concept of beauty in art essay

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• Art And Culture
• Carol Burns
• December 1, 2022

What is Beauty in Art? And Does it Still Matter?

What is beauty in art? It’s an eternal question which tests our ideas of history, culture, geography, politics, race, religion, time and place.  But the question remains: should art be beautiful?  And if it should, what does beauty in art mean? 

For those who gaze on artwork, “beautiful” is often one of the most common adjectives you will hear.  But does beauty in art matter?  And is it something an artist should aspire to?

What is the definition of beauty?

Without resorting to a dictionary, we can define beauty as a quality that attracts us.  A visual feast. Something that brings joy or piques interest. A visual and emotional appreciation.  But we can be as drawn to ugliness as we are to beauty.  Think of a crooked tree next to a perfectly symmetrical one.   It’s the warped and twisted branches that leave us contemplating the majesty of nature.

And, yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Culture influences the eye when it comes to defining beauty.

Our concept of beauty changes across history and time zones. There is no all-encompassing theory which can contain the vast complexities and richness of our view of beauty, any more than there is a grand unifying theory of anything.

So, what is beauty? That which we find alluring, aesthetic, foreign, pleasurable, sexual, covetous, inspirational, aspirational, divine, otherworldly and transcendent.

What is beauty in art?

The subject of beauty has always been a thorny one for many artists and critics to wrestle with.  It’s in part due to the difficulty of defining beauty. But it also reflects evolving attitudes over time to the place of the role beauty should occupy in our public and private lives and how – and whether – art should embody these rarefied qualities.  

We are all routinely affected by everyday beauty: a stunning sunset, a person, or, of course, a work of art.  These works will often reflect versions of everyday beauty: a landscape or the human form . But abstract art and 3D art often achieve beauty through color and texture. You are just as likely to hear someone talk of beauty standing in front of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture or a Mark Rothko painting as you are a work by J.W. Turner or Monet.

Is the beautiful inherently complex and contradictory?

But artwork is not one thing or another. Consider Casper David Friedrich’s romantic rendering of Two Men Contemplating the Moon .  It’s a luminous composition with two gentle figures communing with nature.  Yet there is something slightly gothic about the scene.  Nature seems alive and brooding.  The tree could be the “whomping willow” from Harry Potter.  This painting allegedly inspired Samuel Beckett’s tragi-comic masterpiece Waiting for Godot .  A play with the devastating line: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”  Is all of this then beauty? 

Is a skull (the ultimate memento mori ) a beautiful object when painted beautifully?  Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God is a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds and costs $50 million. Does the investment of money make beautiful artworks ugly and vulgar by its association?  What about the medium? Mark Quinn’s Self is a self-portrait of the artist, using his blood set in frozen silicone, while Chris Ofili favors elephant dung as a medium.

In recent decades, these artists and their curators have contributed to a cultural conversation about whether cultural relativism fosters a “cult of ugliness” in contemporary art.

A short history of beauty in art

To consider where beauty stands in today’s art, let’s look to historical assessments of beauty in art.

For instance, the man hailed by many as the “father of art history,” Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), composed his History of Ancient Art long after the art of classical antiquity that he sought to study had been largely destroyed. That absence forced him to rely on the written records of ancient travelers and historians.

Despite this, Winckelmann fervently believed that beauty was not intrinsic to the work of art, but arose from a collaboration between the work and the viewer.  His texts reveal a passion for beauty as a characteristic emerging from prolonged contemplation and reflection.  These include his assessment that “the first view of beautiful statues is… like the first glance over the open sea; we gaze on it bewildered, and with undistinguishing eyes, but after we have contemplated it repeatedly the soul becomes more tranquil and the eye more quiet, and capable of separating the whole into its particulars.”

The journey to find beauty in the unfamiliar

Of no less relevance to today’s art lovers than to Winckelmann’s 18th century counterparts, he noted that he had “imposed upon myself the rule of not turning back until I had discovered some beauty.”  He urged students to approach works of Greek art “favorably prepossessed… for, being fully assured of finding much that is beautiful, they will seek for it, and a portion of it will be made visible to them.”

Did the Conquistadores value pre-Colombian art in the same way as they valued Velasquez?  What is more beautiful: Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X , or Francis Bacon’s homage to Velasquez (his favorite painter), one of his “screaming popes” terrorized and contorted in an existential hell?  Look at those purples in Bacon’s pope’s vestments and how beautiful they are.

Would the Hellenistic mindset have found beauty in Moai statues?  Did those artists in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century only discover a crude, untamed ugliness in those incredible artifacts plundered from the peoples of Africa?  

For centuries, European and American art neglected Winckelmann’s insights on beauty. Instead of recognizing and celebrating the exquisite beauty in the arts of Africa, Asia, Latin American and the Pacific, these works were simply plagiarized and manipulated, while the inspiration was erased and denied.  

What other artists think of beauty

Even putting aside JJ Winckelmann’s call for a sustained search for beauty even in those artworks that may not seem to yield it, there is plenty of reason for optimism about the role of beauty – or the lack of it – in the art of today.

Beauty has, for one thing, re-entered the critical conversation in recent decades.  The Dutch artist Marlene Dumas (born 1953), for example, has mused that “one cannot paint a picture of or make an image of a woman and not deal with the concept of beauty.”

Fellow artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004), meanwhile, signaled her appreciation of beauty as existing in the present moment of the viewer’s judgement, when she declared in her 1989 essay “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life”: “When a beautiful rose dies, beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose.  Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make.”

What do critics say about beauty?

As wordsmiths, art critics can often describe beauty better than us mere artists. Drawing these battle lines are such critics as JJ Charlesworth and Jonathan Jones.  The former has reasoned that “beauty is one of those ideas that over the past 100 years or so has been slowly downgraded when it comes to considering the value of art … if anything, we [now] regard humanity as pretty ugly.”  Jones, meanwhile, has suggested that “ the rejection of beauty as a creative ideal began not with modernism , but when modern art started believing its own press.”

And I finish with the controversial example of Immersion (Piss Christ) . This photo of a cheap plastic crucifix submerged in artist Andres Serrano’s own urine caused huge criticism, not least causing him to lose a valuable tax-funded art prize. But critic Lucy R. Lippard describes it as mysterious and beautiful. The controversy continues (In October 2022 the work sold for £130,000).

The beauty in ugliness and the ugliness in beauty

Do we still think of people with disabilities or deformities as unable to be beautiful?  If I paint someone with a skin disease is it an ugly portrait?  Is it degenerate art?  Or shocking art?  Or is it a dignified portrait of a beautiful soul, who appears a little different, physically speaking, to many others. Does your nude self-portrait conform to ideas of the body perfect?

There can also be a beauty in ugliness and an ugliness in beauty.  Think Giacometti’s skeletal figures, or the grand drippings of paint in Pollock. What of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series?  What of Goya’s Disasters of War ? Are Jeff Koon’s slick balloon dogs beautiful or ugly?  Are they profound, or merely gaudy baubles for the rich to dump on their perfectly manicured lawns?

There are moments in many artworks which we may consider ugly and parts which we may consider beautiful.  Perhaps the subject matter is unpleasant, but it is rendered beautifully in the medium of choice.  A great example is Salvator Rosa’s painting in the National Gallery in London, Witches at their Incantations .  It is a macabre scene of human desecration, yet the reds in the painting are some of the most beautiful you will ever see.

Regardless, the iconic artworks of recent decades shows us that beauty in art is by no means long gone. For example, Irish artist Mary Duffy’s evocations of statues like the Venus de Milo reveal the beauty of her own body. Equally, Greek artist Jannis Kounellis’ (1936-2017) juxtaposes fragmentary casts of ancient sculpture within a modern doorway for 1980s Untitled to explore concepts from identity to the immortality of art.

Should your work be beautiful?

So does beauty in art really matter?  To use the firmest of clichés: beauty is fleeting.  We would countenance today a cultural, moral, political and social attitude very different from those held by people in the past.  That would take precedence across the globe.

Once, capturing beauty was a key part of an artist’s role , but what about today?

The young will not tolerate the same prejudicial attitudes towards race, culture, gender and sexuality, for instance, as their forbearers did. In the most progressive of circles today, black is as beautiful as white. Is there anyone more beautiful than Beyonce?  A transgender woman is as beautiful as a cis-gender woman. Is there anyone more beautiful than Monroe Bergdorf ? 

They are all as worthy of revelation, contemplation and celebration as each other.  The hierarchical of the past are the heterarchical of the future.  All are created equally beautiful.

Is beauty a myth or is it real?  Is it identifiable, quantifiable, qualifiedly, marketable and saleable. Billionaires purchase it in abundance.  Does it make them more beautiful for doing so?

In the end, beauty in art is a fluttering of the eye, a shivering of the skin, a shudder in the intellect.  It is that moment when the soul swoons, or the heart sinks, in being, or elation, or wanderlust.  A brief instant in collaboration with the senses: a glimpse of melancholy, or pulse of nostalgia.  It is a movement, a pause, a glimpse, a beat.  It is everything and it is nothing.  A moment when we appreciate it all and then contemplate none of it.  Beauty is fleeting, regardless, defiant, vulgar and aloof. It is worth knowing once and worth dying for twice. 

As an artist, we all have our own ideas of beauty and how to render that on canvas.  Perhaps the only question worth asking is do you want beauty in your work?

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Friday essay: in defence of beauty in art

Senior Lecturer, Art History and Visual Culture, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Robert Wellington receives funding from Australian Research Council. Material in this article was first presented as the Australian National University 2017 Last Lecture.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Art critics and historians have a difficult time dealing with beauty. We are trained from early on that the analysis of a work of art relies on proof, those things that we can point to as evidence. The problem with beauty is that it’s almost impossible to describe. To describe the beauty of an object is like trying to explain why something’s funny — when it’s put into words, the moment is lost.

Works of art need not be beautiful for us to consider them important. We need only think of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal that he flipped on its side, signed with a false name, and submitted to the exhibition of the newly founded Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. We’d have a hard time considering this object beautiful, but it is widely accepted to be one of most important works of Western art from the last century.

To call something beautiful is not a critical assertion, so it’s deemed of little value to an argument that attempts to understand the morals, politics, and ideals of human cultures past and present. To call something beautiful is not the same as calling it an important work of art. As a philosopher might say, beauty is not a necessary condition of the art object.

And yet, it is often the beauty we perceive in works of art from the past or from another culture that makes them so compelling. When we recognise the beauty of an object made or selected by another person we understand that maker/selector as a feeling subject who shared with us an ineffable aesthetic experience. When we find something beautiful we become aware of our mutual humanity.

Take, for example, the extraordinary painting Yam awely by Emily Kam Kngwarry in our national collection. Like so many Indigenous Australians, Kngwarry has evoked her deep spiritual and cultural connection to the lands that we share through some of the most intensely beautiful objects made by human hands.

In her work we can trace the lines of the brush, the wet-on-wet blend of colours intuitively selected, the place of the artist’s body as she moved about the canvas to complete her design. We can uncover her choices—the mix of predetermination and instinct of a maker in the flow of creation.

It is not our cultural differences that strike me when I look at this painting. I know that a complex set of ideas, stories, and experiences have informed its maker. But what captures me is beyond reason. It cannot be put into words. My felt response to this work does not answer questions of particular cultures or histories. It is more universal than that. I am aware of a beautiful object offered up by its maker, who surely felt the beauty of her creation just as I do.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that works of art ought to be beautiful. What I want to defend is our felt experience of beauty as way of knowing and navigating the world around us.

The aesthete as radical

The aesthete — a much maligned figure of late-19th and early-20th century provides a fascinating insight on this topic. Aesthetes have had a bad rap. To call someone an aesthete is almost an insult. It suggests that they are frivolous, vain, privileged, and affected. But I would like to reposition aesthetes as radical, transgressive figures, who challenged the very foundations of the conservative culture in which they lived, though an all-consuming love of beautiful things.

Oscar Wilde was, perhaps, the consummate Aesthete - famed as much for his wit as for his foppish dress and his love of peacock feathers, sun flowers and objets d’art. His often-quoted comment “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china” has been noted as a perfect summary of the aesthete’s vacuous nature.

For Wilde and his followers, the work of art — whether it be a poem, a book, a play, a piece of music, a painting, a dinner plate, or a carpet — should only be judged on the grounds of beauty. They considered it an utterly vulgar idea that art should serve any other purpose.

Over time, the term “aesthete” began to take on new meanings as a euphemism for the effete Oxford intellectual. Men like Wilde were an open threat to acceptable gender norms—the pursuit of beauty, both in the adoration of beautiful things, and in the pursuit of personal appearances, was deemed unmanly. It had long been held that men and women approached the world differently. Men were rational and intellectual; women emotional and irrational.

These unfortunate stereotypes are very familiar to us, and they play both ways. When a woman is confident and intellectual she is sometimes deemed unfeminine. When she is emotional and empathic, she is at risk of being called hysterical. Likewise, a man who works in the beauty industry — a make-up artist, fashion designer, hairdresser, or interior designer — might be mocked for being effete and superficial. We only need to look to the tasteless comments made about Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson to see evidence of that today.

By the 1880s, many caricatures were published of a flamboyant Wilde as a cultivated aesthete. One cartoon from the Washington Post lampooned the aesthete with a reference to Charles Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution. How far is the aesthete from the ape, it asked. Here the pun relies on a comparison made between the irrational ape — Darwin’s original human — and Wilde the frivolous aesthete.

The aesthete was a dangerous combination of male privilege, class privilege, and female sensibility. The queerness of aesthetes like Wilde was dangerously transgressive, and the pursuit of beauty provided a zone in which to challenge the heteronormative foundations of conservative society, just as Darwin’s radical theories had challenged Christian beliefs of the origins of humankind.

Wilde’s legacy was continued by a new generation of young aristocrats at a time of cultural crises between the two World Wars. The Bright Young Things, as they were called, were the last bloom of a dying plant — the last generation of British aristocrats to lead a life of unfettered leisure before so many were cut down in their prime by the war that permanently altered the economic structure of Britain.

Stephen Tennant was the brightest of the Bright Young Things. He was the youngest son of a Scottish peer, a delicate and sickly child whose recurrent bouts of lung disease lent him a thin, delicate, consumptive and romantic appearance.

Stephen was immortalised as the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s character of the frivolous Oxford Aesthete who carries around his teddy bear, Aloysius, and dotes on his Nanny, borrows these characteristics from Stephen — who kept a plush monkey as a constant companion right up until his death.

Waugh’s book is a powerful meditation on art, beauty and faith. The narrator, Charles Ryder, is thought to have been loosely based on Tennant’s close friend, the painter/illustrator Rex Whistler, the aesthete-artist who tragically died on his first day of engagement in the Second World War.

Through the character of Charles, Waugh grapples with the dilemma of beauty vs erudition. Visiting Brideshead, the magnificent country estate of Sebastian’s family, Charles is keen to learn its history and to train his eye. He asks his host, “Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.” Sebastian replies: “Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?” Sebastian gives the aesthete’s response, that a work of art or architecture should be judged on aesthetic merit alone.

I’m not suggesting that we should all drop what we’re doing and quit our jobs to pursue an uncompromising pursuit of beauty. But I do think we can learn something from the aesthete’s approach to life.

Aesthetes like Wilde and Tennant, cushioned by their privilege, transgressed the accepted norms of their gender to pursue a life not governed by reason but by feeling. This is a radical challenge to our logocentric society; a challenge to a world that often privileges a rational (masculine) perspective that fails to account for our deeply felt experience of the world around us.

How, then, to judge works of art?

How, then, should the art critic proceed today when beauty counts for so little in the judgement of works of art?

The unsettling times in which we live lead us to question the ethics of aesthetics. What happens when we find an object beautiful that was produced by a person or in a culture that we judge to be immoral or unjust?

I often encounter this problem with works of art produced for the French court in the 17th and 18th century – the period I study.

Last year, when I took a group through the exhibition Versailles: Treasures from the Palace at the National Gallery of Australia, one student was particularly repulsed by Sèvres porcelain made for members of the Court of French king Louis XV . For her, it was impossible to like those dishes and bowls, because she felt they represented the extraordinary inequity of Old Regime France – these exquisitely refined objects were produced at the expense of the suffering poor, she thought.

I suppose that might be true, but I can’t help it – I find this porcelain irresistibly beautiful.

The vibrant bleu-celeste glaze, the playful rhythm of ribbons and garlands of flowers, those delicate renderings painted by hand with the tiniest of brushes. It is the beauty of such objects that compels me to learn more about them.

When it was first made, Sèvres porcelain demonstrated the union of science and art. We are meant to marvel at the chemistry and artistry required to transform minerals, metal and clay into a sparkling profusion of decoration. This porcelain was the material embodiment of France as an advanced and flourishing nation.

You might well argue that the politics of 18th-century porcelain is bad. But our instinctual perception of beauty precedes the reasoned judgement of art.

The artists and makers at the Sèvres factory were responding to the human capacity to perceive beauty. These objects were designed to engage our aesthetic sensibilities.

Works of art don’t have to be beautiful, but we must acknowledge that aesthetic judgement plays a large part in the reception of art. Beauty might not be an objective quality in the work of art, nor is it a rational way for us to argue for the cultural importance of an object. It’s not something we can teach, and perhaps it’s not something you can learn.

But when it comes down to it, our ability to perceive beauty is often what makes a work of art compelling. It is a feeling that reveals a pure moment of humanity that we share with the maker, transcending time and place.

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Question of the Month

What is art and/or what is beauty, the following answers to this artful question each win a random book..

Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words alone are not enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.

What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood home furnishing store; but these we might not refer to as beautiful; and it is not difficult to find works of artistic expression that we might agree are beautiful that are not necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants – the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist’s most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and bright, or dark and sinister. But neither the artist nor the observer can be certain of successful communication in the end. So beauty in art is eternally subjective.

Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri

Works of art may elicit a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the work of art may be direct or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are bounded only by the imagination of the artist. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.

Now a theme in aesthetics, the study of art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance between works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art rise like islands from a current of more pragmatic concerns. When you step out of a river and onto an island, you’ve reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you to treat artistic experience as an end-in-itself : art asks us to arrive empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we experience the work of art. And although a person can have an ‘aesthetic experience’ of a natural scene, flavor or texture, art is different in that it is produced . Therefore, art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself . The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or trivial, but it is art either way.

One of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly broad. An older brother who sneaks up behind his younger sibling and shouts “Booo!” can be said to be creating art. But isn’t the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger movie just one of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertising or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an end and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, ‘communication’ is not the best word for what I have in mind because it implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined by the artist’s intentions.

Mike Mallory, Everett, WA

The fundamental difference between art and beauty is that art is about who has produced it, whereas beauty depends on who’s looking.

Of course there are standards of beauty – that which is seen as ‘traditionally’ beautiful. The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a point. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to name just three. They have made a stand against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its only function is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).

Art is a means to state an opinion or a feeling, or else to create a different view of the world, whether it be inspired by the work of other people or something invented that’s entirely new. Beauty is whatever aspect of that or anything else that makes an individual feel positive or grateful. Beauty alone is not art, but art can be made of, about or for beautiful things. Beauty can be found in a snowy mountain scene: art is the photograph of it shown to family, the oil interpretation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.

However, art is not necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: it can make you think about or consider things that you would rather not. But if it evokes an emotion in you, then it is art.

Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks

Art is a way of grasping the world. Not merely the physical world, which is what science attempts to do; but the whole world, and specifically, the human world, the world of society and spiritual experience.

Art emerged around 50,000 years ago, long before cities and civilisation, yet in forms to which we can still directly relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which so startled Picasso, have been carbon-dated at around 17,000 years old. Now, following the invention of photography and the devastating attack made by Duchamp on the self-appointed Art Establishment [see Brief Lives this issue], art cannot be simply defined on the basis of concrete tests like ‘fidelity of representation’ or vague abstract concepts like ‘beauty’. So how can we define art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modern city sophisticates? To do this we need to ask: What does art do ? And the answer is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One way of approaching the problem of defining art, then, could be to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact. Art need not produce beautiful objects or events, since a great piece of art could validly arouse emotions other than those aroused by beauty, such as terror, anxiety, or laughter. Yet to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of art from this understanding means tackling the concept of ‘emotion’ head on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to do this. But not all of them: Robert Solomon’s book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent start, and this seems to me to be the way to go.

It won’t be easy. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great height when all he said was that literature, poetry, patriotism, love and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally important to maintaining broad standards in civilisation. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years old, and science, which is a mere 500 years old. Art deserves much more attention from philosophers.

Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd

Some years ago I went looking for art. To begin my journey I went to an art gallery. At that stage art to me was whatever I found in an art gallery. I found paintings, mostly, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as art. A particular Rothko painting was one colour and large. I observed a further piece that did not have an obvious label. It was also of one colour – white – and gigantically large, occupying one complete wall of the very high and spacious room and standing on small roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that it was a moveable wall, not a piece of art. Why could one piece of work be considered ‘art’ and the other not?

The answer to the question could, perhaps, be found in the criteria of Berys Gaut to decide if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function only as pieces of art, just as their creators intended.

But were they beautiful? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Beauty is frequently associated with art. There is sometimes an expectation of encountering a ‘beautiful’ object when going to see a work of art, be it painting, sculpture, book or performance. Of course, that expectation quickly changes as one widens the range of installations encountered. The classic example is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a rather un-beautiful urinal.

Can we define beauty? Let me try by suggesting that beauty is the capacity of an artefact to evoke a pleasurable emotional response. This might be categorised as the ‘like’ response.

I definitely did not like Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of course, in its construction. But what was the skill in its presentation as art?

