The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  Aspects of Kant’s theory were quickly adopted, and adapted to a variety of metaphysical contexts, by a number of German philosophers, from Schiller, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel to Hegel and Schopenhauer; so that the assumption that an artifact, insofar as it is a work of fine art, is to be contemplated in and for itself entered the mainstream of aesthetic philosophy. I want to emphasize the suddenness, the rapidity, and the completeness of this Copernican revolution in the theory of art. In the course of a single century, human products ranging from poetry and painting to music and architecture, entirely diverse in their materials, in their required skills, in the expressed aims of their individual makers, and in the occasion and social function of individual works—products which had been classified with other crafts, some of them even with mathematics and the natural sciences, and which had only occasionally and in selected aspects been linked one to another—came to be systematically treated as “the fine arts”: a single and entirely distinctive class. The construction model, in terms of which the individual arts had been treated, like carpentry or harness-making, primarily as a procedure for selecting and adapting elements to each other and to preconceived ends and uses, was replaced by the contemplation model, in terms of which all works of fine art were regarded as existing simply to be attended to for the pleasure of doing so. And the essential attribute predicated for the fine arts, distinguishing them from all practical and moral concerns, was that each work is to be contemplated disinterestedly, for its own sake and inherent value, independently of reference to ordinary life or the outer world, or to any relations or ends outside the sufficiency of the work itself.

  I don’t believe that we can account for so radical and thorough a change by reference to the internal dynamics of the ideas constituting the theory of art. An adequate explanation, for example, must take into account the altering social conditions of the arts in the eighteenth century, and the rapid proliferation of new institutions for making each of these arts available, outside its original social situation, for the appreciation of an ever-growing public; the result was to make connoisseurship—the stance of a spectator, auditor, or reader to a completed and isolated work of art—the normal one for the public, and the normative one for theorists and critics of the arts. That sociological topic, however, must be reserved for another occasion.7 The question I shall pose now is this one: Whatever the changing historical circumstances which required, or at least fostered, a new kind of art theory, was there at hand an intellectual prototype that would satisfy the requirement, and whose familiarity to philosophers might explain why the theory of art-as-such, once brought into criticism, developed so rapidly and was accepted so readily and so widely?

  I think it can be shown that both the point of view and the philosophical idiom constituting the new theory of art were, in a systematic form, commonplaces—very familiar commonplaces—which long predated the eighteenth century; that they had their place, however, not within traditional discussions of the arts, but within the realm of metaphysics, and especially of theology; and that when these ideas were imported into, and specialized for, the theory of the arts, their novelty was not a novelty of content but merely of application.

  II.

  We can begin with the emergence of the crucial concepts that a work of art is contemplated, and that this contemplation is disinterested. It was not Addison, the empirical analyst of the pleasurable and nonpossessive responses of a spectator to a beautiful object, but the Earl of Shaftesbury who, in the essays collected in Characteristics (1711), introduced and set current the specific terms “contemplation” and “disinterested” in connection with the arts;8 primarily among thinkers in Germany, where the climate of metaphysical speculation made them much more receptive than the English to Shaftesbury’s way of thinking. The first thing to note, however, is that the subject of Shaftesbury’s elaborately urbane essays is neither aesthetics nor art, but morals, religion, and the lifestyle appropriate to a gentleman, and that in this inquiry he takes his concepts not from earlier theories of the arts but from a philosophical tradition of the summum bonum, the nature of the ultimate human good. Shaftesbury’s writings are directed especially against the views of seventeenth-century empiricists, represented at a notorious extreme by Thomas Hobbes, that all human conduct is grounded on “self-interest” or “self-love,” as well as against the related views of a utilitarian religion, in which the bases of piety are held to be the desire for reward and the fear of punishment. In his counterclaims Shaftesbury renounces the empirical tradition of his tutor, John Locke, and reverts instead to the opponents both of this tradition and of egoistic morality and religion. Shaftesbury, that is, adopts the dialectical reasoning of the Cambridge Platonists, in which (1) the normative concepts of beauty, goodness, and truth are conflated, and (2) consideration of the modes in which these norms manifest themselves proceeds by a play of analogy between higher and lower realms of being. In Shaftesbury’s moral scheme the topic of beauty—including the beauty both of natural objects and of works of art—enters because, as he says, “beauty and good are still the same,” and “all beauty is truth,” in that all three share the essential formal features of harmony and proportion: “What is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable; what is harmonious and proportionable is true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good.”9 And in the play of Shaftesbury’s dialectic, all our sensible experiences of things which are beautiful are referred to their supersensible “original” and criterion, which he calls “beauty itself,” the “supreme and sovereign beauty,” the “divine beauty,” “the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty” (II, 128–33).

