordelia in Kierkegaard’s second sto76 ry. The Seducer’s Diary is an analysis of an aesthetic approach to life; it is the expression of the awakening of passion and aesthetic teasing. Whereas in the case of Don Juan the point was to gain the abstract idea of wom76 Allegedly nearly an autobiographical one.

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anhood through a general sexual appetency, The Seducer’s Diary is about a  particular, unique experience regarding a  unique object of fancy. It is a methodology for gaining attention, interest, teasing and wanting; it is a subjective description of hedonism from intensive experience, not from its quantity. In this work, Kierkegaard plays out two motifs of aestheticism, that being the approach of a subjective, reflective aesthete (Cordelia), who is fascinated by her object, but even more by her aesthetic experience (being in love) which she likes to such an extent that she loses herself. Cordelia is enchanted by her seducer and longs to give herself to him fully – to annihilate her existence. On the other hand, however, there is Johannes – the seducer and a connoisseur of the art of seduction, who relishes his influence over the aesthetic subject (Cordelia), her increasing teasing, bonds and mastery. But by his mastery of Cordelia, Johannes does not merely acquire his object, but rather confirms himself. Johannes is a live metaphor for an artist who knows how to arouse interest and who at the same time desires and enjoys his own aesthetic experience in the mastery and manipulation of the object. The similarity to Schopenhauer in Kierkegaard is strengthened by thorough use of the infinite possibility for fantasy as a tool of aesthetic feeling, but also the egoistic focus of the aesthetic experience and the will of the given subject (McDonald 2017). It is only natural that after the saturation of the needs of the will and reaching its goal the seducer – the aesthete – loses interest in the cognised object and focuses his attention on something different. The teasing of the will and its focus on the mastery of the object is what links Kierkegaard with the will to power in Nietzsche. Kierkegaard’s aestheticism is an expression of the Hegelian dialectic – the tension between the object and subject, desire and acquisition, uniqueness and banality and the holding and culmination (aufheben) thereof in a synthesis. Beauty and aesthetic attitude are a way in which we master our own being, how the sleeping spirit discovers itself, how it wakes up and perceives the present moment of being. However, for the Copenhagen thinker aestheticism represents a non-authentic manner of existence, as we do not find the reasons or motives for the action and perception in ourselves but they are dictated to us by something or somebody outside of us. That has the aesthetic and ethical stages in common, while the latter overcomes the former in Kierkegaard. Only in the religious stage do we take responsibility for our own decisions and we stand before God (coram Deo) aware that with each decision we can find or lose ourselves for all eternity. In an aesthetic attitude the present moment is the horizon of the experience and what others will say to it.

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Despite the fact that for Kierkegaard the aesthetic stage of life is the lowest of the three stages, it is aesthetic experience and passion that awakens an individual to the experience of their existence and the possibility to authentically master it.

Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Passion In a  number of aspects Friedrich Nietzsche is linked to both his predecessors. In his work Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872) he openly stands in the shadow of Schopenhauer, of whom he only makes minor corrections. But this work was preceded by the lecture Die Dionysische Weltanschauung (1870), in which he presented his main theses without identifying with Schopenhauer and without promoting Wagner, returning to it later on several occasions. Nietzsche asserted that Greek art was born out of two mutually opposed and contrary tendencies – from the Dionysian and the Apollonian cults. For Nietzsche the Apollonian cult represented an individualistic, rationalistic, idealistic instinct, inward looking, tranquilly but naively taking refuge in a world of idealism and illusion. Its desire was peace and harmony, and a flight from pain and suffering but also from real feelings into the realm of dreams. Nietzsche later identified this element of the history of Greek culture with Socratic and Platonic idealism but also with the weaknesses of Christianity. Standing contrary to Apollo – the god of light – the Dionysian cult existed in Thracia, which preferred vivacious celebrations, drinking and debauchery. But this element, despite being more closely connected to life and experiences, also flees from the reality of being through intoxication and its narcotic influence (being drunk). However, unlike the individualising Apollonian element that gave preference to light (painting), the essence of the Dionysian element is the dissolution of the individual in society, nature, in the environment and its expression is music and celebration. Nietzsche identifies the birth of art in the synthesis of both of these contrary elements, and this, in his opinion, particularly takes place in Greek tragedies. He found its culmination in the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as well as in the philosophy of Heraclitus. But the synthesis between them was not fully perfect, because it separated the spectator – captured, to a  great extent, in Apollonian dreaming – from the creating artist, in whom the aesthetic experience is absent. With the arrival of Socrates and

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Euripides, however, the original Greek tragedy ceased to exist, because dreaming and feeling were replaced by reason and a theoretical approach to the world. In his initial lecture on the Dionysian view of the world Nietzsche shared the Schopenhauerian pessimistic and tragic perception of art, which however he later modified (and not only due to the fact that he did not see the birth of music in suffering and tragedy but rather in the “spirit of tragedy”) by giving it a more optimistic and radical shape. He no longer found the justification of music or art merely in the dissolution of the will of the subject and the forgetting of its suffering but rather in the experience of being and its grasping. Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer in that music represents the most perfect form of art because it is an expression of the most fundamental idea of the world as will. In his considerations of Wagner he therefore offers a brief overview of the history of music, which in his opinion, however, in its most authentic form only came into being with Beethoven. It was he who endowed it with real experience and passion and replaced the calming motif of moods by an expression of an inner state of conflict. Nonetheless, the real artist par excellence could only be, in Nietzsche’s opinion, Richard Wagner. Wagner’s works represented in Nietzsche’s philosophy an intricate and gradually developing theme.77 From the early fascination with his music, which he perceived as a rebirth of the antique tragedy, up to the partial criticism of him. Initially Wagner was specifically the prototype of an artist, who consented to suffering, but later he became more of an example of the revolt against life, an incessant attempt of self-mastery, to express that which eludes him, a certain expression of the will to power. Especially in his later works (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches – 1878–1880; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft – 1882; Also sprach Zarathustra – 1883–1885) Nietzsche emphasised the need to master one’s own being through the rejection of asubjective and paralysing reason and in relation to this he also emphasised the significance of beauty and of art. Art was for him what became the principal means for authentic and full experiences.78 Art should wake up, enliven, and it should stimulate the will to life. Its role is not to reveal the truths of the world in the sense of their imitation. Quite the contrary, the purpose of art is to create an illusion but not only in order to make life 77 Kai Hammermeister identifies 3 stages in Nietzsche’s creation (philosophy of art, positivist period and the period of radical aesthetisation of philosophy – Hammermeister 2002, 157) and based on this we can also distinguish his relationship to Wagner. 78 “Die Kunst und nichts als die Kunst! Sie ist die große Ermöglicherin des Lebens, die große Verführerin zum Leben, das große Stimulans des Lebens” (Nietzsche 1980, 522–521).

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more bearable but in order to reveal deeper truths and not mere imitations of the world. The truth in art exists in the reality of its experience. Nietzsche, who believed in the epistemological, ethical and aesthetic autonomy of the subject (what is beautiful, in the same way as what is good and true, is not defined by society or any authority but it is the product of Overman who masters himself),79 thus presents a new type of reflection on beauty and its relation to cognition. As Paul Guyer states, he “continued the cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience that dominated the nineteenth century, although after his early work he rejected the value of metaphysical cognition to which, in his view, art pretends” (Guyer 2014d, 321). “In later works, especially The Gay Science, there is much to suggest that art is necessary as the provider of illusions that make life bearable. Yet at the same time, the chapter contends, Nietzsche promotes the ‘intellectual conscience’ which entails a commitment to affirmation of life ‘as it is’” (Janaway 2014). “A renewed and fuller analysis of aesthetic experience as a form of play as well as renewed developed appreciation of the value as such a form of experience, would largely have to wait for others” (Guyer 2014d, 321).

