The Revival of Beauty: Aesthetics, Experience, and Philosophy [1 ed.] 9781003387282, 9781032480756, 9781032480763

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
General Introduction
Part 1 Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty
Part 1: Introduction
1 Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”
2 Beauty and Evil
3 Art without Beauty
Part 1: Conclusion
Part 2 Philocaly: The Case for Beauty
Part 2: Introduction
4 Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic
5 Arguments for Beauty
6 Neo-aestheticism
Part 2: Conclusion
Part 3 Kallistics: The Verdict
Part 3: Introduction
7 The Acquaintance Principle
8 The Aesthetic Attitude
9 Aesthetic Emotion
Part 3: Conclusion
General Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Revival of Beauty

This book provides original descriptive accounts of two schools of thought in the philosophy of beauty: the 20th-century “Anti-Aesthetic” movement and the 21st-century “Beauty Revival” movement. It also includes a positive defence of beauty as a lived experience extrapolated from BeautyRevival position. Beauty was traditionally understood in the broadest sense as a notion that engages our sense perception and embraces everything evoked by that perception, including mental products and affective states. This book constructs and places in parallel with one another the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty-Revival movements. In the author’s view, Anti-Aestheticism is devoted to a decisive negation of beauty—denying its importance as a philosophical notion and its significance as a lived experience. It suggests that beauty is a merely sensual experience, which can be used, at best, as a distraction from justice and, at worst, as an instrument of evil. Alternatively, the Beauty-Revival movement advances arguments for beauty as an experience that extends primarily to sensual experience, but which also calls forth mental products and cognitive and affective states evoked by that experience. After reconstructing these two positions, the author elaborates on the notion of beauty as a lived experience through three key moments which occur in the process of our experiencing beautiful objects. These moments are (a) the conditions that constitute an experience of beauty, (b) the attitudinal features most likely to lead to the experience of beauty, and (c) the results of the experience of beauty. The Revival of Beauty will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, history of philosophy, and art history. Catherine Wesselinoff is a lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, where she teaches courses in the history of philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2022.

Routledge Research in Aesthetics

The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness and Phantasy Working with Husserl Paul Crowther Objects of Authority: A Postformalist Aesthetics Jakub Stejskal Gadamer’s Hermeneutical Aesthetics Art as a Performative, Dynamic, Communal Event Cynthia R. Nielsen The Philosophy of Fiction Imagination and Cognition Edited by Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life Edited by Peter Cheyne Othello and the Problem of Knowledge Reading Shakespeare through Wittgenstein Richard Gaskin A Somaesthetics of Performative Beauty Tangoing Desire and Nostalgia Falk Heinrich The Revival of Beauty Aesthetics, Experience, and Philosophy Catherine Wesselinoff For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Aesthetics/book-series/RRA

The Revival of Beauty Aesthetics, Experience, and Philosophy Catherine Wesselinoff

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Catherine Wesselinoff The right of Catherine Wesselinoff to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-48075-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-48076-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38728-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to Adam: my beautiful man.

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements General Introduction

ix xi 1

PART 1

Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty

13

Part 1: Introduction

15

1

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”

