This is the introduction of a book that I read.. it talks about some things that we've talked about in class
INTRODUCTION
The sense of beauty has a more important place in life than aesthetic theory
has ever taken in philosophy. The plastic arts, with poetry and music, are the
most conspicuous monuments of this human interest, because they appeal only to
contemplation, and yet have attracted to their service, in all civilized ages,
an amount of effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to
industry, war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where aesthetic feeling
appears almost pure, are by no means the only sphere in which men show their
susceptibility to beauty. In all products of human industry we notice the
keenness with which the eye is attracted to the mere appearance of things: great
sacrifices of time and labour are made to it in the most vulgar manufactures;
nor does man select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without
reference to their effect on his aesthetic senses. Of late we have even learned
that the forms of many animals are due to the survival by sexual selection of
the colours and forms most attractive to the eye. There must therefore be in our
nature a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value
it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes
over so conspicuous a faculty.
That aesthetic theory has received so little attention from the world is not
due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but rather to lack of
an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to the small success of the
occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute curiosity, and love of
comprehension for its own sake, are not passions we have much leisure to
indulge: they require not only freedom from affairs but, what is more rare,
freedom from prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make
for the habitual goal of our thought.
Now, what has chiefly maintained such speculation as the world has seen has
been either theological passion or practical use. All we find, for example,
written about beauty may be divided into two groups: that group of writings in
which philosophers have interpreted aesthetic facts in the light of their
metaphysical principles, and made of their theory of taste a corollary or
footnote to their systems; and that group in which artists and critics have
ventured into philosophic ground, by generalizing somewhat the maxims of the
craft or the comments of the sensitive observer. A treatment of the subject at
once direct and theoretic has been very rare: the problems of nature and morals
have attracted the reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have
absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon aesthetic experience has
remained abortive or incoherent.
A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the failure of
aesthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the phenomenon with which it deals.
Man has a prejudice against himself: anything which is a product of his mind
seems to him to be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied only
when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws independent of our
nature. The ancients long speculated about the constitution of the universe
before they became aware of that mind which is the instrument of all
speculation. The moderns, also, even within the field of psychology, have
studied first the function of perception and the theory of knowledge, by which
we seem to be informed about external things; they have in comparison neglected
the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination and emotion. We
have still to recognize in practice the truth that from these despised feelings
of ours the great world of perception derives all its value, if not also its
existence. Things are interesting because we care about them, and important
because we need them. Had our perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we
should soon close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence were of no service
to our passions, we should come to doubt, in the lazy freedom of reverie,
whether two and two make four.
Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and insignificance of
things purely emotional, that those who have taken moral problems to heart and
felt their dignity have often been led into attempts to discover some external
right and beauty of which, our moral and aesthetic feelings should be
perceptions or discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, in men's
opinion, a perception or discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem to
feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of objective
truth, and not merely expressions of human nature, they stand condemned of
hopeless triviality. A judgment is not trivial, however, because it rests on
human feelings; on the contrary, triviality consists in abstraction from human
interests; only those judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which
wander beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the ordering
and enriching of life.
Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice against the
subjective. They have not suffered more because both have a subject-matter which
is partly objective. Ethics deals with conduct as much as with emotion, and
therefore considers the causes of events and their consequences as well as our
judgments of their value. Esthetics also is apt to include the history and
philosophy of art, and to add much descriptive and critical matter to the theory
of our susceptibility to beauty. A certain confusion is thereby introduced into
these inquiries, but at the same time the discussion is enlivened by excursions
into neighbouring provinces, perhaps more interesting to the general reader.
We may, however, distinguish three distinct elements of ethics and
aesthetics, and three different ways of approaching the subject. The first is
the exercise of the moral or aesthetic faculty itself, the actual pronouncing of
judgment and giving of praise, blame, and precept. This is not a matter of
science but of character, enthusiasm, niceness of perception, and fineness of
emotion. It is aesthetic or moral activity, while ethics and aesthetics, as
sciences, are intellectual activities, having that aesthetic or moral activity
for their subject-matter.
The second method consists in the historical explanation of conduct or of art
as a part of anthropology, and seeks to discover the conditions of various types
of character, forms of polity, conceptions of justice, and schools of criticism
and of art. Of this nature is a great deal of what has been written on
aesthetics. The philosophy of art has often proved a more tempting subject than
the psychology of taste, especially to minds which were not so much fascinated
by beauty itself as by the curious problem of the artistic instinct in man and
of the diversity of its manifestations in history.
