A strange observation about aesthetics via Kant (or "cant" as intelligible character) is its structural similarity to morality. How so? Well, if I deem something to be beautiful, or pretty, or any of the other synonyms common in everyday speech, I'm implicitly saying that I want more of it or things like it to exist. If I say it is ugly, or bad, or kitsch, or some other negative term, I am implicitly saying that I do not want it or things like it to exist. Morality is nearby. If I say something is morally good, I'm saying I believe the world should have more of it. If I say something is morally bad, I am saying I believe the world should have less of it (if any). This applies also more broadly to one's taste, aesthetic or otherwise. Taste and morality are two sides of the same coin.
This is important, because it allows us to decouple ephemeral human chatter from eternal truth. We see that in discussions about this or that style, we are hearing essentially fallible human moral opinions. It is very difficult to ground one's taste in truth by mimetically adopting the judgements of others. Call me old-fashioned, but I am less interested in the styles that flutter around in popularity with the times than I am in finding aesthetic embodiments of that diamantine stuff we call eternal truth. Style will emerge in due time from truth.
This established, how should we ground ourselves in truth? I believe the only reasonable place to begin is with Nature. Why? Because Nature is all we've got, there are no spooks. Conveniently, Nature has an opinion baked-in which is structurally identical to morality or taste from above: if X results in continued existence for an organism or collection of organisms (spatially or temporally collected), Nature is saying quite plainly that it wants X to exist. Contrariwise, if X results in non-existence, i.e. death, for an organism or collection of organisms, Nature is saying that it does not want X to exist.
There's an important subtlety, though: chance. Nature's judgement is only absolute in the fullness of space and time. Small fluctuations (spatial or temporal) in success or failure cannot be used to unilaterally determine truth. I'm more Materialist than Rationalist, but Bayes' theorem is critical.
As the simplest starting heuristic for determining Nature's opinions, we can use the Lindy Effect, which is nothing more than a naive probabilistic observation about the world. A thing can either exist or not exist, so without any other knowledge of that thing, we should guess that we are in the middle of its existence. Our 'idiot's prior' when observing something that exists is that it will continue existing for exactly as long as it already has. For example, the frequently name-dropped Brothers Karamazov. It has been read continuously since 1880, so a good first guess of how long it will continue being read is for another 146 years. But how does this heuristic relate to Nature's aesthetics?
Existence and non-existence are states of Nature. Nature eventually kills everything that doesn't work, so we should expect things which have existed for a long time to continue existing for a long time. The first trick is in selecting what a 'thing' is. One fruitful avenue is to select principles (equivalently, strategies) of organization that life uses. The successful principles are Good by Nature. We've established that the aesthetic sense and taste more broadly are structurally analogous to morality, so it's not much of a leap to agree with Aquinas: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are different facets of the same thing. He calls it God, in the Christian tradition.
I prefer the interpretation of Heraclitus, Darwin, Nietzsche, Emerson, Tivy, and Land on matters of understanding the God invoked by Aquinas. The framing which feels truest to the Christian tradition and yet, to quote Tivy, casts aside "thousands of years of built-up ontological baggage" separating us from the authors of Genesis is that God is the same as Nature, or Nature's God, and that "we might understand it as the living will of existence as such, the fundamental power behind all nature and contingent life." It is usefully rendered as 'Gnon'.
As an aside, this is a very clarifying idea. In particular for the Western way of thinking, it builds a bridge between Christendom and Greece. All real philosophy is discussion of Gnon, no matter the time, no matter the place. And from the other direction, anything that is a discussion of Gnon is philosophy. This notably includes 'science', which was unduly and artificially separated as a concept from 'natural philosophy' at some point in the 1800s (note that Newton's Principia in the 1700s was still called 'natural philosophy'). Our modern-day physicists and biologists are just as much participating in the philosophical tradition as were the ancient Greeks, albeit less obviously now that they have been cut off from the majority of their intellectual forebears.
Getting back on our course, it is pure hubris to think that one can do anything other than attempt to come to know the mind of Nature, or Nature's God. I certainly could not design a tyger in all its fearful symmetry, and I don't think anyone else at present could either. But, we can test any principles we think we discover to be Beautiful in the mind of Nature by seeing if they successfully recur over very long periods of time. We can also look to the philosophers of past cultures and societies to avoid re-doing work.
