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And that gaze is unqualifiedly universal, as is often claimed by upholders of the classical aesthetic in antiquity: anybody can occupy its point of view, and anyone with eyes for seeing—anyone with sufficient culture—does just that.
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A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away.
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There is abundant evidence that in preliterate cultures the composition of songs is a process in which discussion and criticism, often passionate, play an important part—and inevitably so, because any aesthetic reaction implies preference, and preference
implies criticism.
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We have to admit the conclusion, distasteful to many historians of aesthetics but grudgingly admitted by most of them, that ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art from their intellectual, moral, religious and practical function or content, or to use such an aesthetic quality as a standard for grouping the fine arts together or for making them the subject of a comprehensive philosophical interpretation.
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Which brings us back to the question whether the so-called systematization of the arts had any bearing on the rise or formulation of aesthetic enquiry in the eighteenth century.
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That the concept, let alone its so-called systematization, was (or is) a prerequisite to the emergence of aesthetic theory and the discipline of aesthetics, is an unnecessary assumption.
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The argument slides along a chain of non sequiturs, which it pretends to treat as historical consequents, from ‘system of fine arts’ to ‘fine arts ’ to ‘fine art ’ to ‘art’ to ‘(the) aesthetic’ (understood as the autonomy of art from moral and other spheres).
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