21

2

Beauty and Evil

34

3

Art without Beauty

53

Part 1: Conclusion

70

PART 2

Philocaly: The Case for Beauty

75

Part 2: Introduction

77

4

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic

84

5

Arguments for Beauty

95

6

Neo-aestheticism

Part 2: Conclusion

111 126

viii Contents PART 3

Kallistics: The Verdict

131

Part 3: Introduction

133

7

The Acquaintance Principle

140

8

The Aesthetic Attitude

150

9

Aesthetic Emotion

161

Part 3: Conclusion

172

General Conclusion

176

Bibliography Index

183 195

Preface

Beauty, these pages will show, has a bad reputation in certain circles, and for good reasons. But the fact that a concept is out of fashion does not make it useless or redundant. As Goethe writes in his Letters to Werther: A soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone. For the world has given up on beauty. It doesn’t believe in fairy tales anymore, or happy endings. So, a soul that sees beauty is a soul thought to be insane by the majority. They call it stuck up, delusional, and abnormal—all because it sees something better that it can hold out for. But if my words mean anything—hold out for that beauty. Walk alone until you grab it. (Goethe, ­ Letters of Werther 96) Hardly a day goes by during which I am not struck by the beauty of certain things, and it would be remiss not to recognise them as I have the helpful individuals named in the acknowledgements: the violet and pink wash of the sky at sunset; the velvet touch of incense; the monastic hush of the Australian bush; the interior logic of a Shakespearian sonnet (the logic of a love affair: so singularly weird and obsessive and forbidden and, in the end, confused with poetry itself); the unhurried bloom of a rose; the cicada’s untiring cry; rainbows. Beauty (like philosophy) has its origins in wonder and is spread through the world like coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, which at every turn presents a new and exquisite revelation. I can provide any number of examples of beauty or of my experiences of beauty and describe them in perfectly coherent ways without seeking a successful definition of beauty. Socrates introduces this difficulty about beauty into the philosophical canon when, in the Hippias Major, he asks Hippias, “What is beauty?” (Plato, Hippias 287d) and receives the answer “a maiden” (287e), followed by the answer “gold” (289e). Socrates’s corrections not only indicate that exemplification, as such, cannot exhaust the landscape of beauty but also, perhaps, indicate that the average person knows and experiences very much more about beauty than she is able

x Preface to define. I have been studying the subject of beauty for years, and yet, despite (or perhaps because of) observing it in various kinds of objects, in people, in nature, in propositions and proofs, in births and deaths and acts of sacrifice, and, yes, in front of a vast array of art forms, I cannot shake the suspicion that there is something inarticulable about beauty. I wonder whether Oscar Wilde has a point when he writes “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins” (Wilde 54). That our experience of beauty is not easily articulated has arguably contributed to many people’s strong motivation to say something about it. It has undoubtedly sustained my enthusiasm for the subject. Even if theoretical knowledge of beauty is not a condition for an experiential understanding of beauty, we (philosophers) tend to think that the former can be enlightening when originating from the latter. Indeed, this consideration has led to a rich history of attempts to describe the nature of the experience of beauty and to just as many efforts, if not more (including my own), to challenge and improve proposed formulations. As a result, we are left with a diverse collection of different conceptualisations of beauty, and a wide variety of meanings and ideas associated with it. In this study, I engage with some of them in detailed investigations. However, it is worth observing at the outset, if only as a proviso of my limitations, that my engagements with and treatments of beauty (as Hippias’s) have above all been geared towards the contemplation of actual encounters with beautiful objects. And, from these acts of contemplation, I can only confirm that (as Socrates suggested) there is, perhaps, something about beauty which is not accessible to logos—to reasoned discourse or argument, to knowledge, to language—at all. “Beauty” as Shakespeare writes in The Rape of Lucrece, “doth of itself persuade/the eyes of men without an orator” (line 29–30). In writing, thinking, and reading about beauty, I have become increasingly aware of the inappropriateness of that ancient Platonic question: ti esti, “What is it?” with reference to the essence of beauty, for the concept of beauty, beauty as such—like so many other non-discursive aspects of the human experience—continues to elude and defy accurate definition, often leaving us to draw the same conclusion Socrates reaches: “I think I know the meaning of the proverb ‘beautiful things are difficult’” (Plato, Hippias Major 304e). I am nonetheless grateful to have had this opportunity to expose myself to so much beauty—to have become so much more conscious and appreciative of all that is beautiful—and to attempt, however falteringly, to describe the experience of beauty in this book.

