Descartes by putting reason and doubt on a pedestal, became the father of modern philosophy. Whereas aesthetics does not occupy an important place in the work of Descartes, we cannot say he is completely indifferent to art.
He has written a book about music, yet he claims that music is not really music, but mathematics. Tending to be anti-aesthetic, he also notes that oratory and poetry are "gifts of the mind" and hence not properly arts at all.
The philosopher of the 17th century had little to say about beauty and art. Descartes was in favour of the mental universality that is reflected in science in contrast to the material particuliarity represented by the arts.
He also distinguished the poetic imagination from the sensory perception. Free will of imagination brings out new creations that do not exist in the natural world. According to Descartes rational method has no application in art. Art, poetry and beauty are subjective products of imagination and cannot be rationalised.
He differentiates poetic imagination from sensual perception. Descartes holds that emotions are the attributes that rise by the intimate union of the mind and body. He asserts that emotions are felt by the soul. In ‘’Passions of the Soul’’, he states the pleasure derived from art is intellectual joy. The aesthetic experience, according to Descartes, is the experience of intellectual joy along with emotion. He classifies aesthetic experience as confused thought. Merlau-Ponty considers that Descartes degrades art as a handmaiden to perception. Answering to Descartes who had claimed that painting entails metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty points that ‘‘every theory of painting is ametaphysics’’.
While Descartes had not constructed any aesthetical theory as Kant and Hegel did, he exerted an inherent influence on the course of history of aesthetics. Cartesian scepticism, ‘’to think about thinking’’ influenced modern art, bringing to the stage the wonder about truth and reality. Cartesian solipsism left a legacy that led up to contemporary films as ‘’The Matrix’’ or ‘’Inception’’.
Are we living in a simulation? Is what we call ‘’reality’’ a dream world’’? (by the way a great book about philosophical solipsism is Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s ‘’The sect of the egoists’’).
Descartes pondered distinct individuality and what made a person separate from the rest of the world. He brought the notion of inner self to the forefront of philosophy. Furthermore, the French philosopher believed that to gain knowledge of the self one must participate in introspective self-awareness, in self-reflection.
The birth of many artistic movements is a product of doubt. For instance, post-impressionism owes its existence to impressionism. Moreover the art itself is infused by doubt. Jackson Pollock started questioning art itself. The literary stream of consciousness (ibid. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses) is also a sign Descartes legacy concerning the importance of the ‘’res cogitans’’. Representation, sentiments, pleasure, imagination, crucial elements of art occupied strongly the mind of Descartes. This in combination with his metaphysical aspects of his philosophy about doubt and subjectivity opened a new horizon to the arts, proving his influence on the arts setting aside the absence of any systematic cartesian aesthetic theory.
Theognosia Rigopoulou, PhD
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