I. BEAUTY IN DECLINE
The difficulty of discerning conceptual similarities
and differences
underneath terminological differences
and similarities can be pointed up by
an interesting
contrast. Like other Hegelian idealists of the
nineteenth
century, Bernard Bosanquet, in his History of
Aesthetic
(London and New York, 1892), defined
“Aesthetic” as
the “philosophy of the
beautiful.” He also defined “the
beautiful” as “that which has characteristic or individ-
ual expressiveness for
sense-perception or imagination,
subject to the conditions of general or
abstract expres-
siveness in the same
medium” (Ch. 1). Bosanquet noted
that he was proposing a broader
concept of beauty
than that sanctioned in ordinary usage, or even in
typical philosophical usage, but he claimed that his
formula embodied the
most profound insight into
beauty that the “aesthetic
consciousness” of man had
yet reached. For he saw the whole
history of aesthetics
as a progressive intellectual development, from the
first
classical view of beauty as harmony and symmetry, or
as unity in
variety, to the recognition, first of the
sublime and later of other
qualities as having aesthetic
significance, such as the grotesque, the
graceful, the
violent (Ch. 15). Thus we might say that in Bosanquet's
view beauty swallows up the whole of aesthetic value;
and that few later
aestheticians have given such cen-
trality
and generality to beauty.
On the other hand, Frank Sibley's significant and
highly influential essay
on “Aesthetic Concepts” (Phil-
osophical Review,
68 [1959])—though it discusses a
variety of
qualities, such as grace, elegance, delicacy,
garishness—refers
to beauty only in a final footnote,
as merely one (perhaps not the most
interesting or
important) of those qualities. And in his later
Inaugural
Lecture at the University of Lancaster (1966), in which
he
calls upon philosophers to undertake far more ex-
tensive analyses of the varied terms in the critic's rich
vocabulary, he suggests that too much effort has cen-
tered on a very few terms, including
“beautiful.” Here
we might note an extreme
compression of the scope
of beauty, as contrasted with its expansion by
Bosan-
quet, and say that in the
intervening half-century
beauty has itself been swallowed up by the
broader
concept of expressive quality.
Yet would this contrast be more than a verbal one?
If Bosanquet simply defines “beautiful” so
that it in-
cludes all aesthetic qualities, and
Sibley defines it so
that “beautiful,”
“powerful,” “elegant,” and
“gay,” for
example, now mark coordinate species, it
might be
argued that they are in fact saying nearly the same
thing in
different words. Of course, it is still of histori-
cal interest that the word is being used in a different
sense,
but perhaps that fact belongs to philology, not
philosophy—the
history of words, not the history of
doctrines.
The contrast between Bosanquet and Sibley is indeed
less significant,
historically, than their similarity, for
Bosanquet marks a turning point.
In the nineteenth
century, the Romantic and Victorian poets, the Trans-
cendentalists, those who
cultivated art for art's sake,
ascribed to beauty the highest value, even a
kind of
divinity; and they would feel that beauty has not fared
well
in the twentieth century—even if they agreed
that Robert
Bridges' Testament of Beauty (Oxford,
1929) is one
of its greatest poetic monuments.
First, beauty—the central topic in aesthetic theory
from the
Greeks through the German idealists—was
displaced by the concept
of expression. Benedetto
Croce's Estetica come scienza
dell'espressione e lin-
guistica
generale (Milan, 1902) developed a new view
of artistic
creation and aesthetic experience based on
the double formula that
“art equals expression equals
intuition,” and ended
by defining beauty as simply
“successful
expression”—or rather “expression and
nothing more, because expression when it is not
suc-
cessful is not
expression.” “Expression and beauty are
not two
concepts, but a single concept,” he remarks
in his Breviario di estetica (Bari, 1913), Lecture II.
Croce's system was the dominant influence in aesthetics
for three decades,
and has left its mark even on the
thinking of those who repudiate his basic
doctrines.
Not that the implications of his highly paradoxical
statements have been found to be unequivocal: if art
is identical to
expression, and beauty is also identical
to expression, then, it might be
argued, beauty is the
essence of art. But expression and intuition are
for
Croce the basic concepts in terms of which the aes-
thetic is to be understood. One consequence was that
the way opened for recognizing a much wider range
of aesthetic qualities
than had ever been recognized
before. It is noteworthy that the two most
influential
twentieth-century writers on the fine arts, Clive Bell
(Art, London [1914]; New York [1958], pp. 20ff.)
and
Roger Fry (Vision and Design, London [1920];
Mid-
dlesex [1937], pp. 236ff.) contrasted
beauty, at least
in its ordinary senses, with “significant
form,” which
was for them the important feature of visual art.
Second, the twentieth century has seen the most
violent repudiation of
beauty by some creative artists
themselves—not merely by Dada,
black theater, the
“theater of cruelty,” “op
art,” and similar minor
movements, but by more serious artists,
such as expres-
sionist painters and
ideological playwrights who have
felt that the achievement of beauty is not
the most
important aim of art, and may interfere with the in-
tensification of experience or the
radicalizing of the
perceiver. This conflict first appeared sharply
among
the French nineteenth-century realists and
naturalists—
Flaubert and Zola felt it, in their very different
ways,
and were prepared to dispense with beauty to achieve
their
visions of truth. The twentieth-century avant
garde is more likely to speak
in the voice of Henry
Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
(Paris [1934]; New York
[1961], pp. 1-2): “This is not a book,
in the ordinary
sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a
gob
of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God,
Man,
Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.”
Third, the twentieth century is perhaps the first
century in which the very
existence of beauty has been
categorically denied. “Terms such
as Beauty are used
in discussion for the sake of their emotive
value,” said
one of the earliest manifestoes of the modern
linguistic
movement in philosophy, C. K. Ogden and I. A.
Richards' Meaning of Meaning (London and New York,
1923).
According to their early version of what later
came to be
developed—notably by Charles L. Steven-
son in Ethics and Language (New Haven,
1944)—into
a much more sophisticated one, genuine empirical
statements, whether objective (“This is red”) or subjec-
tive (“I feel
sad”), are couched in “referential lan-
guage,” but the statement “That is
beautiful” (like
other value judgments) is “emotive
language,” and
amounts to no more than an exclamation of
approval
(“Oh, ah!” “Mmmmm!”)
in the presence of an object.
On this view, the noun
“beauty,” though deceptively
like the noun
“booty,” refers to nothing, since there is
nothing
for it to refer to, and hence all statements
about beauty or about things
being beautiful are,
strictly speaking, meaningless.