Acknowledgements

I have received kind support, encouragement, and advice from many friends, and colleagues at the University of Sydney and the University of Notre Dame, Australia. For their help, I’m particularly grateful to Laura Wynn, Lucy Smith, Renee Khöler-Ryan, Sam Shpall, and Peter Anstey. I have a special thanks for those who were the book’s first readers and brought it to life—David Macarthur, Rick Benitez, and my father, Simon Haines—and for those who guided the manuscript through its final hours—Nathan Lyons, Andrew Weckenmann, Rosaleah Stammler, and the rest of the editorial and production team at Routledge. I would like to thank my brothers, William, for his criticisms, and Edmund, for his constant companionship, and my mother, Jane, for the daily beauty in all our lives. This book would not have been written were it not for my beloved husband, Adam.

General Introduction

The Philosophy of Beauty This book is technically an exercise in aesthetics, the philosophical home for the study of beauty. Beauty was once a central concern of Western philosophy but has now become a contentious issue within the academic field of aesthetics. Deemed an essential ingredient of the “good life” by Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment philosophers, the subject of beauty fell out of grace in the 20th century when aestheticians abandoned it as an interesting feature of artistic expression and a signifier of intellectual value. Why did this change come about, and what are philosophers at the dawn of the 21st century to do about it? This book proposes a defence of beauty. I argue that one explanation for the change in philosophers’ attitudes towards beauty lies in the change our notions of beauty have undergone. Beauty was traditionally understood in the broadest sense as a notion that engages our sense perception and embraces everything evoked by that perception—including mental products and affective states. In my view, during the 20th century, this “traditional” notion of beauty became impoverished under the influence of a school of thought I characterise as the “Anti-Aesthetic” movement. Anti-Aestheticism reduces our understanding of beauty to a notion of merely sensory apprehension. I argue that a burgeoning 21st-century school of thought, which I refer to as the “Beauty Revivalist” movement, understands the Anti-Aesthetic view as a misapprehension of beauty. The Beauty Revivalists are engaged in a project of renewal, re-enriching the Anti-Aesthetic reduction of beauty to recover some of the notion’s original meaning, and give it new purchase in the future. The primary aim of this book is to provide accounts of these two schools of thought: the AntiAesthetic and Beauty Revival movements. One of the original contributions which this book makes to knowledge in philosophical aesthetics is the characterisation of Anti-Aestheticism and  Beauty Revivalism as philosophical schools of thought. In previous DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-1

2  General Introduction scholarship, neither Anti-Aestheticism nor Beauty Revivalism is conceptualised in this way. A school of thought is identifiable and interesting because it consists of a significant flourishing of intellectual work on connected ideas, in a reasonably certain time and place. We can understand a school of thought (or intellectual tradition) as representing the broad views of many individual philosophers, who share common goals, influences, outlooks, and beliefs on related ideas. In the case of the Anti-Aesthetic movement, I argue, the common goal is a denial of the significance of beauty. In the case of Beauty Revivalism, I argue, the common goal is to affirm the importance of beauty. Often, advocates of a specific school of thought also demonstrate common points of origin. Thus, one of the ways I characterise 20th-century Anti-Aestheticism and 21st-century Beauty Revivalism is through reference to the century at the beginning of which they each arose. In my view, Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism are also philosophical “movements.” This means that the appearance of each school is marked by its increased popularity, and thus marks a broad but identifiable sea-change in mainstream attitudes to the philosophy of beauty. In the first instance, it is helpful to characterise the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty Revival movements by locating them within their context in the broad trajectory of the history of the philosophy of beauty to which they belong. To do so, I suggest that we identify three stages in the development of our philosophical notions of beauty: the first stage represents the broad philosophical “tradition” of thought about beauty, while the latter two stages are represented in this book by Anti-Aestheticism in the 20th century and Beauty Revivalism in the 21st century. This approach will lend historical specificity to my account of the two philosophical schools of thought discussed within this book. For the purposes of this study, the first stage in the development of our philosophical notions of beauty is the broad intellectual tradition, starting with Pythagoras in the 5th century BCE and spanning two and a half millennia until the end of the 19th century.1 Alasdair Macintyre defines a philosophical tradition such as this as “arguments extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of both internal and external debates” (Macintyre, 3). This “tradition” places authority about beauty in specific received texts and subjects these texts to systematic questioning, stimulating novel and alternate interpretations.2 From Pythagorean fragments to Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises, from St. Augustine’s Confessions to St Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, throughout the Renaissance and into the English and German Enlightenment, experiences or perceptions of beauty are linked in various ways to the function and teleology of the human being. Beauty is variously described as a “manifestation of order” (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1120a24) at which “the soul rejoices” (Plotinus, Enneads

