RuskintheRomantic
John Ruskin’s (1819-1900) vast amount of work roughly consists of two groups on art and economy.1 We may locate a watershed dividing his life and career at about 1860.
He was engaged in the aesthetics of painting and architecture in his early years through the celebrated publication of Modern Painters (five vols., 1843-60), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice (three vols., 1851-3), and then he turned to the controversial criticism of economy and society in his later years through the publication of The Political Economy of Art (1857), Unto This Last (1862), and Munera Pulveris (1872). In addition to these major publications, there are a variety of discourses on art and economy in the forms of university and public lectures, and also the series of open letters on public affairs addressed to the British labour class.Let me clarify my approach to reading Ruskin. First, in past studies of Ruskin, his thoughts on art and economy were treated separately by the specialists in each field, so that they were never discussed as an integral whole in any satisfactory way. By and large, the ways in which specialists in art discussed economy and society were less convincing, while specialists in economy and society paid the least attention to Ruskin’s thoughts on art. The object of this paper is to present a way in which Ruskin’s thoughts on art and economy can be interpreted in a unified manner. My framework for interpretation is a reference to romanticism, or the romantic world view.
Second, Ruskin's thoughts on art and economy are historically given, allowing us to apply two different approaches: rational reconstruction (i.e., logical, theoretical, and methodological interpretation) and historical reconstruction (i.e., biographical, psychological, and historical interpretation). My approach is an attempt at a rational reconstruction of Ruskin by means of the conceptual framework of romanticism, in which I emphasize the key notions of the ‘entire human nature', covering ‘reason, feeling, and will', on the one hand, and of the ‘organism' of ‘nature, mind, and society', on the other.
In other words, romanticism is construed from both sides of multiple humanity and organic objects.Third, I construct this framework by the image of ‘Ruskin's triangle', integrating ‘Wealth, Life, and Beauty' by reformulating the central concept of Life in terms of ‘capability, composition, and labour'. This framework should enable Ruskin to be revived in the present world, transcending the historical circumstances of Victorian Britain. In other words, the purpose of the present paper is not only to discover Ruskin's link between art and economy but also to explore the possibility of economic thought, which will be an alternative to the mainstream economic doctrines.
Regarding Ruskin's work on art (but not his work on economics), the following appraisal seems to have been accepted among art scholars: ‘Modern Painters is the last great statement of the English romantic renovation of sensibility as the Lyrical Ballads is the first. Nature is the central term in both, Wordsworth equating it with “simplicity” in his attack on Augustan poetry, Ruskin with the “truth” in his attack on the Grand Style in art' (Rosenberg 1986,7). Lyrical Ballads (1798), co-authored by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is regarded as an epoch-making monumental work in the birth of British romanticism. In 1798 in Germany too, the Athenaum, the core organ of the early German romantic movement, was published by the Schlegel brothers. The limitation of space in this paper does not allow me to discuss the philosophical and aesthetical dimensions of German romanticism. The picture of Ruskin as a romantic will be drawn in the course of my argument without imposing a rigid conceptual frame of German romanticism.
Romanticism, in the sense of the philosophical world view as well as the style of art, is the overall criticism of the Enlightenment and classicism. The fundamental thesis of classicism claims that the grasp of truth by reason provides invariable ideals even in art and morality.
In Britain, aesthetics underwent a shift from classicism to romanticism concerning the criteria of taste or beauty. In Britain, however, there was no radical change from the classical thesis to the romantic notion that art is the product of the human soul, feelings, and imaginations and that the judgements of tastes are intuitive and relative. Under the influence of the British empirical philosophy the shift was mediated by the idea of ‘association’ (Bate 1946).In psychology, ‘association’ is the process of forming mental connections between sensations, perceptions, or memories. Hume argued that association of ideas was derived by imaginations, and he attributed to imaginations the primary status in mental activity, comparable to the law of gravity. Although in aesthetical judgements the subjectivity or relativity of tastes is often emphasized on empirical grounds, the theory of association was applied to the coordination of various ideas emerging from individual experiences. Thus, the combination of empiricism and intuition yielded a particular type of aesthetics in British romanticism, in which although imaginations, intuitions, and feelings were emphasized as the source of life, they were incorporated into the mould of ideas, or intellect, so that ideas might become the conceptualization of experience. British romanticism under the influence of the empiricist tradition is sometimes characterized as ‘intuitive empiricism’ or ‘poetic realism’ and was able to avoid the extreme positions of idealism, subjectivism, and transcendentalism of German romanticism that stemmed from the philosophical climate of German idealism. It is possible to mention two names among the British romantics who directly affected Ruskin: William Wordsworth (1771-1855) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881).
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