The third method in ethics and aesthetics is psychological, as the other two
are respectively didactic and historical. It deals with moral and aesthetic
judgments as phenomena of mind and products of mental evolution. The problem
here is to understand the origin and conditions of these feelings and their
relation to the rest of our economy. Such an inquiry, if pursued successfully,
would yield an understanding of the reason why we think anything right or
beautiful, wrong or ugly, it would thus reveal the roots of conscience and taste
in human nature and enable us to distinguish transitory preferences and ideals,
which rest on peculiar conditions, from those which, springing from those
elements of mind which all men share, are comparatively permanent and universal.
To this inquiry, as far as it concerns aesthetics, the following pages are
devoted. No attempt will be made either to impose particular appreciations or to
trace the history of art and criticism. The discussion will be limited to the
nature and elements of our aesthetic judgments. It is a theoretical inquiry and
has no directly hortatory quality. Yet insight into the basis of our
preferences, if it could be gained, would not fail to have a good and purifying
influence upon them. It would show us the futility of a dogmatism that would
impose upon another man judgments and emotions for which the needed soil is
lacking in his constitution and experience; and at the same time it would
relieve us of any undue diffidence or excessive tolerance towards aberrations of
taste, when we know what are the broader grounds of preference and the habits
that make for greater and more diversified aesthetic enjoyment.
Therefore, although nothing has commonly been less attractive than treatises
on beauty or less a guide to taste than disquisitions upon it, we may yet hope
for some not merely theoretical gain from these studies. They have remained so
often without practical influence because they have been pursued under
unfavourable conditions. The writers have generally been audacious
metaphysicians and somewhat incompetent critics; they have represented general
and obscure principles, suggested by other parts of their philosophy, as the
conditions of artistic excellence and the essence of beauty. But if the inquiry
is kept close to the facts of feeling, we may hope that the resulting theory may
have a clarifying effect on the experience on which it is based. That is, after
all, the use of theory. If when a theory is bad it narrows our capacity for
observation and makes all appreciation vicarious and formal, when it is good it
reacts favourably upon our powers, guides the attention to what is really
capable of affording entertainment, and increases, by force of new analogies,
the range of our interests. Speculation is an evil if it imposes a foreign
organization on our mental life; it is a good if it only brings to light, and
makes more perfect by training, the organization already inherent in it.
We shall therefore study human sensibility itself and our actual feelings
about beauty, and we shall look for no deeper, unconscious causes of our
aesthetic consciousness. Such value as belongs to metaphysical derivations of
the nature of the beautiful, comes to them not because they explain our primary
feelings, which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact
constitute, some of our later appreciations. There is no explanation, for
instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes. Such a
relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to understand why the
symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain moments of contemplation, when much
emotional experience lies behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both
of nature and of life, our delight in any particular object may consist in
nothing but the thought that this object is a manifestation of universal
principles. The blue sky may come to please chiefly because it seems the image
of a serene conscience, or of the eternal youth and purity of nature after a
thousand partial corruptions. But this expressiveness of the sky is due to
certain qualities of the sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure,
and, in a mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in an
idea of God, bind it also to that idea.
So it may happen that the most arbitrary and unreal theories, which must be
rejected as general explanations of aesthetic life, may be reinstated as
particular moments of it. Those intuitions which we call Platonic are seldom
scientific, they seldom explain the phenomena or hit upon the actual law of
things, but they are often the highest expression of that activity which they
fail to make comprehensible. The adoring lover cannot understand the natural
history of love; for he is all in all at the last and supreme stage of its
development. Hence the world has always been puzzled in its judgment of the
Platonists; their theories are so extravagant, yet their wisdom seems so great.
Platonism is a very refined and beautiful expression of our natural instincts,
it embodies conscience and utters our inmost hopes. Platonic philosophers have
therefore a natural authority, as standing on heights to which the vulgar cannot
attain, but to which they naturally and half-consciously aspire.
When a man tells you that beauty is the manifestation of God to the senses,
you wish you might understand him, you grope for a deep truth in his obscurity,
you honour him for his elevation of mind, and your respect may even induce you
to assent to what he says as to an intelligible proposition. Your thought may in
consequence be dominated ever after by a verbal dogma, around which all your
sympathies and antipathies will quickly gather, and the less you have penetrated
the original sense of your creed, the more absolutely will you believe it. You
will have followed Mephistopheles' advice: —
Im ganzen haltet euch an Worte,
So geht euch durch die sichere Pforte
Zum Tempel der Gewissheit ein.
