Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
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5 | ![]() | III. | THEORIES OF BEAUTY SINCETHE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY |
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![]() | Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ![]() |
THEORIES OF BEAUTY SINCE
THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
Descendants of nearly every older theory about
beauty can be traced in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries,
and due notice of these will be
taken below. The main purpose of this
article, how-
ever, is to give an account of new
ideas or emphases
that have emerged.
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
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.
II. CONCEPTS OF BEAUTY
The history of beauty is probably best conceived not
as the history of a
single concept selected and favored
by the historian because of his own
aesthetic theory,
but as the history of a term (or
set of more or less
synonymous terms in different languages)
designating
a cluster of concepts whose distinctions and connec-
tions are of equal philosophic
interest. Though not
dominant in recent and contemporary aesthetics,
the
term “beautiful” has figured in a variety of
theories
and in a variety of inquiries, and these can best be
understood if we first sort out the main senses in which
the term has been,
and is being, used.
It is safe to say that throughout its history “beautiful”
has always embodied both descriptive and appraisive
elements:
it has been used both to characterize works
of art or nature and to judge
them. Aestheticians have
often commingled the two senses, or weaved back
and
forth between them, without being very clear about
the
distinction. In recent years these hazards have
somewhat diminished (though
not disappeared), largely
owing to the influence of analytic or linguistic
philoso-
phers, whose high standards of
rigor both in definition
and in argument, and whose concern to keep clear
the
distinction between normative and nonnormative dis-
course, have led many aestheticians to adopt one or
the other sense, either by stipulation or by an appeal
to what they take to
be ordinary (i.e., established
nonphilosophical) usage. A fundamental
difference
among recent philosophers is between those who use
“beautiful” appraisively as the most general term of
aesthetic approbation and those who use it descrip-
tively as a ground of aesthetic
approbation.
In the first sense, “beauty” becomes synonymous
with
another widely-used term, “aesthetic value”: to
say
that an object is beautiful is not to report any facts
about it, but simply
to praise it from the aesthetic point
of view. This usage is not uncommon;
it is, for example,
that of Harold Osborne in his Theory
of Beauty (Lon-
don [1952], Ch. 1),
where he defines “beauty” as “the
proper
or characteristic excellence of a work of art,”
though he also
acknowledges that “beauty” is widely
used as a
“descriptive” term. Stephen Pepper (Aes-
thetic Quality..., New York
[1937], Intro.) equates
beauty with “positive aesthetic
value”; Bosanquet's
Three Lectures on Aesthetics (London, 1915) insists
that
to equate beauty with “aesthetic excellence” is
“not
merely convenient but right.” Most aestheticians
now
avoid this use, since in effect it wastes a word that
is needed
for more specific purposes, and tends to add
to the existing confusion in
the use of “beauty.”
In the second sense, beauty becomes a ground of
aesthetic approbation, that is, a property that may
properly be cited in a
reason to justify that approba-
tion. We may
then say the music is good because it
is beautiful;
its beauty makes, or helps to make, it good.
This is the usage chosen for
the present article.
It is useful to distinguish between the monists, who
hold that beauty is the sole ground of aesthetic value,
and the pluralists, who allow that other properties may
also
count in favor of an object, when considered from
the aesthetic point of
view.
Those who treat beauty as a ground of aesthetic
value, whether monists or
pluralists, divide further into
two groups, according to the sort of
property they
single out as legitimate grounds and describe as beauty.
The term “beauty” is used affectively and attributively.
In the Affective use, to say “X is beautiful” means
a certain sort of pleasure or satisfaction” (call it “kalis-
tic satisfaction”). In Chapters 3 and 4 of What is Art?
(1896), Tolstoy, after reviewing a large number of
statements about beauty (some definitions, some de-
scriptions, some theories), concluded that when the
“objective-mystical” ones are set aside, the rest
amount to defining beauty as pleasurableness. Occa-
sionally the word “disinterested” is added, though, as
Tolstoy remarked, this is redundant. The distinctively
aesthetic feature of kalistic pleasure has been found
in its immediacy or sensuousness or its relative stability
and permanence (Harry Rutgers Marshall, The Beauti-
ful, London [1924]). Ethel Puffer (Howes) argued that
to be beautiful is to possess the “permanent possibility”
of giving an experience characterized by a “union of
stimulation and repose” or “equilibrium” of “antago-
nistic impulses” (The Psychology of Beauty, Boston
[1905], Ch. 2). C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, and James
Wood called this equilibrium “synaesthesis” (Founda-
tions of Aesthetics, London [1922]). Perhaps the best-
known suggestion is that of George Santayana in The
Sense of Beauty (New York [1896], Part I): that
“Beauty is pleasure regarded [that is, experienced] as
the quality of a thing,” or “pleasure objectified.”