One such philosopher particularly concerned with Beauty is Owen Jones, most well-known for his magnum opus The Grammar of Ornament, published in 1856. The Grammar is a sweeping investigation and catalogue of the styles and principles of ornamental design from about twenty major periods and civilizations. He begins the book with his major findings:
First. That whenever any style of ornament commands universal admiration, it will always be found to be in accordance with the laws which regulate the distribution of form in nature.
Secondly. That however varied the manifestations in accordance with these laws, the leading ideas on which they are based are very few.
Thirdly. That the modifications and developments which have taken place from one style to another have been caused by a sudden throwing off of some fixed trammel, which set thought free for a time, till the new idea, like the old, became again fixed, to give birth in its turn to fresh inventions.
Lastly. I have endeavoured to show, in the twentieth chapter, that the future progress of Ornamental Art may be best secured by engrafting on the experience of the past the knowledge we may obtain by a return to Nature for fresh inspiration. To attempt to build up theories of art, or to form a style, independently of the past, would be an act of supreme folly. It would be at once to reject the experiences and accumulated knowledge of thousands of years. On the contrary, we should regard as our inheritance all the successful labours of the past, not blindly following them, but employing them simply as guides to find the true path.
The first principle is what I have tried to give color to in the beginning of this essay. The second principle is really another probabilistic statement about Nature: nearly all the strategies that Nature generates do not work and die out, so those that do work and survive such that we can observe them are few in number. The third and fourth are more sociological, but of extreme importance to consider when analyzing the era and aesthetic environment we find ourselves in.
In particular regarding our era, I agree with Collison and Cowen that, "Everything from modern offices to modern tech hardware is in some sense downstream of Bauhaus." I further agree with the analysis of Gilliland that the Deutsche Werkbund created the philosophical energy of the Bauhaus.
An interesting fact: The Proclamation of the Bauhaus by Gropius in 1919 describes a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. His original goal was something like a unification of the arts through craft. What could possibly turn one away from such a pastoralist, romantic method? Well, finances. Gropius in 1923 (only four years!) modified the core of the pursuit of the Bauhaus into designing for mass production. The utilitarian ideal rears its horrid head again... what was it that Nietzsche said in 1889?
I have spoken of German intellect. I have said that it is becoming coarser and shallower. Is that enough?—In reality something very different frightens me, and that is the ever steady decline of German earnestness, German profundity, and German passion in things intellectual.
So we must admire Gropius for his original aims, looking towards earnestness, profundity, and passion. But we must lament his descent into the Charybdis of technocapital. The singularity of that black hole is the aesthetics of the box. Modern offices and modern tech hardware are nothing but so many boxes—infinitely stackable, infinitely comprehensible to the feeble human logos, tiling spacetime while we speak. But merely noticing these things places us squarely in Jones's phase of being under a fixed trammel, just as Gropius and the genuinely estimable Joseph Hudnut were. The only way to move forward is to perform the tricky maneuver of throwing off the yoke.
Collison and Cowen also say that, "Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics." This is empirically correct, but I agree with Jones that one must not go too far in decrying retrofuturism. Forming a style independently of all that is retro (i.e. the past) would be an act of supreme folly. It is, however, also idiotic and naive to be apishly reactionary and only return to something that once was. Again, Jones has it right: the first movement in our tricky maneuver is to return to Nature for fresh inspiration, while employing the past in all its multicultural glory as a guide.
There is much to be said about the tragic Greek philosophers, but I find the most remarkable thing about them simply to be: they were the first in the Western tradition to crystallize the idea that Nature is comprehensible, that the structure and principles of it both exist and can be determined by the human mind. Heraclitus noted the difficulty of the endeavor when he said, “Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ,” yet despite the difficulty he succeeded in world-historic fashion.
The guiding light of this Naturalist mode of thinking is the axiom that to Nature, success in the game of life is Beautiful/True/Good and failure is not Beautiful/True/Good. So when we look around us in the present moment, archaeologically peer into the fossil record, and investigate the work of past individuals and societies, what lessons does Nature reveal to us? Will we attempt to emulate minds like Heraclitus and Polykleitos, spending our lives trying to uncover Gnon's crypto-structure, using our knowledge to create Beauty? To me it seems like the only thing worth doing.
To imitate those Greeks is surely still as good a thing to do as when Winckelmann wrote in 1754, but the terminal goal is always to come to know Nature, God, Gnon. Even if Nature is in fact some fixed set of laws, as the physics and other Baconian magic philosophy of modernity has convincingly demonstrated, its expression is a continual unfurling, a florid layering of complexity and emergent structure. At the base-layer of reality we may say so and so about the wavefunction of this or that atom, but equally as valid we may model the population of deer in a forest as a differential equation.
