Philosopher, author, and art critic, Arthur Danto quipped a few years ago, that the position of Aesthetics is

“about as low on the scale of philosophical undertakings as bugs are in the chain of being”.

No offence to the bugs, but besides being marginalized by philosophers, Aesthetics is often neglected completely by the literati. Few Indian graduate and post-graduate programmes in literature require even a passing acquaintance with Aesthetics, or advise dissertations in the area.

Originally coined by Alexander Baumgarten in his book “Reflections of Poetry” in 1735, the meaning of “Aesthetics” has metamorphosed over the ages. B. Bosanquet in his “History of Aesthetics” defines Aesthetics as “the philosophy of the beautiful”, while E. Meumann thinks of it as the “Science of beauty in nature and arts”. Hegel, Benedetto Croce and T. Munro opine that Aesthetics studies works of art, the process of producing and experiencing art, and certain aspects of natural and human production outside the field of art. There has always been a close connection between art and aesthetics, and hence the armchair status of aesthetics where literary criticism is concerned is the result of abysmal ignorance in most cases.

R. B. Patankar tells us that the relationship between Aesthetics and literary criticism is often conceived on the analogy of the relation between pure science and technology. Critics analyse, interpret, compare, evaluate, and grade works of art. Aesthetics analyses the conceptual structure underlying these activities of the practical critics. It identifies the inherent concepts, shows how they are interrelated, inspects their form and content, inquires what horizons of value are opened up by their adoption, and relates these concepts to concepts underlying other spheres of human activity.

This type of conceptual analysis throws light on the world we live in, for to analyse the basic concepts underlying our commerce with works of art is to reveal the form of the corresponding aspect of the human world. Aesthetics questions the meaning, intention, and representation of literature. It interrogates the meaning of “meaning”, and in doing so equips the literary critic with a better understanding of his art.

Aesthetics then takes the form of Metacriticism with literary theory as its object. In “The Significance of Theory”, Terry Eagleton states that first there is meta-theory, and then there is literary theory that is the object of enquiry for meta-theory. Similarly, the object of enquiry for literary theory is literary criticism, whose object of enquiry is literature. Finally, there is real life that is the object of literature. The analysis of metaconcepts by Aestheticians has tremendous implications for literary criticism as it ensures the topicality of criticism by maintaining a permanent state of flux. Indeed, as M. C. Beardsley maintains, that by clarifying and confirming critical statements, Aesthetics is “a philosophy of criticism or metacriticism”.

Aesthetic scrutiny helps ward off the phenomenon of essentialisation which often accompanies literary statements, especially pertaining areas like genre theory. To demonstrate, a serious problem arises if we view Aristotle’s description of tragedy as a definition that specifies the essential properties of all tragedies. This, in fact, has been the tendency of many of the Aristotelian commentators. F. R. Lucas, for e.g., argues that,

“the essence of ‘tragedy’ was that it handled serious action of serious characters, whereas comedy dealt grotesquely with the grotesque”.

We may think here of the novels of Thomas Hardy like “Jude the Obscure” or Mahasweta Devi’s “Rudaali”. Such works according to the conventional view cannot be categorized as ‘tragedies’. The analytic flavour of Aesthetic probing helped abandon the idea of any tight definition of Art.

The “de-definition” of art Mary Devereaux observes, was formulated in academic philosophy by Morris Weitz. He derived his views from some work of Wittgenstein on the notion of games. Wittgenstein claimed that there is nothing that all games have in common, and so their historical development has come about through an analogical process of generation, from paradigmatic examples merely by way of “Family Resemblance”. Thus Wittgenstein’s work paves the way for a more flexible conglomeration of criteria for classification ensuring that experimental literary exercises do not face unqualified rejection or stereotyping.

Aesthetics provides philosophical tools to probe certain issues or problems as they emerge adding rigour to critical introspection. The application of the Indian Rasa theory to contemporary cinema is one example of the same. Such novel use results in innovative investigation, which yields startling, and at times subversive results.

Patankar tells us, that often the relationship between the aesthetician and the critic is like the relationship between the logician and the common men as thinkers. Men did not learn from Aristotle how to think syllogistically. They were doing it ages before Aristotle was born. He merely made them explicitly conscious of the logical form of their reasoning. In a similar fashion, Harold Osborne in his “Aesthetics and Criticism” does not invent or discover “Configurationism”, but merely makes the literary critics explicitly aware of this criterion from Gestalt psychology that they were using. By making the implicit explicit, the aesthetician helps deconstruct theories, thereby exposing contradictions and ensuring that a critic is reined in before he obfuscates concepts creating semiotic chaos.

Aesthetics in the process of clarifying concepts deployed by critics questions the norms used to judge works of art. For instance, Matthew Arnold’s claim that a true estimate of art must not take history into account may be contested by historicizing art. One sees instantaneously the fatuity of comparing a Caravaggio and prehistoric cave-paintings using the same prescripts. But can one use history to exonerate all callow attempts? By dwelling on such issues, the Aesthetician provides valuable insights into the literary world.