The Neuroaesthetics of Desire, Genius and Music What all these three thinkers have in common is their conviction about the key function of the will and desires or passions in aesthetic feelings. Whereas Schopenhauer attempts to remove expressions of will, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the contrary consider them to be the most essential and desirable thing about an aesthetic experience. It is thus only understandable that cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have focused their attention on research into aesthetic desire and its connection to the behaviour of the brain. From the times of Benjamin Libet (Libet 1985) the question of will and its research has been the focal point of interest of not only philosophers but also many neuroscientists.80 The research on will, and not only free will, 79 In the spirit of the Kantian considerations about the ideal of beauty, he goes as far as to state that “Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naiveté rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined” (Nietzsche 1998, 54). 80 A notable piece of research documenting how will deforms our cognitive processes is

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however, is joined to many other problems, those also being in the field of aesthetic feelings. The first problem is that the objects we perceive affect our will before we realise it ourselves. In other words, we want something even before we realise that we want or like it. That of course opens a deeper metaphysical question regarding who is the “I” or “we” that wants something, whether there is an unconscious liking and also if the expression of will is only a more-or-less automatic reaction to the influence of certain stimuli, to what extent it is actually possible to speak about free liking and the role of the individual as a free subject in the process of liking and wanting. Another important issue is that even when we realise that we want something, we often cannot identify precisely what causes the desire we feel. “It’s as if our brains have told us what the conclusion of all this processing is (‘you do or don’t like X’) but don’t necessarily explain to us why we have arrived at that state” (Andrew 2015). Third: What we identify as the source of our wanting may not be its true cause but merely its object. As Charles Andrew (Andrew 2015) states, the identification of factors that influence our will may also be problematic because many emotional stimuli and reactions are present in the brain’s right hemisphere, which does not have the capability for speech. In order for us to be able to express our intentions that we experience in this part of the brain, we have to translate them for the speech centres of the left hemisphere, which is inclined to a more analytical and rational processing of information. As Phelps’ and Gazzaniga’s  experiment shows, the left hemisphere will seek reasons even where they in fact do not exist, even at the price of making them up. Thus we might identify something as the cause of our wanting, liking and will, although the real cause remains hidden to us on a conscious and verbalised level (Phelps & Gazzaniga 1992). This is the reason why traditional questionnaires- or language-based psychological studies are not sufficient to provide a valid and reliable revelation of the true causes and relationships of our desire, liking and wanting. With the development of new imaging technologies, however, a road has opened

that of Emily Balcetis and David Dunning, who studied the influence of the intensity of will and desire on the perception of distance. They showed that if we want something very much (for example we feel like having coffee or water), our perception of distance changes with an indirect correlation to the feeling of desire which we have (a strong desire reduces the feeling of distance). In the same way, the notion of a weight we have to carry upwards on our shoulders lengthens the perceived distance and makes the climb visually steeper than an awareness of a lessening of the burden or the notion of the closeness of the end of the climb (Balcetis & Dunning 2010).

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to a different type of study of will and internal motives, through the mapping of the immediate reactions of the organism (brain) to stimuli and the activities of the neuronal centres mobilising the reaction of the organism. One of the most canonical studies in the search for aesthetic will by neuroaestheticians is Kawabata’s and Zeki’s analysis of the neuronal correlates of desire (Kawabata & Zeki 2008). On the basis of older and partial studies with various types of desires and rewards, Kawabata and Zeki have sought whether there exit any common brain areas of desire in which activity correlates with different categories of reward and, if so, whether the level of activity in them is related quantitatively to the declared levels of desire. By studying healthy individuals who evaluated various visual scenes (events, objects and persons) which they classified according to desirability (desirable, indifferent or undesirable), through fMRI neuroimaging technologies they have identified the centres of the brain which are activated when we desire something. With regard to the fact that various objects evoke activity in various areas of the brain depending on the nature of the reward, what the scientists have been looking for is the existence of joint activity. It has been demonstrated (by the conjunction analysis of the contrast desirable > undesirable) that independent of the type of desire, our brain displays an increased activity in the superior OFC. Another conjunction analysis – the conjunction analysis of desirable > indifferent revealed activity in the mid-cingulate cortex and in the anterior cingulate cortex. “These results show that categorizing any stimulus according to its desirability activates three different brain areas: the superior orbito-frontal, the mid-cingulate, and the anterior cingulate cortices” (Kawabata & Zeki 2008). All these areas are involved in the reward circuits and dopaminergic pathways connected with feeling pleasure. It is particularly the study of wanting and the possible addiction to various types of rewards that has become the dominant area of subsequent neurocognitive research. Gradually we reveal further centres of activity,81 the role played in this by pleasure, dopamine and opioidergic pathways and endocannabinoids, and how the reward circuits work. We know that our desires are joined with evolutionarily acquired knowledge but also individual experience, or induced by the cultural environment (Erk et al., 2002), but we also know that they may be eliminated or suppressed chemically or through cognitive mechanisms (Hollman et al. 2012).

81 For example, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the pre-supplementary motor area, the inferior frontal gyrus, the dorsal striatum, the bilateral OFC, the anterior insula and the temporo-parietal junction (Hollman et al. 2012).

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The problem of such research is, however, that desire is often mistaken for love and sometimes for aesthetic evaluation itself. For this reason, studies have also originated which attempt to find differences in the brain activities of these individual states. Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge and their colleagues (Kringelbach & Berridge 2010) showed that liking and wanting are not the same thing in the brain. “Liking, the core experience of pleasure, engages the nucleus accumbens and its connections within the rest of the ventral striatum. Neural activity in these structures is driven by mu-opioid and cannabinoid receptors. Opioid receptors are involved in the pleasure that people experience when taking opiates like heroin and morphine…Cannabinoid and opiate receptors work together to produce our pleasures. Our wants, the desire to get to objects we like, is driven by dopamine rather than opioids or cannabinoids. The ventral striatum also contains neurons that respond to dopamine and promote wanting. These neurons are interspersed with liking opioid and cannabinoid neurons” (Chatterjee 2014, 104). It is only understandable that liking and wanting occur together and in particular we want what we like. However, states occur when wanting and liking do not act in synchronisation. “For example, the drug naloxone blocks the effects of opiates and diminishes the pleasure of eating without decreasing the desire to eat when hungry (Smith & Berridge 2007). This effect means that liking can be turned down without changing wanting. Wanting can also be turned down while preserving liking. When dopamine cells in rats are experimentally destroyed by a toxin, the rats simply stop eating. Scientists first thought they stopped eating because they no longer got pleasure from food” (Chatterjee 2014, 104). In the case of human brains it is, however, a bit more complicated. With people it is quite common that states exist when we may want something without liking it and on the contrary, we may like something without wanting it. In his research into love, beauty and desire, Semir Zeki arrived at the opinion that at the cortical level, love is similar to wanting (it activates similar centres as desire or perception of beauty) but at the same time it cognitively fulfils what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche denote as genius madness. In love we feel unity with another, often under the influence of oxytocin and vasopressin we act in a way that we would not otherwise act and with a different object. We see what others do not see, and in the course of it we often experience pleasant feelings or euphoria. On the basis of the contrary activities of the cortical and subcortical systems Zeki is convinced that “Human attachment seems therefore to employ a push–pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social

