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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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


208

“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.