General Introduction  3 1.6 Chapter 2 102); the “cause of the good harmony and brightness of all things” (Pseudo-Dionysius Divine Names Chapter 4 234) that we recognise through “cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way” (Aquinas I.73.1); a judgement that “can be resolved into the concept of perfection” (Kant, Critique of Judgment §15); and so on. This lengthy discussion about beauty in philosophy relies on beauty being regarded as a vital, incomparable, non-reducible feature of our experience. From the ancient Greeks, who conceive of beauty as an ideal towards which we must aspire, to the Romantics who develop the view that beauty is the foundation of knowledge and the pursuit of truth, beauty is understood to be essential to the human experience and, as such, deserving of explanation and analysis. For the purposes of this book, the second stage in the development of our philosophical notions of beauty occurs during the 20th century. During this time, the study of beauty becomes restricted to the (not-very-tidy) intellectual discipline of aesthetics—within which beauty is, for the most part, discredited, and even at times dispelled. As Jerome Stolnitz (1925–) observes, “we have to recognise that ‘beauty’ has receded or even disappeared from contemporary aesthetic theory. For, like other once-influential ideas, it has simply faded away” (Stolnitz, “Beauty” 185). Many 20thcentury philosophers and theorists argue that the experience of beauty is not as appealing as is traditionally held. Some maintain that “the concept of beauty is simple and therefore not susceptible to further elaboration”; others, that it is “ambiguous and fluid” meaning “anything that anyone wishes,” and, accordingly, “unsuitable for serious use.” Indeed, it is asserted that beauty becomes such a “faulty concept as to be an inadequate basis for any theory” (Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas 122). As Alexander Nehamas (1946–) wrote in 2000: “Beauty is the most discredited philosophical notion—so discredited that I could not even find an entry for it in the index of the many books in the philosophy of art I consulted in order to find it discredited” (“An Essay” 4). One “seldom finds the word beauty employed in 20th-century writing on aesthetics—its place is taken by other words even more weighed down by ambiguity (notably the word ‘aesthetic’ itself)” (Tatarkiewicz “The Great Theory” 165). In my view, this crisis for beauty represents a critical juncture in the development of our philosophical notions of beauty. After a reign stretching millennia, the 20th century witnesses a decline in interest in beauty as a subject of intellectual discourse and pursuit of art. I argue that this decline in interest is largely due to the fact that, during the 20th century, our notions of beauty became impoverished under the influence of Anti-Aestheticism. This school of thought reduces our understanding of beauty to experience apprehended merely by the senses, a notion which I refer to as “Sensual Beauty.” Being thus reduced, our notion of beauty began to wither and fade into insignificance.