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assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate” (Zeki 2007, 2575), causing us to overlook the deficiencies of the object of love and hypostatise its positives (Bartels & Zeki 2000). In addition, Zeki has discovered that the differences between romantic and motherly love especially lie in powerful activity of the areas responsible for perception and distinguishing the appearance of faces (with motherly love), whereas the strong activation of the hypothalamus “which is associated with sexual arousal, is only involved in romantic love. The common regions activated for both types of love are located in the striatum, part of the reward system of the human brain” (Zeki 2007, 2577). Nonetheless, Zeki finds that all these mechanisms are also activated during the perception of beauty, which makes us sensitive to certain types of stimuli and hence also less sensitive to the critical evaluation of its contexts. This is something that links love with genius but also with non-critical thinking. The faculty of critical evaluation and heightened sensitivity to certain important information in the environment is what sets a common person apart from a genius or an exceptionally creative thinker and artist. Hence scientists also focus on the study of creativity and genius and its comparison with common thinking or feelings. Analyses of the specificities of the configuration of the brains of people with exceptional talents (generally: Amunts et al. 2004, Donaldson & Canavan 1928; brain of Lenin: Bentivoglio 1998, Kreutzberg et al. 1992; brain of A. Einstein: Anderson & Harvey 1996, Diamond et al. 1985, Witelson et al. 1999) have brought partial and often controversial findings (Hines 2014, Colombo 2018). They consisted of the discovery of anatomical features that support a thesis of more parallel thinking and increased connectivity of the individual brain regions (Interlaminar astroglia: Colombo et al 2006, corpus callosum: Men et al. 2014) indirectly supporting the thesis of a greater vivacity and “drive” in thought. Studies concerning the discovery of neuroanatomical, neurobiological and functional specificities of individuals possessing extraordinary creativity have yielded similar results. It has been demonstrated that their brains show more parallel activity, they more frequently correlate with a higher intelligence, but for instance also with anxiety (Carlsson et al. 2000), or a higher connectivity of individual regions (Wei et al. 2014), especially between the “right mPFC and part of the right fronto-parietal network which is responsible for producing original ideas” (Shamay-Tsoory 2011). It could therefore be expected that increased connectivity and functional activity of the individual centres of the brain correlate with an increased degree of creativity in their users. However, cases of idiot savants or overly creative

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people who are however lost in everyday life are clear counter-examples that complicate this theory. From the nature of creativity, as the ability to find new solutions in usual, but also unusual contexts, it could seem that to think “out of the box” is an indubitable evolutionary advantage for creative individuals. Their abilities should help them to find a solution where others fail and thus also a higher success rate in their careers or personal lives. Generally it would thus be logical to expect a  significant correlation between creativity and a  positive attitude to life. That would support the Nietzschean theses on creativity and the will to life. But it shows that highly creative people, similar to highly intelligent people, suffer from the difficulties of life in the same way and are often defeated by obstacles which common individuals manage well. The degree of personal happiness and intelligence thus does not show a causal relationship, and it is often the case that intelligent people feel higher rates of sadness or unhappiness than the less intelligent. Numerous cases of addictions to drugs or medication or even suicides in geniuses, highly intelligent and creative individuals are an example of this. The pattern is similar for the influence of music on feelings of happiness or to support intelligence. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche considered music the highest form of art, but for different reasons. Whereas for Schopenhauer music was especially connected with the ability to dissolve the omnipresent individual will and the idea of self, for Nietzsche it represented rather an expression of energy, passion and the will to life expressing itself. Several scientific studies demonstrate the effect of being engulfed or a deep immersion into music the way Schopenhauer described it. In addition, many of them (Hsu & Lai 2004, Castilio-Peres et al. 2010) also document the fact that music contributes towards the dissolution of most depressive and anxious states, stress, and even to the better management of physical pain (Cepeda et al. 2006, Guétin et al. 2012, Holden & Holden 2013). However, studies researching the influence of music on the management of pain often diverge over whether music really does significantly decrease (post-operative or chronic) pain (which would mean the possibility for a systematic decrease in doses of analgesics) or whether it only facilitates relaxation and distracts attention. Similar results have been found in the research into the influence of music on intelligence. The German philosophers assumed that music was the most perfect form of art, because it is not imitative and it conveys its meanings directly, without the need for words or images. At the same time they assumed that it was the essence of intelligence, because “Schopenhauer believes the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence of the world

A r t h u r S c h o p e n h a u e r, S ø re n K i e r k e g a a rd a n d Fr i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e. . .

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as will—it is as direct an experience of the will qua thing in itself as is possible for a human being to have” (Shapshay 2018). Regarding the influence of music on the development of intelligence, a long-term discussion is underway. It was assumed that listening to classical music as early as the prenatal period could improve a child’s intelligence. But real discussion was only provoked by a study documenting the so-called Mozart effect, that is the achievement of better results after short-term stimulation by classical (Mozart) music. Frances H. Rauscher, Gordon L. Shaw and Catherine N. Ky in their experiment exposed a group of university students to a 10-minute sonata by Mozart and afterwards asked them to carry out spatial-intelligence tasks. The test showed that listening to Mozart’s composition had a positive effect on their performance (measurement of spatial IQ before the test and after, plus a comparison with a control group only listening to relaxing music) which led them to postulate the so-called Mozart effect. Later studies confirmed that this effect is not only caused by Mozart’s music, but in fact almost any music (the Blur effect – named after the British band whose music led to a similar improvement). This provokes the question of to what extent the improvement in the score is related to music and to what is related to a change in the rhythm of thought and action which is linked to music. But the one thing which is truly demonstrable is the influence of learning music on some components of intelligence. Sylvian Moreno et al. studied the influence of musical instruction on the increase of verbal intelligence in three- and four-year-old children. They discovered that children who underwent an interactive computerised training programme for music, developed for preschool children, displayed a significant improvement in verbal intelligence after as few as 20 days of training. “These improvements in verbal intelligence positively correlated to changes in functional brain plasticity during an executive-function task” (Moreno et al. 2011, 1425). Children who underwent a similar programme focusing on visual arts lasting for the same length of time did not display similar improvement. A study by Franziska Degé (Degé et al. 2011) arrived at a similar conclusion, confirming a positive correlation between musical instruction and the executive functions of intelligence in 9–12-year-old children. However, no important influence of individual musical styles on intelligence,82 or on the contrary, any correlation of the level of intelligence

82 Although according to Satoshi Kanazawa and Kaja Perina, people with higher intelligence prefer classical and instrumental music over vocal compositions (Kanazawa & Perina 2011).

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with a preference for a particular kind of music, was recorded83 and thus to this day we have not succeeded in solving the Schopenhauer-Nietzschean dispute concerning the “superiority” of Beethoven over Wagner.

83 Cf. Dutton 2013.

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The phenomenological school represents a strange chapter in the history of German philosophical thinking. It is rooted in the Kantian attempt to map the conditions of cognition and aesthetic feelings, as well as in the study of pure reason, or in the case of phenomenology, in the study of pure consciousness. Kant is not the sole source of phenomenology – it is also found in Descartes and other completely opposing sources (Brentano, Hegel, Thomism), and thus phenomenology does not represent a completely unified school but rather a movement of diverse (far from only German) philosophers reacting to various impulses, who employed the same or similar methods and neither do the phenomenological concepts of the individual phenomenologists represent a unified theory, but rather contributions to phenomenological investigation in this sub-discipline of philosophy.84 Despite the fact that, among phenomenologists, the issue of aesthetics was mostly discussed by Moritz Geiger, Roman Ingarden, Fritz Kaufmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne, the author of the book Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (1953) or Gunter Figal, in the scope of the present book focused on the history and legacy of German idealism we will attempt to concentrate on two German authors – Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Guyer in his book A History of Modern Aesthetics in the chapter German Aesthetics between the Wars states, perhaps surprisingly, that the most important figures of German aesthetics in the inter-war years were György Lukács (1885–1971) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). It is not the Hungarian origins of György Lukács which causes surprise, but rather the unconventional view of the sources and development of phenomenology and its aesthetics, which are normally attributed to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It is incredibly frequently assumed, erroneously, that Martin Heidegger was the disciple and successor of Husserl. The reasons for this view are within the conventional historical-philosophical theses and the fact that Husserl helped Heidegger to obtain a post at the university, that Heidegger worked as an assistant to Husserl and that Heidegger dedicated an acknowledgement to him in his first edition of his key manuscript Sein und Zeit. However, their relationship was considerably more complicated, and rather than speaking of a successor we should speak of Heidegger’s rejection of Husserl’s fundamental theses and his radical modification of them. This was also reflected in their understanding of aesthetics. 84 In spite of this, there are extensive compendia and a  handbook of phenomenological aesthetics. Cf. Sepp & Embree 2010.