So I began to reach a definition of art. A work of art is that which asks a question which a non-art object such as a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, but they invariably involve a judgement, a response to the invitation to answer. The answer, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the ‘Who am I?’ which goes towards defining humanity.

Neil Hallinan, Maynooth, Co. Kildare

‘Art’ is where we make meaning beyond language. Art consists in the making of meaning through intelligent agency, eliciting an aesthetic response. It’s a means of communication where language is not sufficient to explain or describe its content. Art can render visible and known what was previously unspoken. Because what art expresses and evokes is in part ineffable, we find it difficult to define and delineate it. It is known through the experience of the audience as well as the intention and expression of the artist. The meaning is made by all the participants, and so can never be fully known. It is multifarious and on-going. Even a disagreement is a tension which is itself an expression of something.

Art drives the development of a civilisation, both supporting the establishment and also preventing subversive messages from being silenced – art leads, mirrors and reveals change in politics and morality. Art plays a central part in the creation of culture, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and so it cannot be fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, however, art can communicate beyond language and time, appealing to our common humanity and linking disparate communities. Perhaps if wider audiences engaged with a greater variety of the world’s artistic traditions it could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.

Another inescapable facet of art is that it is a commodity. This fact feeds the creative process, whether motivating the artist to form an item of monetary value, or to avoid creating one, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create art, comment on it, and even define it, as those who benefit most strive to keep the value of ‘art objects’ high. These influences must feed into a culture’s understanding of what art is at any time, making thoughts about art culturally dependent. However, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded role of the art critic also gives rise to a counter culture within art culture, often expressed through the creation of art that cannot be sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its meaning, and the meaning of art to society.

Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk

First of all we must recognize the obvious. ‘Art’ is a word, and words and concepts are organic and change their meaning through time. So in the olden days, art meant craft. It was something you could excel at through practise and hard work. You learnt how to paint or sculpt, and you learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the birth of individualism, art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the artist. His or her personality became essentially as important as the artwork itself. During the era of Modernism, the search for originality led artists to reevaluate art. What could art do? What could it represent? Could you paint movement (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you paint the non-material (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could anything be regarded as art? A way of trying to solve this problem was to look beyond the work itself, and focus on the art world: art was that which the institution of art – artists, critics, art historians, etc – was prepared to regard as art, and which was made public through the institution, e.g. galleries. That’s Institutionalism – made famous through Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.

Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the later part of the twentieth century, at least in academia, and I would say it still holds a firm grip on our conceptions. One example is the Swedish artist Anna Odell. Her film sequence Unknown woman 2009-349701 , for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and by many was not regarded as art. But because it was debated by the art world, it succeeded in breaking into the art world, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.

Of course there are those who try and break out of this hegemony, for example by refusing to play by the art world’s unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Factory was one, even though he is today totally embraced by the art world. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much like Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn’t use galleries and other art world-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects directly to private individuals. This liberal approach to capitalism is one way of attacking the hegemony of the art world.

What does all this teach us about art? Probably that art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. We will always have art, but for the most part we will only really learn in retrospect what the art of our era was.

Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden

Art periods such as Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern and post-Modern reflect the changing nature of art in social and cultural contexts; and shifting values are evident in varying content, forms and styles. These changes are encompassed, more or less in sequence, by Imitationalist, Emotionalist, Expressivist, Formalist and Institutionalist theories of art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Arthur Danto claims a distinctiveness for art that inextricably links its instances with acts of observation, without which all that could exist are ‘material counterparts’ or ‘mere real things’ rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art can be seen to possess ‘family resemblances’ or ‘strands of resemblance’ linking very different instances as art. Identifying instances of art is relatively straightforward, but a definition of art that includes all possible cases is elusive. Consequently, art has been claimed to be an ‘open’ concept.

According to Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), capitalised ‘Art’ appears in general use in the nineteenth century, with ‘Fine Art’; whereas ‘art’ has a history of previous applications, such as in music, poetry, comedy, tragedy and dance; and we should also mention literature, media arts, even gardening, which for David Cooper in A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) can provide “epiphanies of co-dependence”. Art, then, is perhaps “anything presented for our aesthetic contemplation” – a phrase coined by John Davies, former tutor at the School of Art Education, Birmingham, in 1971 – although ‘anything’ may seem too inclusive. Gaining our aesthetic interest is at least a necessary requirement of art. Sufficiency for something to be art requires significance to art appreciators which endures as long as tokens or types of the artwork persist. Paradoxically, such significance is sometimes attributed to objects neither intended as art, nor especially intended to be perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or utilitarian artefacts. Furthermore, aesthetic interests can be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously affect artistic authenticity. These interests can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading as art. Then it’s up to discerning observers to spot any Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).

Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire

For me art is nothing more and nothing less than the creative ability of individuals to express their understanding of some aspect of private or public life, like love, conflict, fear, or pain. As I read a war poem by Edward Thomas, enjoy a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a M.C. Escher drawing, I am often emotionally inspired by the moment and intellectually stimulated by the thought-process that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared by thousands, even millions across the globe. This is due in large part to the mass media’s ability to control and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a performance or production becomes the metric by which art is now almost exclusively gauged: quality in art has been sadly reduced to equating great art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. Too bad if personal sensibilities about a particular piece of art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.

So where does that leave the subjective notion that beauty can still be found in art? If beauty is the outcome of a process by which art gives pleasure to our senses, then it should remain a matter of personal discernment, even if outside forces clamour to take control of it. In other words, nobody, including the art critic, should be able to tell the individual what is beautiful and what is not. The world of art is one of a constant tension between preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.

Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia

What we perceive as beautiful does not offend us on any level. It is a personal judgement, a subjective opinion. A memory from once we gazed upon something beautiful, a sight ever so pleasing to the senses or to the eye, oft time stays with us forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac’s house in France: the scent of lilies was so overwhelming that I had a numinous moment. The intensity of the emotion evoked may not be possible to explain. I don’t feel it’s important to debate why I think a flower, painting, sunset or how the light streaming through a stained-glass window is beautiful. The power of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don’t expect or concern myself that others will agree with me or not. Can all agree that an act of kindness is beautiful?

A thing of beauty is a whole; elements coming together making it so. A single brush stroke of a painting does not alone create the impact of beauty, but all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect flower is beautiful, when all of the petals together form its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating scent is also part of the beauty.

In thinking about the question, ‘What is beauty?’, I’ve simply come away with the idea that I am the beholder whose eye it is in. Suffice it to say, my private assessment of what strikes me as beautiful is all I need to know.

Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois

Stendhal said, “Beauty is the promise of happiness”, but this didn’t get to the heart of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking about? Whose happiness?

Consider if a snake made art. What would it believe to be beautiful? What would it deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and detect the world largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson’s organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its human form even make sense to a snake? So their art, their beauty, would be entirely alien to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would be foreign; after all, snakes do not have ears, they sense vibrations. So fine art would be sensed, and songs would be felt, if it is even possible to conceive that idea.

From this perspective – a view low to the ground – we can see that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. It may cross our lips to speak of the nature of beauty in billowy language, but we do so entirely with a forked tongue if we do so seriously. The aesthetics of representing beauty ought not to fool us into thinking beauty, as some abstract concept, truly exists. It requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on certain combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of nothing more than preference. Our desire for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs developed in such a way. A snake would have no use for the visual world.

I am thankful to have human art over snake art, but I would no doubt be amazed at serpentine art. It would require an intellectual sloughing of many conceptions we take for granted. For that, considering the possibility of this extreme thought is worthwhile: if snakes could write poetry, what would it be?

Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon

[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]

The questions, ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is beauty?’ are different types and shouldn’t be conflated.

With boring predictability, almost all contemporary discussers of art lapse into a ‘relative-off’, whereby they go to annoying lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If art is just whatever you want it to be, can we not just end the conversation there? It’s a done deal. I’ll throw playdough on to a canvas, and we can pretend to display our modern credentials of acceptance and insight. This just doesn’t work, and we all know it. If art is to mean anything , there has to be some working definition of what it is. If art can be anything to anybody at anytime, then there ends the discussion. What makes art special – and worth discussing – is that it stands above or outside everyday things, such as everyday food, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or exceptional dishes, paintings, and music.

So what, then, is my definition of art? Briefly, I believe there must be at least two considerations to label something as ‘art’. The first is that there must be something recognizable in the way of ‘author-to-audience reception’. I mean to say, there must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or enjoy. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the art actually is – in other words, the author doesn’t have to tell you it’s art when you otherwise wouldn’t have any idea. The second point is simply the recognition of skill: some obvious skill has to be involved in making art. This, in my view, would be the minimum requirements – or definition – of art. Even if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to make anything at all art. Otherwise, what are we even discussing? I’m breaking the mold and ask for brass tacks.

Brannon McConkey, Tennessee Author of Student of Life: Why Becoming Engaged in Life, Art, and Philosophy Can Lead to a Happier Existence

Human beings appear to have a compulsion to categorize, to organize and define. We seek to impose order on a welter of sense-impressions and memories, seeing regularities and patterns in repetitions and associations, always on the lookout for correlations, eager to determine cause and effect, so that we might give sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. However, particularly in the last century, we have also learned to take pleasure in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our artistic ways of seeing and listening have expanded to encompass disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an ever-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who continue to define art in traditional ways, having to do with order, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who try to see the world anew, and strive for difference, and whose critical practice is rooted in abstraction. In between there are many who abjure both extremes, and who both find and give pleasure both in defining a personal vision and in practising craftsmanship.

There will always be a challenge to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions around the appropriateness of our understanding. That is how things should be, as innovators push at the boundaries. At the same time, we will continue to take pleasure in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned machine, a successful scientific experiment, the technology of landing a probe on a comet, an accomplished poem, a striking portrait, the sound-world of a symphony. We apportion significance and meaning to what we find of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our art and our definitions of beauty reflect our human nature and the multiplicity of our creative efforts.

In the end, because of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will always be inconclusive. If we are wise, we will look and listen with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry smile, always celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievements.

David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire

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8.1: What Is Beauty, What Is Art?

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8.1.1 What Is Beauty?

The term “beauty” is customarily associated with aesthetic experience and typically refers to an essential quality of something that arouses some type of reaction in the human observer — for example, pleasure, calm, elevation, or delight. Beauty is attributed to both natural phenomena (such as sunsets or mountains) as well as to human-made artifacts (such as paintings or symphonies). There have been numerous theories over the millennia of Western philosophical thought that attempt to define “beauty,” by either:

• attributing it to “essential qualities” within the natural phenomenon or artifact, or
• regarding it purely in terms of the experience of beauty by the human subject.

The former approach considers beauty objectively, as something that exists in its own right, intrinsically, in the “something” or art object, independently of being experienced. The latter strategy regards beauty subjectively, as something that occurs in the mind of the subject who perceives beauty —  beauty is in the eyes of the beholder . In Aesthetics, objectivity versus subjectivity has been a matter of serious philosophical dispute not only with regard to the nature of beauty but it also comes up in connection with judging the relative merits of pieces of art, as we will see in the the topic on aesthetic judgement. Here we ask whether beauty itself exists in the object (the natural phenomenon or the artifact) or purely within the subjective experience of the object.

Objectivist Views

Some examples:

• In the view of  Plato (427-347 BCE) , beauty resides in his domain of the Forms. Beauty is objective, it is not about the experience of the observer. Plato’s conception of “objectivity” is atypical. The world of Forms is “ideal” rather than material; Forms, and beauty, are non-physical ideas for Plato. Yet beauty is objective in that it is not a feature of the observer’s experience.
• Aristotle (384-322 BCE)  too held an objective view of beauty, but one vastly different from Plato’s. Beauty resides in what is being observed and is defined by characteristics of the art object, such as symmetry, order, balance, and proportion. Such criteria hold, whether the object is natural or man-made.

While they hold differing conceptions of what “beauty” is, Plato and Aristotle do agree that it is a feature of the “object,” and not something in the mind of the beholder.

Subjectivist Views

• David Hume (1711-1776)  argued that beauty does not lie in “things” but is entirely subjective, a matter of feelings and emotion. Beauty is in the mind of of the person beholding the object, and what is beautiful to one observer may not be so to another.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)  believed that aesthetic judgement is based on feelings, in particular, the feeling of pleasure. What brings pleasure is a matter of personal taste. Such judgements involve neither cognition nor logic, and are therefore subjective. Beauty is defined by judgement processes of the mind, it is not a feature of the thing judged to be beautiful.

A complication emerges with a purely subjective account of beauty, because the idea of beauty becomes meaningless if everything is merely a matter of taste or personal preference. If beauty is purely in the eye of the beholder, the idea of beauty has no value as an ideal comparable to truth or goodness. Controversies arise over matters of taste; people can have strong opinions regarding whether or not beauty is present, suggesting that perhaps there are some standards. Both Hume and Kant were aware of this problem. Each, in his own way, attempted to diminish it by lending a tone of objectivity to the idea of beauty.

• Hume proposed that great examples of good taste emerge, as do respected authorities. Such experts tend to have wide experience and knowledge, and subjective opinions among them tend to agree.
• Kant too was aware that subjective judgments of taste in art engender debates that do actually lead to agreement on questions of beauty. This is possible if aesthetic experience occurs with a disinterested attitude, unobstructed by personal feelings and preferences. We will return to Kant’s notion of “disinterest” in the section on “Aesthetic Experience and Judgement.”

A supplemental resource (bottom of page) provides further details on the subjectivity and objectivity of beauty.

The following TED talk by philosopher  Denis Dutton (1944-2010)  offers an unusual account of beauty, based on evolution. He argues that the concept of beauty evolved deep within our psyches for reasons related to survival.

A Darwinian theory of beauty .  [CC-BY-NC-ND]  Enjoy this 15-minute video!

Denis Dutton’s lecture ends with these words:

“Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, it’s deep in our minds. It’s a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists.”

Do you think a case can be made, based on Dutton’s Darwinian perspective, that the nature of beauty is objective? or subjective? Explain your position based on points made in the lecture, in 100-150 words.

Note:  Submit your response to the appropriate Assignments folder.

8.1.2 Is “This” Art?

The question “what is art?” has engendered a myriad of diverse responses. At one end of the spectrum, aestheticians propose theories that demarcate the realm of art by excluding pieces that do not meet certain criteria; for example, some views stipulate a particular characteristic to be an essential element of anything considered to be art, or that conventions of art-world society apply to what can be considered art. On the other hand, there are views on aesthetics that claim that art cannot be defined, it defies definition — we just know it when we see it.

Do works of art have an essential characteristic?

Some main theories of art claim that works of art possess a defining and essential characteristic. As we will see in the section on aesthetic judgement, these same defining characteristics serve also as a  critical  factor for evaluating the merit of art objects. These are some examples of theories that define art in terms of an essential characteristic:

Representationalism:   A work of art presents a reproduction, or imitation of something else that is real. (With Plato’s theory of Forms, art is representational; it is an approximation, though, and never a perfect one, of an ideal.) Representationalism is also referred to as “imitation.”

Formalism : Art is defined by exemplary arrangement of its elements. In the case of paintings, for example, this would involves effective use of components such as lines, shapes, perspective, light, colors, and symmetry. For music, a comparable but different set of elements would create form.

Functionalism:  Art must serve a purpose. While functionalism is often taken to refer to practical purposes, some functionalist theories maintain that experiential purposes, such as conveying feeling, fulfill the requirement of functionality.

Emotionalism:  Art must effectively evoke feeling or understanding in the subject viewing the art. (Some theorists regard the criterion of evoking emotion as a form a functionalism – it is art’s purpose.)

An objection to “essentialist” definitions of art is that not everything that embodies one of these characteristics is art. Seeing the essential characteristic as “necessary” rather than “sufficient,” helps to a certain extent. For example:

“ If this evokes emotion, then it is art”  denotes sufficiency – a child’s tantrum might be art.

“ If this is art, then it is evokes emotion.”  denotes necessity – emotion is a necessary component but not sufficient to make something “art.”

This reasoning helps resolve one objection to essentialist theories, but there is another flavor of objection to essentialism. Something besides  one  essential feature seems to be required to define art; it is not a simple matter. The fact that essential criteria do not necessarily exclude one another helps; some art embodies several of the features. However, the true usefulness of these essential features may be as judgment criteria, rather than defining factors.

Does art defy definition?

The  family-resemblance, or cluster theory of art  is a reaction to perceived failures of theories of art that attempt to define art by a common property. According to the family-resemblance view, an object may be designated as “art” if it has at least some of the features or properties typically ascribed to art. There is no single common property among art objects. Works of art have a family resemblance, overlapping similarities. The family resemblance concept was originally suggested by Austrian philosopher  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)  in his work  Philosophical Investigati ons  (1953, 1958) where he addressed the problem of attributing a common characteristic to all things that go by one name. His examples included games. There are many types of games — board games, ball games, card games, etc. “…look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.” (66) Given the widely diverse array of objects accepted as works of art, it followed that merging their nature under a common definition was inadequate.

Morris Weitz (1916-1981)  was an American philosopher of aesthetics. He was critical of the many theories of art that attempt to define art by finding an essential feature possessed by all works of art. Wittgenstein’s family resemblance theory supported his view regarding anti-essentialism in art. In his view, “artwork” is an open concept, and there is a non-specific set, or “cluster,” of characteristics that may apply to the concept of artwork.

Compared to theories on the nature of art that designate an essential criterion, the family-resemblance (or cluster) theory offers the possibility of being more inclusive; work rejected by other theories can be considered art by family resemblance. A criticism to the cluster or family resemblance theory is that it is ahistorical; that is, the cluster of concepts used to define art does not hold over time. In addition to discussing this criticism of cluster theory, the following journal article provides an example of present-day scholarship on aesthetics.

Contemporary Aesthetics “ The Cluster Account of Art: A Historical Dilemma”:  The Cluster Account of Art: A Historical Dilemma . [CC-BY-NC-ND]

Should art meet conventional standards?

Conventionalist theories of art are grounded in fundamental principles or agreements, explicit or implicit, of the art-world society. These theories for defining art set boundaries for what should and should not be included in the realm of art. Their effect is to exclude certain kinds of work, especially those that are progressive or experimental. Conventionalist theories include:

Historical Theories of Art:  In order to be considered art, a work must bear some connection to existing works of art. At any given time, the art world includes work created up to that point, and new works must be similar or related to existing work. These theories invite an objection related to how the first art work became accepted. Proponents of these theories would respond that the definition also includes the “first” art.

Institutional theories of art : Art is whatever people in the ‘art world’ say it is. Those who have spent years in professional careers studying and savoring art and its history have an eye for fine distinction (or an “ear” perhaps if we are considering music.) Such theories are regarded as arbitrary or capricious by those who view beauty as purely subjective.

Conventionalist views define explicit boundaries for art. Such theories may exclude anything not intentionally created by a human “agent.” For example, natural phenomena are not art, nor are items such as paintings created by animals. (Search online for “paintings by elephants.” for example, if you are curious; this is not a course requirement.)

A supplemental resource (bottom of page) provides further investigation of definitions of art.

Supplemental Resources

Nature of Beauty

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).  Beauty . Read Section 1 on Objectivity and Subjectivity.

Art Definition

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).  The Definition of Art .

• 8.1 What Is Beauty, What Is Art?. Authored by : Kathy Eldred. Provided by : Pima Community College. License : CC BY: Attribution

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Beauty

Introduction, anthologies and reference works.

• The Sensuous and Desire
• Beauty and Art
• Beauty and Disinterest
• Beauty and Nature
• Beauty Contested
• Beauty Experienced
• Beauty and Evaluation
• Beauty and Aesthetic Form
• Beauty and Autonomy
• Beauty and the Form of Perfection
• Aesthetic Judgement and Community
• Beauty and Truth
• Beauty and Value Theory
• Beauty and Morality
• Beauty Naturalized

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Beauty by Jennifer A. McMahon LAST REVIEWED: 26 April 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 31 July 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0038

Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found, and how it was to be included in a life were prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments―metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical―and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul that we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment that can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgement by which we exercise the social, comparative, and intersubjective elements of cognition, and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation between mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavors while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation, or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterizes beauty theory prior to the 20th century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. However, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary-inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics, and psychology. Although during the 20th century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning, and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. This work has been funded by an Australian Research Council Grant: DP150103143 (Taste and Community).

Anthologies on beauty that bring together writers who, while they may discuss art, do so in the main only to reveal our capacity for beauty, include the excellent selection of historical readings collected in the one-volume Hofstadter and Kuhns 1976 and the more culturally inclusive collection Cooper 1997 . Recent anthologies on beauty can take the form of a study of aesthetic value, such as in Schaper 1983 , or more specifically on the ethical dimension of aesthetic value, such as in Hagberg 2008 . Reference works in philosophical aesthetics today tend to focus on the philosophy of art and criticism. They typically include one chapter on beauty, and in this context Mothersill 2004 treats beauty as an evaluative category for art; and in keeping with this approach, Mothersill 2009 recommends a historically informed understanding of the concept beauty derived from Hegel. A recent trend toward environmental aesthetics brings us back to beauty as a property of the natural world, as in Zangwill 2003 , while McMahon 2005 responds to empirical trends by treating beauty as a value compatible with naturalization. The comprehensive entry “ Beauty ” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is divided into four parts. It begins with Stephen David Ross’s brief but excellent summary of the history of concepts that underpin beauty theory and philosophical aesthetics more broadly. It is followed by Nickolas Pappas’s dedicated section on classical concepts of beauty, and then Jan A. Aertsen’s section on medieval concepts of beauty. The entry concludes with Nicholas Riggle’s discussion of beauty and love, which introduces contemporary themes to the topic. Guyer 2014 analyzes historical trends in approaches to beauty theory in a way that sets up illuminating contrasts to contemporary perspectives.

