BEAUTY

Until the eighteenth century, "beauty" was the single most important idea in the history of aesthetics. One of the earliest works in the literature of aesthetics, the Hippias Major (probably by Plato), was addressed to the question, "What is beauty?" Around this question most of later thought revolves. The treatment of the other major concept, art, when it is not ancillary to that of beauty, lacks comparable generality, for it is often restricted to a single artistic form or genre, or its theoretical status is equivocal, because art is taken as identical with craft or skill. The modern notion of the fine arts did not appear until the eighteenth century and, more important, it was then too that the concept of aesthetic experience was first formulated systematically. As a consequence, beauty lost its traditional centrality in aesthetic theory and has never since regained it.

Our survey of these historical developments will be selective. Specific theories will be singled out because they are paradigms of the major kinds of theory of beauty. Thus, where beauty is taken to be a property, we will be less concerned with what, on some particular proposal, this property is, more with the logical relations of beauty, so construed, to the other properties of beautiful things and to the conditions of its apprehension. Where it is not so construed, the chief alternative meanings for beauty will be illustrated. Beautiful is used to esteem or commend and therefore to make a claim that is honored in the processes of criticism. Throughout this article, accordingly, the implications of the major kinds of theory for evaluation of the object will be traced.

Classical Aesthetics

The concluding section of Plato's Philebus is the prototype of the dominant ways of thinking about beauty prior to the eighteenth century. This will be shown by unpacking its major theses, which, whether they were taken over or whether they became the focuses of dispute, made up the framework of classical theory and defined its preoccupations.

The discussion of beauty in the Philebus, as in other dialogues, arises in the course of discussion of a larger question not itself aesthetic, namely, whether pleasure or knowledge is the supreme good for humankind. Socrates wished to distinguish "pure" from "mixed" pleasures, and among the examples that he gives of the former are the pleasures evoked by objects that are "beautiful intrinsically." He cited simple geometrical shapes, single colors, and musical notes (50e–52b).

The first thing to see is that Plato took beauty to be a property ingredient in things. It is nonrelational twice over, for its existence is not dependent upon, or affected by, perceiving it; and whereas "relative" beauty exists only by virtue of comparison with things that are of a lesser degree of beauty or simply ugly, "intrinsic" beauty does not. This view can be specified in two different ways, both of which appear to be suggested by Plato: Either the property of beauty is identified with, and defined by, certain properties of the object, here the determinate ordering or "measure" of the whole (64e), or beauty is itself indefinable, but supervenes upon a further, distinct property, the internal unity of the parts, which is the condition of its existence (66b).

On the former theory, whether a thing is beautiful is decided just by finding whether it does or does not possess the salient property. In the Philebus, the success of such inquiry, even on Plato's rigorous conception of knowledge, is assured by the markedly intellectualist character of measure. It is a formal or structural property and therefore cognate with the nature of intelligence (59b–c, 65d), unlike matter which is opaque to mind. It is no accident that, having illustrated intrinsic beauty by objects produced by the "carpenter's rule and square," Socrates later eulogized carpentering for its cognitive exactness (55d–56e). This insistence on the clarity and knowability of beauty (shared by Aristotle in Metaphysics 1078b) is also reflected in the choice of sight and hearing, the senses most appropriate to rational cognition, as the sole avenues of the perception of beauty (cf. Phaedrus 250d).