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Husserl failed to develop coherent and systematically structured aesthetics. His principal views on aesthetics can be found in Hua XXIII: Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925) and in Hua XL: Untersuchungen zur Urteilstheorie. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1918). Yet, in order to better understand his aesthetic opinions, his early works should also be considered. In his work Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl analyses the nature of a conscious experience and reveals that its principal trait is intentionality (Husserl 2009, 380). Our consciousness is always the consciousness of something – something that it intentionally tries to reach. This can be an object (e.g., an aesthetic object) – the subject of our aesthetic observation is then an aesthetic object in the consciousness (as cogitatum) – but it can also be the realisation of our own consciousness, or the realisation of how an aesthetic object affects our consciousness. In section 15 of the fifth investigation, Husserl warns that despite the desire of phenomenology to understand pure consciousness and its pure contents, our observation of consciousness does not contain pure ideas (in the sense of theoretical contents uncontaminated by subjective experience), but on the contrary, these are always tied to feelings. And feelings are essential for our sense of aesthetics. As Husserl continues to analyse aesthetic experience, he reaches the conclusion that fundamentally, aesthetic experiences are always assessments. The valuation of a thing or situation necessarily involves feelings and that feelings are rooted in the way it is presented in our consciousness (see, e.g. Husserl 1984, 402–10, 496–518). Thus, when we experience a situation, it is because we are looking, in our consciousness, at the presentation of a phenomenon, which may or may not provoke feelings within us. In the case of Kantian determinant judgements, we focus on objects without the primary intention of examining how the various ideas affect us. In line with phenomenology, we try to describe the ideas without taking a stance. However, judgement and the adoption of a stance are inevitable and essential parts of an aesthetic experience. Thus, if I see an object, I see how it is represented in our consciousness. In the case of perception, I do not create it, but it is sensorily predetermined and that is how it is presented to my consciousness. Observing this presentation, I subsequently feel various physical sensations in my body that accompany or trigger the observation of the content and form of the presentation. I can feel, for instance, an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, excitement, or on the contrary, a decrease accompanied by a reduction in muscle tone. In the case of an aesthetic (and seemingly also partially in the case of an ethical) experience, in addition to

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physical sensations, one also experiences a reflection – the assessment of feelings and the adoption of a stance to what one is feeling when observing something. In other words: one does not only observe the object, but also the impact it has on them and how they experience it. Such reflection can be both positive (I like the object), negative (I dislike it) or indifferent. However, adopting an indifferent stance does not mean making an aesthetic assessment or any other type of assessment. Consequently, beautiful objects are those whose presentation in our consciousness provokes physical sensations that we subsequently consider pleasant. Therefore, we like our feelings about objects – their effect on us. This means that we like what we are experiencing and how we experience it, not what evokes these feelings (the representation of the object in our consciousness). Thus, beautiful objects are those objects that evoke feelings of beauty (similarly, terrifying objects are those which provoke feelings of fear, and disgusting objects are those which provoke feelings of disgust). However, the ability of the phenomenological or eidetic presentation in our consciousness to evoke physical sensations and their following assessment results in a logical shortcut in language and thinking, and thus we do not refer to the feelings provoked by objects as beautiful, but rather the contents of the consciousness that possesses the ability to provoke such feelings. The second important moment in the Husserlian view of aesthetic objects is the way they are given to us. It is apparent that aesthetic phenomena are given to us in our consciousness. In addition to those perceived by our senses, there are those which we create ourselves and which are not the direct result of sensory perception. However, the presentation of both types in the consciousness is ensured by the principle of retention. The principle of retention – of the contents of the consciousness – allows the subject to change the ephemeral and ever-changing sensory experience into something longer-lasting, capable of being observed less fleetingly. Without this ability, experiences would collapse into the rhapsody of impulses. Thus the observed object does not only draw our attention, but at the same time, retention “cements” this in our consciousness, and we may pay attention to it even when it is no longer perceived by our senses. However, for Husserl, retention is not merely the moment of holding an object in our consciousness after our senses no longer perceive it. Its importance is substantially more fundamental. Retention (as well as its opposite – protention – prediction) constitutes an object in the consciousness and thus enables the presentation of a  temporally extended present. Therefore, it is not surprising that for Husserl, this process is related to memory (he initially called it “fresh memory”) and in particular the imagination.

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The third major aspect of Husserlian aesthetics is the structure of phenomenology itself and Husserl’s call for the adoption of a neutral aesthetic approach. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant required a pure aesthetic judgement that was able to ignore all aspects of objects not related to the assessment of their form of purpose. Thus, in order to make a pure aesthetic judgement, we must ignore the purpose of the object, what the object is, its price, its possessor, its author or even the relevant ethical and moral aspects. An aesthetic judgement ought to be free of bias and contamination from non-aesthetic sources. Husserl’s phenomenological methodology employs this. In the explanation of the methodology of his study, Husserl insists on bracketing, Einklammerung, the unimportant aspects not anchored in a phenomenon. Aesthetic consciousness is focused on the manner of the appearance of the object (Phantasy, 462; Hua XXIII, 389); it is neither a theoretical nor a practical interest but purely “sensuous” interest (Phantasy, 168; Hua XXIII, 145) and has no interest in the existence or non-existence of the object (Phantasy, 459; Hua XXIII, 387). If followed rigorously, Husserl’s phenomenology in its very essence is purely aesthetic, in the Kantian sense. It urges us to adopt a completely (historically, socially and individually) unbiased approach, to ignore all that could contaminate and thus influence our aesthetic judgement. And not only does Husserl believe that it is truly possibly to achieve this pure and unburdened approach, but also that it is the essence of true phenomenology. Martin Heidegger adopted many of Husserl’s concepts and notions, however, modifying several of them. Just as Husserl, he believed that the essence of phenomenology lies in the ability to see things as they are, by means of phenomenological reduction, yet he doubts that it is possible to observe them in their pure state, deprived of all context. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger postulates the theory of disposedness (die Befindlichkeit), which not only allows for the perception of and openness towards a phenomenon, but at the same time it inevitably determines it. He understands the term “disposedness” as a  spatial metaphor that explains that we always somehow exist in this world (we are situated) and the position (situation) adopted by us is the determining factor in what we are able to perceive in the world and in what context. It is not possibly to see the same thing from various positions, because different phenomena are obscured in certain positions, others are inaccessible or are phenomenologically dominant. However, Heidegger does not merely want to state that we are determined in time and space. His thinking is more fundamentally hermeneutic.