Patankar indicates that the clarification of concepts is crucial because critics appear not to use just one criteria with limited application, but a “spiral of criteria”, each criterion depending upon a more general criterion for its justification. In the process, many such spirals of criteria are continuously competing for supremacy and therefore always living in an uneasy atmosphere of precarious co-existence. He contends that the inevitable tendency to go from narrower to more general criteria should be obvious from the way literary judgment is defended.

Suppose one were to say, “The Color Purple is certainly a good novel, but it is not so great because its agenda is rather crudely obvious and the author is unable to maintain detachment throughout”. The assumption here is that great literature is subtle and not in the face. In trying to defend our judgment we passed by easy transitions to general criteria which apply – at least we hope they do apply – to all literature disregarding the fact that black writers, especially women, did not have the luxury to be subtle.

There is also another route, says Patankar, by which we come to general statements about literature. While judging the merits of Volpone, Measure for Measure and Hamlet, we realise that though the first two may be called comedies, and that all three share a preoccupation with the problem of moral depravity, we cannot by any stretch of the imagination call Hamlet a comedy. It is here that we find the need to take recourse to a more general criterion of value. The larger the field we wish to consider, and the greater the heterogeneity there is in the works to be evaluated and graded, the more general the criterion is apt to become.

Thus, the critic who begins unostentatiously with “Is this a good play?” invariably ends by asking, “What is good drama?”. The process does not stop here if the critic is acquainted with two or more arts. If literature is a representation of life and if the same is true for painting, can we not say that all art is a representation of life? The constant exchange of terminology between the critics of different arts strengthens this belief. The critic now feels that in order to be a good critic he must know what art in general is. And thus, criticism leads to aesthetics or metacriticism.

Aesthetic interpolation sees to it that discipline and consistency are maintained in a critics work. Even professional critics err at times and use criteria which are mutually exclusive. Dr. Johnson contradicts himself in his Preface to Shakespeare when though he lauds Shakespeare’s “realistic representation of reality” which is in the neoclassical vein, he finds fault with the fact that the good people often suffer and that the villainous prosper in his works. The two criteria obviously contradict each other because divine dispensation is most certainly unreal. One also needs to clarify dubious distinctions made by the likes of Clifford Leech who insist that “tragedy, as it can exist today, must be very different in manner from the plays we have from Sophocles or Shakespeare or Racine, but …in its essence it will be one with them”. Leech has tried to set up a distinction between the noun “tragedy” and the adjective “tragic”, and has argued that, “the noun is still, in precise usage, restricted to drama”.

Many such contradictions go undetected, till philosophically trained aestheticians expose them. Harold Osborne, Terry Eagleton and others have rendered a great service to criticism by making critical discourse more disciplined.

The elucidation of a concept may at times lead to reformulations. Postcolonial Aesthetics that emerged from Edward Said’s “Orientalism” and the phenomenon of “Postmodern” literature that deliberately deconstructs its own constructs may be seen as examples of the same. Also, Foucault’s books on the “History of Sexuality” have ushered in “Queer Aesthetics” that has turned traditional literary criticism on its head with people like Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield as its exponents.

Concepts like autonomy, spontaneity, psychological, and archetypal pattern (Maud Bodkin) theories are examined. People like Walter Benjamin debate over the radical potential that technological advancements invest art with. All in all, Aesthetics equips us by engaging in questions of philosophy, psychology, social sciences, history etc. to view Art as an open concept and new movements become a welcome possibility.

The task of the critic presupposes that of the Aesthetician, and it must be noted that Aesthetics does not dictate which concepts are to be employed, but analyses the concepts already used and foregrounds the discrepancies if any. The discipline is anything but static as it negates prescription. It is time one realized that the aesthetics of literature is nothing but poetics and the critical examination of concepts involved in it. As Patankar tells us, it is an error to suppose that literary aesthetics is the application of extra literary principles to literature.

Of course, there are people like Stuart Hampshire who try to prove that there cannot be anything like aesthetics or even literary criticism as no general criteria employed by either discipline may be applied to any art, as all art is “unique”. If it is a fact that every work of art is unique it follows that works of art cannot be classified and compared and graded, and also that there can be no general criteria of aesthetic excellence and thus the occupation of critics and aestheticians is gone. But, Patankar says, “if the concept of uniqueness is correctly interpreted, these consequences do not follow”.

To echo Terry Eagleton’s “The Ideology of the Aesthetic”, aesthetics is always “a contradictory, self-undoing sort of project, which in promoting the theoretical value of its object risks emptying it of exactly that specificity or ineffability which was thought to rank among its most precious features”. To ensure that the very language that elevates art does not perpetually offer to undermine it, it is crucial the “mist of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion” enveloping aesthetics and literary criticism needs to be lifted !!