“Beauty.” In Abhinavagupta–Byzantine Aesthetics . Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In the course of setting out the historical foundations to the concept beauty, we are provided with an excellent summary of the key concepts that still dominate or underpin philosophical aesthetics, including pleasure, desire, the good, disinterest, taste, value, and love. Available at Oxford Art Online by subscription.

Cooper, David. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings . Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Introductions are provided to some of the classic readings on beauty followed by an extract from the relevant work. They are discussed in terms of their relevance to understanding art rather than value more generally.

Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics . 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Guyer traces the development of key concepts in aesthetics, including beauty, within a context of broader scaled trends, such as aesthetics of truth in the ancient world, aesthetics of emotion and imagination in the 18th century, and aesthetics of meaning and significance in the 20th century.

Hagberg, Garry I., ed. Art and Ethical Criticism . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444302813

A series of papers on the ethical dimension of art, the authors draw out the ethical significance of a particular art/literary/musical work or art form. It is worth noting that the lead essay by Paul Guyer argues that 18th-century writers on beauty did not hold any concepts incompatible with this approach.

Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Well-chosen readings from classic works, with commentary provided, marred occasionally by the editors’ anachronistic emphasis on art. The readings provide a good introduction to various conceptions of beauty as a general value.

McMahon, Jennifer A. “Beauty.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 307–319. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

A historical overview drawing out the contrast between sensuous- and formal/value-oriented approaches to beauty, culminating in the contrast between Freud’s pleasure principle and the constructivist approach of cognitive science.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment: Remapping Aesthetics.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics . Edited by Peter Kivy, 152–166. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

DOI: 10.1002/9780470756645

Setting out the change in focus in philosophical aesthetics between the 19th and 20th century, Mothersill then proceeds to analyze beauty with a view to its significance for understanding aesthetic value in relation to art.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty.” In A Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper, 166–171. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Mothersill considers the contributions made by key historical figures before settling on Hegel’s historicism as providing the most helpful insight for the present context. Available online.

Schaper, Eva, ed. Pleasure, Preference and Value . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

A series of essays by prominent philosophers on the nature of aesthetic value, which are very useful as an introduction to the study of value theory, including essays on taste, pleasure, aesthetic interest, aesthetic realism, and aesthetic objectivity.

Zangwill, Nick. “Beauty.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics . Edited by Jerrold Levinson, 325–343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

An introduction to the tradition of analytic approaches to value theory, beauty is analyzed into its components and relationships, and its status considered in terms of subjectivity and objectivity.

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Beauty is one of the most intriguing and captivating concepts that has been discussed for millennia. From Ancient Greek philosophers to modern-day researchers, people have long sought to define beauty and its place in our lives. This article will explore the philosophy of beauty, looking at how different cultures and eras have tried to explain it, and why it is so important to us. From the earliest days of human existence, people have sought to define beauty. Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle wrote extensively about beauty, trying to find its essence and understand its purpose.

In the Middle Ages, theologians and philosophers sought to understand the place of beauty in God’s plan. As modern science and technology developed, researchers began to look at beauty in a more scientific light. This article will explore the various theories and philosophies of beauty that have been proposed throughout history. We will look at how these theories have changed over time, and how they continue to shape our understanding of beauty today.

We will also examine why beauty is so important to us as a society, and why we should strive to appreciate it in all its forms. The concept of beauty has been a fascinating topic of discussion for thousands of years. It is defined as a combination of qualities that give pleasure to the senses or stir up positive emotions. Philosophers have long debated what beauty is, what makes something beautiful, and how it affects our lives today.

Definition of Beauty

History of beauty, how beauty affects our lives today, controversies around beauty.

Additionally, there is disagreement over whether physical beauty is more important than inner beauty. Another debate in the philosophy of beauty involves the notion of art and beauty. Some believe that art is an expression of beauty, while others believe that beauty should be judged independently of art. Additionally, some argue that art should not be judged according to aesthetic standards, while others argue that it should. Finally, there is disagreement over the role of culture in defining beauty. Some argue that beauty is universal and does not depend on cultural values, while others believe that culture has a significant influence on what we consider to be beautiful.

In ancient Rome, beauty was seen as a sign of wealth and power, and those with more beauty were considered more worthy of respect. The Middle Ages saw a shift in focus from the physical to the spiritual. During this period, beauty was seen as something that came from within, and was linked to moral goodness and piety. This belief was embraced by the Church, and beauty was seen as a reflection of one's inner soul. In the Renaissance, art and beauty became intertwined, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo attempting to capture the ideal forms of beauty in their works. In the Enlightenment, philosophy began to explore the idea of beauty as something more than just physical attractiveness.

Immanuel Kant argued that beauty had a universal quality which could be found in all aspects of nature. He believed that beauty had an inherent value which could be appreciated by everyone, regardless of their background or beliefs. Later philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche further developed these ideas, exploring the notion that beauty could be found in many different forms. Today, beauty is still seen as something to be admired and appreciated. We live in a world where physical attractiveness is often praised, but there is more to beauty than simply looks.

By embracing our own sense of beauty, we can create works of art that represent our unique style and vision. Beauty can also be used as a form of self-care, as taking time to appreciate the beauty around us can help us to feel grounded and connected to our environment. In addition, beauty can provide us with comfort and security. Seeing something beautiful can bring us a sense of peace and joy, allowing us to escape from the stresses of everyday life.

Beauty can also be a source of inspiration, helping us to stay motivated and creative. Finally, beauty can be used as a tool for connection. Sharing our appreciation for beauty with others can bring people together and foster meaningful relationships. Through these connections, we can learn more about each other, build empathy, and create a sense of unity. It is clear that beauty plays an important role in our lives today.

In philosophy, beauty is seen as an abstract concept that can be interpreted in various ways. Beauty can be found in the natural world, in art, literature, and music. It is a concept that transcends the physical and speaks to the soul. It is something that can be experienced but not necessarily quantified. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that beauty can be found in objects that possess a certain degree of complexity, but also a sense of unity.

He believed that beauty was something that could be appreciated by all people, regardless of their cultural backgrounds or beliefs. Kant's views have been highly influential in the philosophical discussion about beauty. Aesthetics, which is the study of beauty and art, also has much to say about beauty. Aestheticians believe that beauty is something that can be appreciated universally, and can bring joy to those who experience it. The notion of beauty has also been explored by writers and poets throughout history, such as William Wordsworth and John Keats. Beauty is ultimately a personal experience, and it is up to each individual to decide what they find beautiful.

Although there are many theories about beauty, no one definition can encompass the full scope of this complex concept. The philosophy of beauty is an important and complex subject, and this guide has explored its definition, history, and how it affects our lives today. We have seen that beauty is often subjective, and that there can be different interpretations of what is considered beautiful. We have also discussed some of the controversies surrounding beauty, such as the idea of “beauty standards” and the implications that this can have on people’s self-perception. Ultimately, it is important to remember that everyone has the right to express their own concept of beauty and that beauty should be celebrated in all its forms.

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André Aciman: Why Beauty Is So Important to Us

By André Aciman Dec. 7, 2019

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A quest for our better selves

Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.

Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”

We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses.

We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.

Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.

Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.

Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.

We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.

André Aciman is the author of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Find Me.”

The marketing machines of modern life would have us believe that beauty is about physical attributes. With the benefit of the wisdom we have attained after many years spent traversing the planet as conservation photographers, we know otherwise.

Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.

Every day we learn that species, landscapes and indigenous knowledge are vanishing before our eyes. That’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to reminding the world of the fragile beauty of our only home, and to protecting nature, not just for humanity’s sake, but for the benefit of all life on earth.

Committing our time, energy and resources to achieve these goals fills our lives with beauty.

Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen are conservation photographers and the founders of SeaLegacy .

Science enriches us by bringing us beauty in multiple forms.

Sometimes it can be found in the simplest manifestations of nature: the pattern of a nautilus shell; the colors and delicate shapes of a eucalyptus tree in full flower; the telescopic images of swirling galaxies, with their visual message of great mystery and vastness.

Sometimes it is the intricacy of the barely understood dynamics of the world’s molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems that speaks to our imagination and wonder.

Sometimes there is beauty in the simple idea of science pursuing truth, or in the very process of scientific inquiry by which human creativity and ingenuity unveil a pattern within what had looked like chaos and incomprehensibility.

And isn’t there beauty and elegance in the fact that just four DNA nucleotides are patterned to produce the shared genetic information that underlies myriad seemingly unrelated forms of life?

Elizabeth Blackburn is a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

A person’s definition of beauty is an abstract, complicated and highly personal ideal that becomes a guiding light throughout life. We crave what we consider beautiful, and that craving can easily develop into desire, which in turn becomes the fuel that propels us into action. Beauty has the power to spawn aspiration and passion, thus becoming the impetus to achieve our dreams.

In our professional lives as fashion designers, we often deal with beauty as a physical manifestation. But beauty can also be an emotional, creative and deeply spiritual force. Its very essence is polymorphic. It can take on limitless shapes, allowing us to define it by what makes the most sense to us.

We are extremely fortunate to be living at a time when so many examples of beauty are being celebrated and honored, and more inclusive and diverse standards are being set, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or creed. Individuality is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful.

Beauty will always have the power to inspire us. It is that enigmatic, unknowable muse that keeps you striving to be better, to do better, to push harder. And by that definition, what we all need most in today’s world is perhaps simply more beauty.

Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough are the co-founders and designers of Proenza Schouler.

Beauty is just another way the tendency of our society to create hierarchies and segregate people expresses itself. The fact that over the past century certain individuals and businesses realized that it is incredibly lucrative to push upon us ever-changing beauty standards has only made things worse.

The glorification of impossible ideals is the foundation of the diet and beauty industries. And because of it, we find ourselves constantly in flux, spending however much money and time it takes to meet society’s standards. First, we didn’t want ethnic features. Now, we are all about plumping our lips and getting eye lifts in pursuit of a slanted eye. Skin-bleaching treatments and tanning creams. The ideal is constantly moving, and constantly out of reach.

The concept of beauty is a permanent obsession that permeates cultures around the world.

Jameela Jamil is an actress and the founder of the “I Weigh” movement .

The Life of Beauty

The sung blessing of creation

Led her into the human story.

That was the first beauty.

Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice

Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin

Of her birthing cocoon.

Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands

As he held the newborn against his breathing.

Next beauty the moon through the dark window

It was a rocking horse, a wish.

There were many beauties in this age

For everything was immensely itself:

Green greener than the impossibility of green,

the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,

Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her mouth.

She ate well of the next beauty.

Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.

Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly

To hold back her hair.

Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower

Between her legs as she became herself.

Do not forget this beauty she was told.

The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,

Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.

When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.

But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.

When it was beautiful all around and within,

She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.

Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.

Even her bones, said time.

Were tuned to beauty.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.

Beauty is a positive and dynamic energy that has the power to convey emotion and express individuality as well as collectiveness. It can be felt through each of our senses, yet it is more magnificent when it transcends all five.

Over more than 30 years as a chef, I have experienced beauty unfolding through my cooking and in the creation of new dishes. Recipes have shown me that beauty is not a singular ingredient, object or idea, but the sum of the parts. Each dish has an appearance, a flavor, a temperature, a smell, a consistency and a nutritional value, but its triumph is the story all those parts tell together.

When my team and I launched Milan’s Refettorio Ambrosiano, our first community kitchen, in 2015, beauty was the guiding principle in our mission to nourish the homeless. We collaborated with artists, architects, designers and chefs to build a place of warmth, where gestures of hospitality and dignity would be offered to all. What I witnessed by bringing different people and perspectives around the table was the profound ability of beauty to build community. In a welcoming space, our guests had the freedom to imagine who they would like to be and begin to change their lives. In that space, beauty wielded the power of transformation.

When I visit the Refettorios that Food for Soul, the nonprofit I founded, has built around the world over the years, what strikes me as most beautiful is neither a table nor a chair nor a painting on the wall. Beauty is the spontaneity of two strangers breaking bread. It is the proud smile of a man who feels he has a place in the world. It is the emotion of that moment, and its power to fill a room with the celebration of life.

Massimo Bottura is a chef and the founder of Food for Soul .

Who wouldn’t argue that some things are objectively beautiful? Much of what we can see in the natural world would surely qualify: sunsets, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers. Images of these scenes, which please and soothe our senses, are among the most reproduced in all of civilization.

It’s true, of course, that we’re not the only creatures attracted to flowers. Bees and butterflies can’t resist them either — but that’s because they need flowers to survive.

Lying at the opposite end of the beauty spectrum are reptiles. They’ve had it pretty bad. Across decades of science fiction, their countenance has served as the model for a long line of ugly monsters, from Godzilla to the Creature in the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to the Gorn in “Star Trek.”

There may be a good reason for our instinctive attraction to some things and distaste for others. If our mammalian ancestors, running underfoot, hadn’t feared reptilian dinosaurs they would have been swiftly eaten. Similarly, nearly everyone would agree that the harmless butterfly is more beautiful than the stinger-equipped bee — with the possible exception of beekeepers.

Risk of bodily harm appears to matter greatly in our collective assessment of what is or is not beautiful. Beauty could very well be a way for our senses to reassure us when we feel safe in a dangerous universe.

If so, I can’t help but wonder how much beauty lies just out of reach, hidden in plain sight, simply because we have no more than five senses with which to experience the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is the author of “Letters From an Astrophysicist.”

Beauty can stop us in our tracks. It can inspire us, move us, bring us to tears. Beauty can create total chaos, and then total clarity. The best kind of beauty changes hearts and minds.

That’s why the bravery of our girls is so beautiful — it can do all these things.

Over the past year, girls have moved us to tears with impassioned speeches about gun control, sexual assault and climate change. They have challenged the status quo and brought us clarity with their vision of the future. They have changed the hearts and minds of generations that are older, but not necessarily wiser.

Girls like Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi are fighting for the environment. Young women like Diana Kris Navarro, a Girls Who Code alumna, are leading efforts against harassment in tech. Girls like Lauren Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, are speaking out against gun violence. The list goes on and on and on.

These girls are wise and brave beyond their years. They speak up because they care, not because they have the attention of a crowd or a camera. And they persist even when they’re told they’re too young, too small, too powerless — because they know they’re not.

Their bravery is beauty, redefined. And it’s what we need now, more than ever.

Reshma Saujani is the founder and chief executive of Girls Who Code and the author of “Brave, Not Perfect.”

I spend most of my waking hours (and many of my nightly dreams) thinking about beauty and its meaning. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to express beauty through design.

I see beauty as something ineffable, and I experience it in many ways. For example, I love gardening. The form and color of the flowers I tend to fill me with awe and joy. The time I spend in my garden frequently influences the shape of my gowns, as well as the objects that I choose to surround myself with. It even brings me closer to the people who have the same passion for it.

As humans, we all are more or less attuned to beauty. And because of this, we all try to engage with it one way or another — be it by being in nature, through poetry or by falling in love. And though our interaction with it can be a solitary affair, in the best cases, it connects people who share the same appreciation for it.

Beauty is what allows us to experience the extraordinary richness of our surroundings. Sensing it is like having a visa to our inner selves and the rest of the world, all at once. The interesting thing about beauty is that there is simply no downside to it: It can only enhance our lives.

Zac Posen is a fashion designer.

“The purpose of sex is procreation,” a straight cisgender man once told me, trying to defend his homophobia. “So that proves that homosexuality is scientifically and biologically wrong. It serves no purpose.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” I then said, “so … what’s the science behind blow jobs?” That shut him up real quick.

I often hear arguments that reduce human existence to a biological function, as if survival or productivity were our sole purpose, and the “bottom line” our final word. That is an attractive stance to take because it requires the least amount of energy or imagination. And for most animals, it’s the only option — the hummingbird sipping nectar is merely satisfying her hunger. She does not know her own beauty; she doesn’t have the capacity to perceive it. But we do. We enjoy art, music, poetry. We build birdfeeders. We plant flowers.

Only humans can seek out and express beauty. Why would we have this unique ability if we weren’t meant to use it? Even quarks, those fundamental parts at the core of life, were originally named after “beauty” and “truth.”

That’s why beauty matters to me. When we find beauty in something, we are making the fullest use of our biological capacities. Another way of putting it: When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.

Constance Wu is a television and film actress.

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Beauty as a Philosophical Concept Essay

Beauty can be considered one of the most powerful and most disputable forces that have always inspired people, moved them, and preconditioned serious changes in societies. The importance of the given phenomenon can be evidenced by the fact that there have always been multiple attempts to determine beauty and introduce a sample that could be followed (Sartwell). However, all these attempts failed because of the changeable and relative character of this notion. Every period in the history of humanity has its own vision of beauty. Ancient Greek statues, drawings of the renaissance, or modern photos try to express this idea and emphasize the visual appeal. However, beauty is not just lines and forms, as it includes many other dimensions.

Attempts to determine this phenomenon also resulted in the appearance of the idea that a truly beautiful person should combine both physical attraction and a rich inner world to be appreciated by peers. In such a way, the term becomes broader, as only shapes of the body cannot suffice and provide a clear answer to the question. In other words, beauty can also be found in the character of a person, his/her actions, beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts.

That is why one can conclude that the concept of beauty is one of the most sophisticated ideas that remain disputable even today. Considering the information provided above, it can be determined as a set of shapes of the body, forms, and lines, along with the inner qualities and peculiarities of the character that are considered attractive at the moment by the majority of society members. However, this definition remains extremely simple and relative as it does not take into account other dimensions and millions of meanings peculiar to this very phenomenon.

Sartwell, Crispin, “ Beauty .” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, June 11). Beauty as a Philosophical Concept. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-as-a-philosophical-concept/

"Beauty as a Philosophical Concept." IvyPanda , 11 June 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-as-a-philosophical-concept/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Beauty as a Philosophical Concept'. 11 June.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Beauty as a Philosophical Concept." June 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-as-a-philosophical-concept/.

1. IvyPanda . "Beauty as a Philosophical Concept." June 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-as-a-philosophical-concept/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Beauty as a Philosophical Concept." June 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-as-a-philosophical-concept/.

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Home > Books > Perception of Beauty

The Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Field

Submitted: 11 November 2016 Reviewed: 03 April 2017 Published: 25 October 2017

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.68945

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Scientific discoveries of neuroscience are apparently explaining all the mysteries of the human brain. In particular, great advances have been made in the field of the perception of beauty. However, historical‐philosophical revision, such as the one I carry out in this chapter, can shed light on the limits that this approach can have. To this end, I begin by reviewing the psychologization of beauty that has been carried out by David Hume since the origins of modernity. From this premise, I question the laws of art enunciated by one of the most prominent researches on neuroaesthetics, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, by contrasting his conclusions in the light of the philosophy of art of Arthur Danto, who calls into question that the value of what is purely perceptive might be enough to understand art. He also rejects any identification of art with beauty, just as he is contrary to any general statement of the laws of art. With this contraposition, I try to show that the question of beauty in art goes far beyond mere visual perception.

• neuroaesthetics
• philosophy of art
• V.S. Ramachandran

Author Information

Raquel cascales *.

• Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Espana

*Address all correspondence to: [email protected]

1. Introduction

The excessive specialization of contemporary science usually tends to disregard the contributions of other sciences and, in some cases, to obviate the historical and theoretical concepts it works with. Nowadays, as regard to the consideration of the perception of beauty, attention has increasingly focused on neuroscientific studies. Although the findings in this area are providing very interesting results, I consider it important to show the development of the philosophical ideas underlying these approaches.

In this sense, I wish to begin by setting forth some historical issues related to the concept of beauty. In the first place, it should be noted that the perception of beauty underwent a psychological conversion in modernity, especially with the empiricist aesthetics of David Hume. This change resulted in a relativization of the concept of beauty, which neuroaesthetics is still trying to address at present. Thus, secondly, and for this reason, I will analyze the main contributions of neuroaesthetics and its defense of objectivity, especially developed by V.S. Ramachandran. Finally, I will confront Ramachandran’s position on artistic beauty with that of the philosopher Arthur Danto in order to problematize the question about whether beauty and art can be identified completely.

2. The psychological conversion of the perception of beauty in modernity

Aesthetic reflection, the question of beauty, art and its connection with knowledge, has been present since antiquity. This is shown in the thought and the influence by authors such as Plato or Aristotle. However, we must be cautious when attempting to bring to current discussions the concerns about beauty as found in Dialogues or the Aristotelian description of art as techné, since the problems of present‐day aesthetics have started in the Modern Age, since aesthetics became a discipline of its own.

The philosophers of antiquity considered that beauty was a property of the real objects, not only of the artistic ones, and therefore could be known in an objective way. The medieval philosophers continued to consider that the perception of beauty was objective and, in addition, human beings could discover the creator of such beauty through the contemplation of natural beauty. But all these conceptions changed completely in the modern era.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, aesthetics did not escape the influence of the rationalist scheme of Wolff and Leibniz and focused on the need to establish a science of perfect sensory knowledge. This is the context in which we find Baumgarten, the initiator of this study as a science. In his work Aesthetica (1750/1758), he gave the name of aesthetics to the philosophical science that studies beauty and art. Baumgarten conceives aesthetics as the”science of sensible knowledge“[ 1 ]. That is to say, it is based on the gnoseological criterion of the perfection in the specific realm of sensibility. But since he considers this capacity to be inferior to the rational, he also believes it has an inferior gnoseological value. Therefore, Baumgarten collects various aesthetic approaches and systematizes sensitive knowledge. With this, he led modern aesthetics to the terrain of subjectivation through the path of empiricism.