A more fundamental difference among Affective uses
is that between
relativistic and nonrelativistic ones.
Beauty may be defined nonrelativistically as the ca-
pacity to provide kalistic satisfaction. John Ruskin, for
example (Modern Painters, London [1846], I, i, 6),
says,
“Any material object which can give us pleasure in
the simple contemplation of its outward qualities
without any direct and
definite exertion of the intellect,
I call in some way or in some degree,
beautiful.” Again,
W. D. Ross in The Right and
the Good (Oxford [1930],
Ch. 4) states clearly and defends ably a
view “which
identifies beauty with the power of producing a certain
sort of experience in minds, the sort of
experience
which we are familiar with under such names as aes-
thetic enjoyment or aesthetic
thrill” (p. 127). It is in
this sense that he holds beauty to be
objective, for it
is a property of (a capacity in) the object. On this
view,
the question whether a particular painting is beautiful
is a
straightforward question, whether someone can be
found who derives kalistic
pleasure from it, or whether
there is reason to believe that in time such a
person
will appear. The nonrelativist position has been de-
fended by Stephen Pepper, The Work of Art (Bloom-
ington,
Ind. [1955], Ch. 2).
The alternative view is that when a particular per-
son, A, says “X is beautiful,” he is to be
understood
as saying that X actually does give, or has given, pleas-
ure to him (whether or not among others);
and of
course when B says “X is beautiful” he is
saying that
X gives pleasure to him. Thus if A and B enter into
a dispute
about the beauty of X, one affirming and the
other denying that X is
beautiful, it may turn out that
they are not in fact contradicting one
another, for A
is saying that X pleases A and B is saying that X does
not please B. A. relativistic definition of beauty is
one
that permits such a situation to arise, i.e., one according
to
which two persons who verbally disagree about the
beauty of an object can
both be speaking the truth.
The view of beauty proposed by Samuel Alexander in
Beauty and Other Forms of Value (London [1933], Ch.
10) is relativistic in this sense. Though Alexander ini-
tially proposes a
capacity-definition—“Beauty... is
that which
satisfies... the constructive impulse used
contemplatively, and is
beautiful or has value because
it pleases us after the manner so
described” (pp.
179-80)—he allows beauty to have
value only when
it “satisfies a standard mind,” or
those who “possess
the standard aesthetic sentiment,”
and since the stand-
ard varies with the
society, “It follows that there is
no fixed or eternal standard
of the beautiful but that
it is relative to age and people” (pp.
175-77). Another
notable defense of relativism is that in C. J. Ducasse,
Philosophy of Art (New York and Toronto [1929]; rev.
ed. [1966], Ch. 15, §§10-16).
The questions whether there is a peculiar species
of satisfaction or
pleasure properly called “aesthetic,”
and whether
works of art provide such satisfaction, and
whether the provision of such
satisfaction is a legiti-
mate ground of
aesthetic value, are all important ques-
tions. But there seems little warrant for introducing
the term
“beauty” into such discussions. Beauty of
course can
be enjoyed, can give us pleasure; but when
we say that it is the beauty
that pleases us we cannot
be understood to mean anything so empty as that
what
pleases us is what pleases us. Therefore many aestheti-
cians avoid the Affective use of
the term “beauty.”
The alternative is to regard beauty as a property
of perceived things (of
sunsets and precious stones as
well as of sonnets and landscape paintings).
To hold
this Attributive view is not necessarily to be committed
to
any far-reaching metaphysical or epistemological
position—but
only to say that when a painting is seen,
its seen beauty is a phenomenally
objective character
of it, in the same way its colors and shapes are,
and
that beauty can be heard in sound—though whether
it can
also be tasted and smelt is a question that goes
back a long way in the
history of aesthetics, and is
still subject to dispute (see, for example,
Francis J.
Coleman, “Can a Smell or a Taste or a Touch be Beau-
tiful?” American Philosophical Quarterly,
2 [1965]).