The nondefinist theory is, for the reasons to be cited in later philosophers, more plausible but considerably more complicated. This theory is that, given unity in variety in a thing, beauty is also necessarily present. It will still be true that whether a thing is beautiful can be decided by showing that it possesses internal unity if—but this proviso is crucial—we can be certain that the two properties do, in all instances, exist together. Hence we must be able to apprehend beauty in its own right. Yet to say that beauty is indefinable is to say that what it is cannot be identified conceptually and therefore in commonly understandable terms. The cognitive assurance and stability of definist theory may be lost as a result. Plato was amply aware of the possibility of uncertainty and disagreement among judgments of beauty (Laws Bk. II). The account of intrinsic beauty in the Philebus guards against these dangers. Things are beautiful intrinsically precisely because they are "always beautiful in their very nature" (51c–d). Though the objects cited by Socrates are empirical—"the surfaces and solids which a lathe, or a carpenter's rule and square, produces from the straight and the round"—they nevertheless enjoy the self-identity, unaffected by adventitious or contextual factors, that is also characteristic of the Platonic Ideas. Unlike objects of relative beauty, they resemble the ideal beauty described in the Symposium (211–212), which cannot be "fair in one point of view and foul in another" (cf. Republic 479). Socrates held that they will necessarily arouse in the beholder a kind of pleasure that is peculiar to intrinsic beauty (51d). That the apprehension of such beauty will be veridical is further assured in the Philebus by the notion of "pure" pleasures, that is, those unmixed with pain. Pain warps or falsifies judgment (36c et seq.), but it is never present in the appreciation of intrinsic beauty. The related concepts of the intrinsic and the pure are used to guarantee the stability of the experience of beauty. They lead, however, to a severe delimitation of the class of beautiful objects. Paintings and living creatures are excluded as relative, tragedy and comedy (50a–b) because they are impure. Human significances are hostile to beauty because they encourage error and diversity in our responses to it.

In its analysis of the concrete phenomena of beauty, the Philebus is distinguished from the mythic and metaphysical approaches of the Phaedrus and Symposium and the social moralism of the Republic and Laws. Even here, however, the beautiful does not constitute a distinct and autonomous subject matter. It is treated as a "form" or mode of goodness in general, and the term beautiful is used, as it was by the Greeks generally, interchangeably with excellent, perfect, and satisfying. It is also worthy of note that the concept of art enters in hardly at all. Painting and literature are mentioned only so that they may be excluded. By contrast, Aristotle's Poetics devotes itself to a single art form, tragedy, making only a casual reference to beauty—measure is a necessary condition (VII). Later treatments of beauty and art are even less congenial to our modern conception of aesthetics, which led the historian Bernard Bosanquet to speak of a centuries-long "intermission" in aesthetics between the Greco-Roman and the modern eras. The metaphysic of Plotinus, which derived from Plato, is spiritualist and Idealist; and here, as in later philosophy, the bias of such thought is to encourage regard for, and insight into, the experience of beauty. The soul is said to strive toward beauty, which is a manifestation of the spiritual force that animates all of reality. It is just because of the vitality and moving appeal of beauty that Plotinus rejected the identification of beauty with a merely formal property. The living face and the dead face are equally symmetrical, but only the former stirs us. Hence "beauty is that which irradiates symmetry rather than symmetry itself" (Enneads VI; VII, 22). Further, some simple, sensory objects lacking internal structure are beautiful, and, finally, symmetry is present in some ugly things as well (I; VI, 1). Plotinus's critique of formalism effectively made the larger point that beauty cannot be identified with any single element of the object, form or any other. It is the total object, the whole of form and expressiveness and what the form is of, that possesses beauty. If, on the other hand, beauty is thought to be a global quality that "irradiates" this object and moves us, it is difficult or impossible, in a definition, to specify conceptually the nature of this quality. Moreover, Plotinus's argument cast doubt on the possibility of finding even the conditions of beauty. A formal property such as symmetry is the most likely candidate, because it can be shared by objects that are otherwise highly diverse, artistic or natural, abstract or representational, sensory or mathematical. Yet if the negative instances cited by Plotinus show that this property is not even a universal concomitant of beauty, then a fortiori it cannot be the necessitating ground of beauty.