Empiricism is the fundamental trend in British philosophy since the influence of John Locke. Empiricism is characterized, among other things, as the rejection of the existence of innate ideas and the assertion that all our knowledge necessarily arises from sensible experience, that is, it has its origin in the senses. Within empiricist aesthetics, we find several figures, among which the most prominent is Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. This author considers that the human being possesses a moral and aesthetic nature that has its organ in feeling. Both the emphasis on empiricism and moral sentimentality will greatly influence Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, especially in the investigation and development of aesthetic”taste.”

David Hume (1711–1776) was the empiricist philosopher who would have the greatest impact on the psychologization of beauty. There are several principles that stand out in his empiricist philosophy. In the first place, he affirms that all our ideas come from sensible impressions. In the second place, he makes a critique of the idea of cause that has greatly influenced contemporary theories of science. For Hume, the causal relation means that one phenomenon follows another but not that one is the cause of the other: the only thing we can affirm is that it has always happened this way. On the other hand, he makes a very strong criticism of inductive reasoning. He considers that induction is never complete and thus the foundations of universal laws must be established on a principle other than induction.

Hence, one of the essential theories of Hume’s philosophy is that our ideas are associated according to principles, which in turn establish links between them. Ideas are naturally connected according to three laws: resemblance, contiguity and cause‐effect relationship [ 2 ]. These three laws of association will have a decisive influence on the psychologization of perception. Many of the approaches of the later English psychologists will depart from these premises.

Before proceeding, it is worth making a pause to check the impact of this understanding of perception on the concept of beauty. To do this, we must turn to the fourth of Hume’s Four Dissertations , published in 1757. In”Of the Standard of Taste” [ 3 ], the English philosopher sets forth his consideration of how beauty is perceived. He affirms that beauty is not a quality of the things themselves but only exists in the mind that contemplates them. Beauty is neither a transcendental or innate idea nor a sensory impression that seems to correspond with it. From this point of view, it seems that we can only identify a pleasant feeling, which we can assume that is caused by something beautiful but not that we have known something beautiful as such.

Beauty, then, is defined in relation to the subject since it is a property that lies in the beholder. That is to say, the feeling of pleasure provoked by beauty in the subject is the only thing that justifies our speaking of it. Taste takes place in the conformity between the object and the faculties of the mind. Research on how the feeling of pleasure is produced in the subject leads one to consider that there must be an organ capable of perceiving beauty. Both the organ and its aesthetic sense were called”taste.” The experiences of taste would be immediate and spontaneous and would not be directly related to reason but rather to the realm of sensibility. From this point of view, an object is said to be beautiful because certain properties of the object stimulate our sensibility and make us feel its beauty.

In this sense, Hume discards the metaphysics of the beautiful but does not invalidate an empirical science of the aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, he believes that there must be rules in the arts that allow us to judge them. These rules cannot be established a priori but can only be established empirically. Thus, Hume states five conditions that are required to be able to make an aesthetic judgment adequately: (1) delicacy of taste; (2) practice of judging; (3) assiduous comparison of works; (4) being free of prejudices; and (5) good sense that avoids the influence of prejudices [ 3 ]. However, despite all his attempts, Hume fails to establish universality for aesthetic taste using the principles of his philosophy and the rules just mentioned.

In summary, we can say that the empiricist approach led to the consideration that beauty could only be perceived by the senses, thus reducing it to a matter of mere intellectual pleasure, which in turn provoked a relativistic consideration of beauty. This analysis had a great impact, first of all, among philosophers who reflected on beauty, especially Immanuel Kant. Later, both the enlightened and the romantic spirits, with their interest in the historical, progressively moved the reflection on beauty from a universal concept to concrete artistic work. However, while the post‐Hegelian line focuses on studies on the history of art, the Anglo‐Saxon world continues the research on the possibilities of perception and knowledge. At this point, it is important to mention the work of the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who investigated much about the laws of perception to develop his artistic theories, as can be seen in studies such as The Image of the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [ 4 ].

In particular, it can be said that the legacy of Hume influenced English empiricist writers who were nourishing the associationist psychology, especially [ 5 ]. The Humean stance on how ideas combine in our minds influenced them decisively. Associationism will be taken up in particular by James Mill and John Stuart Mill, who laid the foundations of empirical and experimental psychology. The psychic processes, according to these authors, come one after the other, following certain laws of connection. Such laws could be quantified and described, which is why they consider that mental states can be measured to some extent. On one hand, these theories will influence the psychology of the Gestalt, centered on the laws of association and, on the other, they will influence neuroscience. Therefore, it is not surprising that when the techniques of brain and neurological analysis have been developed, the question of beauty has been formulated again.

3. The pursuit of objective beauty in neuroaesthetics

There is no doubt that neuroscience has made great advances in the knowledge of the brain. Much of the success of its research is due to the interdisciplinary approach that scientists have decided to take when it comes to studying the functions of the brain. In the 1960s, several lines of research converged, culminating in the publication of The Neurosciences: A Study Program (1966). This work was the result of 4 weeks of lectures organized by Fran O. Schmitt, which addressed a wide range of aspects of interest, constituting what later on would be known as neuroscience [ 6 ].

Almost 30 years passed before a researcher decided to focus his neuroscience research on the aesthetic perception [ 7 ]. In 1999, Semir Zeki published his investigations on art and the brain in individual articles [ 8 , 9 ]. In addition to opening a new field of research, he coined the term neuroaesthetics and laid its foundations. In these articles, Zeki made a parallelism between the functioning of neurons and that of artists, especially with regard to the visual grasping of the world. According to Zeki, the work of artists shows externally the inner workings of the brain. The neuronal work breaks down visual information into color, luminosity, and motion, and then reconstructs the figure. In the same way, artists decompose the information received and then translate it into their works. For this reason, it can be said that”the function of art is therefore an extension of the function of the brain ‐ the seeking of knowledge in an ever changing world“[ 8 ].

Zeki’s contributions on the neuronal behavior were well received and the comparison with art seemed to open new lines of investigation. In 2003, Semir Zeki and Hideaki Kawabata performed a relevant research on how the brain perceives beauty [ 10 ]. In this case, they were no longer doing a comparison with the artist, but they were trying to see how something more complex, beauty, is perceived. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to perform the study and find out if there were specific areas of the brain that were activated in the subjects when they appreciated paintings that they had considered beautiful. At first, in order to grasp the concept of beauty for each person, they offered them a large number of pictorial works that the subjects had to classify as beautiful, neutral or ugly. Subsequently, the process was repeated by analyzing it with functional magnetic resonance techniques.

Through this technique, they verified that the vision of a picture (classified as beautiful or not) does not activate the visual area of the whole brain but only specialized areas for the process and perception of that particular category of stimulus (such as portrait or landscape). This demonstration implicitly implies that at the basis of aesthetic judgments lies a functional specialization. Thus, what Kawabata and Zeki mean is that to be judged as beautiful, the painting must be processed by an area specialized in that particular type of work. Predictably, they also found that the judgment of paintings as beautiful (or not) is correlated with specific brain structures, mainly with the orbitofrontal cortex and motor cortex. The results of this research showed that although it is not possible to determine what beauty consists of in neuronal terms, we can know the zones of activation or increase of the neuronal activity when perceiving beauty:

”We cannot be said to have been able to determine what constitutes beauty in neural terms. Instead, the more meaningful question for both would currently seem to be the Kantian question outlined in the INTRODUCTION, namely what are the conditions implied by the existence of the phenomenon of beauty (or its absence) and of consciousness (or its absence) and what are the presuppositions that give validity to our esthetic judgments. In esthetics, the answer to both questions must be an activation of the brain’s reward system with a certain intensity” (1704) [ 10 ].

The work of Professor Zeki has stimulated many neurologists to perform different investigations on the functions of the brain and the perception of beauty or art. Among the researchers who have had the most success in this line, V. Ramachandran stands out although he approaches it from a substantially different point of view. While up to now art was seen as a phenomenon that helped to explain the mechanisms of the brain, Ramachandran believes that art is a phenomenon that can actually be explained by the brain.

In fact, Ramachandran goes a step further and tries to explain, from neuroscience, what art is and which are the biological functions it has had in human beings from the evolutionary point of view. It is worth pausing here to see how the Indian professor starts from questioning how beauty is generated and which brain mechanisms are involved in the appreciation of beauty but then goes to stipulate universal laws of art.

In”The Science of Art” (1999), Ramachandran tries to explain that the task of art is not to faithfully reproduce reality but to transform it [ 11 ]. The question is to determine which transformations are effective and why. In this sense, Ramachandran focuses on determining the mechanisms that artists use to recreate reality and make it pleasing to the viewer. People usually consider that the creations of the artists are the result of their free creativity but what if in fact they are the product of cerebral mechanisms and fruit of the evolution? For Ramachandran, our taste for certain forms responds to evolutionary questions. He thinks that we value those forms positively because they have been useful for us throughout evolution. If the premise is true, it should be possible to establish universal rules of art. These rules, in turn, would explain the pleasant stimulation we find in art and why we value beauty.

In this sense, Ramachandran dares to propose eight universal laws of art: the peak shift principle, the isolating a single module, the contrast extraction, the perceptual grouping, the symmetry, the perceptual problem solving, the visual metaphors and the generic viewpoint. In later works, the order changes and adds some more laws (grouping, peak shift, contrast, isolation, peekaboo or perceptual problem solving, abhorrence of coincidences, orderliness, symmetry and metaphor) [ 12 ]. However, the explanation of the laws does not change substantially. A detailed explanation of these principles will enable us to better understand the current approaches to neuroaesthetics.

First, the peak shift principle refers to the exaggerations or intensifications of certain parts of the work of art, made with the purpose of getting our attention. Based on ethology, Ramachandran considers that just as exaggeratedly large peaks attract the attention of birds, artists also exaggerate different parts of their works so that we focus attention on them. Another way artists get our attention is the modular isolation (isolating a single module). Since our brain cannot concentrate on all parts at the same time, isolating an element helps to focus the brain’s attention. This would also explain why in art, sometimes, sketches work better than sharply defined images that require too much attention. For example, cartoonists or landscapers highlight particular features of what they see and remove irrelevant ones. The viewers’ attention is drawn toward the important information and, as a result, there is an amplification of the limbic system activation and reinforcement. Also related to the attention is the law of contrast (contrast extraction), which refers to a sudden change of one of the elements: light, color, structure, etc. The contrast reinforces attention because the greater the contrast in the parts of the whole work, the greater is the appreciation of the elements. Naturally, this law also has an evolutionary explanation. According to Ramachandran, when we were hominids, we needed to distinguish the fruits at a great distance, and the ones that are best distinguished are those that cause a greater contrast between the trees. Therefore, the persistence of this law is due to a question of survival.

Indeed, the question of survival for the species and thus the evolutionary question is one of the key elements in understanding Ramachandran’s theory. In this line, therefore, the law of grouping (perceptual grouping) can be explained. When we are confronted with some fragmented representation, the brain has to regroup the parts and make a single definite figure. The brain finds pleasure every time it performs this operation. The perceptive regrouping, an instinctive brain process that was generated when we were hunters in the jungle, is a method widely used in the different arts.

Clearer still is the case of the law of symmetry. Symmetry, in the first place, would have allowed us, always in an evolutionary key, to distinguish the parts of a person and establish their importance very quickly. Secondly, lack of symmetry is usually due to malformations or illnesses, so it indicates the poor health of the person. This information would have been of great help for the reproduction and survival of the species. Although today is not a necessary condition for pairing, we still find greater pleasure in what is symmetrical.

In respect to the other laws, the question of evolution, although present, is not so explicit. In both the perceptual “problem solving” and in the generic viewpoint, Ramachandran places the emphasis on the aesthetic question of perception. In this sense, the perceptual “problem solving” refers to the fact that we find more attractive what we have to reveal or discover than what is presented to us explicitly. Although it seems paradoxical, we are attracted by that which is hidden because concealment is considered as an enigma and stimulates our brain to solve it, since it finds pleasure in its resolution.

The same is true for the law of metaphors or visual games. As in the previous law, here the brain finds greater pleasure when it finds relationships between different elements and it rewards whatever is useful for our survival. Finally, generic viewpoint alludes to the fact that the human eye has little regard for visual coincidences; it finds repetition irrelevant since it has already stored such information. It explains our aversion to coincidences or, in other words, our preference for the unique point of view.

These are the eight laws that according to Ramachandran and Hirstein are behind the artistic practice and the aesthetic pleasure. Although they themselves affirm that they form only a framework of understanding and recognize that they do not explain the essence of art, they do not have any qualms about affirming that these laws are always present in art:

“We recognize, of course, that much of art is idiosyncratic, ineffable and defies analysis but would argue that whatever component of art is lawful —however small— emerges either from exploiting these principles or from a playful and deliberate violation of them” (34) [ 11 ].

Ramachandran has continued to investigate visual perception and brain activity, and his research has been of great interest to neuroaesthetics. However, it must also be noted that some of his reflections have been strongly criticized among his colleagues, since they suppose a reductionism of both aesthetic and artistic consideration. Although he tried to answer to those critiques [ 13 ] he has not yet given a good account of all of them.

From the point of view of neuroaesthetics, as well as from aesthetics in general, you may find objections to these approaches. Firstly, I consider that these laws are reductionist from the neuroscientific point of view since they present the artistic task as a simple consequence of the evolutionary process of the species. This interpretation tends to support all its claims on adaptive terms in a way that is not falsifiable since one could always see in each new artistic feature an issue of adaptation. In this way, it runs the risk of nullifying freedom and creativity, insofar as everything would respond to innate traits that we do not control when performing an action or judging it. It should also be noted that it does not take into account the role of culture.

Although the brain has not changed much in its structure since the Upper Paleolithic, we do not know whether the mind is simply the functional translation of the structure of the brain. It could be that the functioning of the mind is much more versatile, and the technological and cultural development might have influenced in it. In this area, the work of Frederick Turner occupies a prominent place. In spite of sustaining an evolutionary vision, he includes the influence of culture. He understands the evolution of our sense of beauty as a “nonlinear feedback between cultural and biological determinants” (103) [ 14 ]. That is, we have an aesthetic sense designed to perceive the beauty of objects that derives meaning from a flow of both biological patrons and cultural systems that deal with forms of order such as poetic meter or visual patterns.

Nonetheless, several neuroscientists have criticized evolutionary adaptation. For example, Stephen Jay Gould criticizes adaptationism for being”panglossian“[ 15 ]. Other more recent studies in neurology show the dysfunctionality of some of the starting points of Ramachandran’s investigations, such as the theory”one area one skill“to analyze the brain. Against this, they explain that sight is not in one area and smell in another, but everything is interconnected. Everything influences everything and, therefore, it is not enough to analyze the visual part to account for the whole [ 16 , 17 ].

Secondly, Ramachandran’s consideration of beauty can be called reductionist, which is illuminating to understand the process of psychologization of beauty mentioned above. Theories like those of Ramachandran consider that the characterization of beauty depends on the internal impact provoked in the subject. That is, beauty has been identified with the mere feeling of pleasure caused in the brain by some objects. In contrast with the approaches of the beginning of modernity, these theories speak no longer of the intellectual powers in general, but they have taken a step further: we now have greater scientific knowledge that allows us to determine the zones in the brain in which the feeling of aesthetic pleasure occurs. It is true that we can now determine which areas of the brain are activated when beauty is perceived and even the pleasure those areas can experience but that does not tell us what beauty is. It explains how our brain works in the face of specific stimuli, but does not even fully explain why we find pleasure in them.

The two previous premises result in a reductionist assimilation of art and beauty. Although Ramachandran understands”pretty“in a positive way, he generally does not take into account the important distinctions between beautiful, pretty or sublime. Nor does he note that”pretty,” in the sense of pleasant, was a term that artists, like Picasso (who he mentions), wanted to get rid of. Precisely, they wanted to get rid of it to show that art is much more than a mere pretext for complacency, an attitude which they considered merely bourgeois. Due to this reduction, he is also unable to explain the beauty of what is ugly or how the existence of art that is not beautiful is possible or how we can like artworks such as Goya’s black paintings. Moreover, since Ramachandran’s analysis focuses on visual perception, his conclusions are only useful for visual arts. From this point of view, it is not possible to justify the fact that we can enjoy the representation of evil and consider good literary works such as Les Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire or On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts of Thomas de Quincey. In the same way, this reductionism can say very little of the pleasure found in sad music [ 18 ].

Finally, the enunciation of these eight laws assumes that all art is based on them, which would allow us to speak of conditions to determine what art is as well as objective parameters for artistic beauty, as Hume already tried. Although these objectives are not in the scope of the Indian teacher, the truth is that from his theses, we can deduct the possibility of distinguishing the characteristics of art and, more specifically, of beautiful art. However, I consider that although neuroscientific discoveries provide important insight into how the brain perceives beauty, the enunciation of the eight laws is reductionist and problematic. The consideration of what art is and its relation with beauty is much more complicated than neuroaesthetics can claim today. Therefore, in the last section of this chapter, I would like to compare Ramachandran’s statements with those of one of the most important philosophers of art, Arthur Danto.

4. Beauty beyond artistic beauty

Beauty has always been an important issue for both artists and philosophers but not always in the same way. Beauty for philosophers is especially interesting since it is a particular case that combines the sensitive with the intellectual, and as such it has led to ask how knowledge works. It is not surprising, then, that in the modern age, when the philosophical questioning focuses on the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, aesthetic reflection becomes a foreground. The aesthetic reflection since Hegel’s Aesthetic Lessons will begin to focus on art and will leave behind the beauty.

Also artists throughout the twentieth century tried to disassociate themselves from beauty as it was understood at that time and established academic laws. Already during impressionism, many artists were beginning to break with the mimetic representation form of the reality. It was especially Marcel Duchamp who represented a key point in this story as he tried to unlink aesthetics with art through the ready‐mades. The objects that make up the ready‐mades are simple, quotidian, industrial and without notable aesthetic characteristics. They were so far from what had been produced until then that they were considered, if not anti‐artistic, at least, anti‐aesthetic works. The ready‐mades are defunctionalized real objects that went so far as to raise the question of their status as works of art. In fact, the focalization on the object could have given rise to a revalorization of objective beauty. But instead, it gave way to a rejection of beauty because beauty was not anymore understood, like in the ancient times, as a property of the being but as a bourgeoisie and Renaissance imposition on art. In this line of anti‐aesthetic rupture, Andy Warhol took a step further the day he proposed his work Brillo Box; the boxes looked identical to boxes of Brillo detergent found in the supermarket. This work, as will be seen, is crucial to understanding Danto’s philosophy of art.

The philosophy of art of Arthur C. Danto is relevant in this point since he begins confronting the theories that defended that art could be distinguished at the perceptive level. His approach was novel since he opposed the widespread beliefs of Neowittgensteinians such as Morris Weitz, Maurice Mandelbaum or Monroe Beardsley. These authors found in Wittgenstein’s theory of”family resemblances“a sufficient method to account for art without having to establish a closed definition of art [ 19 ]. Just as in families there are traits that allow us to identify a group of people as members of the same family, it is the same case with art. These authors, therefore, considered visual perception as the absolute criterion of discernment between art and that which is not art.

On the contrary, for Danto, this criterion was not valid enough since it was based on an inductive analysis that offered no more than a generalization about the kinds of works we can call”art” but without providing any comprehension [ 20 ]. One of the key reasons why Danto rejects the perceptualist conception is due to his philosophy of the mind. It is a philosophy that shares the principles of the modular theory of the mind. This theory conceives that the mind has several modules independent of each other, whose function is not susceptible of being affected by previous knowledge, beliefs, concepts or desires. From this perspective, it follows the search for a new concept that is not linked to the perceptive and that can dismantle the theory that relates art to “family resemblances.” Danto’s proposal was based, thus, on affirming that perception is not enough to distinguish between what art is and what it is not, rather it is necessary to take into account the “theory of art” in which a particular work has been done and in which it is interpreted.

From this theory, the American philosopher states that there is nothing at the level of perception that allows us to distinguish between two seemingly equal objects as in the case of his paradigmatic example: the Brillo Box (1964). This work of Andy Warhol invalidates the theory of mere perception, as would be Ramachandran’s, since these boxes are indiscernible from the daily objects that they imitate. Danto considers that Warhol’s work manifests the essence of art by putting us in the position of having to distinguish it from reality. The difference between art and reality is considered by Danto as the essence of art.

The Brillo Boxes lead art toward self‐consciousness when posing, by purely artistic means, the question of the nature of art. The question raised by the Brillo Box is not why this is a work of art but why this is and the one in the supermarket is not. The very way of posing the question seems to suggest that the essence of art lies in being different from reality. In this way, it can be seen how the discovery of the essence causes a change in art. Art has changed and, along with it, our understanding of what art is must also change, accepting that works of art can have any sort of appearance now and yet maintain the same essence.

The definition of art he wants to establish, therefore, has to account for this distinction. This leads Danto to present a non‐perceptive criterion that allows explaining the ontological differences between works of art and mere objects. In this line, Danto argues that”to see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry ‐an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld“(580) [ 21 ]. Later, in The Transfiguration on the Commonplace , he seeks to determine the essential criteria of art. This leads to a definition of art in terms of sufficient conditions. The two sufficient conditions that all work must fulfill to be considered art are being about something (aboutness) and embodying a meaning (embodiment) [ 20 ]. Such simple statements could be confused with some of the earlier laws; however, especially the second condition refers to the historical condition of each work, which must be taken into account when judging it. Now, what role does beauty play in the philosophy of art of this author?

