The Decline of Theology; the Growth of Aesthetics

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

I’m sure there are plenty of discussions about this, all I can remember right now is Carl Schmitt in Political Theology and Political Romanticism, which address different but relevant points.

As I suggested in yesterday’s post, Hume marks some kind of transition from a ‘Stoic’ belief in the sovereignty of reason overs the passions to a belief in the sovereignty of passion, to use a crude formulation I hope has a useful function in elucidation. The interest in ‘taste’ is tied up with this loss of sovereign reason, not that I’m suggesting that Hume is an irrationalist, but that some kinds of Reason are undermined by him.

One form of Reason that Hume undermines, famously, is metaphysical theology and its centrality to philosophy. While I don’t think there is a such a thing as an outright victory or defeat in arguments about religious and naturalist views of the universe, or the existence of God, Hume and then Kant’s arguments on this topic are nevertheless about as successful as any set of philosophical arguments have ever been in shifting the central pre-occupations of philosophy. This is not necessarily anything to do with abandoning God and religion: Hume avoids such an argument and has been taken up by Faith based thrological thinkers; Kant intended to strengthen a way of thinking about ethics which gives us a reason to believe in God. However, their arguments certainly make it easier to abandon God and religion, and shift philosophy away from putting God at its centre in metaphysics.

Very broadly, the arguments of Hume and Kant depend on making a separation between the evidence of our perceptions, and our knowledge of ultimate reality. There is no way tracing our perceptions back to a unified divine cause. There is also no basis for the argument that there is a kind of being that must exist, because it is perfect being, which means a whole shift away from any assumption that some kinds of beings are dependent on higher kinds of being, and so on until we reach Perfect Being as the source of all beings. That is, we move away from the idea of a hierarchy of being.

In Hume and Kant, aesthetics and taste enter into areas where God would have entered, in earlier philosophy. Ethics in Hume is linked with aesthetic taste, in the explanation of how it is formed and how it develops in human history. Kant harmonises ethics and knowledge with reference to an account of the power of judgement, the first half of which is taken up with aesthetic judgement. Understanding and sensibility are harmonised through beauty, coming into the role Descartes, Occasionalists and Leibniz attributed to God, of harmonising different substances. When Kant talks about harmonising understanding and sensibility he is approaching the issue of harmonising mental substance and physical substance in earlier philosophers. Beauty symbolises moral ideas for Kant, and that symbolism is the model for grasping God. The sublime is a way of grasping God, as what is greater than any force of nature. Agreement on taste is the basis for communicability between humans.

Reason is no longer sovereign over the passions, God is no longer sovereign over events. Taste emerges as a way of explaining how the passions organise and unify different people; the beautiful and the sublime emerge as ways of unifying the faculties of the mind, and grounding social communication. We are not necessarily talking about a total aestheticisation of philosophy here, but we are taking about its ineliminability from a less theological philosophy.

The Death of Stoicism and the Birth of Aesthetics

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Returning to a topic I addressed on 3rd July, ‘Racine, Hume and the Death of Tragedy’, I’ve been considering the birth of philosophical aesthetics in the 18th Century in relation to ethical changes of the time. I refer to the birth of philosophical aesthetics in the 18th Century, partly because that is when ‘aesthetic’ began to be used as a term for philosophy of beauty and art. There was such a philosophy in Plato and Aristotle, but in the 18th Century we get questions not asked before: what is taste and why does it change? What can we learn about history through poetry? How can aesthetics harmonise nature and human history?

These aesthetic questions arise from uncertainty about the movements of humans consciousness, the feeling that the passions moves beyond the control of reason and not in a sense that can be resolved by focusing on rationality. It is Hume who says that reason can only be, and only should be, the slave of the passions. What Hume meant by the passions is more expansive than our sense of inner intensity. In Hume it refers to a much more general sense of ideas in the mind and the way they combine and bring about actions and thoughts. The important point here is that the mind can never be completely rational, and should not be completely rational, though rationality is a state we should pursue.

The idea of an ethics of reason controlling the passions, would have been something Hume associated with Stoicism. He also associated it with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but in his time Stoicism was much more at the forefront of what people thought had been bequeathed by the Ancient world. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, were seen through a Stoic understanding. Hume sometimes refers Cicero, who had a dominant position in republican political thought and as an ethical thinker, which has disappeared since the 19th Century, though has been recently revived. Cicero was maybe not a pure Stoic, but is understood to have been sympathetic to Stoic ethics.

Very briefly and crudely, I am defining Stoicism as rationality over the emotions in a balanced self, which fully understands itself. We can see the force of this ‘Stoicism’ in Montaigne and Descartes, but also the strain placed on it by a philosophical interest in self-reflection. That strain is made clear by Pascal. Jumping back to Hume, whatever relationship he did or did not have with Montaigne or Descartes (who he certainly took very seriously) or Pascal, he belongs to a moment in which ‘Stoicism’ is collapsing though Hume hangs on to a mitigated interest in it. But because Hume, himself, undermines the ‘Stoic’ self through his scepticism about causality, personal identity, and free will, he starts to think of taste for beauty as something variable and subjective, in a way which would have seemed highly peculiar to Plato and Aristotle. Hume needs to think of ways in which human sociability allows common standards of taste to emerge.

The ‘aesthetic’ in Hume emerges from the disintegration of the ‘Stoic’ and this is the background to the ‘aesthetic’ (taste, poetics, the sublime and the beautiful) in Hutcheson, Burke, Vico and Kant.