Beauty

1. What is it that makes some human artifacts art (for example, a painting
or a piece of music), while others (for example, the mass-produced
classroom chair you are sitting in) are not art?

2. Is a copy of a great painting itself a work of art?

3. In what sense is art an imitation of reality?

4. Does the appreciation of beauty make us better (more moral) human

beings?

5.What is your (personally) favorite work of art? How would you

describe your relationship with it?
*Plato and Confucius (and many other thinkers) have taken the
ultimate good in human life to be characterized by its beauty.

*We characterize anything well done as “artful”.

*Beauty does not always fit well with truth and goodness. Our
novels and stories do not always depict reality. When we say that
a story is “fiction,” what we mean is precisely that it is not true.
When we look at paintings or modified photographs that
represent made-up situations or fantasy figures, our judgment is
not primarily concerned with the fact that they are not “true.”
And then there is music, which often seems not to represent
anything at all.
*Beauty can sometimes be seductive or distracting or even fatal
(like Circe in Homer’s Odyssey)

Alessandro Allori - The Witch

Circe Poisons Odysseus' Friends
(1580)

*Aesthetics became the study of sensory perception, later the appreciation of

beauty. Today it refers to the study and appreciation of all the arts, and much that
is not art as well, not only the beautiful but the sublime, the striking, even the silly
and the ugly (for example, in comedy).
*For many centuries, the definitive voice in the
identification of beauty with ultimate reality was
Plato.

*Beauty itself was not just the truth of (beautiful) things. Beauty was a
transcendent Form that stood behind every beautiful thing and made it
beautiful.

*Beauty was therefore objective. The idea that truth was beauty and beauty
truth was, for Plato, quite literally true. At the end of The Republic,
Socrates famously bans the poets of Athens because unlike the
philosophers they did not tell the truth.
Artemision Bronze figure depicting of either Voltri XXI , 1962 Hirshhorn
Zeus or Poseidon. Bronze. Ca. 460-450 BCE. Museum and Sculpture Garden
Cape Artemision, Greece. Washington, DC, USA
 *Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of Beauty as a
transcendent Form just as he rejected Plato’s theory of
Forms in general.

*What made a work of art beautiful was its form, all

right, but the form was the form of the work in a
straightforward sense. No transcendent Forms were
necessary.

*Aristotle’s philosophy of art was an attempt to analyze

forms and structures to find out what made some art
works “work” and others not.
*What made tragedies “work” as works of art?

It is the development of the characters, the pacing, and the structure of the plot.
But most important, it was that such plays allowed for the expression of some basic
emotions, such as fear and pity, and the elements of character and plot were
effective in evoking such emotions. The function of such drama was to allow us to
express ourselves—both actors and audience—to achieve catharsis, the release or
sublimation of some of our most disturbing emotions. By allowing ourselves to feel
fear and pity in the theater (or at the movies), we get rid of or purify some of those
emotions.
Amanda Milke,
Canada 2008
*David Hume (1711–1776) believed that everyone
must judge for him- or herself whether a work of art
was worth appreciating. Art appreciation, in other
words, is a wholly subjective enterprise. An artwork
is valuable, according to Hume, if it inspires a
particular aesthetic emotion.

*Taste is subjective, even if a great many people, including those who have
had the most artistic and aesthetic experience, come to agree that certain
works are great and others are mediocre or contemptible.

*When we speak of someone “having taste” or “not having taste,” the

question is not whether he or she has preferences (in art, in music, in
literature). The question is whether he or she has good taste. But how can
this be determined if taste is subjective?

Hume concludes his argument by suggesting that even though taste is

subjective, there is nonetheless a way of determining the worth of a work of
art. One can and should turn to those who have had the most experience
and who are relatively unbiased in their judgment.
Beauty is in the ear of the
beholder
 Edmund Burke's conceptualization of the
beautiful and sublime is split into fairly
distinct categories. In his Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) , Burke categorizes "objects of
experience" by the way in which they impact the senses. Burke
associates qualities of "balance," "smoothness," "delicacy" and
"color" with the beautiful, while he speaks of the sublime in
terms such as "vastness" and "terror". For Burke, the terms
work almost in opposition to each other; the sublime is
certainly not part of the beautiful in the Burkeian world.
 *Just as Kant insisted that inherent structures
of the mind provide the basic principles of
knowledge and ethics, so, too, inherent
structures of the human mind establish the
possibility of appreciating beauty. According
to Kant, it is not emotional response that
allows us to do this but an intellectual
response.
*One difference between an emotional response and an intellectual response
is that only the latter is “disinterested.” If you are looking at a Cézanne
painting of a bowl of fruit, for example, it is not an aesthetic response if you
find yourself getting hungry and wanting a piece of fruit.
An aesthetic response is free from such interests, or any other practical
concern.