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The essence of Heidegger’s disposedness is the realisation that we understand phenomena differently from different perspectives. A classic example of Heideggerian thinking are the emotions of fear and anxiety. When fearful, we perceive certain phenomena in the world, realising their “menace”. We realise that they may cause us harm,85 that their harmful nature is not only theoretical but real, that we are within their radius of action (within their reach), that their potential effect is sufficiently current86 and that they may affect something important to us. This reveals to us that “being afraid” is a sort of understanding (which enables us to see the “terrible” and harmful potential),87 and thus it is a very specific (“terrifying”) understanding of phenomena in the world. However, the interesting aspect of all states of mind is that in each of them, we understand the world differently,88 and what is more, the individual states of mind allow us to see completely different phenomena, while others are hidden or completely marginalised. States of mind or our disposedness may be thus understood as a sort of lens through which we observe the world, with its own specific sensitivity to certain phenomena to which we are granted access. The same applies to our aesthetic state of mind. It enables us to observe the beauties of the world, regardless of whether they are real or fictive (imaginary), and to be unaware of what does not fit in this view of the world. The question is, where this aesthetic understanding of phenomena stems from. Heidegger clearly realised that it is only possible to understand the worldly phenomena as a response to the non-thematised understanding of oneself. If we were not implicitly aware of our mortality and the finality of our lives, there would be, for instance, no reason to worry that something may do us harm. Thus, what fear reveals is not only the danger “out there”, but primarily the danger stemming from the finality of our own existence. He claims, that this is fully reflected in the fear of a true “nothing” – the possibility (and hermeneutic certainty) of our own non-existence. At the same time, anxiety shows us the temporal limitations and boundaries of our existence in the world – of our stay here. This is also important for aesthetic feelings. 85 We do not fear good things. 86 We are not afraid of evil in the distant future. 87 The very same object or situation does not terrify us in different circumstances (e.g., a knife when we are slicing bread or a flame on the stove when brewing coffee as opposed to the image of a knife in the hands of a criminal or flames in a fire). 88 Feeling sad, we do not see the joys of the world; being afraid, we cannot see its diversity, etc.

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Later, Heidegger purposefully swapped the term “disposedness” for the term “attunement” (Ab-Stimmung), which brought him closer to Kierkegaard’s attunement in Fear and Trembling as well as the initial reflections of Kant and Schiller on attunement and tune in art (Démuth 2018). Attunement has similar effects to disposedness. We are always in some sort of mood; we are always attuned somehow. Even when we say we are “not in the mood”. However, attunement is not a spatial metaphor, but rather an expression of openness to allow different phenomena to affect us, to be sensitive to them. Heidegger states that “our mood discloses our ‘beingin-the-world’ as a whole and makes any kind of concentration on… possible” (Heidegger 1967, 138), and a few lines below, he explicitly states that “our state of mind existentially involves a revealing reference to the world, which may liberate something that concerns us” (Heidegger 1967, 138). According to Heidegger, it is attunement which enables us to be approached by worldly phenomena and that they concern us. So what does it mean to be or not to be in the mood for something? The essence of this auditory metaphor is whether something is (or is not) close to us, whether its form is (or is not) in tune with how we understand ourselves, what we want and need. Not being in the mood thus means that we are feeling a discord between “what the world has to offer” and our current tastes or needs. This is why we are not in the mood for it. Heidegger thus borrows Kant’s metaphor (Einstimmung, Übereinstimmung, Zusamenstimmung and proportionierte Stimmung),89 which represents the centre of the experience of beauty and assumes that liking is an expression of the concord and harmony between us and the phenomenon. However, Heidegger is not interested in a mere superficial agreement and accord with the world. In the spirit of Heidegger’s reflections on fear and anxiety, we can assume that what is presented to us by anxiety is our being in the world itself and its existential understanding. The same applies for aesthetic perception. What is presented to us by beautiful objects is their own existence and the value of its perception. We tend to prefer formally valuable objects, whether it is their rendering, material, originality, etc. Hence we protect beautiful objects, we strive to preserve beautiful moments, memories of them, or we feel the need to protect beautiful sceneries or objects. Art enables us to glance at the value of being – but not only the being of beautiful objects but (in particular) also our own existence, since our feelings related to an aesthetic experience resemble those of our own existentially important experience. Our own being is our own value, hence 89 Cf. Chaouli 2017, 64.

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we enrich it with aesthetic experiences (which we deem enriching) and hence we seek out beautiful objects and moments and consider the value of aesthetic experiences as important. The previous paragraph is, however, nothing more but a mere assumption of Heidegger’s views on states of mind and beauty, for Heidegger did not further elaborate his views on this type of existential reflection. His views on beauty and art are included in several works,90 and probably mostly in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1950). It is a well-known fact that in this work he adopted a very critical position towards aesthetics (anti-aesthetism) and rejected the modern subjectivism and subject-oriented fragmentation of aesthetic experience (Thomson 2017). Heidegger criticised the analysis of aesthetic experience as the psychology or neuroscience of a certain type of experience. What he aimed to do was to cross the borders of aesthetics and to examine what beauty and art reveal and what is their importance in the human life. According to Heidegger, the role of art is the revelation of the being itself. How does art manage to do this? Primarily through the truth. However, Heidegger does not understand the truth as the Aristotelian sufficient representation or expression of something. In his understanding, the truth is aletheia – unconcealedness. In the objectivity-versus-subjectivity of beauty dilemma, he was definitely a supporter of antisubjectivism. “Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment” (Heidegger 1968, 92). “Beauty cannot be interpreted from a subjective experience, or from its effect on a subject, but rather from the openness of the artwork, from the fundamental phenomenon of unconcealedness” (Biemel 1995 121). He believes that it is the unconcealedness and the myriad of possibilities of its perception what is important in a piece of art. Thus, if we perceive a beautiful object, what we are seeing is not only the rendering of the object. What beauty reveals to us is the being itself, which we can glance upon through a beautiful object or art, which reveals it. Thus, art ought to awaken us existentially and to immerse us in the experience of being.91 90 It is a well-known fact that Heidegger dedicated several of his works to the topic of beauty and art: Wozu Dichter? (1946), »...dichterisch wohnet der Mensch...« (1951), Die Kunst und der Raum (1969) or lectures: for example about Hölderlin and his poetry, or Über die Bestimmung der Künste im gegenwärtigen Weltalter (Baden-Baden Haus Schweizer 7. - 8. Mai 1959), Bemerkungen zu Kunst – Plastik – Raum (St. Gallen 3. Oktober 1964), Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens (Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste in Athen 4. April 1967) and even his last official lecture (Die Frage nach der Bestimmung der Kunst, presented on 9 April 1970 in Munich) was devoted to the topic of art. 91 For this reason, Heidegger believed that good art is that which captivates us (e.g. the tales of the Brother Grimm or dramatic plays), and in which we are living a real life.

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Gunter Figal, the last of the German phenomenologists who succeeded Husserl and later Heidegger in the post of professor at the University of Freiburg, has similar views. In his work Aesthetics as Phenomenology the Appearance of Things (Figal 2015) he “unmasks art as a decentring experience that opens further possibilities for understanding our lives and our world”. Poetry plays a particular role in this aspect. Heidegger as well as other German philosophers (Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche…) placed poetry at the pedestal of artistic efforts. “All art that is, all bringing-into-being of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry” (Heidegger 1971, 59). He believed that it is in poetry that the truth is most present, and hence a man is poetic. In poetry (despite the fact that the essence of aesthetics is to observe phenomena as they are) it is not only the aistheta in the sense of sensory observation which is important, but rather the revelation of being as a whole. “Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (Heidegger 1971, 216). For this reason, art has contributed to the humanisation and existential awakening of an individual.