Both in Beyond the Brillo Box and in The Abuse of Beauty, Danto develops an analysis on beauty in the artistic field. In this work, he examines his reflection on art and questions why he did not include beauty in his definition of art. The American philosopher replies that beauty was not part of its definition because it is not part of the essence of art. If it were, it could not be said of so many works that, despite not being beautiful, are, without a doubt, works of art. It must be said that Danto does not distance himself from beauty in itself, but he does disagree with a long‐held conception which ultimately leads to the understanding of art as a high and separate form of life. This conception implies that there can only be art when it is said to be beautiful. However, it is a mistake to believe that artistic value is the same as beauty and that the perception of artistic value is the aesthetic perception of beauty [ 22 ].

However, the separation between art and beauty is not something that Danto proposes but something already done by the artists themselves, such as not only Duchamp, of course, but also all those he calls”intractable avant‐garde,” who showed that beauty was not consubstantial to the concept of art. These artists wanted to make clear that something can be good art without being beautiful. This clarification could not have been revealed before Romanticism but rather in our day. This clarification allowed to banish aesthetics from the definition of art, although it took time to be accepted in many areas, including art.

The consideration that beauty is not an essential part of the definition of art does not mean that beauty can no longer be part of art anymore. What we are considering here is that beauty cannot be identified as the essential property of art. In no way art excludes beauty, just as it cannot set aside philosophical reflection. Danto himself affirms that”even if beauty proved far less central to the visual arts than had been taken for granted in the philosophical tradition, that did not entail that it was not central to human life. (…) [The beauty is] one of the values that defines what a fully human life means“(14–15) [ 23 ].

However, although Danto could not consider beauty as a necessary condition, he does say that it can become relevant when interpreting some works. Hence, he establishes a distinction between external and internal beauty. Danto says that the former refers to the external appearance of the work, which is commonly required to judge the work as”beautiful“or”pretty.” Evidently Danto could not accept this consideration of beauty—a perceptual quality—as a necessary and sufficient condition of art. That is why he turns to internal beauty which, on the other hand, is about that type of beauty which is linked to the content of the work, forming a constituent part of its meaning. Danto also calls this second type”artistic beauty,” since he considers that this type of beauty is found exclusively in art. By artistic beauty, he means the coherence between the idea and its sensible expression in the artwork. In his own words:

”What it leads to is an understanding of how aesthetics beauty plays a role in the meaning of the work to which it belongs. One can stay that in such a case, the beauty is born of the spirit because the meaning of the work is internally related to its aesthetic qualities. The beauty is part of the experience of the art. But the experience is richer by far than the ‘retinal shudder’ Duchamp impugned“(97) [ 23 ].

In the last book he published, What is art , Danto continues to defend the importance of the internal beauty of art, that is, the content that resides in it. Hence, it may say that”much of contemporary art is hardly aesthetic at all, but it has in its stead the power of meaning and the possibility of truth, and depends upon the interpretation that brings these into play“[ 24 ]. After these words, we can see a way of conceiving the type of art that demands that the viewer strives to unravel the content and not just to look at it. This is what allows you to understand the work.

Danto’s emphasis on this last point made some authors think that it was precisely the aesthetic qualities that could serve to complete his definition of art. He had argued that there were two necessary conditions that every work must fulfill, but he had failed to establish sufficient conditions. Could aesthetic qualities be the answer? I personally consider that if Danto did not explain them, it was because he felt that those conditions were, to a certain extent, included in the necessary conditions. That is, the aesthetic qualities would be framed within the second condition of possibility: the embodiment. This point is important because it leads us out from the subjective aesthetic perception and forces us to take into account the concrete work, in its fullness and united to its historicity. All these do not give us a scientific and purely objective vision of what art or beauty is, but it puts the necessary counterpoint to consider that in order to reach a unified view of reality we must go beyond subjective perception.

Danto’s theory of how we perceive art and distinguish it from ordinary objects, as well as his refusal to identify art and beauty, seems to me a perfect counterpoint to maintaining a dialogue with current neuroaesthetic theories. This dialogue can, in turn, illuminate the problematic result of the perception of beauty in the artistic field.

5. Conclusions

After all this, it is worthwhile reviewing the main ideas and conclude this exposition. In the first section, I have developed the psychological conversion of beauty in modernity. Through Hume’s philosophy, we have seen how beauty goes from being considered an attribute of real things to be a property of the intellectual faculty of taste. By means of this analysis, we have seen how beauty was considered as an objective attribute before modernity, while in modern times the weight is placed on what beauty causes in the subject. The development of the faculty of taste can thus be seen as an anticipation of neuroaesthetic analysis. In turn, it can also be seen that neuroaesthetics begin from many hypotheses that were initiated in modernity.

The psychological view continues to develop for several centuries until the emergence of neuroscience. Neuroaesthetic research is enormously valuable in understanding more about how we capture something as complex as beauty. However, on more than one occasion neuroscientists draw conclusions about beauty in art that go beyond their field of study by not taking into account issues of historical or philosophical order. This is the case especially of the theses of Ramachandran that fall in several reductionisms. It can be said that his theses are reductionist because of six important reasons: (1) he argues that the fact that beautiful art exists is due to a merely evolutionist question, since it served for human survival; (2) he identifies the power to determine how beauty is perceived with knowing what beauty is; (3) he reduces beauty to what is merely”nice“or pleasurable; (4) he identifies beauty only with art, leaving out the perception of beauty in nature; (5) he reduces art and artistic practice to an issue that can be explained as psychophysiological; and (6) despite not having sufficient evidence to determine what beauty or art is, he risks to enact laws about art that claim to have universal reach.

Just as beauty is not reduced to its expression in the art world, neither must art necessarily be identified with beauty. Although the mechanisms through which we perceive beauty can be determined, this does not mean that we know what beauty in art is nor what beauty is or what art is. The analysis of Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and the artistic examples of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol have shown how beauty is not an essential property of art. That is to say, there can be art that is not beautiful without invalidating its status of art. In turn, the analysis of the problem of”indiscernibles“reveals how mere visual perception is not enough to distinguish a work of art.

In this sense, we have seen how the perception of beauty is not a matter of examining the external properties of the work but rather we must know how to capture the internal properties, where a much deeper beauty is found. This internal”beauty“has to do with the meaning that the artist wants to express and how he has configured the work in such a way to express that meaning. That is, beauty is in the inside and thus sensible perception is not enough to capture the beauty of art, but the intellectual and emotional parts of the person must be involved too.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the researchers of the Chair of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art of the University of Navarra for their help in the preparation of this chapter, especially to Rosa Fernández Urtasun. My acknowledgment also to the Mind and Brain team of the Institute of Culture and Society of the University of Navarra, especially to Jose Ignacio Murillo, Carlos Blanco and Nathaniel Barrett, who have helped me to deepen the advances and problems posed by neuroaesthetics.

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© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Hegel’s Aesthetics

G.W.F. Hegel’s aesthetics, or philosophy of art, forms part of the extraordinarily rich German aesthetic tradition that stretches from J.J. Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and G.E. Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) through Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) and (in the twentieth century) Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–6) and T.W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970). Hegel was influenced in particular by Winckelmann, Kant and Schiller, and his own thesis of the “end of art” (or what has been taken to be that thesis) has itself been the focus of close attention by Heidegger and Adorno. Hegel’s philosophy of art is a wide ranging account of beauty in art, the historical development of art, and the individual arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. It contains distinctive and influential analyses of Egyptian art, Greek sculpture, and ancient and modern tragedy, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest aesthetic theories to have been produced since Aristotle’s Poetics .

1. Hegel’s Knowledge of Art

2. hegel’s texts and lectures on aesthetics, 3. art, religion and philosophy in hegel’s system, 4. kant, schiller and hegel on beauty and freedom, 5. art and idealization, 6.1 ideal beauty as such, 6.2 the particular forms of art, 6.3 the system of the individual arts, 7. conclusion, hegel’s collected works, english translations of key texts by hegel, transcripts of hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, secondary literature in english, secondary literature in german, other relevant works, other internet resources, related entries.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) contains chapters on the ancient Greek “religion of art” ( Kunstreligion ) and on the world-view presented in Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus the King . His philosophy of art proper, however, forms part of his philosophy (rather than phenomenology) of spirit. The Phenomenology can be regarded as the introduction to Hegel’s philosophical system. The system itself comprises three parts: logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit, and is set out (in numbered paragraphs) in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the philosophical Sciences (1817, 1827, 1830). The philosophy of spirit is in turn divided into three sections: on subjective, objective and absolute spirit. Hegel’s philosophy of art or “aesthetics” constitutes the first sub-section of his philosophy of absolute spirit, and is followed by his philosophy of religion and his account of the history of philosophy.

Hegel’s philosophy of art provides an a priori derivation—from the very concept of beauty itself—of various forms of beauty and various individual arts. In marked contrast to Kant, however, Hegel weaves into his philosophical study of beauty numerous references to and analyses of individual works of art—to such an extent, indeed, that his aesthetics constitutes, in Kai Hammermeister’s words, “a veritable world history of art” (Hammermeister, 24).

Hegel read both Greek and Latin (indeed, he wrote his diary partly in Latin from the age of fourteen); he also read English and French. He was thus able to study the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Shakespeare and Molière in the original languages. He never travelled to Greece or Italy, but he did undertake several long journeys from Berlin (where he was appointed Professor in 1818) to Dresden (1820, 1821, 1824), the Low Countries (1822, 1827), Vienna (1824) and Paris (1827). On these journeys he saw Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and several paintings by Correggio (in Dresden), Rembrandt’s Night Watch (in Amsterdam), the central section of the van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Lamb (in Ghent)—the wing panels were at that time in Berlin—and “famous items by the noblest masters one has seen a hundred times in copper engravings: Raphael, Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian” (in Paris) ( Hegel: The Letters , 654). He liked to visit the theatre and opera, both on his travels and in Berlin, and he was acquainted with leading singers, such as Anna Milder-Hauptmann (who sang in the first production of Beethoven’s Fidelio in 1814), as well as the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (whose revival of J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion Hegel attended in March 1829). Hegel was also on close personal terms with Goethe and knew his drama and poetry especially well (as he did those of Friedrich Schiller).

Adorno complains that “Hegel and Kant [ … ] were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art” (Adorno, 334). This may or may not be true of Kant, but it is clearly quite untrue of Hegel: he had an extensive knowledge and a good understanding of many of the great works of art in the Western tradition. Nor was Hegel’s knowledge and interest restricted to Western art: he read (in translation) works of Indian and Persian poetry, and he saw at first hand works of Egyptian art in Berlin (Pöggeler 1981, 206–8). Hegel’s philosophy of art is thus an a priori derivation of the various forms of beauty that, pace Adorno, is informed and mediated by a thorough knowledge and understanding of individual works of art from around the world.

Hegel’s published thoughts on aesthetics are to be found in pars. 556–63 of the 1830 Encyclopaedia . Hegel also held lectures on aesthetics in Heidelberg in 1818 and in Berlin in 1820/21 (winter semester), 1823 and 1826 (summer semesters), and 1828/29 (winter semester). Transcripts of Hegel’s Berlin lectures made by his students have now been published (though so far only the 1823 lectures have been translated into English) (see Bibliography). Further, hitherto unknown transcripts of Hegel’s Heidelberg lectures on aesthetics were discovered in 2022 by Klaus Vieweg (Jena) in the Freising Cathedral library in Germany. These transcripts, which were written by Hegel’s assistant F.W. Carové, are part of a collection of transcripts on different topics, which numbers approximately 5,000 pages and whose discovery drew worldwide attention when it was announced. The transcripts are currently being edited and prepared for publication by a team led by Vieweg.

In 1835 (and then again in 1842) one of Hegel’s students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, published an edition of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics based on a manuscript of Hegel’s (now lost) and a series of lecture transcripts. This is available in English as: G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art , trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Most of the secondary literature on Hegel’s aesthetics (in English and German) makes reference to Hotho’s edition. Yet according to one of the leading specialists on Hegel’s aesthetics, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Hotho distorted Hegel’s thought in various ways: he gave Hegel’s account of art a much stricter systematic structure than Hegel himself had given it, and he supplemented Hegel’s account with material of his own ( PKÄ , xiii–xv). Gethmann-Siefert argues, therefore, that we should not rely on Hotho’s edition for our understanding of Hegel’s aesthetics, but should instead base our interpretation on the available lecture transcripts.

Since Hegel’s manuscript, on which Hotho based much of his edition, has been lost, it is no longer possible to determine with certainty to what extent (if at all) Hotho did in fact distort Hegel’s account of art. It should also be noted that Gethmann-Siefert’s own interpretation of Hegel’s aesthetics has been called into question (see Houlgate 1986a). Nevertheless Gethmann-Siefert is right to encourage readers with a knowledge of German to consult the published transcripts, since they contain a wealth of important material, and in some cases material that is missing from the Hotho edition (such as the brief reference to Caspar David Friedrich in the 1820/21 lectures [ VÄ , 192]).

Hegel’s philosophy of art has provoked considerable debate since his death in 1831. Does he believe that only Greek art is beautiful? Does he hold that art comes to an end in the modern age? The answers one gives to such questions should, however, be offered with a degree of caution, for, sadly, there is no fully worked out philosophy of art by Hegel that was officially endorsed by Hegel himself. The paragraphs in the Encyclopaedia are written by Hegel, but they are very brief and condensed and were intended to be supplemented by his lectures; the transcripts of the lectures are written by students of Hegel (some taken down in class, some compiled afterwards from notes taken in class); and the “standard” edition of Hegel’s lectures is a work put together by his student, Hotho (albeit using a manuscript by Hegel himself). There is, therefore, no definitive edition of Hegel’s fully developed aesthetic theory that would trump all others and settle all debate.

Hegel’s philosophy of art forms part of his overall philosophical system. In order to understand his philosophy of art, therefore, one must understand the main claims of his philosophy as a whole. Hegel argues in his speculative logic that being is to be understood as self-determining reason or “Idea” ( Idee ). In the philosophy of nature, however, he goes on to show that logic tells only half the story: for such reason is not something abstract—is not a disembodied logos —but takes the form of rationally organized matter . What there is, according to Hegel, is thus not just pure reason but physical, chemical and living matter that obeys rational principles.

Life is more explicitly rational than mere physical matter because it is more explicitly self-determining. Life itself becomes more explicitly rational and self-determining when it becomes conscious and self-conscious—that is, life that can imagine, use language, think and exercise freedom. Such self-conscious life Hegel calls “spirit” ( Geist ). Reason, or the Idea, comes to be fully self-determining and rational, therefore, when it takes the form of self-conscious spirit. This occurs, in Hegel’s view, with the emergence of human existence. Human beings, for Hegel, are thus not just accidents of nature; they are reason itself—the reason inherent in nature—that has come to life and come to consciousness of itself. Beyond human beings (or other finite rational beings that might exist on other planets), there is no self-conscious reason in Hegel’s universe.

In his philosophy of objective spirit Hegel analyses the institutional structures that are required if spirit—that is, humanity—is to be properly free and self-determining. These include the institutions of right, the family, civil society and the state. In the philosophy of absolute spirit Hegel then analyses the different ways in which spirit articulates its ultimate, “absolute” understanding of itself. The highest, most developed and most adequate understanding of spirit is attained by philosophy (the bare bones of whose understanding of the world have just been sketched). Philosophy provides an explicitly rational, conceptual understanding of the nature of reason or the Idea. It explains precisely why reason must take the form of space, time, matter, life and self-conscious spirit.

In religion—above all in Christianity—spirit gives expression to the same understanding of reason and of itself as philosophy. In religion, however, the process whereby the Idea becomes self-conscious spirit is represented —in images and metaphors—as the process whereby “God” becomes the “Holy Spirit” dwelling in humanity. Furthermore, this process is one in which we put our faith and trust : it is the object of feeling and belief, rather than purely conceptual understanding.

In Hegel’s view, philosophy and religion—which is to say, Hegel’s own speculative philosophy and Christianity—both understand the same truth. Religion, however, believes in a representation of the truth, whereas philosophy understands that truth with complete conceptual clarity. It may seem strange that we would need religion, if we have philosophy: surely the latter makes the former redundant. For Hegel, however, humanity cannot live by concepts alone, but also needs to picture, imagine, and have faith in the truth. Indeed, Hegel claims that it is in religion above all that “a nation defines what it considers to be true” ( Lectures on the Philosophy of World History , 105).

Art, for Hegel, also gives expression to spirit’s understanding of itself. It differs from philosophy and religion, however, by expressing spirit’s self-understanding not in pure concepts, or in the images of faith, but in and through objects that have been specifically made for this purpose by human beings. Such objects—conjured out of stone, wood, color, sound or words—render the freedom of spirit visible or audible to an audience. In Hegel’s view, this sensuous expression of free spirit constitutes beauty . The purpose of art, for Hegel, is thus the creation of beautiful objects in which the true character of freedom is given sensuous expression.

The principal aim of art is not, therefore, to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom—images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art’s purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art’s sake, but for beauty’s sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.

Hegel’s close association of art with beauty and freedom shows his clear indebtedness to Kant and Schiller. Kant also maintained that our experience of beauty is an experience of freedom. He argued, however, that beauty is not itself an objective property of things. When we judge that a natural object or a work of art is beautiful, on Kant’s view, we are indeed making a judgment about an object, but we are asserting that the object has a certain effect on us (and that it should have the same effect on all who view it). The effect produced by the “beautiful” object is to set our understanding and imagination in “free play” with one another, and it is the pleasure generated by this free play that leads us to judge the object to be beautiful (Kant, 98, 102–3).

In contrast to Kant, Schiller understands beauty to be a property of the object itself. It is the property, possessed by both living beings and works of art, of appearing to be free when in fact they are not. As Schiller puts it in the “Kallias” letters, beauty is “freedom in appearance, autonomy in appearance” (Schiller, 151). Schiller insists that freedom itself is something “noumenal” (to use Kant’s terminology) and so can never actually manifest itself in the realm of the senses. We can never see freedom at work in, or embodied in, the world of space and time. In the case of beautiful objects, therefore—whether they are the products of nature or human imagination—“it is all that matters [ … ] that the object appears as free, not that it really is so” (Schiller, 151).

Hegel agrees with Schiller (against Kant) that beauty is an objective property of things. In his view, however, beauty is the direct sensuous manifestation of freedom, not merely the appearance or imitation of freedom. It shows us what freedom actually looks like and sounds like when it gives itself sensuous expression (albeit with varying degrees of idealization). Since true beauty is the direct sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit, it must be produced by free spirit for free spirit, and so cannot be a mere product of nature. Nature is capable of a formal beauty, and life is capable of what Hegel calls “sensuous” beauty ( PK , 197), but true beauty is found only in works of art that are freely created by human beings to bring before our minds what it is to be free spirit.

Beauty, for Hegel, has certain formal qualities: it is the unity or harmony of different elements in which these elements are not just arranged in a regular, symmetrical pattern but are unified organically . Hegel gives an example of genuinely beautiful form in his discussion of Greek sculpture: the famous Greek profile is beautiful, we are told, because the forehead and the nose flow seamlessly into one another, in contrast to the Roman profile in which there is a much sharper angle between the forehead and nose ( Aesthetics , 2: 727–30).

Beauty, however, is not just a matter of form; it is also a matter of content . This is one of Hegel’s most controversial ideas, and is one that sets him at odds with those modern artists and art-theorists who insist that art can embrace any content we like and, indeed, can dispense with content altogether. As we have seen, the content that Hegel claims is central and indispensable to genuine beauty (and therefore genuine art) is the freedom and richness of spirit. To put it another way, that content is the Idea, or absolute reason, as self-knowing spirit. Since the Idea is pictured in religion as “God,” the content of truly beautiful art is in one respect the divine . Yet, as we have seen above, Hegel argues that the Idea (or “God”) comes to consciousness of itself only in and through finite human beings. The content of beautiful art must thus be the divine in human form or the divine within humanity itself (as well as purely human freedom).

Hegel recognizes that art can portray animals, plants and inorganic nature, but he sees it as art’s principal task to present divine and human freedom. In both cases, the focus of attention is on the human figure in particular. This is because, in Hegel’s view, the most appropriate sensuous incarnation of reason and the clearest visible expression of spirit is the human form. Colors and sounds by themselves can certainly communicate a mood, but only the human form actually embodies spirit and reason. Truly beautiful art thus shows us sculpted, painted or poetic images of Greek gods or of Jesus Christ—that is, the divine in human form—or it shows us images of free human life itself.

Art, for Hegel, is essentially figurative. This is not because it seeks to imitate nature, but because its purpose is to express and embody free spirit and this is achieved most adequately through images of human beings. (We will consider the exceptions to this—architecture and music—below.) More specifically, art’s role is to bring to mind truths about ourselves and our freedom that we often lose sight of in our everyday activity. Its role is to show us (or remind us of) the true character of freedom. Art fulfills this role by showing us the freedom of spirit in its purest form without the contingencies of everyday life. That is to say, art at its best presents us not with the all too familiar dependencies and drudgery of daily existence, but with the ideal of freedom (see Aesthetics , 1: 155–6). This ideal of human (and divine) freedom constitutes true beauty and is found above all, Hegel claims, in ancient Greek sculptures of gods and heroes.

Note that the work of idealization is undertaken not (like modern fashion photography) to provide an escape from life into a world of fantasy, but to enable us to see our freedom more clearly. Idealization is undertaken, therefore, in the interests of a clearer revelation of the true character of humanity (and of the divine). The paradox is that art communicates truth through idealized images of human beings (and indeed—in painting—through the illusion of external reality).

