I turn now to an issue in artistic meaning that is on everyone’s lips, but seemingly in nobody’s mind, in the sense that is very rarely given so much as a brief discussion; I mean the topic of pleasure in the visual arts as an aspect of the meaning of artworks. It strikes me as a near-universal in the contemporary world that, when one asks what someone thinks of an artwork, the initial response is somewhere on a spectrum marked at one end by ‘I loved it’, and the other ‘I hated it’. One step inwards from the end of the spectrum yields ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it’, and all of these responses admit of re-formulation in terms of the language pain-or-pleasure: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it’; ‘I’m pleased that someone’s keeping the faith’; ‘I enjoyed how he handled the paint’; ‘I’d rather receive 50 lashes than have to look at it again’; etc. Further reflection and discussion typically abandon the topic of pleasure for interpretation, e.g. ‘What do you make of his use of unstretched canvas?’ A first question in canonical philosophy of art asks why tragedy on stage gives pleasure, whereas the depicted incidents and sights, if seen in real life, would give unrelieved pain. Aristotle’s brief answer, that tragedy effects a ‘catharsis’ (a purgation and/or clarification) through pity and fear, is sufficiently tantalizing and sufficiently obscure to have induced agreement and opposition, and irreducibly different lines of interpretation for over two thousand years; but surely the general thrust is that the distinctive pleasure of tragedy involves some recognition of the similarities and differences between the tragic character and ourselves, some sense of emotions entertained and experienced without the practical urgencies that would attend them in real life, and some sense of pleasure in seeing and re-seeing, and understanding and re-considering familiar stories. In modern philosophy perhaps most central question arises from Kant: what if any difference is their between, on the one hand, the idiosyncratic pleasures of everyday life (I particularly like chocolate ice cream, you rocky road) or the sensuous pleasures of food, drink, sex, etc., and, on the other, the pleasures characteristic of artistic response, where, as Kant sternly put it, we ‘demand’ the agreement of others. What sort of pleasure, then, distinctively arises in the arts, and what role if any does such pleasure play in the creation and appreciation of artistic meaning?
A survey of philosophical reflection on pleasure offers, it seems to me, little guidance for thinking about pleasure in the arts, as much of it occurs in the context of considerations of hedonism, very roughly, the doctrine that the good life for human beings (and perhaps animals) consists in regularly experiencing pleasure, at least of the right kinds and in the right kind of ways. And further, since there is a default assumption in much of Western philosophy of rationalism, that is (again roughly), the doctrine that the best sort of life is guided by the right sort of uses of reason, much of the relevant philosophical activity is devoted to distinguishing those sorts of pleasures that should be part of the good life from those that shouldn’t, and exploring the ways that the right kind of pleasures can be integrated into reasonable living (from an enormous literature, I would recommend from the bibliography below Roger Crisp for a brief history and contemporary re-statement of hedonism, and John Cottingham and Michael Rosen on rationalism). So, among countless examples, Kant in his Anthropology distinguishes sensuous from intellectual pleasures, and Mill in On Liberty famously distinguishes higher and lower pleasures. If one then thinks that the pleasures of the arts must be intellectual and/or higher pleasures, one struggles to understand the pleasures of looking at a painting by Howard Hodgkin, not to mention the pleasures of the mosh pit.
Despite the sense that in reflecting upon pleasure in art one pursues a line without merit, there are it seems to me two contributions to the topic that contribute to deepening our understanding of meaning in the arts, Richard Wollheim’s brief account of visual delight in painting practiced as an artform, and Mohan Matthen’s distinction between types of pleasures and his analysis of the role of learning in pleasure. First Wollheim: he begins the second chapter of Painting as an Art, ‘What the spectator sees’, with the claim that “the artist paints in order to produce a certain experience . . . : pleasure” (Wollheim (1987), p. 44). He then insists that the artist also paints to produce the experience of content or meaning. Wollheim devotes most of the following parts of the chapter to explicating representation and expression as basic kinds of pictorial meaning. At the end of the chapter he returns to pleasure, or what he there calls ‘visual delight’, and a bit surprisingly there says that has “little to say on this subject”, despite its evident importance. He dismisses the philosophical question ‘What is visual delight?’ and instead devotes barely two pages to the question ‘What is the source of visual delight?’. Wollheim’s answer is that, distinct from whatever pleasures arise from the recognition of the subject matter, visual delight in artistic painting arises from contrasts of two sorts, which are available to the viewer in every sustained instance of pictorial perception. One kind arises from the viewer’s awareness that the depicted subject is not the same as the focal subject in ordinary perception, followed by the transfer of pleasure from depicted to actual subject, and vice versa. Wollheim cites Marcel Proust’s essay on Chardin: “If, looking at a Chardin, you can say to yourself: This is intimate, this is congenial, this is full of life like a kitchen, then you will be able to say to yourself, walking around a kitchen: This is strange, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin.” (p. 98)
So the pleasure arises in the recognition of a subject matter, whether depicted or ordinary, and then transferring the recognition, together with the pleasure, to the other kind of subject matter.