  In his own life Shaftesbury was, in his own term, a “virtuoso”—that is, a connoisseur—of what were soon to be classified as the fine arts. In his essays he sets forth the stance of the gentleman-virtuoso as exemplary for the stance of the gentleman to instances of virtue and moral goodness. “One who aspires to the character of a man of breeding and politeness is careful to form his judgment of arts and sciences upon right models of perfection,” and therefore seeks out “the truest pieces of architecture, the best remains of statues, the best paintings,” as well as that music “which is of the best manner and truest harmony.” But since beauty and good are, in their essential harmonious principle, the same, and the “right taste” for beauty is equivalent of the right taste for what is good in character and conduct, Shaftesbury is able to assert that “the science of virtuosi and that of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same” (II, 217–18).

  What, then, is the stance of the connoisseur, or of what Shaftesbury calls “the virtuoso-passion, the love of painting and the designing arts of every kind”? Shaftesbury describes it as a mode of love which manifests itself in an unpossessive, nonutilitarian viewing of the beauty of a work of art for itself—“beauties, where there is no possession, no enjoyment or reward, but barely seeing and admiring” (II, 270, note). The response to such sensible beauties is immediate, unreflective, and coercive: such “shapes, motions, colours, and proportions . . . being presented to our eye, there naturally results a beauty or deformity.” In a strictly analogous way “the mind which is spectator or auditor of other minds . . . finds a foul and fair, a harmonious and a dissonant as really and truly here as in . . . representations of sensible things”; at least, he adds, “in all disinterested cases” (I, 251–52). To this set of terms for the way we manifest our love of beauty Shaftesbury adds the portentous word “contemplation.” “Every real love,” he says, is “the contemplation of beauty either as it really is in itself or as it appears imperfectly in the objects which strike the sense”; an example of the latter type is “the contemplation of the ocean’s beauty” (II, 126–27). Thus Shaftesbury introduces into his discussion of the way we regard beauty, whether in its primal form, in nature, in virtue, or in works of art, the concept of a contemplation which is disinterested, hence without reference to possession, to
personal desires or concerns, or to utility; and he classifies such contemplation, very strikingly, as a manifestation of “love.”

  Shaftesbury had at hand an exact prototype of a love which finds its satisfaction in the impersonal and absorbed contemplation of an object of supreme beauty—a prototype which was available to him both in a classical and a Christian formulation. In its classical form this prototype is Plato’s representation of the ultimate essence, the criterion-Idea which, in its unison of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, is the terminus of all human desire. Socrates declares in the Symposium that what “love wants and has not” is “beauty,” and that “in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good.” He then proceeds to recount, and consent to, Diotima’s description of the ascent of the lover from the beauty of physical bodies to the beauty of the mind, then to the “beauty of institutions and laws,” to culminate in the contemplation, “with the eye of the mind,” of “beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting.”

  “This, my dear Socrates,” said the stranger of Mantineia, “is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute . . . the true beauty, the divine beauty, I mean pure and clear and unalloyed . . . simple and divine.” (Symposium, 201, 210–12)

  This absolute also constitutes the Idea of the Good in The Republic, which is at the same time the ultimate Beauty and Truth, of which the “beatific vision,” or “divine contemplation” by “the mind’s eye,” is the final stage of knowledge and the highest value in life (Republic, 507–18).

  In Philebus Plato makes explicit what is already implied in these passages, that this ultimate Idea of beauty and goodness is perfect in the sense that it possesses autarkeia, utter self-sufficiency. The Good, the “contemplation” of which constitutes true wisdom, “differs from all other things” in that it “always everywhere and in all things has the most perfect sufficiency, and is never in need of anything else.” This Good involves in itself “Beauty, Symmetry, Truth”; and the claims “both of pleasure and mind to be the absolute good” are invalid “because they are both wanting in self-sufficiency and also in adequacy and perfection” (Philebus, 59–60, 65, 67). Self-sufficiency, a total independence of relationship to anything outside oneself, is also the essential attribute of Aristotle’s God: “One who is self-sufficient . . . is capable of living alone. This is especially evident in the case of God. Clearly, since he is in need of nothing, God cannot have need of friends, nor will he have any.” Aristotle adds that “the choice, then, or possession of the natural goods . . . [which] will most produce the contemplation of God . . . is best.”10 In the Enneads of Plotinus, the Absolute is likewise endowed with a self-bounded self-sufficiency which makes the selfless contemplation of its essential beauty and goodness the goal of all love and the ultimate human value. “Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect,” thus “wholly self-sufficing,” “self-closed,” “supremely adequate, autonomous, all transcending, most utterly without need.”11 Since this essence is the ultimate residence and source of “Beauty, which is also the Good,” the highest good of the human soul, impelled by “the passion of love,” is to rise from the beauties of sense to the nonsensible vision of the One. Then and only then the soul “contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity . . . perfect in its purity.” And in passages of great consequence for Christian thought, Plotinus describes this contemplation as an act of “perfect surrender” of the self which is

  the soul’s peace, outside of evil . . . here it is immune. . . . He is become the Unity . . . no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire . . . reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even . . . the very self. . . . He has in perfect stillness attained isolation . . . utterly resting he has become very rest.12