It is worth noting at this stage that Hegel’s account of art is meant to be both descriptive and normative. Hegel thinks that the account he gives describes the principal features of the greatest works of art in the Western tradition, such as the sculptures of Phidias or Praxiteles or the dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles. At the same time, his account is normative in so far as it tells us what true art is. There are many things that we call “art”: cave paintings, a child’s drawing, Greek sculpture, Shakespeare’s plays, adolescent love poetry, and (in the twentieth century) Carl André’s bricks. Not everything called “art” deserves the name, however, because not everything so called does what true art is meant to do: namely, give sensuous expression to free spirit and thereby create works of beauty. Hegel does not prescribe strict rules for the production of beauty; but he does set out broad criteria that truly beautiful art must meet, and he is critical of work that claims to be “art” but that fails to meet these criteria. Hegel’s critique of certain developments in post-Reformation art—such as the aspiration to do no more than imitate nature—is thus based, not on contingent personal preferences, but on his philosophical understanding of the true nature and purpose of art.

6. Hegel’s Systematic Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art

Hegel’s philosophical account of art and beauty has three parts: 1) ideal beauty as such, or beauty proper, 2) the different forms that beauty takes in history, and 3) the different arts in which beauty is encountered. We will look first at Hegel’s account of ideal beauty as such.

Hegel is well aware that art can perform various functions: it can teach, edify, provoke, adorn, and so on. His concern, however, is to identify art’s proper and most distinctive function. This, he claims, is to give intuitive, sensuous expression to the freedom of spirit. The point of art, therefore, is not to be “realistic”—to imitate or mirror the contingencies of everyday life—but to show us what divine and human freedom look like. Such sensuous expression of spiritual freedom is what Hegel calls the “Ideal,” or true beauty.

The realm of the sensuous is the realm of individual things in space and time. Freedom is given sensuous expression, therefore, when it is embodied in an individual who stands alone in his or her “self-enjoyment, repose, and bliss [ Seligkeit ]” ( Aesthetics , 1: 179). Such an individual must not be abstract and formal (as, for example, in the early Greek Geometric style), nor should he be static and rigid (as in much ancient Egyptian sculpture), but his body and posture should be visibly animated by freedom and life, without, however, sacrificing the stillness and serenity that belongs to ideal self-containment. Such ideal beauty, Hegel claims, is found above all in fifth- and fourth-century Greek sculptures of the gods, such as the Dresden Zeus (a cast of which Hegel saw in the early 1820s) or Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite (see PKÄ , 143 and Houlgate 2007, 58).

Ancient Greek sculpture, which Hegel would have known almost exclusively from Roman copies or from plaster casts, presents what he calls pure or “absolute” beauty ( PKÄ , 124). It does not, however, exhaust the idea of beauty, for it does not give us beauty in its most concrete and developed form. This we find in ancient Greek drama—especially tragedy—in which free individuals proceed to action that leads to conflict and, finally, to resolution (sometimes violently, as in Sophocles’ Antigone , sometimes peacefully, as in Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy). The gods represented in Greek sculpture are beautiful because their physical shape perfectly embodies their spiritual freedom and is not marred by marks of physical frailty or dependence. The principal heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy are beautiful because their free activity is informed and animated by an ethical interest or “pathos” (such as care for the family, as in the case of Antigone, or concern for the welfare of the state, as in the case of Creon), rather than by petty human foibles or passions. These heroes are not allegorical representations of abstract virtues, but are living human beings with imagination, character and free will; but what moves them is a passion for an aspect of our ethical life , an aspect that is supported and promoted by a god.

This distinction between pure beauty, found in Greek sculpture, and the more concrete beauty found in Greek drama means that ideal beauty actually takes two subtly different forms. Beauty takes these different forms because pure sculptural beauty—though it is the pinnacle of art’s achievement—has a certain abstractness about it. Beauty is the sensuous expression of freedom and so must exhibit the concreteness, animation and humanity that are missing, for example, in Egyptian sculpture. Yet since pure beauty, as exemplified by Greek sculpture, is spiritual freedom immersed in spatial , bodily shape, it lacks the more concrete dynamism of action in time , action that is animated by imagination and language. This is what lends a certain “abstractness” (and, indeed, coldness) to pure beauty ( PKÄ , 57, 125). If art’s role is to give sensuous expression to true freedom , however, it must move beyond abstraction towards concreteness. This means that it must move beyond pure beauty to the more concrete and genuinely human beauty of drama. These two kinds of ideal beauty thus constitute the most appropriate objects of art and, taken together, form what Hegel calls the “centre” ( Mittelpunkt ) of art itself ( PKÄ , 126).

Hegel also acknowledges that art can, indeed must, both fall short of and go beyond such ideal beauty. It falls short of ideal beauty when it takes the form of symbolic art, and it goes beyond such beauty when it takes the form of romantic art. The form of art that is characterized by works of ideal beauty itself is classical art. These are the three forms of art ( Kunstformen ), or “forms of the beautiful” ( PKÄ , 68), that Hegel believes are made necessary by the very idea of art itself. The development of art from one form to another generates what Hegel regards as the distinctive history of art.

What produces these three art-forms is the changing relation between the content of art—the Idea as spirit—and its mode of presentation. The changes in this relation are in turn determined by the way in which the content of art is itself conceived. In symbolic art the content is conceived abstractly, such that it is not able to manifest itself adequately in a sensuous, visible form. In classical art, by contrast, the content is conceived in such a way that it is able to find perfect expression in sensuous, visible form. In romantic art, the content is conceived in such a way that it is able to find adequate expression in sensuous, visible form and yet also ultimately transcends the realm of the sensuous and visible.

Classical art is the home of ideal beauty proper, whereas romantic art is the home of what Hegel calls the “beauty of inwardness” ( Schönheit der Innigkeit ) or, as Knox translates it, “beauty of deep feeling” ( Aesthetics , 1: 531). Symbolic art, by contrast, falls short of genuine beauty altogether. This does not mean that it is simply bad art: Hegel recognizes that symbolic art is often the product of the highest level of artistry. Symbolic art falls short of beauty because it does not yet have a rich enough understanding of the nature of divine and human spirit. The artistic shapes it produces are deficient, therefore, because the conceptions of spirit that underlie it—conceptions that are contained above all in religion—are deficient ( PKÄ , 68).

6.2.1 Symbolic Art

Hegel’s account of symbolic art encompasses the art of many different civilizations and shows his considerable understanding of, and appreciation for, non-Western art. Not all of the types of symbolic art Hegel discusses, however, are fully and properly symbolic . So what connects them all? The fact that they all belong to the sphere of what Hegel calls “pre-art” ( Vorkunst ) ( PKÄ , 73). Art proper, for Hegel, is the sensuous expression or manifestation of free spirit in a medium (such as metal, stone or color) that has been deliberately shaped or worked by human beings into the expression of freedom. The sphere of “pre-art” comprises art that falls short of art proper in some way. This is either because it is the product of a spirit that does not yet understand itself to be truly free , or because it is the product of a spirit that does have a sense of its own freedom but does not yet understand such freedom to involve the manifestation of itself in a sensuous medium that has been specifically shaped to that end. In either case, compared to genuine art, “pre-art” rests on a relatively abstract conception of spirit.

Hegel’s intention in his account of symbolic art is not to comment exhaustively on every kind of “pre-art” there is. He says nothing, for example, about prehistoric art (such as cave painting), nor does he discuss Chinese art or Buddhist art (even though he discusses both Chinese religion and Buddhism in his lectures on the philosophy of religion). Hegel’s aim in his account of symbolic art is to examine the various kinds of art that are made necessary by the very concept of art itself, the stages through which art has to pass on its journey from pre-art to art proper.

The first stage is that in which spirit is conceived as being in an immediate unity with nature. This stage is encountered in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrians, Hegel claims, believe in a divine power—the Good—but they identify this divinity with an aspect of nature itself, namely with light. Light does not symbolize or point to a separate God or Good; rather, in Zoroastrianism (as Hegel understands it) light is the Good, is God ( Aesthetics , 1: 325). Light is thus the substance in all things and that which gives life to all plants and animals. This light, Hegel tells us, is personified as Ormuzd (or Ahura Mazda). Unlike the God of the Jews, however, Ormuzd is not a free, self-conscious subject. He (or it) is the Good in the form of light itself, and so is present in all sources of light, such as the sun, stars and fire.

The question we have to ask, Hegel remarks, is whether seeing the Good as light (or giving utterance to such an intuition) counts as art ( PKÄ , 76). In Hegel’s view, it does not do so for two reasons: on the one hand, the Good is not understood to be free spirit that is distinct from, but manifests itself in, the light; on the other hand, the sensuous element in which the Good is present—the light itself—is understood not to be something shaped or produced by free spirit for the purpose of its self-expression, but simply to be a given feature of nature with which the Good is immediately identical.

In the Zoroastrian vision of the Good as light, we encounter the “sensuous presentation [ Darstellung ] of the divine” ( PKÄ , 76). This vision, however, does not constitute a work of art , even though it finds expression in well-crafted prayers and “sublime” utterances.

The second stage in the development of pre-art is that in which there is an immediate difference between spirit and nature. This is found, in Hegel’s view, in Hindu art. The difference between the spiritual and the natural means that the spiritual—i.e., the divine—cannot be understood (as in Persia) to be simply identical with some immediately given aspect of nature. On the other hand, Hegel claims, the divine in Hinduism is conceived in such an abstract and indeterminate way that it acquires determinate form only in and through something immediately sensuous, external and natural. The divine is thus understood to be present in the very form of something sensuous and natural. As Hegel puts it in his 1826 lectures on aesthetics: “natural objects—the human being, animals—are revered as divine” ( PKÄ , 79).

Hindu art marks the difference between the spiritual (or divine) and the merely natural by extending, exaggerating and distorting the natural forms in which the divine is imagined to be present. The divine is portrayed not in the purely natural form of an animal or human being, therefore, but in the unnaturally distorted form of an animal or human being. (Shiva is portrayed with many arms, for example, and Brahma with four faces.)

Hegel notes that such portrayal involves the work of “shaping” or “forming” the medium of expression ( PKÄ , 78). In that sense, one can speak of Hindu “art.” He claims, however, that Hindu art does not fulfill the true purpose of art because it does not give appropriate and adequate shape to free spirit and thereby create images of beauty. Rather, it simply distorts the natural shape of animals and human beings—to the point at which they become “ugly” ( unschön ), “monstrous,” “grotesque” or “bizarre” ( PKÄ , 78, 84)—in order to show that the divine or spiritual, which cannot be understood except in terms of the natural and sensuous, is at the same time different from, and finds no adequate expression in, the realm of the natural and sensuous. Hindu divinity is inseparable from natural forms, but it indicates its distinctive presence by the unnaturalness of the natural forms it adopts.

Hegel’s judgment on Hindu art does not mean, by the way, that he finds no merit at all in such art. He remarks on the splendor of Hindu art and on the “most tender feeling” and the “wealth of the finest sensuous naturalness” that such art can display. He insists, however, that Hindu art fails to reach the height of art, in which spirit is shown to be free in itself and is given appropriate natural, visible shape ( PKÄ , 84).

The third stage in the development of “pre-art” is that of genuinely symbolic art in which shapes and images are deliberately designed and created to point to a determinate and quite separate sphere of “interiority” ( Innerlichkeit ) ( PKÄ , 86). This is the province of ancient Egyptian art. The Egyptians, Hegel tells us, were the first people to “fix” ( fixieren ) the idea of spirit as something inward that is separate and independent in itself ( PKÄ , 85). (In this context he refers to Herodotus, who maintained that the Egyptians were “the first people to put forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul” [Herodotus, 145 [2: 123]].) Spirit, as Hegel understands it (in his philosophy of subjective and objective spirit), is the activity of externalizing and expressing itself in images, words, actions and institutions. With the idea of spirit as “interiority,” therefore, there necessarily comes the drive to give an external shape to this inner spirit, that is, to produce a shape for spirit from out of spirit itself. The drive to create shapes and images—works of art—through which the inner realm can make itself known is thus an “instinct” in the Egyptians that is deeply rooted in the way they understand spirit. In this sense, in Hegel’s view, Egyptian civilization is a more profoundly artistic civilization than that of the Hindus ( Aesthetics , 1: 354; PKÄ , 86).

Egyptian art, however, is only symbolic art, not art in its full sense. This is because the created shapes and images of Egyptian art do not give direct, adequate expression to spirit, but merely point to , or symbolize, an interiority that remains hidden from view. Furthermore, the inner spirit, though fixed in the Egyptian understanding as a “separate, independent inwardness” ( PKÄ , 86), is not itself understood as fully free spirit. Indeed, the realm of spirit is understood by the Egyptians to a large degree as the simple negation of the realm of nature and life. That is to say, it is understood above all as the realm of the dead .

The fact that death is the principal realm in which the independence of the soul is preserved explains why the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is so important to the Egyptians. It also explains why Hegel sees the pyramid as the image that epitomizes Egyptian symbolic art. The pyramid is a created shape that hides within it something separate from it, namely a dead body. It thus serves as the perfect image of Egyptian symbols which point to, but do not themselves reveal and express, a realm of interiority that is independent but still lacks the freedom and life of genuine spirit ( Aesthetics , 1: 356).

For Hegel, Greek art contains symbolic elements (such as the eagle to symbolize the power of Zeus), but the core of Greek art is not the symbol. Egyptian art, by contrast, is symbolic through and through. Indeed, Egyptian consciousness as a whole, in Hegel’s view, is essentially symbolic. Animals, for example, are regarded as symbols or masks of something deeper, and so animal faces are often used as masks (by amongst others, embalmers). Symbolism can also be multi-layered: the image of the phoenix, Hegel claims, symbolizes natural (especially, celestial) processes of disappearance and reemergence, but those processes are themselves viewed as symbols of spiritual rebirth ( PKÄ , 87).

As noted above, the pyramid epitomizes the symbolic art of the Egyptians. Such art, however, does not just point symbolically to the realm of the dead; it also bears witness to an incipient but still undeveloped awareness that true inwardness is found in the living human spirit. It does so, Hegel maintains, by showing the human spirit struggling to emerge from the animal. The image that best depicts this emergence is, of course, that of the sphinx (which has the body of a lion and the head of a human being). The human form is also mixed with that of animals in images of gods, such as Horus (who has a human body and a falcon’s head). Such images, however, do not constitute art in the full sense because they fail to give adequate expression to free spirit in the form of the fully human being. They are mere symbols that partially disclose an interiority whose true character remains hidden from view (and mysterious even to the Egyptians themselves).

Even when the human form is depicted in Egyptian art without adulteration, it is still not animated by a genuinely free and living spirit and so does not become the shape of freedom itself. Figures, such as the Memnon Colossi of Amenhotep III in Western Thebes, display no “freedom of movement” ( PKÄ , 89), in Hegel’s view, and other smaller figures, which stand with their arms pressed to their sides and their feet firmly planted on the ground, lack “grace [ Grazie ] of movement.” Egyptian sculpture is praised by Hegel as “worthy of admiration”; indeed, he claims that under the Ptolemies (305–30 B.C.) Egyptian sculpture exhibited great “delicacy” (or “elegance”) ( Zierlichkeit ). Nonetheless, for all its merits, Egyptian art does not give shape to real freedom and life and so fails to fulfill the true purpose of art.

The fourth stage of pre-art is that in which spirit gains such a degree of freedom and independence that spirit and nature “fall apart” ( PKÄ , 89). This stage is in turn sub-divided into three. The first sub-division comprises sublime art: the poetic art of the Jewish people.

In Judaism, Hegel maintains, spirit is understood to be fully free and independent. This freedom and independence is, however, attributed to the divine rather than the human spirit. God is thus conceived as a “free spiritual subject” ( PKÄ , 75), who is the creator of the world and the power over everything natural and finite. That which is natural and finite is, by contrast, regarded as something “negative” in relation to God, that is, as something that does not exist for its own sake but that has been created to serve God ( PKÄ , 90).

Judaic spirituality, in Hegel’s view, is not capable of producing works of true beauty because the Jewish God transcends the world of nature and finitude and cannot manifest itself in that world and be given visible shape in it. Jewish poetry (the Psalms) gives expression, rather, to the sublimity of God by praising and exalting Him as the source of all things. At the same time, such poetry gives “brilliant” ( glänzend ) expression to the pain and fear felt by the sinful in relation to their Lord ( PKÄ , 91).

The second sub-division of this fourth stage of pre-art comprises what Hegel calls “oriental pantheism” and is found in the poetry of Islamic “Arabs, Persians, and Turks” ( PKÄ , 93), such as the Persian lyric poet Hafez (German: Hafis) (c. 1310–1389). In such pantheism, God is also understood to stand sublimely above and apart from the realm of the finite and natural, but his relation to that realm is held to be affirmative , rather than negative. The divine raises things to their own magnificence, fills them with spirit, gives them life and in this sense is actually immanent in things ( Aesthetics , 1: 368; PKÄ , 93).

This in turn determines the relation that the poet has to objects. For the poet, too, is free and independent of things, but also has an affirmative relation to them. That is to say, he feels an identity with things and sees his own untroubled freedom reflected in them. Such pantheism thus comes close to genuine art, for it uses natural objects, such as a rose, as poetic “images” ( Bilder ) of its own feeling of “cheerful, blessed inwardness” ( PKÄ , 94–5). The pantheistic spirit remains, however, free within itself in distinction from and in relation to natural objects; it does not create shapes of its own—such as the idealized figures of the Greek gods—in which its freedom comes directly into view. (Note, by the way, that in the Hotho edition of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics pantheistic Islamic poetry is placed before, rather than after, the poetry of Judaism; see Aesthetics , 1: 364–77.)

The third sub-division of the fourth stage of pre-art is that in which there is the clearest break between spirit and the realm of the natural or sensuous. At this stage, the spiritual aspect—that which is inner and, as it were, invisible—takes the form of something quite separate and distinct. It is also something finite and limited: an idea or meaning entertained by human beings. The sensuous element is in turn something separate and distinct from the meaning. It has no intrinsic connection to the meaning, but is, as Hegel puts it, “external” to that meaning. The sensuous element—the pictorial or poetic image—is thus connected with the meaning by nothing but the subjective “wit” or imagination of the poet ( PKÄ , 95). This occurs, Hegel maintains, in fables, parables, allegories, metaphors and similes.

This third sub-division is not associated with any particular civilization, but is a form of expression that is found in many different ones. Hegel contends, however, that allegory, metaphor and simile do not constitute the core of truly beautiful art, because they do not present us with the very freedom of spirit itself, but point to (and so symbolize) a meaning that is separate and independent. A metaphor, such as “Achilles is a lion,” does not embody the spirit of the individual hero in the way that a Greek sculpture does, but is a metaphor for something that is distinct from the metaphor itself (see Aesthetics , 1: 402–8; PKÄ , 104).

Hegel’s account of symbolic art (or “pre-art”) draws widely on the work of other writers, such as his former colleague at Heidelberg, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, the author of Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples, especially the Greeks (1810–12). Hegel’s account is not meant to be strictly historical, but rather to place the various forms of pre-art discussed in a logical relation to one another. This relation is determined by the degree to which, in each form of pre-art, spirit and nature (or the sensuous) are differentiated from one another.

To recapitulate: in Zoroastrianism, spirit and nature are in immediate identity with one another (as the Light). In Hindu art, there is an immediate difference between the spiritual (the divine) and nature, but the spiritual remains abstract and indeterminate in itself and so can be brought to mind only through images of natural things (unnaturally distorted). In Egyptian art, the spiritual is again different from the realm of the merely natural and sensuous. In contrast to the indeterminate divinity of the Hindus, however, Egyptian spirituality (in the form of the gods and of the human soul) is fixed, separate and determinate in itself. The images of Egyptian art thus point symbolically to a realm of spirit that remains hidden from direct view. The spirit to which such symbolic images point, however, lacks genuine freedom and life and is often identified with the realm of the dead.

In the sublime poetry of the Jews, God is represented as transcendent and as a “ free spiritual subject.” Finite human beings, however, are portrayed in a negative relation to God in that they are created to serve and praise God and are pained by their own sinfulness. In the sublime poetry of “oriental pantheism” God is once again portrayed as transcendent, but, in contrast to Judaism, God and finite things are shown to stand in an affirmative relation to one another: things are infused with spirit and life by God. The poet’s relation to things is, accordingly, one in which his own free spirit finds itself reflected in the natural things around him.

In the last stage of pre-art, the difference between the spiritual and the natural (or sensuous) is taken to its limit: the spiritual element (the “meaning”) and the sensuous element (the “shape” or “image”) are now completely independent of, and external to, one another. Furthermore, each is finite and limited. This is the realm of allegory and metaphor.

6.2.2 Classical Art

Hegel does not deny the magnificence or elegance of pre-art, but he maintains that it falls short of art proper. The latter is found in classical art, or the art of the ancient Greeks.

Classical art, Hegel contends, fulfills the concept of art in that it is the perfect sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit. It is in classical art, therefore—above all in ancient Greek sculpture (and drama)—that true beauty is to be found. Indeed, Hegel maintains, the gods of ancient Greece exhibit “absolute beauty as such”: “there can be nothing more beautiful than the classical; there is the ideal” ( PKÄ , 124, 135; see also Aesthetics , 1: 427).

Such beauty consists in the perfect fusion of the spiritual and the sensuous (or natural). In true beauty the visible shape before us does not merely intimate the presence of the divine through the unnatural distortion of its form, nor does it point beyond itself to a hidden spirituality or to divine transcendence. Rather, the shape manifests and embodies free spirituality in its very contours. In true beauty, therefore, the visible shape is not a symbol of, or metaphor for, a meaning that lies beyond the shape, but is the expression of spirit’s freedom that brings that freedom directly into view. Beauty is sensuous, visible shape so transformed that it stands as the visible embodiment of freedom itself.