A second kind is given in the conditions of viewing a depiction: there are indeterminately many relatively near and relatively distant views of the painting, and so a distinctive kind of visual delight in contrasting views internal to the action of pictorial perception. Wollheim registers perhaps a lack of certainty about this second kind, only “offering a hypothesis” that there is a kind of visual delight stemming from the materiality of the painting, namely in ‘detail’, which in this context means “detail relative to a more comprehensive, a more distanced view of the marked surface” (p. 100). It seems to me that the account both of these kinds of visual delight in artistic painting can be generalized to the visual arts as a whole, since both depend only on the viewer’s recognition of the materiality of the visual artifact and grasping it as an artwork that represents, expresses, symbolizes, evokes, etc. something in ‘reality’, an object, topic, or situation in ordinary life.
But what of the more standard points about pleasure in the arts? Is Kant right in thinking that such pleasure is ‘disinterested’ and categorically distinct from the pleasures available from real objects or ideas? Mohan Matthen’s account of artistic pleasure seems to capture the truth in Kant’s claims with a psychology considerably more naturalistic and plausibly construed than Kant’s. Matthen begins with a piece of philosophical anthropology: human beings experience two kinds of pleasures: pleasures of restoration or relief when the human body and/or mind has left a state of normal, resting equilibrium for a different state that are physically or psychologically costly (such as pain, physical exertion, sexual arousal, or mental concentration), and then returns to the ordinary resting state; and ‘facilitating pleasures’ where one savors and enjoys some activity in that very activity. The simple example of eating when hungry exhibits both kinds of pleasures: eating relieves hunger, and so as a consequence gives one pleasure in relief, while one experience pleasure in savoring the food, enjoying the taste, textures, sight, and smell, reflecting on the growing and gathering of the ingredients, visualizing the process of cooking, comparing it with other instances of the dishes, etc. In the pleasures of relief one is passive, in facilitating pleasures active. Further, facilitating pleasures activate a learned nexus of preparatory mental and physical actions, with the current instance of facilitating pleasure itself becoming, at least potentially, part of the very nexus that is exercised in experiencing the pleasure. So facilitating pleasures are part of an open-ended learning process. It’s no surprise that Matthen thinks that aesthetic pleasure generally, and the kinds of pleasures we distinctively experience in the arts, are facilitating pleasures. Matthen adds a great deal of analytic detail to the account, but even this bare-bones statement is sufficient for my purpose here of showing the role of pleasure in the formation of artistic meaning. Richard Wollheim once remarked to me that “paintings have a way of teaching you how to look at them”. Matthen’s account suggests how one might interpret this mysterious remark, namely, that it is through a steady engagement with whatever pleasures a work initially offers that one is led to further pleasures, and there is no conceptual gulf between experiencing and expanding one’s facilitating pleasures in an artwork with coming to understand and appreciate the work. Pleasure in art is learning art, and the learning is self-reinforcing and admits of no terminus other than the limits of the viewer’s capacities for looking, inquiring, and reflecting. And Wollheim’s account leads us to expect that a major aspect of artistic meaningfulness will involve the ways that artworks invoke, expand upon, play with, and revoke the distinctions between fiction and reality, as well as the range of views potentially given in any visual artwork.
This completes my initial survey of the great resources of artistic meaningfulness. In the next major section I shall consider the kinds of artistic meaningfulness in the great classes of artforms—bodily decoration and tattooing, pottery; masking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. I shall introduce the topic of the distinctiveness of artforms by considering an instance of proto-art, one brilliant discussed in the anthropological writings of Phillipe Lemonnier and Alfred Gell: the eel trap!
References and Works Consulted (mostly on pleasure):
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
--Poetics
Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum
John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (1998)
Roger Crisp, Reasons and the Good (2006)
Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’ and ‘Principal Doctrines’, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book 10
Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life (2004)
J. C. Gosling, Pleasure & Desire: The Case for Hedonism Reviewed (1969)
Gosling and Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (1982
Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, vol. 1-3 (2007-2009)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
--Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)
Richard Kraut, What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (2007)
--The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised (2018)
Jerrold Levinson, ‘What is Aesthetic Pleasure?’ and ‘Pleasure and the Value of Works of Art’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (1996)
Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (1966)
--After Virtue (1981)
Herbert Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’ (1938), in Negations (1968)
Mohan Matthen, ‘The Pleasure of Art’, in the Australasian Philosophical Review (2017)
--‘The Emergence of Tastes’, in The Geography of Taste (2024), Matthen et alia
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984)
Marcel Proust, ‘Chardin’, in Marcel Proust on Art and Literature 1896-1919 (1958)
Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (1996)
Plato, Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic, Philebus
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)
--‘Pleasure’, in Dilemmas (1954)
Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (1976)
Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)