The position of G. E
. Moore (Principia Ethica,
Cam-
bridge [1903], Ch. 6) may be cited as an
example of
the Attributive view. For though he thinks it best to
plation is good in itself” (p. 201), he holds that the
“beautiful qualities” of objects—“that is to say any or
all of those elements in the object which possess any
positive beauty”—is such that their mere existence has
some intrinsic value, though it is the enjoyment of
beautiful objects and the pleasure of personal rela-
tionships that are “by far the most valuable things,
which we know or can imagine” (pp. 188-92). (See
also a very good defense of this view by T.
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“The Definition of Beauty,” Proceedings of the Aris-
totelian Society, 1933.)
Those who regard beauty as a property divide on
the question whether it is a
natural property, explain-
able in
psychophysical terms, or a nonnatural property,
supervening upon the
object, but having a transcendent
status, like a Platonic Idea. The
nonnatural view, de-
spite its ancient
tradition, has practically disappeared
from the scene, outside the schools
of Neo-Scholasti-
cism (for example,
Jacques Maritain, Art et scolastique,
Paris
[1920]; trans. J. F. Scanlan, New York [1930], and
also by Joseph Evans,
New York [1962]; and Étienne
Gilson, The Arts of
the Beautiful, New York [1965]).
The naturalist view is defended
by D. W. Prall, Aes-
thetic
Judgment (Cambridge, Mass., 1929). He holds
that beauty may be
called a “tertiary quality” of ob-
jects, but strictly speaking it occurs only in
“transac-
tions”
between objects and human organisms, its oc-
currence being dependent on both organic and external
processes.
Naturalists and nonnaturalists alike also divide on
the further question
whether beauty is complex or
simple.
What may be called the Definist view is that beauty
is a complex property,
capable of analysis into more
elementary features of a formal kind. This
view, com-
ing down from Platonists,
Neo-Platonists, Stoics,
Augustinians, and others, makes a key use of
various
pregnant terms: harmony, measure, proportion, sym-
metry, order. Traditional philosophers who searched
for a definition of beauty were presumably sometimes
searching for a
successful formula of this sort, but such
proposals have seldom stood long
against the proper
tests to determine whether the proposed properties
are
both necessary and sufficient for beauty.
The Nondefinist may argue that very simple things
(single colors or tones)
can be beautiful, though they
have no harmony, symmetry, etc. He may argue
that
even if all well-proportioned things are beautiful,
well-proportionedness cannot be identified with
beauty, for one causes, or
explains, the other. For him,
beauty is a simple quality, like yellow or
the taste of
sugar, and it is incapable of being analyzed into simpler
constituents. Many inquiries that are described, per
haps even by the inquirer, as a search for the
“definition
of beauty” are better understood as a
search for the
conditions of beauty: i.e., those features of
objects
whose presence insures (or aids) the presence of beauty.
Among
those modern aestheticians who have con-
cerned themselves much with problems about beauty,
the Nondefinist
view has generally prevailed.
But Nondefinists themselves divide on what is evi-
dently the next question: What are the conditions of
beauty?
Broadly speaking, there are those who hold
that the conditions of beauty
are internal properties
of the object that is beautiful (we may call
them
Objectivists) and those who hold that the conditions
of beauty
lie, at least in part, outside the object itself.
Objectivism may be characterized in general as
commitment to a principle
defended by G. E
. Moore:
that given two objects with the same
“intrinsic” prop-
erties, if one is beautiful, the other must be equally
so. But
Objectivism can be formulated in two different
ways, and it is important
not to lose sight of the dis-
tinction,
though for convenience we can discuss them
together. Affective Objectivism
is the position that
adopts an Affective definition of beauty and
proceeds
to inquire into the perceptual conditions of kalistic
satisfaction; Qualitative Objectivism regards beauty as
a quality and
inquires into its perceptual conditions.
A proposed answer to the question,
“What are the
objective conditions of beauty (considered as
either
kalistic satisfaction or as a quality)?” is a genuine
theory of beauty, i.e., a theory about what makes an
object beautiful. Two types of theory have figured
largely in the history
of aesthetics, and are still alive
today. Each makes the old and
much-disputed distinc-
tion between the form
and the content of an object;
each selects one of these aspects as the
exclusive (or
at least primary) determinant of beauty. Let us call
them Formalism and Intellectualism.
Formalism is the theory that the beauty of an object
(or the kalistic
satisfaction it provides) is a function
solely of its formal features. For
example, “Any formal
organization or
pattern which is intrinsically satisfying
may be said to possess
beauty” (T. M. Greene, The Arts
and the Art of
Criticism, Princeton [1940], Intro.).