Neurophenomenology Phenomenological reflections on the topics of art and beauty represent a strange chapter in the history of philosophy and its dialogue with the empirical sciences. Both Husserl and Heidegger strongly opposed efforts to relate phenomenology with psychology or the natural sciences and criticised the concepts which later formed neuroaesthetics. Yet, efforts to relate first-person descriptions of subjective experiences with scientific studies of the correlates or conditions for the formation, processes and laws of aesthetic experiences from the perspective of neurosciences, and thus from a third-person perspective, lead to the formation of, for instance, neurophenomenology. The following section will attempt to introduce research into the aspects of aesthetic experience as mentioned by Husserl and Heidegger from the perspective of the neurosciences in three major parts. The first section describes the role of imagination in aesthetic feelings. Mapping the neural processes that accompany the process of fantasy or imagination is a rather complex task. Not only because imagination represents a wide scale of excitations and impulses, which tend to be connect-

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ed to other features (e.g. evaluation, motoric readiness and memory), but also because it is difficult to differentiate it from those processes related to the perception of real impulses by the activation of our senses.92 In order to “purify” imagination removing real sensory perception, scientists collaborating with Crawford I. P. Winlove conducted a  meta-analysis of 40 neuroimaging studies of visual imagery which was understood as a form of sensory imagination, involving subjective experiences typically described as similar to perception, but which occur in the absence of corresponding external stimuli (Winlove 2018). The results identified “a  total 634 foci in 40 individual experiments, based on measurements from 464 participants (64% Male, >95% right-handed, mean age 25.9 ± 4.8 years)” with the core of activation “in the superior parietal lobule, particularly in the left hemisphere, consistent with the proposed ‘top-down’ role for this brain region in imagery; the inferior premotor areas and inferior frontal sulcus” (Winlove 2018, 9). A study aimed at the analysis of the centres of “imagery vividness” discovered that “several posterior cortical regions show a positive correlation with imagery vividness: regions of the fusiform gyrus, posterior cingulate and parahippocampal gyri (BAs 19, 29, 31 and 36) displayed exclusively positive correlations. By contrast several frontal regions including parts of anterior cingulate cortex (BA 24) and inferior frontal gyrus (BAs 44 and 47), as well as the insula (BA 13), auditory cortex (BA 41) and early visual cortices (BAs 17 and 18) displayed exclusively negative correlations” (Fulford et al. 2018). It seems that imagination engages a number of diverse brain centres and structures that correlate with the activities of the brains folds and centres involved in the process of sensory perception.93 Interestingly enough, despite the similarities or the sameness of the centres involved, it is still possible to find a difference in the activity of individual centres, depending on whether it is sensory perception or imagination. According to the study by Daniela Dentico et al. (Dentico et al. 2014), a closer look at the activities of the individual centres shows that “the visual information from the real events that the eyes see flows ‘up’ from the brain’s occipital lobe to the parietal lobe, but imagined images flow ‘down’ from the parietal to the occipital” (Wanjek 2014). According to classic theory, we should assume that the parietal lobe processes and integrates information from the lower levels (the visual cortex in the occipital lobe), but it has been shown that there

92 Imagination works even during sensory perception. 93 In the case of sight, especially the V1 to V5 areas, depending on the nature of the imagined object – its colour, shape, movement...

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is no centre which could store mental images (as footprints of a real-life experience), quite the opposite – our mind actively reconstructs them itself. The relationship between memory and imagination represents a very complex issue related to the second aspect of Husserl’s philosophy – retention. Several studies have pointed out that people with damage to their operational or episodic memory have severe problems with their imagination. On the other hand, it is uncertain to what extent damage to the imagination (aphantasia) influences the visual working memory and to what extent the damaged memory is the cause of the limitation of imagination. The third aspect of the problem is whether patients with damaged or lessened imagination truly have no imaginary ideas or whether they do have them, but they are not meta-cognitively aware of their existence. Jacobs and his colleagues showed “that although a lack of mental imagery can be compensated for under some conditions, mental imagery has a functional role in other areas of visual cognition, one of which is highprecision working memory” (Jacobs et al. 2018, cf. Bergman et al. 2016). Nicholas W. Watkins (Watkins 2018) reached a similar conclusion, but this time from the first-person perspective, which warned that the loss of visual imagination does not have to be an obstacle in the case of mathematical or physical phenomena. And although the aforementioned studies indicate that it is possible to unconsciously possess visual imagination, the study of Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearlson reports “that aphantasia is a condition involving a lack of sensory and phenomenal imagery, and not a lack of meta-cognition” (Keogh & Pearson 2018, 53). All of the abovementioned studies are attempting to examine the connection between perception, imagination and working memory more-orless generally, without specifically focusing on experiences of beauty and aesthetic feelings. However, recent studies in the cognitive sciences have focused on this type of experience. One example is the neurophenomenological analysis of Shaun Gallagher et al. (Gallagher et al. 2015) focusing on a scientific study of feelings of awe and wonder. Logically the findings imply that individuals with a richer and livelier imagination more frequently encounter aesthetic experiences and experience them in a richer and more intensive manner. This leads us to the issue of personality traits and mood. The third problem especially thematised by Heidegger’s phenomenology is the role and influence of mood in aesthetic experience and assessment. For a long time, studies did not pay too much attention to the analysis of aesthetic assessment depending on the emotional state of mind of the percipient. According to Erla Leon (2007), the reason for this maybe that Berlyne, the founder of modern research in the field of aesthetic as-

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sessment, concentrated systematically and exclusively on the properties of the artwork, and not on the emotional aspects of its assessment (IzsófJurásová 2017, 259). But today we know that the emotional state of mind of the assessors affects their assessments and views, but on the other, it is also true that artworks and the perception of beauty also have an impact on the emotional state of the percipient. Hence it is equally necessary to examine both the valency of the emotional state, with respect to the processing of any type of information, as well as the impact of specific emotions on their assessment. Neuropsychological research has clearly shown that “engaging in positive mental imagery leads to mood amplification of both positive and negative moods in those participants higher in hypomanic-like experiences and… in participants scoring high for hypomanic-like experiences, greater vividness of mental imagery during the experimental task was associated with greater amplification of positive mood” (O’Donnel et al. 2018). This fact equally explains why certain objects appear more beautiful and their perception is more intensive in certain states or under the influence of certain substances.94 Similarly, it is possible to see the more intensive experience of both positive and negative aesthetic feelings in severely emotionally unstable and extravert individuals as opposed to the emotionally flat, introvert and stable people. Interestingly, positively experienced (assessed) emotional states tend to have a holistically positive effect on the overall aesthetic assessment of the percipient, whereas negative states do not lead to worse aesthetic assessments, but rather to deeper analyses. “With respect to empirical studies concerned with aesthetic processing, we therefore assume that aesthetic experience might be hindered by an initially negative mood of the perceiver” (Leder et al. 2004, 494). On the other hand, studies by Arthur M. Jacobs and Jana Lüdtke (Jacobs et al. 2016, 87) based on the mood empathy hypothesis show “that poems expressing moods of persons, atmospheres, situations, or objects should engage readers to mentally simulate and affectively resonate with the depicted state of affairs” (see also Lüdtke et al. 2014). Gerger Gernot, Matthew Pelowski and Helmut Leder reached similar conclusions in their research on empathy, the “feeling into” (“Einfühlung”) emotional content – a central aspect of art empathy theories and of the physical sensations during aesthetic experience. Measuring physical reactions and assessing the subjective reports, they discovered that subjects with a more profound experience when perceiving a work of art equally displayed “more 94 For more information on the impact of certain chemical substances (ethanol, oxytocine, vasopresin) on the perception of the attractiveness of a partner, see, e.g. Démuth 2019a.

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intense bodily reactions (Electromyography (EMG) and skin conductance responses (SCR)) and aesthetic evaluations (higher being moved, valence, and interest) and also liked the art more” (Gernot et al. 2018, 147). This was even true in the case of abstract and modern art. The ability to “feel into” an artwork as well as, in particular, its assessment by others creates a crucial context for our own aesthetic assessment. This is also demonstrated by the contagiousness or even epidemic spread of certain aesthetic emotions related to a common experience or coexistence,95 despite the fact that we should be unbiased in our assessment of an aesthetic object. Kant’s ideal of a pure aesthetic judgement requires not only a lack of bias but also a minimal influence of emotions on the aesthetic assessment (he literally speaks of the necessity to eliminate awe), despite the fact that the reaction provoked by an aesthetic impulse ought to be emotional in nature (liking or disliking). Husserl and other phenomenologists assume the same necessity of adopting a neutral aesthetic approach, although Heidegger himself questions this neutral approach in his theory of disposedness. Therefore, Helmut Leder and his colleagues (elaborating on the work (Forgas 1995) on how mood affects cognitive processing), in their work A Model of Aesthetic Appreciation and Aesthetic Judgments assume in advance “that the mood at the beginning of an aesthetic experience affects the quality of aesthetic processing” (Leder et al. 2004, 502). Instead of aiming to eliminate moods, they anticipate their effect on the aesthetic judgement, although in their newer version of the model they do not speak directly of moods, but rather of aesthetic emotions (Leder & Nadal 2014, 450). Aesthetic emotions have become a hot topic – their definition, categorisation, the study of their impact and comprehension of how and why aesthetic objects affect us. Winfried Menninghaus and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics are therefore studying not only the conceptual domains of aesthetic emotional terminology (Hosoya et al. 2017), but especially the impact of negative emotions on aesthetic experience and its assessment in the life of an individual (Menninghaus et al. 2017). For it has been shown that an aesthetic experience is more moving and influential the more negative or positive the emotions it can provoke in the percipient.

