I’ve been rather ignorant of this discipline, and only saw categorization of historical style progressions as a taxonomic exercise. Over the years as I listened to classical music, I’ve gained at least one understanding of why there is a progression — something rooted in human expectation and its motivic innovation, I suppose (some fascinating papers on the subject of aesthetics here and here). But why this particular progression was never clear. Perhaps there was no rhyme or reason, I thought, just a coincidence.

So lately I’ve been considering whether there is some organization to better understand some milestones of (Western) art history, which get period labels like:

premodern, classicist, medieval, renaissance, baroque, rationalist, romantic, modern, and postmodern.

And I thought, without prejudice to those who do this for a living (by this I mean I could be totally wrong), that I would group these in the following way:

I. classicist -> renaissance -> rationalist
II. medieval -> baroque -> romantic
III. premodern -> modern -> postmodern

I conjecture that the human condition has always embraced two competing threads of philosophical inquiry, and the aesthetic experience surely parallels this: one is rational, the other emotional. This split shows up in various pseudoscientific personality inventories and left-brain right-brain claims, so whatever the validity, altogether many people believe there are these two traits. Rationality requires thinking, emotion requires feeling. As time went on, people got better at accessing and expressing both. That makes the first two chains. Classicism and renaissance art are sort of a crude version of the more polished later rationalism, emphasizing rules of regularity rather than the essence of logical rigor. Similarly, medievalism and baroque emphasize the ornate or religious form, a particular representation, rather than the underlying emotional content that is abstractly expressed in late romanticism. Rationalism is not easy, it requires political organization, order, and an optimistic view of progress. Perhaps when things are going well, people gravitate toward the rational, and when things are not going well, in times of turmoil and chaos we fall back on our innate emotions that link us more to our primeval past.

The third chain is a recurring attempt at synthesis. The premodern form is sort of a backdated attempt at describing what must have existed in an uninspired form of synthesis — that is, whatever existed naturally by dint of our existence, which naturally has elements of both rationality and emotion: this is what defines us as humans. But following the (for now) pinnacle achievements of the rational and emotional movements — “pinnacle” only because they have delivered to us our current state of the world — we’ve been in a state of modern synthesis perhaps to try something different or to come to terms with the duality. It’s hard to classify the likes of impressionism and expressionism, which I see as sort of the rational-slanted and emotional-slanted precursors, respectively, of full-blown modernist abstraction. Impressionism uses rational language, but an intentionally imprecise one that somehow recalls emotional content. On the other hand, expressionism uses emotional language, but an intentionally distorted one that tends to evoke rational retrospection. Modernism in general creates, by abstraction, a distance from the human, and in this way, synthesizes the rational and emotional from the vantage point of a duality better observed. Nevertheless, modernism still gives the human element a place among equals, perhaps a slightly privileged one, still. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is more adversarial, which in its deconstructionist drive, removes the natural place that the human occupies in artistic expression. One would believe that ultimately, postmodernism would fail for this reason, but one can’t be sure… For there is a long road to synthesis yet, especially as it is set up for a future where artificial intelligence may join us. And from the papers on aesthetics in the opening, there may be a shorter distance between the rational and the emotional, and between the human and the algorithmic, than we think.