Abstract
Much of Arnold Hauser’s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser’s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge—where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser’s personal and intellectual background, as well as of the shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser’s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser’s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser’s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer—“on Hauser’s behalf”, as it were—to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in.
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Notes
On Hauser’s distinction between aesthetics and the theory and sociology of art, see also (Demeter 2008: 7).
All page numbers in the remainder of this section refer to The Philosophy of Art History (Hauser 1959).
For a critique of Wölfflin’s divorcing of the scholarly methods of art history from those of cultural history, see also (Wind 1931).
This foreshadows Paul Feyerabend’s argument that “there are no ‘neutral’ objects which can be represented in any style, and which can be used as objective arbiters between radically different styles” (Feyerabend 1975: 23); see also the section “Art, technology, and scientific knowledge.”
This is confirmed by Hauser’s reiteration of the point in The Sociology of Art: “In this sense, we can maintain that the sciences, especially the formal ones like logic or mathematics, have no ‘actual’ history and that as far as they are concerned it is more proper to speak of a history of errors and misunderstandings than of one with positive results.” (Hauser 1982: 85) Debates within the history of science, following Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), seem to have had no impact on Hauser’s thinking. Interestingly, Kuhn himself acknowledges the influence that debates in art history have had on his own thinking (Kuhn 1969: 403). An anonymous referee raised doubts about the extent of this influence, by noting that Kuhn cautioned art historians not to think of styles as paradigms: “If the notion of paradigm can be useful to the art historian, it will be pictures not styles that serve as paradigms.” (Kuhn 1969: 412) However, this criticism overlooks two important points. First, Kuhn’s warning against the misuse of the term “paradigm” in art historian circles coincides with his (failed) attempts, in this and other 1969 papers, to establish, once and for all, a narrow meaning of the term “paradigm” in philosophy of science, namely as referring to (individual) “exemplars” (hence his analogy with “pictures” in art history)—as opposed to the more expansive notion of a “disciplinary matrix”. (See Hoyningen-Huene 1993: 142.) Second, Kuhn’s rejection of equating “style” with “paradigm” is, in actuality, a rejection of talk about “theory”:
Both ‘style’ and ‘theory’ are terms used when describing a group of works which are recognizably similar. (They are ‘in the same style’ or ‘applications of the same theory’.) In both cases it proves difficult—I think ultimately impossible—to specify the nature of the shared elements which distinguish a given style or a given theory from another. (Kuhn 1969: 412)
Thus, Kuhn’s real target is a reified notion of “style” that would be quite alien to Hauser—who, as shown in the previous section, attempts to rescue the concept of “style” from those who would like to attribute to it the status of a “‘higher’, Platonic, or Hegelian idea” (Hauser 1959: 213). On the link between iconography, the concept of artistic style, and Kuhn’s philosophy of science, see also (Fuller 2000: 51–77).
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Gelfert, A. Art history, the problem of style, and Arnold Hauser’s contribution to the history and sociology of knowledge. Stud East Eur Thought 64, 121–142 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-012-9163-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-012-9163-5