4  General Introduction The third stage in the development of the notion of beauty is currently undergoing composition. This effort originated in the 1970s and continues today, in the 2020s, unabated. As Crispin Sartwell (1958–) asserts: “there has been a revival of interest in beauty in both art and philosophy in recent years” (Sartwell, “Beauty” 11). A school of philosophical thought within the academic field of aesthetics—which I identify and refer to as Beauty Revivalism—is developing new concepts and theoretical structures to revitalise our notions of beauty. According to art historian Alexander Alberro (1957–), writing in 2004: During the past decade, several texts by authors such as Arthur Danto, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Dave Hickey, Elaine Scarry, Peter Schjeldahl, and Wendy Steiner have sought to return our attention to the subject of beauty…The central questions raised by these authors, the questions they all in one way or another seem to need to address, are: Whatever happened to beauty? Why and how has it been disparaged? Who denigrated it? And why do so many art critics and historians no longer consider the judgment of beauty to be a valid exercise? All of the authors named above present their work as an unapologetic attempt to revitalise the experience of the beautiful, to give credence once again to aesthetic judgments of beauty. ‘Beauty,’ Schjeldahl boldly announced in the late 1990s with an enormous sense of relief, ‘Is Back’. (Alberro, “Beauty Knows No Pain” 37) The present study primarily considers Elaine Scarry (1946–), Alexander Nehamas (1946–), and Roger Scruton (1944–2020) as exemplars of the Beauty Revival movement. All three authors have written book-length defences of beauty. These are, respectively, On Beauty and Being Just (2000); Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007); and Beauty (2009). In my view, these “Beauty Revivalists” defend the value of beauty by advancing arguments for “Revived Beauty”—a philosophical notion that (re-)emphasises beauty’s presence in our lives as worthwhile, instructive, and significant. Due to their efforts, and after nearly a century of neglect, scholarly interest in the subject of beauty is being renewed. Method of Inquiry In presenting the above sketch of the three stages of the development of our philosophical notions of beauty, I indicate that there are (at least) three different notions3 of beauty at play in this book: A

“Traditional Beauty.” Beauty in the most expansive sense. This includes Ancient Greek, Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment accounts of beauty.

General Introduction  5 “Sensual Beauty.” Beauty in the narrow, purely aesthetic sense, limited to things apprehended merely by the senses. I argue that this notion of beauty is a formulation of the 20th-century Anti-Aesthetic movement’s attitude to beauty, which I address further in Part 1, “Kalliphobia.” C “Revived Beauty.” Beauty in the broadest aesthetic sense. This notion of beauty includes sensory experiences and embraces everything evoked by those experiences, including mental products and affective states. I argue that this notion of beauty is a formulation of the 21st-century Beauty-Revivalist movement’s attitude to beauty, which I address further in Part 2, “Philocaly” and Part 3, “Kallistics.” B

This book is predominately concerned with constructing notions B and C—“Sensual Beauty” and “Revived Beauty,” which are, I argue, employed by Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism, respectively. My project constitutes an effort to arrive at the notions of beauty that these two schools of thought engage, given the schools’ own set of goals. Anti-Aestheticism is devoted to a denial of beauty, while the Beauty Revival is committed to an affirmation of beauty. Corresponding to these endeavours, Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism engage largely incompatible notions of beauty: “Sensual Beauty” and “Revived Beauty,” respectively. The first problem that arises when constructing notions of “Sensual Beauty” and “Revived Beauty” is how to define the word “aesthetic.” The term was not introduced into philosophical discourse until Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) coined it in his Metaphysics (1739), itself a development of his doctoral dissertation Aesthetica (1735). The word Baumgarten chose—aesthetic—is derived from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning “sensitive, sentient, pertaining to sense perception,” which in turn is derived from the Greek aisthanomai, meaning “I perceive, feel, sense” and related to aisthēsis, “sensation” (Liddell and Scott 41). According to Baumgarten’s definition, “aesthetic” means “the science of sensation or feeling …” Baumgarten intends for the word “feeling” to correspond to the five senses, rather than to refer to the emotions (or passions) per se (although the latter are also, for him, involved in aesthetic experience). Baumgarten wishes to “vindicate” this mental activity as a “distinctive, percipient, and valuable” aspect of human experience but nonetheless regards “sensitive activity” as a “lower” or “rudimentary cognition” in relation to knowledge based upon other philosophical principles. For Baumgarten, “aesthetic” experience refers to our “sensibility” or “responsiveness to stimulation of the senses.” Thus, Baumgarten claims that philosophical “aesthetics” correctly implies studying “sensitive activity” (Baumgarten xii). It is Baumgarten’s meaning of the term “aesthetic” which I employ in this book.4 The second problem that arises when constructing notions of “Sensual Beauty” and “Revived Beauty” is, of course, about how one ought to