Here measure, proportion,
order, etc., may be invoked
again; or the theorist may attempt to work out
more
refined conditions, such as the good Gestalt,
the Golden
Section, Hogarth's “line of beauty,”
“dynamic sym-
metry.”
Some contemporary theorists have proposed
to apply information theory to
art and calculate op-
timum levels of redundancy
that can explain the beauty
of a melody or a visual design.
Intellectualism is the view that beauty (or kalistic
satisfaction) is a
function of cognitive content: a con-
cept, or
an Idea (in the Hegelian sense), embodied in
its beauty. Philosophers have been won to this view
by reflecting that certain great beauties are difficult
to account for by formal perfection alone, and also
by its systematic suitability to their other metaphysical
and epistemological positions. (See, for example, W. T.
Stace, The Meaning of Beauty, London [1929]. For
a sustained and interesting defense of the view that
beauty is “that in which we see life as we understand
and desire it, as it gives us joy,” see N. G. Cherny-
shevsky, The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality
[1855], trans. in Selected Philosophical Essays, Moscow
[1953]; cf. A. G. Kharchev, “On the Problem of the
Essence and Specifics of the Beautiful,” trans. in Soviet
Studies in Philosophy [1962-63].)
Formal and Intellectualist elements have been com-
bined in various ways. For example, Friedrich
Kainz—Vorlesungen über
Ästhetik (Vienna, 1948),
trans. H. M. Schueller, Aesthetics the Science (Detroit,
1962)—who treats beauty Affectively, holds that it
depends on
both content and form (though sometimes
he speaks of “beauty of
form” and “beauty of content”
as
distinct). He discusses at length various formal and
cognitive features
that contribute to the production
of beauty (see Ch. 4, §3; Ch. 2,
§8): for example (on
the side of content), conformity to type and
Idea,
“perceptual perfection,” “plenitude
of life,” “anima-
tion”; and (on the side of form) symmetry, proportion,
“agreeable rhythmic structure,” “eusynopsy and
com-
plexibility” (which
seem to constitute organic unity).
Other aestheticians, while often agreeing that the
beauty of an object has
something to do with its formal
features (and perhaps sometimes agreeing
that it has
something to do with its cognitive content), have come
to
doubt that beauty can be fully accounted for in these
terms alone. They
have been struck by, and have
sharply called attention to, the enormous
apparent
variability of taste in beauty, from person to person,
age to
age, culture to culture. What one person finds
beautiful in women, in
clothes, in buildings, in sculp-
ture, in
music, may not appear beautiful at all to
another who is older or younger
or is from a different
ethnic group or “subculture.”
This fact (often incor-
rectly called
“relativism”) has been stated very fre-
quently and very emphatically in recent decades, and
its recognition has done much to undermine confidence
in the Objective
Theory. Nonobjectivism is widely
maintained.
Objectivists have pointed out that variability does
not necessarily disprove
objectivism. Certainly the
variability of taste must be accounted for,
insofar as
it exists. If the Ubangi bride appears beautiful to her
husband, but not to a Miss America judge, then the
capacity to perceive
beauty, at least under certain
conditions, must depend on subjective factors. But it
does not
follow that the beauty is not there merely
because it can be overlooked by
those who are cul-
turally deprived in some
relevant way; a Westerner
may not be able to hear the beauty of Chinese
music
simply because he has not yet learned the musical
system.
Moreover, variability of taste may have been
exaggerated. Do we really know
what the Ubangi
husband sees in his wife? Just because he chooses her
and cherishes her, we cannot infer that she looks beau-
tiful to him; he may be interested in something
besides
beauty, just as many architects who design ugly build-
ings know that their clients care less
for beauty than
for ostentatious display of wealth or a fashionably
“modern” look.
Although a piece of cloth looks red to some and gray
to others, we do not
hesitate to say that it is “really”
red, even though
a person who is color-blind cannot
perceive its redness. We regard the
redness of the
object as a function of its physical properties (wave-
length of reflected light), even though
the experience
of redness is a function of both the
object and certain
necessary conditions in the perceiving organism. Simi-
larly, the Objectivist wants to regard
beauty as a func-
tion of objective features.
But the Nonobjectivist asks
whether, in this case, the functional
relationship is so
obscure and the variability of perception so great
that
the analogy with color cannot be maintained. This
problem has
proved to be a continuing cause of puz-
zlement and dispute.