  By various fathers of the Eastern Church, including Origen, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa, the self-sufficient Absolute of Plato and Plotinus was merged with a very different Being—the personal God of the Old and New Testament.13 Pseudo-Dionysius, the Christian Platonist of the fifth century, made widely current this conflation of a metaphysical principle with the Deity of revelation; and by the sixth century the concept of God as absolute beauty as well as absolute goodness, whose perfection entails self-sufficiency, and who is to be contemplated as the terminus of human love and desire, “had captured,” as Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz says, “the Christian world and influenced all forms of Christian thinking.”14

  But as William James remarked, “I can hardly conceive of anything more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or Isaiah.”15 There are very few passages in Scripture which can be construed, even by a freewheeling exegesis, to predicate beauty as a divine attribute, much less to assert that God is ultimate beauty; and the Platonic concept of an Absolute to be contemplated in the perfection of its self-enclosed sufficiency is patently alien to God, the creator, who walked in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day, or to the God who assumed a lowly human form and was crucified with thieves, or to the just but angry God of the dies irae.16 It was St. Augustine who, a generation earlier than the Pseudo-Dionysius, introduced into Western theology the pagan doctrine that the highest human good is a contemplation of beauty absolute, in the course of expounding the most influential and enduring treatment of Christian love outside of St. Paul himself.

  Augustine put forward his doctrine of caritas, and of its relation to earthly beauties and the ultimate beauty of God, in the Confessions, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, On the Trinity, and various other writings. In his mature thought, the controlling distinction is between uti and frui, “to use” and “to enjoy”; these serve as criteria for dividing love into two categories: (1) to love something for its use to an end beyond itself, for the sake of something else, and (2) to love something in an enjoyment [fruitio] of it as its own end, and for its own sake. All the good and beautiful things of this world of sense, whether these are objects in nature or works of human art, are to be loved only for their use, as a means whereby to ascend to that ultimate goodness and beauty which is God.

  How innumerable are the things made by every kind of art and workmanship in clothes, shoes, vessels and such like, in pictures also and every kind of statue . . . that men have added for the delight of their eyes. . . . But all that loveliness which passes through men’s minds into their skilful hands comes from that supreme loveliness which is above our souls. From the Supreme Beauty those who make and seek after exterior beauty derive the measure by which they judge of it, but not the measure by which it should be used.17

  Of all beings only God, since he possesses his bonum in himself, is self-sufficient, in need of nothing outside himself. And of all things, God and only God is to be loved with pure enjoyment, as his own end and non propter aliud, for his own sake (propter se ipsam), because of his very excellence, and as Augustine repeatedly says, gratis—that is gratuitously, freely, because for no profit outside of him (extra illum). The love of God without regard to reward is opposed to self-love (amor sui). And the summum bonum is to ascend from a love for the things of this world to that fruitio Dei which is a visio Dei, a contemplation of God in his supreme beauty and excellence. In this life, however, such a vision is restricted to the eye of the mind. Only when delivered from this world into the Kingdom of God shall we achieve that “enjoyment of contemplation [fructum contemplationis]” which “will be our reward itself . . . when we enjoy His goodness and beauty”—no longer, as Augustine echoes Paul, “through a glass darkly,” but “face to face.”18

  The culminating stage of Augustine’s doctrine of love—the absorbed contemplation and enjoyment of God, the ultimate beauty and goodness, for his own sake, as his own end, without reference to personal advantage or to utility or to anything outside his self-sufficient excellence—coincides with the contemplation model, the philosophical idiom, and the defining categories of the doctrine of art-as-such. The change—it is of course a not inconsiderabl
e change—is that God as the sole object of disinterested enjoyment has been replaced by works of human art, and that the eye of the mind, as the organ of such contemplation, has been replaced by the physical eye and ear. It is worth noting, however, that Shaftesbury, like Kant and many later theorists, emphasizes that what the percipient responds to in contemplating a work of art is not its physical or sensuous features but an elusive attribute which they call its “form.”19

  To return briefly to Shaftesbury: That philosopher showed his familiarity with the Christian caritas doctrine in his first published work, an edition (1698) of the selected sermons of the seventeenth-century theologian Benjamin Whichcote. In these sermons a principal theme was the moral need to act, not from “self-love” or the desire for personal gain and a “slavish” fear of God, but from “love to righteousness” not as “a Mean, but [as] and End”; together with the concept that the true love of God is not for “what he is to us” but “for what he is in himself”—that is, for “his own Loveliness, Excellency, and Beauty.” Only a mind “Quiet and Serene,” Whichcote said, “can contemplate God, and enjoy Him.” “The Contemplation and Thought of his Excellency, Goodness, and Perfection, should so fill our souls that Foreign Things should be driven away, and be as it were nothing.”20 In his own “Preface” to these Sermons, Shaftesbury attacked the “Ethicks” and the “Political Christianity” of Hobbes. It is a matter difficult to account for, Shaftesbury remarks ironically, that “Men who profer a Religion where Love is chiefly enjoyned,” of which the exemplar is “the Supream Power” himself, should refer human actions “all to Reward,” and so invite for Christian morality the “imputation of being Mercenary, and of acting in a slavish Spirit.”