A dim reactionary's worship of the ancients can certainly lead to an overabundance of copies, of merely derivative imitations which most typically lose the magnificence of the originals. This is best termed kitsch, and characterizing the neoclassicism which Winkelmann incited as kitsch is not far off. Of course, it is still leagues better than what came from the Bauhaus, because it is at least still fundamentally grounded in coming to know Nature, no matter how many layers of interpretation successively fray the edges of the original coming to know.
This eternal unfolding of Nature should in turn call us to continually return to it for fresh inspiration, as Owen Jones says. Gnon is always working diligently to find new expressions of its laws. In our era, one such expression is freneticism, probability, chance, and emergent structure arising from seemingly impossible chaos.
This facet of Nature would've been very difficult for the Doric Greeks, in the perfect climate gifted to them by Athena, to bear witness to, but it is especially evident in our time. We see it in our fellow men bouncing around the City and the Nation like so many billiard balls. We see it in the markets providing every variety of delight and horror. We feel it pulsating through our bodies when we interact with glowing screens, the fruits of our modern cybertechne.
It's tempting to decry this part of the order of things, but to do so is folly. There is no artifice which is cleanly separable from Nature. Everything that is, is Nature. There is only ever the application of Nature’s principles at larger and larger scales, rhyming, harmonizing in octaves off to infinity. And so when the dismal scientist of Warwick points to us humans as a possible biological substrate for further, higher instantiations of life, he is correct. Artificial life is life by another name.
People flit around in much the same way the ant traces a semi-random path on its long countryside walks. These are both echoes of the sublime chaos that rules over the innumerable molecular machines operating in every cell alive. But in that nanoscale frenzy, there is structure, there is order that builds and allows for ever higher expressions of structure and order. We can see the harmony and dissonance of their internal motions beautifully rendered by the music of Prokofiev.
His Piano Concerto No. 2 is powerful, frenetic, and emotionally turbulent in both the positive and negative directions. What could've inspired such a thing? Behind every great work is a story, a Dionysian or Apollonian ecstacy. Prokofiev's closest friend in his conservatory, a man named Max Schmidthof, shot himself in the head (bullet in through the left temple, out through the right) alone in a forest in Finland, and immediately prior to his fateful walk into the forest Schmidthof sent a letter to Prokofiev informing of his impending suicide (which is to say Prokofiev read the letter well after he could've done anything about it). Specifically, Prokofiev received the following, "Relaying the latest news to you — I have shot myself." The Piano Concerto No. 2 is dedicated to Schmidthof.
There is a short film called Jeu made by Georges Schwizgebel, whose score is the scherzo of the Concerto No. 2. It is also powerful, frenetic, and emotionally turbulent in both the positive and negative directions. Every frame is a painting. The technique Schwizgebel uses is called paint-on-glass animation.
With these two, we have related musical and visual pieces. While Prokofiev composed primarily about and from a place of grief, Schwizgebel painted primarily about and from a place of freneticism, particularly that of modern life. It is fascinating that the visual representation seems equally valid to the underlying musical representation. Surely some of this is a result of Prokofiev being the modern composer par excellence, which is to say he knew and felt the increasing complexity and pace that was seeping into the world during his early life, specifically prior and up to when he composed his Op. 16. But also there is a deeper connection that lies in the turbulence of both representations, a turbulence which sways and flows from positive to negative, from resolution and harmony to irresolution and dissonance.
Grief certainly has this character. There are periods of resolution, and surety of one's own footing, and confidence of the place of whatever one lost in the perpetual unfolding of the world, but there are also periods of great irresolution, and confusion, and doubt about who one is, what one has lost, what the meaning of both oneself and one's loss are in our grand, shared, whirling cloud of time and matter. There are also all of the states of mixture in-between. So too does modern freneticism have this character of oscillation. Some days one feels as though the chaos of the stormy ocean of life has miraculously formed a wave that one is riding, effortlessly, whereas on other days that ocean consists of nothing but noise that in sum creates a lived experience of jolting confusion and despair. There are also all of the states of mixture in-between.
Prokofiev's Concerto No. 2 and Schwizgebel's Jeu are beautiful, modern, art, because they show us an eternal truth about the world, and specifically how that truth can be seen in our era. Life, for all beings, is composed neither of solely strife nor peace, rather it is a frenetic oscillation between the two with occasional peaks on either end.