A number of factors, both personal and social, have
been investigated to
explain divergencies in the per-
ception of
beauty. For one example, the modern
movement of functionalism, a descendant
of the old
view that beauty depends in some way on utility, has
sometimes been interpreted as holding that what makes
an object beautiful
is its being designed to fulfill a
purpose in the simplest and most
efficient way. Many
plausible examples, of course, can be given, and func-
tionalists have taught us to be
willing to see beauties
to which we had been blind or
indifferent—in machines
and tools. But Edmund Burke pointed out
long ago
that the snout of a pig may be just as efficient for its
purpose as the body of a racehorse—which does not
make it
beautiful. Thus functionalists generally fall
back on a qualification: the
object must not only fulfill
its function well, but
“express” its function; however,
this may not lead to
beauty but to some other desirable
aesthetic quality.
III. STUDIES OF BEAUTY
The main work that has been done in the twentieth
century on the concepts of
beauty may conveniently
analysis of beauty, (2) the phenomenology of beauty,
(3) the psychology of beauty, (4) the sociology and
anthropology of beauty. These will be described briefly.
1. Philosophical Analysis.
The distinctions made in
Part II of this article are the product of
philosophical
analysis by many mid-twentieth-century thinkers, a
number of whom have already been referred to. Philo-
sophical analysis consists of various procedures de-
signed to elicit and make explicit the nature
of a con-
cept: e.g., is it simple or complex?
If complex, what
are its constituents? Does it have necessary and suffi-
cient constituents, or is it really a
family of concepts
with overlapping sets of criteria? Analytic methods
have contributed to progress in every branch of philos-
ophy, including aesthetics. It is safe to say that, at
the
very least, the distinct issues involving beauty and the
reasonable defensible resolutions are better understood
today than in any
previous period.
2. Phenomenology.
The phenomenologist is con-
cerned with
the characteristics of experience itself,
including its
“intentional objects.” His aim is to remain
wholly
faithful to what is given, without importing
extraneous presuppositions or
illegitimate inferences—
to discriminate and expose the subtle
differences be-
tween closely allied
experiences, and fix their essential
natures. To ask what is the difference
in experience
between beauty and grace or prettiness, for example,
is
a phenomenological question. What distinguishes
contemporary phenomenology
as a particular school
or movement is the systematic formulation of its
pro-
gram (despite many differences among
its practitioners)
and the immense sensitivity and thoroughness with
which inquiries have been carried out.
Phenomenologists (including those sometimes re-
ferred to as existential phenomenologists) have con-
tributed to several branches of aesthetics. Some under-
standing of their methods and results
can be provided
by a brief account of two phenomenological essays,
among the few that deal directly and in detail with
concepts of beauty. The
first is “Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes,” by Martin
Heidegger (Holzwege [1950];
trans. by Albert Hofstadter, as “The
Origin of the Work
of Art,” in Hofstadter and Richard Kuhn,
eds., Philos-
ophies of
Art and Beauty, New York [1964]). Seeking
for the essential
“workly” character of the art-work
(in contrast to
the “thingly” character of mere things
and the
“equipmental” character of useful objects),
Heidegger
finds it in “the setting-itself-into-work of the
truth of what
is.” Thus in Van Gogh's picture of
the
peasant shoes (i.e., of certain pieces of equipment), the
being of
the shoes (their “truth”) is
“unconcealed.” In
its capacity to suggest something
of the life of the
peasant—his toil, poverty,
toughness—this painting
“discloses a world”; as a physical object,
exploiting and
exhibiting the qualities of a medium, it “sets
forth the
earth.” The art-work is a field of conflict
between
world, which strives for openness, and earth, which
has a
tendency to withdraw and hide; in this conflict,
the truth of being is laid
open, and this happening is
beauty: “Beauty is one way in which
truth occurs as
unconcealment.”
The second essay is Truth and Art, by Albert Hof-
stadter (New York, 1965). According to
Hofstadter,
beauty, “the central aesthetic
phenomenon,” is “a
union of power and measure, a
dynamic or living
harmony” that is “the appearance of
truth—not of any
truth at random, but of truth of being”—which is the
kind of
truth that “comes about when a being projects
and realizes its
own being.” In certain natural phe-
nomena—the snowflake, the color gold, the form of
the
horse—Hofstadter discerns this self-realization;
e.g.,
“the horse's visual appearance makes it look
like
life-will—energy, vitality, mobility—come to
perfect
realization” (Ch. 7). In the experience of beauty
we
are seized by the “rightness” or
“validity” of the object,
which appears in its
highest form in works of art
(Ch. 8).