*From this disinterested aesthetic perspective, the very real possibility of

sharing a beautiful experience with other people can be objectified. Because
one is not observing with a personal agenda in mind, one responds as any
other person would, using the mental faculties that every human being shares
with every other.
Kant later argued against Burke's Philosophical Inquiry, highlighting the
difference between the sublime and the beautiful in his Critique of
Judgment (1790) by applying the sublime aesthetic to nature only.

For the beautiful, Kant basically perpetuated the Burkeian notion of the term,
likening (and extending) it to resemble truth, goodness and taste. He
illustrated the way in which the natural sublime "provided a pure instance of
aesthetic judgment," because there was no "artist" of nature - meaning there
was no intention of the artist to interpret when judging the object.

Kant's natural sublime was determined by a subjective judgment; it was a

response that treated something that "was not produced to be meaningful [to
us] as if it were meaningful“, he claimed that the sublime aesthetic shows a
"purposiveness without purpose"
*Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) is but one of
many Western philosophers who have argued
that appreciating art makes us better people.

*Like Confucius in ancient China, Schiller in modern Germany argued that

beauty is not a distraction from the serious business of life but an
inspiration to be a good citizen.

*Beauty, Schiller suggested, helps us to develop morally. The practical

consequence of this theory is that art and aesthetics are an essential part of
every child’s education.
 *The pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
argues that art, more than any other human
activity, gives us deep insight into ourselves and
allows us to reconcile ourselves with an ultimately
irrational and unsatisfying world.
*Music, however, bypasses the Forms and is nothing
less than the direct representation of the Will, the
fundamental reality animating ourselves and the rest
of the world. When we “get into” a piece of music we
are in touch with the most basic truth about
ourselves.

*Art, especially music, gets us “out of ourselves.” Schopenhauer accepts

Plato’s notion of the Forms “behind” particular things, and in the case of
representational art, the artwork reveals the Form of what is portrayed.
*When we appreciate any work of art, according to Schopenhauer, we are no
longer conceiving of ourselves as particular individuals. We become “pure
will-less subjects of knowledge,” and we forget about our desires and
ambitions, at least for a while. The appreciation of beauty, he says, “frees us
from the penal servitude of willing.”
*Nietzsche argues that aesthetic values should replace
standard moral principles; that is, instead of thinking of
what we ought to do as a set of rules dictated by God or
reason, we should pay attention to such values as beauty
(and ugliness) as guidelines for action. He says, for
example, that one should live one’s life as a work of art.
What we ought to do is what is “beautiful,” not what is
obligatory.

*Nietzsche famously distinguishes two different sources

of art and aesthetics, which he calls (following the Greeks)
the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The first source is named after the Greek god
Apollo, the god of the sun and of classic beauty. Dionysus, by contrast, is the god
of wine and fertility, and this conception of beauty is more like frenzy.

*Apollonian art, focusing on individual things, depicts the world as orderly and
harmonious. Dionysian art, by contrast, transcends the individual and absorbs
him or her in the vibrant frenzy of life.

*The greatest art, however, is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian alone, but both
of these in combination.
*Art is everywhere and so, accordingly, is aesthetics. Much of the art that
surrounds us is bad, even offensive, but that should invite rather than
discourage aesthetic analysis.

*The aesthetics of popular culture is a booming business these days, not

only in magazines and online chat rooms but also in philosophy.

*The aesthetics of our environment is largely imposed on us. A good

example, so pervasive that we hardly even take note of it, is the ubiquitous
advertising that surrounds and attacks us at every turn.

*When describing our reaction to a film, for example, we can explain in

some detail the characters, the plot, and the settings when describing a
piece of music, however, getting hold of anything so tangible is difficult.
Most people do not know any music theory and have limited knowledge of
musical notation, and so the description tends to be analogical or
metaphorical.