The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience

This substantial, ambitious, and wide-ranging book is the first in a series of three planned volumes on the origins and evolution of ancient aesthetic inquiry, building on Porter’s extensive earlier publications in this field. The author argues that our understanding of ancient art and ancient aesthetics has been overinfluenced by the formalist and idealist approaches of Plato and Aristotle and that the dominance of these philosophers has obscured the extent to which, in antiquity as in modern times, aesthetic experience was understood in terms of sensualism and materialism. The book is divided into three main parts. The first three chapters deal with broad philosophical issues and begin by arguing, against Kristeller’s well-known paper on ‘The Modern System of the Arts’ (first published in 1951–2 and often reprinted), that there are ancient terms and concepts which can be regarded as ‘aesthetic’ and which can be studied as part of an enquiry into aesthetic experience in antiquity. In chapter 2 Porter goes on to criticize both modern and ancient versions of formalism, dealing with Clive Bell and Roger Fry, the Russian formalists, and the American New Critics as well as both Plato and Aristotle. Against what he sees as ‘the disgrace of matter in philosophy, art and culture’, Porter argues in chapter 3 for the importance of the materiality of art and the sensuousness of art objects and moves towards the closer study of ancient thought, with some controversial pages arguing that all the Presocratics—not just the atomists in whom he has long had a particular interest—should be understood as materialists; at the end of the chapter he suggests some possible connections between the Presocratic concern with appearances and developments in the arts at that time.