Yet reflection might have shown you that the word of the master held no
objective account of the nature and origin of beauty, but was the vague
expression of his highly complex emotions.
It is one of the attributes of God, one of the perfections which we
contemplate in our idea of him, that there is no duality or opposition between
his will and his vision, between the impulses of his nature and the events of
his life. This is what we commonly designate as omnipotence and creation.
Now, in the contemplation of beauty, our faculties of perception have the same
perfection: it is indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the
occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our
conception of the divine life. There is, then, a real propriety in calling
beauty a manifestation of God to the senses, since, in the region of sense, the
perception of beauty exemplifies that adequacy and perfection which in general
we objectify in an idea of God.
But the minds that dwell in the atmosphere of these analogies are hardly
those that will care to ask what are the conditions and the varieties of this
perfection of function, in other words, how it comes about that we perceive
beauty at all, or have any inkling of divinity. Only the other philosophers,
those that wallow in Epicurus' sty, know anything about the latter question. But
it is easier to be impressed than to be instructed, and the public is very ready
to believe that where there is noble language not without obscurity there must
be profound knowledge. We should distinguish, however, the two distinct demands
in the case. One is for comprehension; we look for the theory of a human
function which must cover all possible cases of its exercise, whether noble or
base. This the Platonists utterly fail to give us. The other demand is for
inspiration; we wish to be nourished by the maxims and confessions of an exalted
mind, in whom the aesthetic function is pre-eminent. By responding to this
demand the same thinkers may win our admiration.
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it.
To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the
contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great
deal more, than any science can hope to be. The poets and philosophers who
express this aesthetic experience and stimulate the same function in us by their
example, do a greater service to mankind and deserve higher honour than the
discoverers of historical truth. Reflection is indeed a part of life, but the
last part. Its specific value consists in the satisfaction of curiosity, in the
smoothing out and explanation of things: but the greatest pleasure which we
actually get from reflection is borrowed from the experience on which we
reflect. We do not often indulge in retrospect for the sake of a scientific
knowledge of human life, but rather to revive the memories of what once was
dear. And I should have little hope of interesting the reader in the present
analyses, did I not rely on the attractions of a subject associated with so many
of his pleasures.
But the recognition of the superiority of aesthetics in experience to
aesthetics in theory ought not to make us accept as an explanation of aesthetic
feeling what is in truth only an expression of it. When Plato tells us of the
eternal ideas in conformity to which all excellence consists, he is making
himself the spokesman of the moral consciousness. Our conscience and taste
establish these ideals; to make a judgment is virtually to establish an ideal,
and all ideals are absolute and eternal for the judgment that involves them,
because in finding and declaring a thing good or beautiful, our sentence is
categorical, and the standard evoked by our judgment is for that case intrinsic
and ultimate. But at the next moment, when the mind is on another footing, a new
ideal is evoked, no less absolute for the present judgment than the old ideal
was for the previous one. If we are then expressing our feeling and confessing
what happens to us when we judge, we shall be quite right in saying that we have
always an absolute ideal before us, and that value lies in conformity with that
ideal. So, also, if we try to define that ideal, we shall hardly be able to say
of it anything less noble and more definite than that it is the embodiment of an
infinite good. For it is that incommunicable and illusive excellence that haunts
every beautiful thing, and
like a star
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.
For the expression of this experience we should go to the poets, to the more
inspired critics, and best of all to the immortal parables of Plato. But if what
we desire is to increase our knowledge rather than to cultivate our sensibility,
we should do well to close all those delightful books; for we shall not find any
instruction there upon the questions which most press upon us; namely, how an
ideal is formed in the mind, how a given object is compared with it, what is the
common element in all beautiful things, and what the substance of the absolute
ideal in which all ideals tend to be lost; and, finally, how we come to be
sensitive to beauty at all, or to value it. These questions must be capable of
answers, if any science of human nature is really possible. — So far, then, are
we from ignoring the insight of the Platonists, that we hope to explain it, and
in a sense to justify it, by showing that it is the natural and sometimes the
supreme expression of the common principles of our nature.
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