David Hume: Aesthetician of Neoliberalism?; SentimentTATEality? (2011), GCGCA(i)
SentimentTATEality?
Sensibility not Sense?
Jane Austen's House Museum, Hampshire
22 Dec 2011 - 20 Mar 2012
In the title of Jane Austin’s 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility, 'Sense' means the ability to act with restraint, judgement and reasoning, while ‘Sensibility’ means to give way to feeling and emotion, as reflected in the dual heroines Elinor (‘Sense’) and Marianne (‘Sensibility’).
(Henry Tate Collected Millais): Ophelia (1852), John Everett Millais; SentimentTATEality? (2011), GCGCA(i)
But is sentimentality a barrier to experience? Is it limited in its function as an invitation to repeat a specific psychological phenomena? Does it constitute a form of self-indulgence? An indulgence in an exaggerated emotional state? Of tenderness? Sadness? Nostalgia? Although it draws attention to an essential aspect of art - its relation to feeling - is it ultimately an effect of the psychologisation of Kantian aesthetics (‘aestheticism’)?
'Isn't my Turner divine?' (Sensibility Case Study): Turner; SentimentTATEality? (2011), GCGCA(i)
Is sentiment tied up with an empirical conception of the ‘aesthetic’ that originated with David Hume, who conceived it in terms of our relations of pleasure and displeasure in relation to particular works? Hume’s conception was part of his general moral sentimentalism, the position that ethics ought to be based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He proclaimed in ‘A Treatise on Human Nature’ that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’.
(Henry Tate Collected Fildes): The Widower (1875-6), Luke Fildes; SentimentTATEality? (2011), GCGCA(i)
The concept of aesthetic originates in the concept of taste, which emerged during the 18th century partly as a correction to rise of rationalism (during the ‘Age of Enlightenment’), specifically its application to ideas concerning art and ‘beauty’. Does the tendency to define a relation to a cultural object in terms of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ continue this ‘aesthetic’ tradition, and mirror the basic structure of the market-based, liberal individual ’freedom’ of consumer choice? Could David Hume then be said to function today as an aesthetician of neoliberalism?
(Sensibility Case Study): Klimt/Ivory; SentimentTATEality? (2011), GCGCA(i)
The three terms constituting the field of understanding of art may be said to be aesthetics, logic and poetics (and their four sub-categories: discourse, sensation, intuition and concept). Hume prized poetry as the highest art. And so did Kant, who committed the founding error - in his Critique of Judgement - of conflating ‘art’ with ‘aesthetic’ in the theorisation of a transcendental field of a special type of judgement, privileging of pure aesthetic judgements of taste, and grounding his ideal of ’aesthetic art’ in the idea of ‘immediacy’ from the original concept of taste that had occurred in reaction to the Enlightenment (hence Kant’s rigid dualism of ‘sensible intuition’ and ‘concepts’ that structure his account of our ‘aesthetic’ (perceptual) experience of the world in his Critique of Pure Reason, and the continuation of it in his elaboration of art as ‘aesthetic’).
(Henry Tate Collected Forbes): The Munitions Girls (1918), Stanhope Forbes; SentimentTATEality? (2011), GCGCA(i)