95 The aesthetic experience of listening to, for instance, a song at a concert (where its reproduction is marked by several disturbing moments, but yet enhanced by the synchronisation of emotions) results in the enhancement of feelings of interest and a positive assessment due to it being shared and valued by the surrounding people. Cf. Démuth 2019b.

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The peculiarity of the phenomenological approach to aesthetics is that at first sight, and probably according to most people, phenomenology describes the contents and analyses the possibilities of having a pure (theoretical and aesthetic) consciousness. From this perspective, it continues in the German idealistic school as a philosophy of consciousness. However, if we closely examine Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, we will see that it is not trapped in the study of cognition, but that surprisingly often it also emphasises the corporeality and the body with respect to physical experiences. Hence, the study of meanings is not the only important part of experiences, but so also is the study of an experience as a whole – both mental and physical. As a matter of fact, this is the main motive of Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the unity and physical nature of experience. Husserl’s phenomenology based on the fragmentation of subject and object, body and consciousness, cogito and cogitatum, has become unsustainable and reductionist in the view of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others (e.g. Figal 2015), which is the reason why they have moved away from this classification and understanding of man. In their understanding, man is an entity, but not as a connection of individual parts, but primarily as a unified being, and thus experiences are felt both physically and mentally, and they have their specific existential and non-existential meaning. Thus, the legacy of the phenomenological approach to art and beauty may be found in the unity of aesthetic experience, but also in the study of its roots (e.g. biological or evolutionary), but, first and foremost, in the analysis of the meaning of an aesthetic experience in the life of an individual. From this respect, aesthetics cannot ignore the mental or physical aspects of aesthetic experience or the assessment of a piece of art, which opens the door to non-reductionist scientific-interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research, an integral part of which are cognitive-scientific studies.

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The goal of this book was not to present the heritage of the philosophy of German classical idealism or to attempt to map in detail all of its most important ideological planes or legacies. From the viewpoint of content, and the limited length of the publication, this would be wholly impossible. German idealism represents a wide and internally heterogeneous movement made up of various lines of thinking, starting with Kant’s transcendentalism, through Fichte’s subjective idealism, Romanticism, Schellingian objective idealism emphasising the role of Nature, through Hegel’s theologically and dialectically oriented idealism of the absolute spirit objectified in history, up to its separate and often contrary reflections (Hegelian schools mortally opposed to each other in disputes, voluntarism and irrationalism, up to the phenomenological tradition and the hermeneutical movements, and even neo-Kantism). Besides, the exponents of German idealism represent an important element in the history of philosophy, having contributed to almost every field of philosophy of that time(starting with logic, through metaphysics, epistemology, moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of language ...), in fact founding many of these disciplines (the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, aesthetics ...). Our intention was to dedicate this book to their efforts in one particular area – aesthetics. This field, we believe, is perhaps the most representative of the wide and varied movement of German idealistic thinking and documents its viability and ability to inspire to this day. It is in particular aesthetics and the issues it deals with that join the effort for the unification of subjective experience with objective reality, emotionality with rationality, the laws of perception and feeling with freedom, the seeming passivity of the percipient with the sheer activity of the creator, the universal laws of beauty with taste conditioned by the times, the language and the culture, high art and its evaluation with everyday joy and liking, public opinion with political propaganda and power, the truth of art with illusion, institutionality with the common observer ... Aesthetics has become a classical philosophical discipline which not only draws on the legacies of Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Kant or Hegel, but over the course of time it has also given birth to new – non-Kantian – approaches to beauty and art. From the analyses of lower – sensory – cognition, through the “psychology” and “logic” of the experience of beauty and aesthetic judgement up to the philosophy, theory and history of art, aesthetics has absorbed the influences of the contemporary world and reflected the universalistic, as well as the time- and place-bounded approaches to beauty and art, non-Darwinian impulses, but also pragmatic and ethical factors, the movement of the new criticism and the anti-reaction – “The

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Affective Fallacy”, formalism, but also postmodern and psychoanalytical concepts, the ideas behind conceptual and postconceptual art and many others – including interaction with contemporary scientific approaches. Even in the 19th century, aesthetics – from the time when psychology originated as an independent discipline – reacted (especially under the influence of Gustav Theodor Fechner) to the experimental research and its findings with the origination of the so-called experimental or empirical aesthetics, which forms an influential part of scientific and aesthetic research to this day.96 In the first half of the 20th century a quantitative approach to aesthetics originated (George David Birkhoff, who examined the possibilities of the mathematization of beauty as an expression of the ratio of arrangement and complexity), which was later (in 1970) transformed into informational aesthetics, or the examination of the relationship between aesthetics and theories of information (Abraham Moles, Frieder Nake) and even, in the 1990s, the algorithmic theory of beauty and art (Jürgen Schmidhuber97). One of the latest forms of the transformation of aesthetics under the influence of its dialogue with the natural sciences and especially with cognitive research is the formulation and gradual establishment of neuroaesthetics98 and the cognitive research of beauty or art which we have attempted to underline in this book. It is a true paradox that the philosophical discipline founded originally and mostly on a  speculative, rationalistic and idealistic basis, examining beauty, nobleness, gracefulness, but also the spirit, times, ideas or pure phenomena, has found its methodological inventory in the realm of its mortal enemy and opponent – in the area of natural sciences. Beauty, freedom, ideas or form, all that, so to speak, belong to the realm of the spirit, free thought and contemplation, not to the spheres of laws, causality and reductionist natural cognition. The point is it is the heritage of German idealism99 to separate Geistewissenschaften from Naturwissenschaften so sharply as if they had nothing in common. The irony of this turnabout is, however, only an alleged one. 96 See, e.g. Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics with its seat in Frankfurt am Main with a whole range of activities and magazines of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. 97 Jürgen Schmidhuber formulated the algorithmic theory of beauty which takes into account the subjectivity of the observer and assumes that from among several observations which are comparable by the subjective observer, the most aesthetically favourable is the one with the shortest description. Beauty consists in elegance and simplicity. 98“Neuroesthetics received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art” (Nalbantian 2008). 99 This time neo-Kantian.

