The Enlightenment age begun in the seventeenth century – John Locke (1632-1704) is usually quoted as one of the originators – and there is debate about when, or even if, it ended; some would say with the French Revolution, others may argue that it ended with the advent of Post-modernism. The age of Romanticism which is the period of my particular research, is contained within the period of Enlightenment; Romanticism began with Rousseau, Kant and Blake and ended with the advent of Abstraction, although some would argue that it died out in at the beginning of the Victorian period. The Enlightenment (especially in England) was particularly concerned with rational thought whilst Romanticism gave priority to the imagination and experience.
The French philosophy René Descartes (1596-1650) set scientific endeavour free from the tyrannical control of the Church by presenting a clear foundation for the advancement of philosophical principles with separation between mind and matter. Unfortunately, Descartes died before he was able fully to develop his ideas on dualism but the general principles which he propounded were amongst the most influential in the foundation of the age of Enlightenment. By the time of the Romantic period, the situation had become more subtle, with the boundaries between mind and matter, theology and philosophy becoming somewhat blurred. As the twentieth century philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) expressed this development of prevailing thought:
At its simplest the idea of romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also – truth and validity as such.[i]
To express this thought another way, I suggest that during the early period of Romanticism there was a burgeoning realisation that there may not be absolute solutions to problems of morality or indeed knowledge. It is the human mind or the imagination that creates or gives birth to reason which in turn leads to knowledge, usually with a degree of provisionality or limitation. Taking Isaac Newton (1642-1727) as an example, out of his extraordinary mind came theories on optics, gravity, planetary motion and the beginnings of the calculus, the latter being developed further by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716) and others. At the time Newton was propounding his hypotheses and theories, he did not realise the limits within which they could be applied, and sometimes today one hears the suggestion that Newton has been superseded. This is not so; it is merely that we now know that his system of mathematics and mechanics cannot be applied to the very small (study of the performance of elementary particles) or the extremely large. That said, we only need Newtonian mechanics to enable us to design all that is necessary for mankind to travel to the moon. Thus, there is a provisionality of knowledge – knowledge which has limits within which it can be applied, and which may or may not be known at the time of its discovery. This provisionality does not only apply to scientific endeavour but equally to the humanities where I would give as an example biblical interpretation. It is this provisionality applied to the philosophy of art and to the possibility of the suggestion of transcendence through art and music that particularly interests me
At the end of the eighteenth century, art was beginning to be free from some of the conventions of the past, such as Renaissance art and Classicism with the break from the academic schools being led by William Blake amongst others. Blake, (1757-1827) was a poet, engraver and painter and could be said to be the forerunner of the age of Romanticism in Britain. Some artists, such as J.M.W.Turner and John Constable were using this freedom to produce work that was free from history and produce works that ranged in subject from the political and the moral, to those which were required to produce records for the future (for example portraits). Artists such as Samuel Palmer, Philipp Runge and Caspar David Friedrich during the age of Romanticism, Stanley Spencer (1891-1951) and David Jones (1895 -1974) in Britain and Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in Paris and the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko during the early years of the twentieth century all endeavoured to produce works which revealed or at least gave a glimpse of that ultimate reality that we call the Absolute or God. According to John Harvey, within visual culture there is the encompassing of ‘a broad range of dynamic and interactive fields of knowledge’ subsuming ‘all artefacts, events and phenomena that convey ideas, and are experienced or intended to be apprehended visually’.[ii] Within this broad definition, we can set a framework examining the aesthetic and philosophical trains of thought that were being developed during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. Two paradigms (conceptual frameworks within which theories can be set) can be identified, the first from Baumgarten to Hegel, and the second which opened with the approach to philosophy of art of Schelling (1775-1854) which we can explore in a later reflection.
Whilst Baumgarten initiated a philosophy of aesthetics, claiming epistemological (relating to knowledge and its communication) relevance for sensual perception, it was Immanuel Kant’s development of the subject that has held sway for the past 200 years, and although his views have been challenged since, the Kantian approach was relevant for the development of ideas on the purpose of art for all the artists who endeavoured to express their vision of the numinous through their work.[iii] I am concerned with the way in which the visible world (especially landscape) has been used by artists at a particular time to suggest an invisible, transcendent eternal world. To re-iterate, it is my contention that a paradigm can be traced from its beginning with Baumgarten, who re-introduced the word ‘aesthetics’, its development by Kant and others such as Schiller, to its end with Hegel, at which point Schelling began a new paradigm which continues to the present time.
Kant, in his Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason, began the period of German Idealism ‘which constitutes a cultural phenomenon whose stature and influence has frequently been compared to nothing less than the golden age of Athens’.[iv] Essentially Kant argued that the human intellect is limited to the receipt of knowledge which can be derived using the logic of mathematics and reason on the one hand and which can be derived from empirical observation on the other. There is however a third branch of knowledge – the noumenal or transcendental – which may possibly be available through intellectual intuition. This third type of knowledge has a nature which is more ‘ideal’ than the others – a designation that gave rise to Idealism.
In essence, the first two branches of knowledge – reason and empiricism – have limits as to what we can see and know absolutely. From this it follows that the third branch of knowledge – intellectual intuition – exists beyond the common-sense level and suggests that there is a higher or more ‘ideal’ nature. Kant referred to this level as the noumenal and distinct from the phenomenal domain in which we experience everyday life. Idealism was the framework within the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal could be discussed.[v] This approach to knowledge – with the somewhat artificial separation between rationality and imagination – existed at the time of Blake during the early part of the nineteenth century. And it is this which we will examine in next week’s reflection.
Dr David Greenwood. July 2020 d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk
[i] Watson, P The German Genius London Simon and Schuster 2010 quoting Berlin p; 193.
[ii] Harvey, J. The Bible as Visual Culture Sheffield Sheffield Phoenix Press 2013 p. 4.
[iii] Hammermeister, K. The German Aesthetic Tradition Cambridge CUP 2002, p. 4.
[iv] Watson, P. quoting Americks, K. p 138.
[v] Watson, P The German Genius London Simon and Schuster 2010 see page 136-139 for a detailed explanation of Idealism
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