Hegel does not deny that Greek art and mythology contain many symbolic elements: the story, for example, that Cronus, the father of Zeus, consumed his own children symbolizes the destructive power of time ( Aesthetics , 1: 492; PKÄ , 120). In Hegel’s view, however, the distinctive core of Greek art consists in works of ideal beauty in which the freedom of spirit is made visible for the first time in history. Three conditions had to be met for such beautiful art to be produced.

First, the divine had to be understood to be freely self-determining spirit, to be divine subjectivity (not just an abstract power such as the Light). Second, the divine had to be understood to take the form of individuals who could be portrayed in sculpture and drama. The divine had to be conceived, in other words, not as sublimely transcendent, but as spirituality that is embodied in many different ways. The beauty of Greek art thus presupposed Greek polytheism. Third, the proper shape of free spirit had to be recognized to be the human body, not that of an animal. Hindu and Egyptian gods were often portrayed as a fusion of human and animal forms; by contrast, the principal Greek gods were depicted in ideal human form. Hegel notes that Zeus would sometimes take on animal form, for example when he was engaged in seduction; but he sees Zeus’ transformation of himself into a bull for the purpose of seduction as a lingering echo of Egyptian mythology in the Greek world (see PKÄ , 119–20, in which Hegel confuses Io, who in another story was herself changed into a white cow by Zeus to protect her from the jealous Hera, with Europa, who was the object of Zeus’ love in the story Hegel has in mind).

Not only do Greek art and beauty presuppose Greek religion and mythology, but Greek religion itself requires art in order to give a determinate identity to the gods. As Hegel notes (following Herodotus), it was the poets Homer and Hesiod who gave the Greeks their gods, and Greek understanding of the gods was developed and expressed above all in their sculpture and drama (rather than in distinctively theological writings) ( PKÄ , 123–4). Greek religion thus took the form of what Hegel in the Phenomenology called a “religion of art.” Moreover, Greek art achieved the highest degree of beauty, in Hegel’s view, precisely because it was the highest expression of the freedom of spirit enshrined in Greek religion.

Although Greek sculpture and drama achieved unsurpassed heights of beauty, such art did not give expression to the deepest freedom of the spirit. This is because of a deficiency in the Greek conception of divine and human freedom. Greek religion was so well suited to aesthetic expression because the gods were conceived as free individuals who were wholly at one with their bodies and their sensuous life. In other words, they were free spirits still immersed in nature ( PKÄ , 132–3). In Hegel’s view, however, a deeper freedom is attained when the spirit withdraws into itself out of nature and becomes pure self-knowing interiority. Such an understanding of spirit is expressed, according to Hegel, in Christianity. The Christian God is thus pure self-knowing spirit and love who created human beings so that they, too, may become such pure spirit and love. With the emergence of Christianity comes a new form of art: romantic art. Hegel uses the term “romantic” to refer not to the art of the late 18th- and early 19th-century German Romantics (many of whom he knew personally), but to the whole tradition of art that emerged in Western Christendom.

6.2.3 Romantic Art

Romantic art, like classical art, is the sensuous expression or manifestation of the freedom of spirit. It is thus capable of genuine beauty. The freedom it manifests, however, is a profoundly inward freedom that finds its highest expression and articulation not in art itself but in religious faith and philosophy. Unlike classical art, therefore, romantic art gives expression to a freedom of the spirit whose true home lies beyond art. If classical art can be compared to the human body which is thoroughly suffused with spirit and life, romantic art can be compared to the human face which discloses the spirit and personality within . Since romantic art actually discloses the inner spirit, however, rather than merely pointing to it, it differs from symbolic art which it otherwise resembles.

Romantic art, for Hegel, takes three basic forms. The first is that of explicitly religious art. It is in Christianity, Hegel contends, that the true nature of spirit is revealed. What is represented in the story of Christ’s life, death and resurrection is the idea that a truly divine life of freedom and love is at the same time a fully human life in which we are willing to “die” to ourselves and let go of what is most precious to us. Much religious romantic art, therefore, focuses on the suffering and death of Christ.

Hegel notes that it is not appropriate in romantic art to depict Christ with the idealized body of a Greek god or hero, because what is central to Christ is his irreducible humanity and mortality. Romantic art, therefore, breaks with the classical ideal of beauty and incorporates real human frailty, pain and suffering into its images of Christ (and also of religious martyrs). Indeed, such art can even go to the point of being “ugly” ( unschön ) in its depiction of suffering ( PKÄ , 136).

If, however, romantic art is to fulfill the purpose of art and present true freedom of spirit in the form of beauty, it must show the suffering Christ or suffering martyrs to be imbued with a profound inwardness ( Innigkeit ) of feeling and a genuine sense of reconciliation ( Versöhnung ) ( PKÄ , 136–7): for such an inward sense of reconciliation, in Hegel’s view, is the deepest spiritual freedom. The sensuous expression (in color or words) of this inner sense of reconciliation constitutes what Hegel calls the “beauty of inwardness” or “spiritual beauty” ( geistige Schönheit ) ( PKÄ , 137). Strictly speaking, such spiritual beauty is not as consummately beautiful as classical beauty, in which the spirit and the body are perfectly fused with one another. Spiritual beauty, however, is the product of, and reveals, a much more profound inner freedom of spirit than classical beauty and so moves and engages us much more readily than do the relatively cold statues of Greek gods.

The most profound spiritual beauty in the visual arts is found, in Hegel’s view, in painted images of the Madonna and Child, for in these what is expressed is the feeling of boundless love . Hegel had a special affection for the paintings of the Flemish Primitives, Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling, whose work he saw on his visits to Ghent and Bruges in 1827 ( Hegel: The Letters , 661–2), but he also held Raphael in high regard and was particularly moved by the expression of “pious, modest mother-love” in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna which he saw in Dresden in 1820 ( PKÄ , 39; Pöggeler et al 1981, 142). Greek sculptors portrayed Niobe as simply “petrified in her pain” at the loss of her children. By contrast, the painted images of the Virgin Mary are imbued by van Eyck and Raphael with an “eternal love” and a “soulfulness” that Greek statues can never match ( PKÄ , 142, 184).

The second fundamental form of romantic art identified by Hegel depicts what he calls the secular “virtues” of the free spirit ( Aesthetics , 1: 553; PKÄ , 135). These are not the ethical virtues displayed by the heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy: they do not involve a commitment to the necessary institutions of freedom, such as the family or the state. Rather, they are the formal virtues of the romantic hero: that is to say, they involve a commitment by the free individual, often grounded in contingent choice or passion, to an object or another person.

Such virtues include that of romantic love (which concentrates on a particular, contingent person), loyalty towards an individual (that can change if it is to one’s advantage), and courage (which is often displayed in the pursuit of personal ends, such as rescuing a damsel in distress, but can also be displayed in the pursuit of quasi-religious ends, such as the hunt for the Holy Grail) ( PKÄ , 143–4).

Such virtues are found primarily in the world of mediaeval chivalry (and are subjected to ridicule, Hegel points out, in Cervantes’ Don Quixote ) ( Aesthetics , 1: 591–2; PKÄ , 150). They can, however, also crop up in more modern works and, indeed, are precisely the virtues displayed in an art-form of which Hegel could know nothing, namely the American Western.

The third fundamental form of romantic art depicts the formal freedom and independence of character. Such freedom is not associated with any ethical principles or (at least not principally) with the formal virtues just mentioned, but consists simply in the “firmness” ( Festigkeit ) of character ( Aesthetics , 1: 577; PKÄ , 145–6). This is freedom in its modern, secular form. It is displayed most magnificently, Hegel believes, by characters, such as Richard III, Othello and Macbeth, in the plays of Shakespeare. Note that what interests us about such individuals is not any moral purpose (which they invariably lack anyway), but simply the energy and self-determination (and often ruthlessness) that they exhibit. Such characters must have an internal richness (revealed through imagination and language) and not just be one-dimensional, but their main appeal is their formal freedom to commit themselves to a course of action, even at the cost of their own lives. These characters do not constitute moral or political ideals, but they are the appropriate objects of modern, romantic art whose task is to depict freedom even in its most secular and amoral forms.

Hegel also sees romantic beauty in more inwardly sensitive characters, such as Shakespeare’s Juliet. After meeting Romeo, Hegel remarks, Juliet suddenly opens up with love like a rosebud, full of childlike naivety. Her beauty thus lies in being the embodiment of love. Hamlet is a somewhat similar character: far from being simply weak (as Goethe thought), Hamlet, in Hegel’s view, displays the inner beauty of a profoundly noble soul ( Aesthetics , 1: 583; PKÄ , 147–8).

6.2.4 The “End” of Art

One should note that the development of romantic art, as Hegel describes it, involves the increasing secularization and humanization of art. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (as in ancient Greece) art was closely tied to religion: art’s function was to a large degree to make the divine visible. With the Reformation, however, religion turned inward and found God to be present in faith alone , not in the icons and images of art. As a result, Hegel points out, we who live after the Reformation “no longer venerate works of art” ( VPK , 6). Furthermore, art itself was released from its close ties to religion and allowed to become fully secular. “To Protestantism alone,” Hegel states, “the important thing is to get a sure footing in the prose of life, to make it absolutely valid in itself independently of religious associations, and to let it develop in unrestricted freedom” ( Aesthetics , 1: 598).

It is for this reason, in Hegel’s view, that art in the modern age no longer meets our highest needs and no longer affords us the satisfaction that it gave to earlier cultures and civilizations. Art satisfied our highest needs when it formed an integral part of our religious life and revealed to us the nature of the divine (and, as in Greece, the true character of our fundamental ethical obligations). In the modern, post-Reformation world, however, art has been released (or has emancipated itself) from subservience to religion. As a result, “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” ( Aesthetics , 1: 11).

This does not mean that art now has no role to play and that it provides no satisfaction at all. Art is no longer the highest and most adequate way of expressing the truth (as it was, according to Hegel, in fifth-century Athens); we moderns now seek ultimate or “absolute” truth in religious faith or in philosophy, rather than in art. (Indeed, the considerable importance we assign to philosophy is evident, in Hegel’s view, in the prominence of the philosophical study of art itself in modernity [ Aesthetics , 1: 11; VPK , 6].) Yet art in modernity continues to perform the significant function of giving visible and audible expression to our distinctively human freedom and to our understanding of ourselves in all our finite humanity.

Hegel does not claim, therefore, that art as a whole simply comes to an end or “dies” in the modern age. His view is, rather, that art plays (or at least should play) a more limited role now than it did in ancient Greece or in the Middle Ages. Yet Hegel does think that art in modernity comes to an end in a certain respect . To understand why he thinks this, we need to consider his claim that art in modernity “falls apart” ( zerfällt ) into the exploration of everyday contingencies, on the one hand, and the celebration of witty, “humorous” subjectivity, on the other ( PKÄ , 151).

In Hegel’s view, much painting and poetry after the Reformation focuses its attention on the prosaic details of ordinary daily life, rather than on the intimacy of religious love or the magnificent resolve and energy of tragic heroes. To the extent that such works of art no longer aim to give expression to divine or human freedom but seek (apparently at least) to do no more than “imitate nature,” they prompt Hegel to consider whether they still count as “art works” in the strictly philosophical (as opposed to the more generally accepted) sense of the term. In the twentieth century it was the abstract creations of, for example, Jackson Pollock or Carl André that usually provoked the question: “is this art?”. In Hegel’s mind, however, it is works that appear to be purely naturalistic and “representational” that raise this question. His view is that such works count as genuine works of art only when they do more than merely imitate nature. The naturalistic and prosaic works that best meet this criterion, he maintains, are the paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters.

In such works, Hegel claims, the painter does not aim simply to show us what grapes, flowers or trees look like: we know that already from nature. The painter aims, rather, to capture the—often fleeting—“life” ( Lebendigkeit ) of things: “the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expression of a swiftly passing emotion” ( Aesthetics , 1: 599). Often, indeed, the painter seeks to delight us specifically with the animated play of the colors of gold, silver, velvet or fur. In such works, Hegel notes, we encounter not just the depiction of things, but “as it were, an objective music, a peal in colour [ ein Tönen in Farben ]” ( Aesthetics , 1: 598–600).

A genuine work of art is the sensuous expression of divine or human freedom and life. Paintings that are no more than prosaic, naturalistic depictions of everyday objects or human activity would thus appear to fall short of genuine art and so to bring art to an end. Dutch artists, however, turn such depictions into true works of art precisely by imbuing objects with “the fullness of life.” In so doing, Hegel claims, they give expression to their own sense of freedom, “comfort” and “contentment” and their own exuberant subjective skill ( Aesthetics , 1: 599; PKÄ , 152). The paintings of such artists may lack the classical beauty of Greek art, but they exhibit magnificently the subtle beauties and delights of everyday modern life.

A much more overt expression of subjectivity is found by Hegel in works of modern humor . Such witty, ironic, humorous subjectivity—one we might now describe as “anarchic”—manifests itself in playing or “sporting” with objects, “deranging” and “perverting” material and “rambling to and fro,” and in the “criss-cross movement of subjective expressions, views, and attitudes whereby the author sacrifices himself and his topics alike” ( Aesthetics , 1: 601). Hegel claims that works of “ true humour,” such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), succeed in making “what is substantial emerge out of contingency.” Their “triviality [thus] affords precisely the supreme idea of depth” ( Aesthetics , 1: 602). In other works, by contrast—such as those of Hegel’s contemporary, Jean Paul Richter—all we encounter is the “baroque mustering of things objectively furthest removed from one another” and “the most confused disorderly jumbling of topics related only in his own subjective imagination” ( Aesthetics , 1: 601). In such works, we do not see human freedom giving itself objective expression, but rather witness subjectivity “destroying and dissolving everything that proposes to make itself objective and win a firm shape for itself in reality” ( Aesthetics , 1: 601).

To the extent that works of humor do not give body to true self-determining freedom and life—or afford “the supreme idea of depth”—but merely manifest the power of arbitrary, subjective wit to subvert the settled order, such works, in Hegel’s view, no longer count as genuine works of art . Consequently, “when the subject lets itself go in this way, art thereby comes to an end [ so hört damit die Kunst auf ]” ( PKÄ , 153). In this respect, Hegel does after all proclaim that art comes to an end in modernity. This is not because art no longer performs a religious function and so no longer fulfills the highest vocation of art; it is because there emerge in modernity certain “art works” that are no longer the expressions of true human freedom and life and so no longer genuine art works at all.

As was noted above, however, this does not mean that art as a whole comes to an end in the early nineteenth century. Art, in Hegel’s view, still has a future: “we may well hope,” he says, “that art will always rise higher and come to perfection” ( Aesthetics , 1: 103). For Hegel, the distinctive character of genuine art in contemporary (and future) modernity—and thus of genuinely modern art—is twofold. On the one hand, it remains bound to give expression to concrete human life and freedom; on the other hand, it is no longer restricted to any of the three art-forms. That is to say, it does not have to observe the proprieties of classical art or explore the intense emotional inwardness or heroic freedom or comfortable ordinariness that we find in romantic art. Modern art, for Hegel, can draw on features of any of the art-forms (including symbolic art) in its presentation of human life. Indeed, it can also present human life and freedom indirectly through the depiction of nature.

The focus of modern art, therefore, does not have to be on one particular conception of human freedom rather than another. The new “holy of holies” in art is humanity itself— “ Humanus ”—that is, “the depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates” ( Aesthetics , 1: 607). Modern art, in Hegel’s view, thus enjoys an unprecedented freedom to explore “the infinity of the human heart” in manifold ways ( VÄ , 181). For this reason, there is little that Hegel can say about the path that art should take in the future; that is for artists to decide.

Hegel’s judgment that modern artists are—and are quite rightly—free to adopt whatever style they please has surely been confirmed by the history of art since Hegel’s death in 1831. There is reason to suspect, however, that Hegel might not have welcomed many of the developments in post-Hegelian art. This is due to the fact that, although he does not lay down any rules that are to govern modern art, he does identify certain conditions that should be met if modern art is to be genuine art. Hegel notes, for example, that such art should “not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful and capable of artistic treatment” ( Aesthetics , 1: 605; VPK , 204). He insists that modern artists should draw their content from their own human spirit and that “nothing that can be living [ lebendig ] in the human breast is alien to that spirit.” He also remarks that modern art may represent “everything in which the human being as such is capable of being at home [ heimisch ]” ( Aesthetics , 1: 607). These may appear to be fairly innocuous conditions, but they suggest that certain post-Hegelian art works would not count in Hegel’s eyes as genuine works of art. These might include works that by no stretch of the imagination can be called “beautiful” (such as some of the paintings of Willem De Kooning or Francis Bacon), or works in which it is evidently hard to feel very much “at home” (such as the writings of Franz Kafka). Hegel’s account of the different arts (such as sculpture and painting) also suggests that he would not have regarded the move from figurative to abstract visual art as appropriate: Netherlandish and Dutch painters excelled in the creating of “objective music” through the play of colors, yet they did so not in the abstract but in the very depiction of concrete, identifiable objects. (Robert Pippin takes a different view on this last point; see Pippin 2007.)

From a twentieth- or twenty-first-century point of view, Hegel’s stance may well look conservative. From his point of view, however, he was trying to understand what conditions would have to be met for works of art to be genuine works of art and genuinely modern. The conditions that Hegel identified—namely that art should present the richness of human freedom and life and should allow us to feel at home in its depictions—are ones that many modern artists (for example, Impressionists such as Monet, Sisley and Pissarro) have felt no trouble in meeting. For others, these conditions are simply too restrictive. They have thus taken modern art in a direction in which, from a Hegelian perspective, it has ceased to be art in the true sense any longer.

Art, in Hegel’s account, not only undergoes a historical development (from symbolic art through classical art to romantic and then modern art), but also differentiates itself into different arts. Each art has a distinctive character and exhibits a certain affinity with one or more of the art-forms. Hegel does not provide an exhaustive account of all recognized arts (he says little, for example, about dance and nothing, obviously, about cinema), but he examines the five arts that he thinks are made necessary by the very concept of art itself.

6.3.1 Architecture

Art, we recall, is the sensuous expression of divine and human freedom. If it is to demonstrate that spirit is indeed free, it must show that spirit is free in relation to that which is itself unfree, spiritless and lifeless—that is, three-dimensional, inorganic matter, weighed down by gravity. Art must, therefore, be the transformation of such brute, heavy matter into the expression of spiritual freedom, or what Hegel calls “the forming of the inorganic” ( VPK , 209). The art that gives heavy matter the explicit form of spiritual freedom—and so works stone and metal into the shape of a human being or a god—is sculpture. Architecture, by contrast, gives matter an abstract, inorganic form created by human understanding. It does not animate matter in the manner of sculpture but invests matter with strict regularity, symmetry and harmony ( PKÄ , 155, 166). In so doing architecture turns matter not into the direct sensuous expression of spiritual freedom, but into an artificially and artfully shaped surrounding for the direct expression of spiritual freedom in sculpture. The art of architecture fulfills its purpose, therefore, when it creates classical temples to house statues of the gods ( VPK , 221).

Hegel points out, however, that prior to the emergence of classical architecture in ancient Greece, architecture took the more primitive form of “independent” ( selbständig ) or “symbolic” architecture ( Aesthetics , 2: 635; PKÄ , 159). The constructions that fall into this category do not house or surround individual sculptures, like classical Greek temples, but are themselves partly sculptural and partly architectural. They are works of architectural sculpture or sculptural architecture. Such constructions are sculptural in so far as they are built for their own sake and do not serve to shelter or enclose something else. They are works of architecture, however, in so far as they are overtly heavy and massive and lack the animation of sculpture. They are also sometimes arranged in rows, like columns, with no distinctive individuality.

Some of these works of independent architecture have regular inorganic, geometrical shapes (such as the temple of Bel described by Herodotus) (see Herodotus, 79–80 [1: 181]); some are clearly embodiments of the organic “force of life in nature” (such as the phallus and the lingam) ( Aesthetics , 2: 641); and some even have a human form, albeit one that is abstract and colossal (such as the Egyptian Memnons of Amenhotep III). In Hegel’s view, however, all such constructions have a symbolic significance for those who built them. They were not built simply to provide shelter or security for people (like a house or a castle), but are works of symbolic art.

These “independent” constructions are meaningful in themselves: their meaning lies, for example, in their shape or in the number of their parts. By contrast, the Egyptian pyramids contain a “meaning” that is separate from the construction itself. That “meaning,” of course, is the body of the dead pharaoh. Since they house within themselves something other than themselves, pyramids, in Hegel’s view, are, as it were, on the way to being properly architectural. They fall short of proper classical architecture, however, because what they shelter within themselves is death, not the embodiment of the living god: they are, as Hegel puts it, “crystals that shelter within them a departed spirit” ( VPK , 218). Furthermore, the “meaning” that they contain is completely hidden within them, invisible to all. Pyramids thus remain works of symbolic art that point to a hidden meaning buried within them. Indeed, as was noted above, Hegel claims that the pyramid is the image or symbol of symbolic art itself ( Aesthetics , 1: 356).

The epitome of symbolic art is symbolic architecture (specifically, the pyramids). Architecture itself, however, comes into its own only with the emergence of classical art: for it is only in the classical period that architecture provides the surrounding for, and so becomes the servant of, a sculpture that is itself the embodiment of free spirit.

Hegel has much to say about the proper form of such a surrounding. The main point is this: spiritual freedom is embodied in the sculpture of the god; the house of the god—the temple—is something quite distinct from, and subordinate to, the sculpture it surrounds; the form of that temple should thus also be quite distinct from that of the sculpture. The temple, therefore, should not mimic the flowing contours of the human body, but should be governed by the abstract principles of regularity, symmetry and harmony.

