Perennial philosophy's theory of art.(Art)

PHILOSOPHY is in the perhaps unique position of being able to claim that, as far as its own discipline is concerned, everything has been said by some philosopher at some time or other. This is the polite version of the assertion that there is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not said it. Now bearing in mind that it was the wise Cicero who made the latter claim, if it was true in his time imagine how much truer it is now.

Is it to its credit for philosophy to have been, historically, so promiscuous in its utterances, or a mark of shame? Well, on the one hand it means that any earnest seeker after truth and wisdom--terms not in great vogue among philosophers these days--has a veritable cornucopia of ideas and theories from which to select. Like most hypermarkets, the hypermarket of ideas might engender at first in the searcher a certain giddy exhilaration at the thought there is just so much from which to choose---indeed that somewhere, in some aisle or other, on some shelf, there is to be found the idea or theory that is just right for him. After a good twenty minutes in one of these megastores, however, experience tells that the dizzy anticipation is usually replaced by just plain dizziness. Where to start? The problem is made all the more acute by the fact that, just as the shrewd supermarket manager moves the stock around from week to week to keep the customers guessing, so in philosophy you never can tell from decade to decade, maybe even from year to year, just what will be the day's theory dujour.

On the other hand, the searcher has some consolation. For if indeed everything has been said by some philosopher or other, it must be the case that everything true has been said. If so, it is only a question of looking hard enough. It is this side of the smorgasbord on which I prefer to focus. For among all the junk food, shrink-wrapped pizza, microwave meals and mechanically recovered meat, I believe good, wholesome food is still to be found. But then I am a bit old-fashioned in that I still believe in truth, that people ought to be able to distinguish by smell a Big Mac from a filet mignon.

It is hard to talk about truth in philosophical circles; even harder outside them. One of the hardest things of all is to talk about truth in art. Perhaps the most difficult is to talk about truth in art to artists. I do not say this as a gesture of misplaced self-flattery, since what I plan to do here is very modest indeed. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that, in a world where the maxim De gustibus non est disputandum has become an article of faith, it is to say the least a challenge to argue that there is in fact truth in art, that there is plenty to argue about and that some arguments are correct, others not. The almost universally undisputed belief, due mainly to the influence of Hume and Kant, is that aesthetics is a discipline that does no more than enquire into the conditions under which humans form judgments of taste, and that reports the findings of subjective opinion. Virtually everyone, within and without artistic circles, believes that there is no absolute sense in which art is good or bad--art just is. On this view beauty--to the extent that beauty, along with truth, has not been ejected into the dustbin of unmentionable ideas--really is in the eye of the beholder and nowhere else.

I do not intend to argue front-on, as it were, for the notion of absolute truth in art. My more limited plan is to set before you, in the briefest of terms, an outline of a theory of art that once dominated Western civilisation for many centuries. Now it is rarely even mentioned, let alone taught, in the universities and other academies, which generally take serious theorising about art to have begun in the eighteenth century. The theory was held, either explicitly or implicitly, by every thinker who believed in artistic truth. I consider it to have been held, in rudimentary and subconscious form, by every artist and craftsman who ever held a hammer or a paintbrush. It goes back in essentials to the Greeks, but finds its full flowering in the philosophers of the Middle Ages, known as scholastics. Among them, it finds its clearest and most precise, if unfortunately brief statement, in the thought of the greatest of the scholastics and the greatest of philosophers, St Thomas Aquinas, and his followers.

Scholastic philosophy is sometimes called peripatetic--after Aristotle and the Aristotelians--and sometimes perennial, signifying the belief of its adherents not only that it goes back in essentials to the Greeks, who invented philosophy, but that in itself it is an eternal and indestructible system that embodies the natural wisdom of mankind and will do so no matter what the intellectual fashions and currents of the time. A big claim to make, of course, big enough for the whole system to be written off as mere dogmatism--as if there were no more frightful sin--by centuries of philosophers who have congratulated themselves no less dogmatically on their enlightened scepticism. Be that as it may, the epitaph of perennial philosophy has not yet been written, and its revival in philosophical circles in our own day is to be welcomed.

By presenting an overview of perennial philosophy's aesthetic theory, I hope to show indirectly what that philosophy has to commend it in general, by the way it treats one subject in particular. I hope also to show that perennial philosophy is not an historical relic, a cast-off from an alien time, fit only for the cramped exegesis of modern historians of ...