Still, the effort to enunciate a set of conditions for beauty is persistent in Western thought, because it answers to the desire for a criticism whose verdicts will be certifiable and authoritative. The high noon of such criticism was the neoclassical period, particularly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the conditions were detailed and formalized, and endowed with the institutional sanctions of the new "Academies." A multiplicity of treatises were devoted to particular arts or genres, each of which was taken to be subject to "rules," inherent in its specific nature and function, which can be rationally known (e.g., Castelvetro, Palladio). The treatises borrowed heavily from their Greek and Roman antecedents—Aristotle, Horace, Vitruvius. The "lawmakers of Parnassus" thereby invested their claims to speak on behalf of "reason" and "nature" with the authority of antiquity. Given that beauty is an objective property, attainable artistically and knowable critically, by reference to the rules, the question of the percipient's response to it was scanted. As in the Philebus, beauty can be expected to arouse the appropriate response, which was referred to briefly and loosely as "pleasure," or "delight."

The Eighteenth Century

The rebellion against the rules, in the name of the spectator's felt response—"the taste is not to conform to the art, but the art to the taste" (Addison)—intimates, in art criticism, the larger and more profound reconstruction of thought that took place in aesthetic theory. In the eighteenth century, indeed, aesthetics first established itself as an autonomous philosophical discipline. It defined a subject matter that is not explicable in terms of any of the other disciplines and is therefore taken out of the metaphysical and moral context of much traditional aesthetics, to be studied in its own right. The pioneer work is to be found in the prolific and assiduous writings of the British who, throughout the century, carried out the inquiry that Addison, at its beginning, justly described as "entirely new."

The century was a Copernican revolution, for instead of looking outward to the properties of beauty or the art object, it first examined the experience of the percipient, to determine the conditions under which beauty and art are appreciated. The decisive condition is disinterestedness, that is, perception directed upon an object without, as in practical or cognitive activity, any purpose ulterior to the act of perception itself. In aesthetic theory so conceived, beauty is no longer the central concept. It now stands for just one kind of aesthetic experience among others, and it can be defined and analyzed only by reference to the logically more basic concept of aesthetic perception.

The introspective examination of our "ideas," stimulated by John Locke's Essay, discloses experiences that differ significantly, in their felt quality, from that of beauty. This century distinguished a great many other "species" of aesthetic response, but the most important was that of sublimity. Sublimity is profoundly unlike beauty, for whereas the latter arouses "joy" and "cheerfulness," the feeling of the sublime is "amazement" and awe. Still, most of the British hold that the two can coexist and that the experience of both is pleasurable. The most drastic distinction was drawn by Edmund Burke (1757), who argued that beauty and sublimity are, conceptually, mutually exclusive and, existentially, antithetical. He at the same time limited the range of beauty severely and pushed back the boundaries of the aesthetic to include a radically different kind of experience, which cannot be accommodated in the traditional category. Indeed Burke clearly considered the experience of sublimity to be the more valuable of the two. Both Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant read Burke and were greatly affected by him, and through their influence Burke's critique of beauty made a lasting impression on Continental thought.

Burke granted that a beautiful object arouses pleasure, but he argued that a sublime object, that is, one that is "terrible," even though it is apprehended disinterestedly, arouses "some degree of horror." Beauty "relaxes," but the experience of sublimity is of great emotional intensity. The two experiences are therefore incompatible with each other. Moreover, the properties that Burke attributed to sublime objects are just the opposites of those that the Philebus had enshrined in the classical conception of aesthetic value. Against clarity and lucidity, Burke urged that we are moved most greatly by what is "dark, uncertain, confused." In place of formal ordering, Burke eulogized what is "vast" and "infinite." The sublime therefore renders beauty "dead and unoperative." When beauty had been taken as the sole value category, ugliness, its contradictory, had necessarily been excluded from aesthetic value. Burke went so far as to suggest that even the ugly can be an object of aesthetic appreciation. In all this, he is pointing the way to the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century concept of expression, which, more catholic by far than classical beauty, admits a limitless diversity of subject matter, treatment, and form, if only the work of art be moving and powerful.

A comparable challenge to the classical values of order and serenity came from another direction. The historical study of art, pioneered by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1764), disclosed that these values are found only in relatively limited epochs and styles, even, indeed, of Greek art itself. Later research emboldened the protest against the once unchallenged arbiters of classical and neoclassical criticism that they had identified selected stylistic properties of Greek and High Renaissance art with what is beautiful "naturally" and universally.