Hegel also insists that the form of the temple should be determined by the purpose it serves: namely to provide an enclosure and protection for the god ( VPK , 221). This means that the basic shape of the temple should contain only those features that are needed to fulfill its purpose. Furthermore, it means (in Hegel’s view) that each part of the temple should perform a specific function within the economy of the whole building and that different functions should not be confused with one another. It is this latter requirement that makes columns necessary. There is a difference, for Hegel, between the task of bearing the roof and that of enclosing the statue within a given space. The second task—that of enclosure—is performed by a wall. If the first task is to be clearly distinguished from the second, therefore, it must be performed not by a wall but by a separate feature of the temple. Columns are necessary in a classical temple, according to Hegel, because they perform the distinct task of bearing the roof without forming a wall. The classical temple is thus the most intelligible of buildings because different functions are carried out in this way by different architectural features and yet are harmonized with one another. Herein, indeed, lies the beauty of such a temple ( VPK , 221, 224).

In contrast to classical architecture, romantic or “Gothic” architecture is based on the idea of a closed house in which Christian inwardness can find refuge from the outside world. In the Gothic cathedral columns are located within, rather than around the outside of, the enclosed space, and their overt function is no longer merely to bear weight but to draw the soul up into the heavens. Consequently, the columns or pillars do not come to a definite end (in a capital on which rests the architrave of the classical temple), but continue up until they meet to form a pointed arch or a vaulted roof. In this way, the Gothic cathedral not only shelters the spirit of the religious community, but also symbolizes the upward movement of that spirit in its very structure ( PKÄ , 170–1).

Hegel considers a relatively small range of buildings: he says almost nothing, for example, about secular buildings. One should bear in mind, however, that he is interested in architecture only in so far as it is an art, not in so far as it provides us with protection and security in our everyday lives. Yet it should also be noted that architecture, as Hegel describes it, falls short of genuine art, as he defines it, since it is never the direct sensuous expression of spiritual freedom itself (in the manner of sculpture) (see Aesthetics , 2: 888). This is a fundamental limitation of architecture: the structures of “independent architecture” symbolize meanings that are more or less indeterminate; the pyramids indicate the presence of a hidden meaning, namely death; and even in its classical and romantic forms architecture remains a “symbolic” art, in so far as the structures it creates remain separate from the spirit they house ( Aesthetics , 2: 888). In no case is architecture the explicit manifestation or embodiment of free spirituality itself. This does not, however, make architecture any less necessary as a part of our aesthetic and religious life. Nor does it prevent Hegel from seeking to understand what distinguishes the “art” of architecture (as opposed to the more everyday practice or business of architecture) in both the classical and romantic eras.

6.3.2 Sculpture

In contrast to architecture, sculpture works heavy matter into the concrete expression of spiritual freedom by giving it the shape of the human being . The high point of sculpture, for Hegel, was achieved in classical Greece. In Egyptian sculpture the figures often stand firm with one foot placed before the other and the arms held tightly by the side of the body, giving the figures a rather rigid, lifeless appearance. By contrast, the idealized statues of the gods created by Greek sculptors, such as Phidias and Praxiteles, are clearly alive and animated, even when the gods are depicted at rest. This animation is apparent in the posture of the figure, in the nuanced contours of the body and also in the free fall of the figure’s garments. Hegel greatly admired the sculpture of Michelangelo—a cast of whose Pietà he saw in Berlin ( Aesthetics , 2: 790)—but it was the Greeks, in his view, who set the standard for “ideal” sculptural beauty. Indeed, Greek sculpture, according to Hegel, embodies the purest beauty of which art itself is capable. (For a more detailed study of Hegel’s account of sculpture, see Houlgate 2007, 56–89).

6.3.3 Painting

Hegel was well aware that Greek statues were often painted in quite a gaudy manner. He claims, however, that sculpture expresses spiritual freedom and vitality in the three-dimensional shape of the figure, rather than in the color that has been applied to it. In painting, by contrast, it is color above all that is the medium of expression. The point of painting, for Hegel, is not to show us what it is for free spirit to be fully embodied . It is to show us only what free spirit looks like , how it manifests itself to the eye. The images of painting thus lack the three-dimensionality of sculpture, but they add the detail and specificity provided by color.

Hegel acknowledges that painting reached a degree of perfection in the classical world, but he maintains that it is best suited to the expression of romantic, Christian spirituality (and the secular freedom of post-Reformation modernity) ( PKÄ , 181). This is because the absence of bodily solidity and the presence of color allow the more inward spirituality of the Christian world to manifest itself as such. If sculpture is the material embodiment of spirit, painting gives us, as it were, the face of spirit in which the soul within manifests itself as the soul within ( PKÄ , 183).

Painting, however, is also able—unlike sculpture—to set divine and human spirit in relation to its external environment: it is able to include within the painted image itself the natural landscape and the architecture by which Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints or secular figures are surrounded ( Aesthetics , 2: 854). Indeed, Hegel argues that painting—in contrast to sculpture, which excels in presenting independent, free-standing individuals—is altogether more suited to showing human beings in their relations both to their environment and to one another: hence the prominence in painting of, for example, depictions of the love between the Virgin Mary and the Christ child.

Hegel’s account of painting is extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging. He has particular praise for Raphael, Titian and the Dutch masters and, as noted earlier, is especially interested in the ways in which painters can combine colors to create what he calls “objective music” ( Aesthetics , 1: 599–600). It should be noted, however, that Hegel sees the abstract play of colors as an integral part of the depiction of free human beings and does not suggest that painting should ever become purely abstract and “musical” (as it did in the twentieth century).

6.3.4 Music

The next art in Hegel’s “system of the individual arts” is music itself. It, too, comes into its own in the period of romantic art. Like sculpture and painting, but unlike architecture, music gives direct expression to free subjectivity. Yet music goes even further in the direction of expressing the inwardness of subjectivity by dropping the dimensions of space altogether. It thus gives no enduring visual expression to such subjectivity, but expresses the latter in the organized succession of vanishing sounds. Music, for Hegel, originates in the immediate uttering of feeling or what he calls “interjection”—“the Ah and Oh of the heart” ( Aesthetics , 2: 903). Yet music is more than just a cry of pain or a sigh; it is an organized, developed, “cadenced” interjection. Music is thus not just a sequence of sounds for its own sake, but is the structured expression in sounds of inner subjectivity. Through rhythm, harmony and melody music allows the soul to hear its own inner movement and to be moved in turn by what it hears. It is “spirit, soul which resounds immediately for itself and feels satisfied in hearing itself [ in ihrem Sichvernehmen ]” ( Aesthetics , 2: 939, translation altered).

Music expresses, and allows us to hear and enjoy, the movement of the soul in time through difference and dissonance back into its unity with itself. It also expresses, and moves us to, various different feelings , such as love, longing and joy ( Aesthetics , 2: 940). In Hegel’s view, however, the purpose of music is not only to arouse feelings in us, but—as in all genuine art —to enable us to enjoy a sense of reconciliation and satisfaction in what we encounter. This, Hegel contends, is the secret of truly “ideal” music, the music of Palestrina, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart: even in the deepest grief “tranquillity of soul is never missing [ … ]; grief is expressed there, too, but it is assuaged at once; [ …] everything is kept firmly together in a restrained form so that jubilation does not degenerate into a repulsive uproar, and even a lament gives us the most blissful tranquillity” ( Aesthetics , 2: 939).

Hegel notes that music is able to express feelings with especial clarity when it is accompanied by a poetic text, and he had a particular love of both church music and opera. Interestingly, however, he argues that in such cases it is really the text that serves the music, rather than the other way around, for it is the music above all that expresses the profound movements of the soul ( Aesthetics , 2: 934). Yet music does not have to be accompanied by a text; it can also be “independent” instrumental music. Such music also fulfills the aim of art by expressing the movements of the soul and moving the soul in turn to “emotions in sympathy with it” ( Aesthetics , 2: 894). Over and above this expression, however, independent music pursues the purely formal development of themes and harmonies for its own sake. This, in Hegel’s view, is a perfectly appropriate, indeed necessary, thing for music to do. The danger he sees, however, is that such formal development can become completely detached from the musical expression of inward feeling and subjectivity, and that, as a result, music can cease being a genuine art and become mere artistry. Music, as it were, loses its soul and becomes nothing but “skill and virtuosity in compilation” ( Aesthetics , 2: 906). At this point, music no longer moves us to feel anything, but simply engages our abstract understanding. It thereby becomes the province of the “connoisseur” and leaves the layman—who “likes most in music [ … ] the intelligible expression of feelings and ideas” ( Aesthetics , 2: 953)—behind.

Hegel admits that he is not as well versed in music as he is in the other arts he discusses. He has a deep appreciation, however, for the music of J.S. Bach, Handel and Mozart and his analyses of musical rhythm, harmony and melody are highly illuminating. He was familiar with, though critical of, the music of his contemporary Carl Maria von Weber, and he had a particular affection for Rossini ( Aesthetics , 1: 159, 2: 949). Surprisingly, he never makes any mention of Beethoven.

6.3.5 Poetry

The last art that Hegel considers is also an art of sound, but sound understood as the sign of ideas and inner representations—sound as speech . This is the art of poetry ( Poesie ) in the broad sense of the term. Hegel regards poetry as the “most perfect art” ( PKÄ , 197), because it provides the richest and most concrete expression of spiritual freedom (in contrast to sculpture which, in its classical form, gives us the purest ideal beauty). Poetry is capable of showing spiritual freedom both as concentrated inwardness and as action in space and time. It is equally at home in symbolic, classical and romantic art and, in this sense, is the “most unrestricted of the arts” ( Aesthetics , 2: 626).

Poetry, for Hegel, is not simply the structured presentation of ideas, but the articulation of ideas in language, indeed in spoken (rather than just written) language. An important aspect of the art of poetry—and what clearly marks it off from prose—is thus the musical ordering of words themselves or “versification.” In this respect, Hegel claims, there are important differences between classical and romantic art: the ancients place more emphasis on rhythmic structure in their verse, whereas in Christendom (especially in France and Italy) greater use is made of rhyme ( PKÄ , 201–4).

The three basic forms of poetry identified by Hegel are epic, lyric and dramatic poetry.

6.3.5.1 Epic and Lyric poetry

Epic poetry presents spiritual freedom—that is, free human beings—in the context of a world of circumstances and events. “In the epic,” Hegel states, “individuals act and feel; but their actions are not independent, events [also] have their right.” What is described in such poetry, therefore, is “a play between actions and events” ( PKÄ , 208). Epic individuals are situated individuals, caught up in a larger enterprise (such as the Trojan War in Homer’s Iliad ). What they do is thus determined as much by the situation in which they find themselves as by their own will, and the consequences of their actions are to a large degree at the mercy of circumstances. Epic poetry thus shows us the worldly character—and attendant limitations—of human freedom. (In this respect, Hegel notes, Alexander the Great would not have made a good subject for epic poetry, because “his world was his army”— his creation under his control—and so was not truly independent of his will [ PKÄ , 213].)

Among the great epic poems Hegel discusses are Homer’s Odyssey , Dante’s Divine Comedy and the mediaeval Spanish poem El Cid . Much of what he has to say about the epic, however, is based on his reading of Homer’s Iliad . In the modern period, Hegel maintains, the epic gives way to the novel ( PKÄ , 207, 217).

In contrast to the epic hero, the subject of lyric poetry does not undertake tasks, journeys or adventures in the world but simply gives expression—in hymns, odes or songs—to the self’s ideas and inner feelings. This can be done directly or via the poetic description of something else, such as a rose, wine, or another person. As always, Hegel’s remarks about lyric poetry bear witness to his extraordinary erudition and to his critical acumen. He lavishes particular praise on Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819) but criticizes the eighteenth-century poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock for wanting to create a new “poetic mythology” ( Aesthetics , 2: 1154–7; PKÄ , 218).

6.3.5.2 Dramatic Poetry

Dramatic poetry combines the principles of epic and lyric poetry. It shows characters acting in the world—in a given situation —but their actions issue directly from their own inner will (rather than being co-determined by events beyond the agent’s control). Drama thus presents the—all too often self-destructive—consequences of free human action itself .

Drama, for Hegel, is the “highest” and most concrete art ( PKÄ , 205)—the art in which human beings themselves are the medium of aesthetic expression. (Seeing a play performed by actors, as opposed to hearing it read aloud or reading it for oneself, is thus central, in Hegel’s view, to the experience of drama [ Aesthetics , 2: 1182–5; PKÄ , 223–4].) Drama, indeed, is the art in which all the other arts are contained (virtually or actually): “the human being is the living statue, architecture is represented by painting or there is real architecture,” and—in particular in Greek drama—there is “music, dance and pantomime” ( PKÄ , 223). At this point, it is tempting to say that, for Hegel, drama—to use Richard Wagner’s expression—is the “total work of art” ( Gesamtkunstwerk ). It is doubtful, however, whether Hegel would have been sympathetic to Wagner’s project. Hegel remarks that drama takes the explicit form of a “totality” in opera , which belongs more to the sphere of music than to drama proper ( PKÄ , 223). (He has in mind in particular the operas of Gluck and Mozart.) In drama as such , by contrast, language is what predominates and music plays a subordinate role and may even be present only in the virtual form of versification. The Wagnerian idea of a “music drama” that is neither a straightforward opera nor a simple drama would thus appear, from Hegel’s point of view, to confuse two distinct arts.

Drama, for Hegel, does not depict the richness of the epic world or explore the inner world of lyric feeling. It shows characters acting in pursuit of their own will and interest and thereby coming into conflict with other individuals (even if, as in the case of Hamlet, after some initial hesitation). Hegel distinguishes between tragic and comic drama and between classical and romantic versions of each. (He also notes that in some plays, such as Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris , tragedy threatens but is averted by acts of trust or forgiveness [ Aesthetics , 2: 1204].)

In classical Greek tragedy individuals are moved to act by an ethical interest or “pathos,” such as concern for the family or for the state. The conflict between Antigone and Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone is of this kind, as is the conflict acted out in Aeschylus’ Oresteia . In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King the conflict is not a straightforwardly ethical one, but it is nonetheless a conflict between two “rights”: the right of consciousness to accept responsibility only for what it knows it has done, and the right of the “unconscious”—of what we do not know—to be accorded respect. The tragedy of Oedipus is that he pursues his right to uncover the truth about the murder of Laius without ever considering that he himself might be responsible for the murder or, indeed, that there might be anything about him of which he is unaware ( Aesthetics , 2: 1213–14).

Greek tragic heroes and heroines are moved to act by the ethical (or otherwise justified) interest with which they identify, but they act freely in pursuit of that interest. Tragedy shows how such free action leads to conflict and then to the violent (or sometimes peaceful) resolution of that conflict. At the close of the drama, Hegel maintains, we are shattered by the fate of the characters (at least when the resolution is violent). We are also satisfied by the outcome, because we see that justice has been done. Individuals, whose interests—such as the family and the state—should be in harmony with one another, set those interests in opposition to one another; in so doing, however, they destroy themselves and thereby undo the very opposition they set up. In the self-destruction of such “one-sidedly” ethical characters, Hegel believes, we, the audience, see the work of “eternal justice” ( Aesthetics , 2: 1198, 1215). This reconciles us to the fate of the characters and so provides the sense of “reconciliation which art should never lack” ( Aesthetics , 2: 1173).

In modern tragedy—by which Hegel means above all Shakespearean tragedy—characters are moved not by an ethical interest, but by a subjective passion, such as ambition or jealousy. These characters, however, still act freely and destroy themselves through the free pursuit of their passion. Tragic individuals, therefore—whether ancient or modern—are not brought down by fate but are ultimately responsible for their own demise. Indeed, Hegel maintains, “innocent suffering is not the object of high art” ( PKÄ , 231–2). Drama that sees people primarily as victims of circumstance or oppression (such as Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck [1836]) is thus, from a Hegelian point of view, drama without genuine tragedy .

In comedy individuals also undermine their own endeavors in some way, but the purposes that animate them are either inherently trivial ones or grand ones which they pursue in a laughably inappropriate way. In contrast to tragic characters, truly comic figures do not identify themselves seriously with their laughable ends or means. They can thus survive the frustration of their purposes, and often come to laugh at themselves, in a way that tragic figures cannot. In this respect, Hegel claims, characters in many modern comedies, such as those by Molière, are frequently ridiculous, but not genuinely comic , characters: we laugh at Molière’s miser or Shakespeare’s Malvolio, but they do not laugh with us at their own foibles. Truly comic figures are found by Hegel in the plays of the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes. What we encounter in such plays, Hegel maintains, is “an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all: this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustration of his aims and achievements” ( Aesthetics , 2: 1200). Modern equivalents of such Aristophanic light-heartedness may be found in Verdi’s Falstaff (1893) and in the unrivalled comic genius of Homer Simpson, both of which, of course, were unknown to Hegel.

Comedy, in Hegel’s view, marks the “dissolution of art” ( Aesthetics , 2: 1236). Yet the way in which comedy “dissolves” art differs from the way in which modern ironic humor does so. Ironic humor—at least of the kind found in the work of Jean Paul Richter—is the expression of the “power of subjective notions, flashes of thought” to “destroy and dissolve everything that proposes to make itself objective” ( Aesthetics , 1: 601). It is the expression of the unchallenged mastery of wit. Since Hegel does not regard such arbitrary mastery as genuine freedom, he argues that works of ironic humor in which this mastery is exhibited no longer count as genuine works of art. True comedy, by contrast, is the expression of a sense of wholeness, self-confidence and well-being—of subjective freedom and life —that survives the loss of mastery and control over one’s life. Plays that express such freedom count as genuine works of art. Yet they are works that show freedom to reside precisely not in the works we undertake but within subjectivity itself, within subjectivity that happily endures the frustration of its laughable aims.

According to Hegel, the idea that true freedom is to be found in inner spirituality that is prepared to let go of, or to “die to,” its own selfish purposes lies at the heart of religion , specifically of Christianity. True comedy, therefore, implicitly points beyond art to religion. It is in this way—and not by ceasing to be art—that comedy “dissolves” art.

Comedy thus takes art to its limit: beyond comedy there is no further aesthetic manifestation of freedom, there is only religion (and philosophy). Religion, in Hegel’s view, does not make the aesthetic expression of freedom redundant; indeed, it is often the source of the greatest art. Yet religion provides a more profound understanding of freedom than art, just as philosophy provides a clearer and more profound understanding of freedom than religion.

Hegel’s aesthetics has been the focus of—often highly critical—attention since his death from philosophers such as Heidegger, Adorno and Gadamer. Much of this attention has been devoted to his supposed theory of the “end” of art. Perhaps Hegel’s most important legacy, however, lies in the claims that art’s task is the presentation of beauty and that beauty is a matter of content as well as form. Beauty, for Hegel, is not just a matter of formal harmony or elegance; it is the sensuous manifestation in stone, color, sound or words of spiritual freedom and life . Such beauty takes a subtly different form in the classical and romantic periods and also in the different individual arts. In one form or another, however, it remains the purpose of art, even in modernity.

These claims by Hegel are normative, not just descriptive, and impose certain restrictions on what can count as genuine art in the modern age. They are not, however, claims made out of simple conservatism. Hegel is well aware that art can be decorative, can promote moral and political goals, can explore the depths of human alienation or simply record the prosaic details of everyday life, and that it can do so with considerable artistry. His concern, however, is that art that does these things without giving us beauty fails to afford us the aesthetic experience of freedom. In so doing, it deprives us of a central dimension of a truly human life.

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Adorno, Theodor W. | aesthetics: German, in the 18th century | Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics | art, definition of | Gadamer, Hans-Georg: aesthetics | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Herder, Johann Gottfried von | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Nietzsche, Friedrich | -->Nietzsche, Friedrich: aesthetics --> | Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von | Schlegel, Friedrich | Schopenhauer, Arthur | Schopenhauer, Arthur: aesthetics

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W as never form and never face So sweet to SEYD as only grace Which did not slumber like a stone But hovered gleaming and was gone. Beauty chased he everywhere, In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. He smote the lake to feed his eye With the beryl beam of the broken wave; He flung in pebbles well to hear The moment's music which they gave. Oft pealed for him a lofty tone From nodding pole and belting zone. He heard a voice none else could hear From centred and from errant sphere. The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. In dens of passion, and pits of wo, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe. While thus to love he gave his days In loyal worship, scorning praise, How spread their lures for him, in vain, Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain! He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

T he spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money value, — his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, and wine.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks are! Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired, "From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?" But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the chicane?

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners , the power of form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always near us.

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life, — we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners , of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; — on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him.

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said, "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement — much of it superficial and absurd enough — about works of art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: — yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research, — namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach a badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show themselves. Every necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships in the theatre, — or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour! — What a difference in effect between a battalion of troops marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday! In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on the top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most elegant imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the immortality.

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, — Beauty rides on a lion . Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with the least weight. "It is the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai . In all design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the nations that created them.

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply because the tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish.

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced without end. How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave two thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence , in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it, since a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.' French memoires of the fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, "the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs, and people go early to get places at the theatres, when it is known they will be there." "Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, "flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get into her post-chaise next morning."

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression which passes from conversation into habit of style.

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type, but have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws, — as every lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet — it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit for nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes, — affirm, that the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence , art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England." "Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold." Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, "was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all; whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. Still, "it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning; — if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but also in the world of manners .

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, "it swims on the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that

— "half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, — has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners , which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners , or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, " vis superba formae ," which the poets praise, — under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in manners , up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say about beauty?

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