legitimate aesthetic function of scientific ideas when they enlarge the scope of a pleasurable play of the imagination, and are freed from the control of a serious purpose of explaining what is seen.
A similar remark applies to the contacts of our aesthetic with our practical interests. While as dominant factors the latter are excluded from aesthetic activity they may influence our feeling for beauty in an indirect and subordinate way. This is recognized by those (e.g. Home) who insist on a particular kind of (b) with practical interests.aesthetic value under the name of relative beauty, or the pleasing aspect of fitness for a purpose. If a drinking-vessel please in part because of its perfect adaptation to its purpose, the aesthetic value ascribed to it seems to derive something from a feeling of respect for utility itself. In another way beauty reasserts in modern aesthetics that kinship with utility on which it insisted in the days of Socrates. The idea that typical beauty coincides with what is vigorous and conducive to the conservation of the species is as old as Hobbes.[1] Biological treatment of beauty. Darwin and his followers have developed the biological conception that sexual selection tends to develop aesthetic preferences along lines which correspond to what subserves the maintenance of the species or tribe. Recent writers have shown how the rude germs of aesthetic activity in primitive types of community would subserve necessary tribal ends—e.g. musical rhythm by exercising members of the tribe in concerted war-like action.[2] Yet these interesting speculations have to do rather with the earlier stages of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty than with its functions in the higher stages.Aesthetics and ethics. An idea of a social utility in aesthetic experience which does demand the attention of the theorist is that the culture of beauty and art has a socializing influence, helping to give to our emotional experience new forms of expression whereby our sympathies are deepened and enlarged.[3] The further elucidation of this element of humanizing influence in aesthetic enjoyment may be expected to throw new light on the question, much discussed throughout the history of aesthetics, of the relation of the science to ethics, by showing that they have a common root in our sympathetic nature and interest in humanity.
In order to complete the outline of aesthetic theory we need to glance at the relation of general aesthetics to the special problems of Fine Art. It is evident that the definition of the aims and methods of art, both as a whole and in its several forms, involving as it does special technical Aesthetic theory
and problems of art.knowledge, may with advantage be treated apart from a general theory. (See Fine Arts.) At the same time the study of art raises larger problems which require to be dealt with to some extent by this theory. We may instance the group of problems which have to do with the relation of art to “beauty” in its narrower sense, such as the function of the painful and of the ugly in art, the meaning of artistic imitation and truth to nature, of idealization, and the nature of artistic illusion; also the question of the didactic and of the moral function of art. Even more special problems of art, such as the effect of the tragic, the nature of musical expression, can only be adequately treated in the light of a general aesthetic theory.
In conclusion, it may be pointed out that the psychological theorist has of late been busy in an outlying region of art-lore, inquiring into the nature of the artistic impulse and temperament, and into the processes of imaginative creation. These inquiries have been carried out to some extent in connexion with studies of the origin of art, and of the relation of art to the social environment. Their importance for aesthetics lies in the circumstance that they are fitted to throw light upon the aesthetic consciousness as it is developed in those who are not only in a special sense cultivators of it, but represent in a peculiar manner the ideas and the aims of art.[4]
History of Theories
In the following summary of the most important contributions to aesthetic doctrine, only such writings will be recognized as contribute to a general conception of aesthetic objects or experience. These include the more systematic treatment of the subject in philosophic works as well as the more thoughtful kind of discussion of principles to be met with in writings on art by critics and others.
1. Greek Speculations.—Ancient Greece supplies us with the first important contributions to aesthetic theory, though these are scarcely, in quality or in quantity, what one might have expected from a people which had so high an appreciation of beauty and so strong a bent for philosophic speculation. The first Greek thinker of whose views on the subject we really know something is Socrates. We learn from Xenophon’s account of him that he regarded the beautiful as coincident with the good, and both of them are resolvable into the useful. Every beautiful object is so called because it serves some rational end, whether the security or the gratification of man. Socrates appears to have attached little importance to the immediate gratification which a beautiful object affords to perception and contemplation, but to have emphasized rather its power of furthering the more necessary ends of life. The really valuable point in his doctrine is the relativity of beauty. Unlike Plato, he recognized no self-beauty (αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν) existing absolutely and out of all relation to a percipient mind.