In the eighteenth century, also, the "logic" of beauty underwent a profound sea change. Francis Hutcheson (1725) announced a new locus for beauty: "Let it be observed, that in the following papers, the word beauty is taken for the idea raised in us. " It follows that any object whatever that does in fact excite this idea must be judged to be beautiful. But this invites the possibility of diverse and conflicting judgments that, if subjective response is the sole and decisive test, must all be accepted as equally valid. Are there, however, any properties peculiar to beautiful objects, which can be pointed to, to legitimate certain judgments and whose absence will show others to be mistaken? Hutcheson thought that there was—the classical property of "uniformity in variety." Yet to be consistent with the definition of beauty with which he began, he had to guarantee that things possessing this property would uniquely and universally arouse the appropriate idea. It can be said summarily that he failed to do so, and his failure is instructive. It points up the tension between the old and the new ways of thinking, between taking beauty to be an inherent, nonrelational property and using beauty to refer to the capacity of things to evoke a certain experience. A capacity is not, however, an observable property in things like uniformity. It must be interpreted as either a very different sort of property or else it is not a property at all. David Hume drew out the radical implications of Hutcheson's initial meaning for beauty with the acute remark that Euclid described all of the properties of a circle, but beauty is not among them ("The Sceptic").

In general, the later British aestheticians did not take beautiful to denote a property. Necessarily, therefore, the logical status of the properties that they attribute to beautiful objects—proportion, utility, and so on—is correspondingly altered. Such properties are no longer, as in the Philebus, either identical with, or the conditions of, a property of beauty. They are, rather, causes of the experience of beauty. Even so considered, however, the traditional formulas of beauty were brought under fire throughout the eighteenth century. Since the attribution of causes can be justified only by the evidence of their effects in experience, the British, arguing from the things that people do in fact find beautiful, showed that none of these properties are shared by all these things. There was also the more subtle and damning criticism that the traditional formula of "unity in variety" is simply devoid of meaning, because it applies indiscriminately to any object whatever. By the close of the century, Alison (1790) concluded that any attempt to find properties common and peculiar to beautiful objects is "altogether impossible." Finally it was suggested that "beautiful" is just "a general term of approbation" (Payne Knight, 1805).

The British thereby generated the problem that is central to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790): How, if the aesthetic judgment arises from subjective feeling and predicates nothing of the object, can it claim to be more than an autobiographical report and can, indeed, claim to be universally binding?

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The most novel development in this period has been the attempt at a scientific approach to aesthetics. This has taken two forms, generally, and the status of beauty in each is worth noting. Psychological aesthetics applies experimental methods to aesthetic experience in an effort to work out "laws" of appreciation. These are to be derived from the consensus of pleasure and displeasure reported by the laboratory subject in the face of various objects. When beauty is used at all in speaking of these objects, as it was by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1876), it is a loose, omnium-gatherum term. The objectivist-formalist connotations of the word have made it increasingly unsatisfactory to later psychologists. Either they have stipulated that it refers to certain psychological responses (e.g., O. Külpe, 1921), or they have abandoned it in favor of the more apt "liberal and comprehensive" (E. Bullough, 1907) concept of "aesthetic value." The last decades of the nineteenth century also saw the rise of Kunstwissenschaft, which may be rendered as "the sciences of art," for it comprises historical, anthropological, and other empirical studies of art as a cultural product. One of the impulses to the development of this field was a pervasive dissatisfaction with beauty, either because it is too limited, if interpreted on the classical model, and cannot therefore encompass, for example, primitive art, or too vague, if it is not. Art, by contrast, is a concrete, institutional phenomenon that is tractable to science. Thus Kunstwissenschaft, which is at present one of the most thriving and fruitful branches of aesthetics, defines itself by opposition to the concept of beauty.