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As Terry Pinkard shows, even in the times of Schelling it was possible to feel that progress in the natural sciences, especially chemistry, physics and biology, was changing the face of Europe, and therefore also of German society, in such a way that it was also changing the social, moral, legal, as well as the cultural ambience. With the onset of Darwin’s theory and its popularisation in Germany by a professor from the University of Jena – Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel – a talented biologist and monist, the role of the priests of the truth,100 which until then had been played by philosophers, was particularly taken over by natural scientists and scientific institutions (Pinkard 2013, 357). The purpose of Berlin University, however, from its very beginning had been directed towards unity of teaching and research, empirical and normative, although it is true that in the second half of the 19th century natural scientists took over the absolute leadership of the university. However, if we look at the idea of aesthetics in German philosophy from the beginning, we find that some kind of cognition has always been at the heart of the aesthetic considerations. In the case of Baumgarten it was lower sensory cognition, which may be explained per analogiam by rational cognition and which in no way opposes the rationality of the subject, but rather supplements it on a sensory level. In the same way it is possible to consider Kant’s Critiques as an inquiry into the conditions needed for the possibility of cognition (which could lay claim to becoming a science); morality (which could lay claim to be universally and inevitably binding); and feeling (fancies or aversions which, albeit subjective, but at the same time are still objectively applicable and binding). “The Kantian legacy, by taking the normative authority to be self-legislated, to be a project of our spontaneity as it combines itself with our receptivity in the theoretical sphere and to be a product of our autonomy in the practical sphere, raised the issue as to whether that kind of normative authority could in itself be secured against further challenge. Kantians had their own answer: this normative authority, although spontaneously generated and therefore self-imposed, is nonetheless that of a ‘universal self-consciousness’, of the rules binding all rational agents, since without such rules we could not be self-conscious at all; and certainly our own ‘self-consciousness’ about our own role in instituting those rules cannot remove their binding quality” (Pinkard 2013, 358). Kant’s project was thus a (non-)psychological examination of the architecture of the human mind and how it affects itself and thus influences the construction of the world of phenomena. Herein also lies the core of 100 Fichte’s term.

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his Copernican revolution. We must seek the conditions for truth, goodness and beauty in ourselves, although their effect may only be seen in the realm of (empirical) phenomena. Whereas Kantian aesthetics is some kind of psychology of the mind, the Romantics focused on cognition of the cultural, linguistic and social laws that shape our taste and ideal of beauty. Their study was something of a cultural epistemology, in a similar way as Hegel’s aesthetics may be understood as a historically conditioned process of self-objectification of the absolute spirit on its journey to the self-realisation and self-cognition of the Spirit. We can find the same idea of self-cognition in Schelling, but with the difference that a subject who comes to itself through spontaneous creation and its reflection is ultimately natural. We can also find the manifestation of the core contents in beauty and aesthetic experiencing in the voluntaristic approach to aesthetics. It may be understood as the psychoanalysis of the volitive basis of our own existence and its effort to master itself. Although in voluntarism the cognitive aspect of beauty is replaced by aesthetic pluralism, aesthetics may be understood as a way of penetrating into the depths and the unification of the individual with the primary fundamentality of being (or the world – will to be) or himself (the artist as the creator – over-man). It is not necessary to specially thematise the cognitive character of the phenomenological reflection or the hermeneutical approach to beauty and art. It thus seems that the fundamental and connecting link between the aesthetic concepts in German idealism is the explicit or implicitly clearly present notion of aesthetics as the science of a better self-cognition and understanding of oneself, as a certain form of not fully reflected and rationally verbalised but all the more authentic and more original self-cognition. Aesthetics is thus a science about the forms of self-relation of the subject (being, spirit ...) to itself, to the most perfect form of the existence of self and the phenomena around us. While Kant’s aesthetics examined how the mind related to itself from the first-person perspective, the newly arising aesthetics of neurosciences and cognitive studies continues this research and especially thematises the conditions for the occurrence of aesthetic experience and its description from a third-person point of view. What neuroaestheticians and cognitive scientists study is the neuronal correlates of aesthetic experience, aesthetic emotions, the laws for the processing of aesthetic stimuli, the determinants for the evaluation of these processes, and especially the progress and structure of aesthetic processes at the neuronal (brain) level (Nalbantian 2008, Conway & Rehding 2013). It is obvious that thanks to their

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methodology and new imaging tools they can examine what has remained hidden and inaccessible to the idealistic philosophers. On the other hand, as is well known, the method to a  certain extent, always determines the subject of its research and therefore neuroscientists and cognitive scientists often overlook important aspects of aesthetic perception, experience and evaluation, and only focus their attention on the search for laws at the level of the processes taking place in the brain, not at the level of the meanings and qualities of the particular perception. Those are also the most frequent reasons for the increasing degree of criticism of neuroaesthetics and cognitive-scientific approaches in the study of beauty. We reproach the adherents of neuroaesthetics because their studies do not take place in a natural environment (fMRI), that their conclusions are reductionist (Noë 2015) because they disregard the content and the meaning of an aesthetic experience and replace it with processes in the brain, that the neurosciences are incapable of explaining the diversity and content of art, the essence of freedom and artistic creativity, or even the essence of conscious experience, which is the basis of aesthetic perception and evaluation (Hirstein 2012), and even that they “are killing the soul” (Ball 2013). The discussion about the relevance or irrelevance of neuroaesthetic and cognitive research into beauty or aesthetic experience has its supporters and its opponents. It is clear that neuroscientific research helps us to more closely understand the many hidden and interesting laws or circumstances of aesthetic perception and evaluation. As with any other research, by asking its questions and by realising its intentions it leaves a number of other questions unanswered, which other thinkers may consider to be more essential and important. The purpose of this book, however, was not to promote neuroaesthetics and cognitive studies, but point out that not only has the legacy of German idealistic thinking shaped the history of philosophy and European culture but that it is still alive and has something to offer even today, ironically that also being in the discussion with the most cutting-edge scientific approaches in the royal discipline of German idealism – aesthetics. If we have succeeded in this and the contribution of the book is to inspire future more detailed research into the issues formulated by the idealists of German idealism, for example through scientific research, then the journey taken by the reader has not been in vain.

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About Authors

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About Authors

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Andrej Démuth was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1974. After a graduate degree in philosophy (1997) and psychology (2000) and a doctorate in systematic philosophy (2000), all at Trnava University in Trnava, he was Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy Trnava University (20002009) and University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius at Trnava (2006-2010) and Associate Professor at Trnava University (2009-2014). He was the Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Trnava University (since 2009 till 2019) and since 2018 he is the Professor of Philosophy at Comenius University, Bratislava. He is the author of several books Homo – anima cognoscens (Iris 2003), Čo je to farba? [What is the colour?] (Iris 2005), Poznanie, vedenie alebo interpretácia? [Knowledge, cognition or an interpretation?] (Schola Philosophica 2009, updated version 2013), Perception Theories (Towarzystwo Słowaków w Polsce 2013), Game Theory and the Problem of Decision-Making (Towarzystwo Słowaków w Polsce 2013), Philosophical Aspects of the History of Science (Towarzystwo Słowaków w Polsce 2013), Introduction to the Study of the History of Epistemology (Peter Lang Verlag, 2015), Prolegomena to the Study of Modern Philosophy (Peter Lang Verlag, 2015), Beauty, Aesthetic Experience, and Emotional Affective States (Peter Lang Verlag, 2019), and many scientific articles focused on modern philosophy and epistemology. He gave lectures at a  number of universities in Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia and also attended several short-time research stays at foreign universities (PPLS Edinburgh, UCD Dublin, LUCS Lund, Tallinn University, Tartu University, Uppsala University and Glasgow University) and took part at many international conferences, and is a member of several scientific associations and councils. He was awarded several research grants by Slovak (VEGA, KEGA, APVV), EU and international institutions; he led the EU project of preparation of a new MA programme in Cognitive Studies, which he supervises; he has established the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Trnava University.

Michaela Rušinová studied Philosophy (Trnava University with stay at Lund University and at Ljubljana University), and works as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Trnava University in Trnava. She is also a member of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at the same department. She received her doctorate from Trnava University in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Andrej Démuth with the thesis “Perception and Concepts – the analysis of their relation within experiential content”. Her research interests cover the history of philosophy

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(with a focus on German Classical Philosophy), systematic philosophy (mainly epistemology and metaphysics), as well as cognitive-scientific research (partially oriented on perception theories, neuroaesthetics and some methodological problems on the interface of cognitive science and philosophy). Currently, she focuses on the problems of aesthetics from the historical point of view with stress on German aesthetic tradition and its possible reception within cognitive science and empirical research nowadays.