3. Experimental Psychology.
The systematic exper-
imental study
of aesthetic responses is generally re-
garded
as having been initiated by Gustav Fechner,
in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (Leipzig, 1876). He has
been
followed by a large number of investigators,
among whom Richard
Müller-Freienfels and Max Des-
soir are
especially noteworthy. Psychological aestheti-
cians have studied reactions to elements of visual,
musical, and
verbal design (colors, lines, sounds of
words), and to combinations of
elements (rhythm,
meter, pictorial balance); they have used the
“method
of paired comparisons” to discover what kinds
of object
certain people call beautiful, and what kinds of people
call
certain objects beautiful—and why. They have
learned a great
deal about preferences in these matters,
e.g., that it is not the Golden
Rectangle, but propor-
tions close to it,
that are preferred in playing cards,
etc.; that the popularity of red among
American chil-
dren declines after age six;
that British children find
beauty in nature before they become
aware—about age
ten—of beauty in art; that when
photographs of several
men or women are superimposed to produce a
“pro-
file-picture,” it is judged more beautiful than the origi-
nals. Much of this work is reviewed in A.
R. Chandler,
Beauty and Human Nature (New York and London,
1934),
and C. W. Valentine, The Experimental Psychol-
ogy of Beauty (London, 1962).
It is not always clear at what point psychological
aesthetics casts light on
the nature of beauty. Valentine
holds—and offers experimental
evidence (in Chs. 7 and
the same as the enjoyment of pleasure, though typically
accompanied by it; yet “It has been found more con-
venient in such psychological experiments to ask per-
sons the question, 'Do you like this, and if so, why?'
or 'Do you find this pleasing?' rather than “Do you
think this beautiful, and why?'” (p. 6). But different
questions, however convenient, are likely to evoke
different answers (cf. H. J. Eysenck, Sense and Non-
sense in Psychology, Baltimore [1957], Ch. 8).
The problem of explaining our perception of beauty
(or our experience of
kalistic pleasure) has tempted few
psychologists, and is generally thought
to remain un-
solved. During the first decades
of this century, the
Empathy Theory was widely accepted. First ex-
pounded by Theodor Lipps in his Aesthetik (2 vols.,
Hamburg and Leipzig, 1903-06),
the theory was de-
veloped and popularized by
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget),
in The Beautiful
(Cambridge and New York, 1913) and
Herbert S. Langfeld, The Aesthetic Attitude (New York,
1920). The primary purpose of
the Empathy Theory
was to explain the expressiveness of visual forms
in
terms of the unconscious transference of the perceiver's
activities
to the object (something in the mountain as
seen activates our tendency to
rise, and so we see
mountain as “rising”); when the
empathic response is
highly unified and quite uninhibited and
unchecked,
beauty is experienced. The hypothesis was never veri-
fied, and serious difficulties were raised
as a result of
some experiments. The satisfaction taken in perceiving
ordered patterns of visual stimuli has been explained
by the Gestalt
psychologists in terms of phenomenal
“requiredness”
and “good gestalts” (see, for example,
Kurt Koffka,
“Problems in the Psychology of Art,” in
Art: A Bryn Mawr Symposium, Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1940);
but Gestalt psychologists have generally not given
special attention to
beauty.
4. Social Science.
When beauty is considered in the
context of a whole society or
culture, a number of
significant questions suggest themselves: What are
the
social causes and effects of people's ideas of beauty
or
experience of beauty? How is the capacity to ap-
preciate a certain kind of beauty, or the preference
for it,
associated with other cultural traits, or with
social class, role, or
status? Though the pioneering
sociological thinkers of the nineteenth
century, for
example, Jean-Marie Guyau, L'Art au point
de vue
sociologique (Paris, 1889), began to consider such
ques-
tions, even today it cannot be said
that we have ob-
tained very conclusive
answers. This is partly because
the specific questions about beauty have
been sunk into
more general questions; there are many studies of the
variability of taste, of connoisseurship, of artistic repu-
tations, etc., but it is not clear in many cases what
light they shed on the social aspects of beauty. Adolf
S.