The distinction between the meaning of beauty when it is synonymous with aesthetic value generally and when it stands for one class or kind of such value has been commonly remarked in recent aesthetics. In the former sense, it is often used to signalize the characteristic excellence of a work of art or an aesthetic object. Thus beautiful does not denote a property such as symmetry but also it is more than just a "term of approbation." It makes a claim on behalf of the object, which must be supported by appealing to the relevant value criteria. These criteria need not, however, be the same for two different artistic media or even for two works in the same medium. They are, perhaps indefinitely, plural; they are of different weight in different cases, and no one of them can be said to be a necessary condition for the use of beautiful. Their relevance is determined by the unique character of each work. In its second meaning, beauty generally connotes a relatively high degree of value, in contrast to, for example, the pretty, a fairly orthodox style or genre, pleasure unmixed with pain and the absence of bizarre or discordant elements. But this is just why so much of recent aesthetics and ordinary discourse finds the word awkward or even irrelevant for evaluation. It will do for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but not the later Ludwig van Beethoven, for Raphael, but not Francisco de Goya. In the Philebus, Socrates had, for his own purposes, narrowed the range of beauty severely, but it was just this narrowness that made it impossible for later thought to preserve beauty as the sole, or perhaps even the major, concept of aesthetic value.

See also Addison, Joseph; Aesthetic Experience; Aesthetic Judgment; Aesthetic Qualities; Aesthetics, History of; Aesthetics, Problems of; Aristotle; Art, Value in; Burke, Edmund; Fechner, Gustav Theodor; Feminist Aesthetics and Criticism; Hume, David; Hutcheson, Francis; Kant, Immanuel; Locke, John; Mendelssohn, Moses; Plato; Plotinus; Properties; Tragedy; Ugliness; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.

Bibliography

Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetic. New York: Meridian, 1957. Fairly difficult but thoughtful and acute; sees the history of aesthetics as a movement from the concept of "unity in variety" to "significance, expressiveness."

Bullough, Edward. "The Modern Conception of Aesthetics." In Aesthetics, edited by E. Wilkinson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. A vigorous polemic, by an able psychologist-philosopher, against the "sterile" effort to find a definition of "beauty"; the "modern conception" is the "study of aesthetic consciousness."

Carritt, E. F. The Theory of Beauty. London, 1931. A readable account, by a leading Crocean, of many of the major historical theories.

Kainz, Friedrich. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik. Vienna, 1948. Translated by Herbert Schueller as Aesthetics the Science. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962. A valuable conspectus of the major tendencies in more recent Continental aesthetics; examines the relation between beauty and the aesthetic attitude.

Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido. L'esthétique contemporaine. Milan, 1960. An extremely comprehensive and well-documented study of aesthetics since 1800, weighted heavily on the twentieth century. Stresses the distinction between the theories of art and beauty.

Osborne, H. Theory of Beauty: An Introduction to Ethics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953. Lucid and informed criticism of some of the major historical theories.

Stolnitz, Jerome. "'Beauty': Some Stages in the History of an Idea." Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (2) (April–June 1961): 185–204. An analysis of the history of the concept in eighteenth-century British aesthetics. An extensive bibliography includes works by authors referred to above.

other recommended works

Brand, Peg Zeglin, ed. Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Danto, Arthur C. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Paul Carus Lectures). Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 2002.

Devereaux, Mary. "Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will.'" In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, edited by Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 227–256.

Donoghue, Denis. Speaking of Beauty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

Eco, Umberto, et al. History of Beauty. Rizzoli International, 2004.

Guyer, Paul. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993.

"Beauty" (several entries). In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 237–251.

Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Lorand, Ruth. Aesthetic Theory, Vol. 5: A Philosophy of Beauty and Art. New York: Routledge 2000.

Mattick, Paul. "Beautiful and Sublime: 'Gender Totemism" in the Constitution of Art." In Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, edited by Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 27–48.

Mothersill, Mary. Beauty Restored. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Beauty and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty. New York: Routledge 2004.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Zangwell, Nick. "Beauty." In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 323–343.

Jerome Stolnitz (1967)

Bibliography updated by Mary Devereaux (2005)