Of the views of Plato on the subject, it is hardly less difficult to gain a clear conception from the Dialogues, than it is in the case of ethical good. In some of these, various definitions of the beautiful are rejected as inadequate by the Platonic Socrates. At the same time we may conclude that Plato’s mind leaned Plato.decidedly to the conception of an absolute beauty, which took its place in his scheme of ideas or self-existing forms. This true beauty is nothing discoverable as an attribute in another thing, for these are only beautiful things, not the beautiful itself. Love (Eros) produces aspiration towards this pure idea. Elsewhere the soul’s intuition of the self-beautiful is said to be a reminiscence of its prenatal existence. As to the precise forms in which the idea of beauty reveals itself, Plato is not very decided. His theory of an absolute beauty does not easily adjust itself to the notion of its contributing merely a variety of sensuous pleasure, to which he appears to lean in some dialogues. He tends to identify the self-beautiful with the conceptions of the true and the good, and thus there arose the Platonic formula καλοκἀγαθία. So far as his writings embody the notion of any common element in beautiful objects, it is proportion, harmony or unity among their parts. He emphasizes unity in its simplest aspect as seen in evenness of line and purity of colour. He recognizes in places the beauty of the mind, and seems to think that the highest beauty of proportion is to be found in the union of a beautiful mind with a beautiful body. He had but a poor opinion of art, regarding it as a trick of imitation (μίμησις) which takes us another step farther from the luminous sphere of rational intuition into the shadowy region of the semblances of sense. Accordingly, in his scheme for an ideal republic, he provided for the most inexorable censorship of poets, &c., so as to make art as far as possible an instrument of moral and political training.
Aristotle proceeded to a more serious investigation of the aesthetic phenomena so as to develop by scientific analysis certain principles of beauty and art. In his treatises on poetry and rhetoric he gives us, along with a theory of these arts, certain general principles of beauty; and scattered among his other Aristotle.writings we find many valuable suggestions on the same subject. He seeks (in the Metaphysics) to distinguish the good and the beautiful by saying that the former is always in action (ἐν πράξει) whereas the latter may exist in motionless things as well (ἐν ἀκινήτοις) At the same time he had as a Greek to allow that though essentially different things the good might under certain conditions be called beautiful. He further distinguished the beautiful from the fit, and in a passage of the Politics set beauty above the useful and necessary. He helped to determine another characteristic of the beautiful, the absence of all lust or desire in the pleasure it bestows. The universal elements of beauty, again, Aristotle finds (in the Metaphysics) to be
- ↑ See passage in Human Nature (first part of Tripos), ch. viii. § 5 (Molesworth’s edition of Works, vol. iv. p. 38).
- ↑ See among others R. Wallascheck, Primitve Music, pp. 270 ff., and Y. Hirn, The Origin of Art, pp. 9 ff.; cf. W. Jerusalem, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pp. 116, 117.
- ↑ The idea of this social utility in aesthetic enjoyment is touched on by Kant, Critique of Judgment (Bernard’s trans.), p. 174; and is more fully worked out by Guyau, L’Art au point de vue sociologique, ch. ii. and iii.; cf. Rutgers Marshall, Aesthetic Principles, pp. 81-82.
- ↑ On the nature of the primitive art-culture, see Rutgers Marshall, Aesthetic Principles, ch. iii.; M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, pp. 151 ff: Y. Hirn, The Origin of Art, ch. ii. On artistic genius and its creative process, see H. Taine, The Philosophy of Art, Part ii.; P. Souriau, L’Imagination de l’artiste; G. Séailles, Essai sur la génie dans l’art; E. Grosse, Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien iii.; Arréat, Psychologie du peintre; L. Dauriac, Essai sur l’esprit musical.