Tomars, for example, begins his Introduction to the
Sociology of Art (Mexico City, 1940) by marking out
the
“phenomena of art” as those referred to in making
the
judgment “this is beautiful” (Ch. 1). And he defends
a relativistic account of beauty, which he holds to be
required by the
scientific character of his investigation
(Ch. 12). But for the most part,
beauty drops out of
his inquiry into relations between characteristics of
art
(“styles”) and types of community, social class,
or insti-
tution. Vytautas Kavolis (Artistic Expression; A Socio-
logical Analysis, Ithaca, N.Y. [1968]) discusses many
discoveries about preference: for example, according
to the Lynds' study of
“Middletown,” homes of lower
middle-class urban
families in the 1920's “were more
likely than those of other
class levels” to have Whis-
tler's
portrait of his mother (Chs. 3, 7); and highly
ethnocentric people prefer
regular, balanced designs
(B. G. Rosenberg and C. N. Zimet, 1957). But
Kavolis
himself does not use the term “beauty” at
all.
Cultural anthropologists have made a beginning in
the investigation of
beauty (again almost always ap-
proached
through aesthetic preference, especially in
view of the linguistic
difficulties), with cross-cultural
comparative studies, and intercultural
functional stud-
ies. There is evidence to
support two generalizations.
First, “the appeal of what a people consider sur-
passingly pleasing, beauty as an abstraction, that
is,
is broadly spread over the earth, and lies deep in human
experience—so wide, and so deep, that it is to be
classed as a
cultural universal” (Melville J. Herskovits,
in Aspects of Primitive Art [1959], p. 43). This is
seen,
for example, in the Pakot (Kenya) distinction between
the
“good” milk pot and the “beautiful”
lip of the pot's
rim or the severely critical attitude of the Tlingit
audience toward their dancers, and in the artistic ac-
tivities of Australian aborigines: “aboriginal
art is pre-
dominantly nonmagical, i.e.,
used in the secular and
ceremonial life by men, women, and children, to
satisfy
an aesthetic urge or to portray their beliefs”
(Charles
P. Mountford, in Marian W. Smith, ed., The
Artist in
Tribal Society, New York [1961], p. 8). Herbert
Read,
commenting on this paper, however, suggested that
“tribal art in general is vital rather than
beautiful”
(ibid. p. 17).
Second, there is a significant cross-cultural conver-
gence in standards of beauty, despite evidence
that
some standards of judgment applied by experts in one
culture are
not applied in others. “I believe that there
are universal
standards of aesthetic quality, just as there
are universal standards of
technical efficiency,” wrote
Raymond Firth (Elements of Social Organization,
Lon-
don [1951]; 3rd ed., Boston [1963], p. 161).
Irvin L.
Child and various collaborators in a number of studies
view among ethnologists that taste is completely vari-
able. They found, for example, significant correlations
between BaKwele and New Haven judgments of
beauty (or aesthetic likeability) in BaKwele masks
(I. L. Child and Leon Siroto, 1965).
SUMMARY
Though displaced from their central or dominant
position in the
aesthetician's field of concern, the con-
cepts
of beauty have continued to be of interest, and
indeed have been the
subject of numerous books and
smaller studies, especially in English,
French, German,
and Italian. Philosophers have carefully explicated
the
distinctions, and the logical connections, among these
concepts,
and have proposed solutions to the philo-
sophical problems about beauty. To a lesser extent,
other
researchers have investigated the empirical
problems about beauty. But it
has not lost its capacity,
evident from the beginning of aesthetic inquiry,
to
tease and puzzle thought.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Raymond Bayer, Traité
d'esthétique (Paris, 1956). M. C.
Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present
(New York, 1966), Chs. 11, 12; idem, Aesthetics:
Problems
in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York, 1958). E
.
F.
Carritt, The Theory of Beauty (London, 1919;
5th ed., 1949).
Katherine Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A
History of Esthetics,
2nd ed. (Bloomington, 1959), Chs. 16-19.
Horace Kallen,
Art and Freedom, 2 vols. (New York, 1943), Vol. II.
Guido
Morpurgo-Tagliabue, L'esthétique
contemporaine (Milan,
1960). Thomas Munro,
“The Concept of Beauty in the
Philosophy of
Naturalism,” Toward Science in
Aesthetics
(New York, 1956).
MONROE C. BEARDSLEY
[See also Beauty to Mid-Nineteenth Century; Empathy;Form; Idea; Naturalism in Art; Relativism in Ethics.]
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