6  General Introduction formulate philosophical concepts. As George Ferree claims in his paper “The Descriptive Use of Aesthetic Experience”: The history of philosophy is, to a considerable extent, a record of efforts to interpret and answer questions of the form ‘What is the nature of x?’ For example, ‘What is the nature of beauty?’ On this traditional model, thinkers in aesthetics have often regarded their focal questions as ‘What is the nature of art’ and ‘What is the nature of aesthetic experience?’ Those concerned with a given ‘What is the nature of x?’ question frequently construe themselves as answering a definitional question. This sort of view—and the essence hunting it has encouraged—has not gone unchallenged, particularly since the appearance of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in 1953. (23) Many philosophers have abandoned the assumption that their work will lead to definitions stating the essential nature of things if engaged successfully. Instead, philosophers have construed “What is the nature of x” questions as questions about the way or ways in which the expression “x” functions in discourse. It is, therefore, appropriate to ask, “How is x employed?” As Ferree notes, “To answer this question is to know what x is, to know the nature of x” (23). To formulate the notions of “Sensual Beauty” and “Revived Beauty,” I employ a method of inquiry that Ferree labels as “descriptive analysis” (23). Philosophers engaged in a descriptive project aim to “reveal the operative notion, that is, the notion that our usage of a specific term tracks” (24). On a descriptive approach to beauty, I am concerned with what particular idea of beauty Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty Revivalist vocabulary tracks. In practice, conceptual analysis of this sort concerns distinguishing terms, analysing the understandings they refer to, and representing this. The task is not to discern a set of appropriate definitions, but rather the notions that such definitions might express. My focus is thus on discovering the narratives that are operational in beauty discourse. I have consequently been obliged to select material from a range of authors to track and represent the use of the term “beauty.” When presented alongside one another, I hope that the authors I have selected reveal the underlying tendencies and commitments of Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism. I hope, too, that the picture I present of each of these two schools of thought shows that their adherents have a shared and unifying set of beliefs and agendas. Ultimately, I  believe that the thinkers I have chosen to represent the duelling positions of Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism belong in conversation with one another, for numerous reasons, which I will outline in due course.

General Introduction  7 Survey of Previous Scholarship At the beginning of each part of this book, I supply detailed literature reviews which pertain to my analysis of Anti-Aestheticism (Part 1) and Beauty Revivalism (Parts 2 and 3). However, since there has been very little conceptual analysis of either movement, I would like to offer a few preliminary remarks about the material I have selected to represent the views of these schools here. Of course, most schools of thought consist of individual thinkers who disagree in various and important ways. However, discussion of a philosophical school of thought can function to represent the views of numerous philosophers (and others associated with the school, such as historians, theorists, critics, artists, and other writers) who share common goals, influences, outlooks, and beliefs. In the cases of Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism, I have endeavoured to select and emphasise the material that represents a coherent and unifying philosophy. By so doing, I am better equipped to explore the rejection of beauty in the 20th century, and the subsequent disavowal of that rejection in the 21st century. Anti-Aesthetic texts that inform a confrontation with beauty are collected in the first part of this book, “Kalliphobia.” Hal Foster (1955–) coined the term “anti-aesthetic” in a collection of essays that he edited, entitled The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Foster’s preface to the book provides the most sustained elaboration of the concept to date. His label has been applied retrospectively to characterise the reaction of the Avant-garde “against academic art and the political situation leading to the First World War,” a context within which Arthur Danto (1924–2013) noted “beauty became anathema” (Danto, The Abuse xiii). It is not that sunsets, diamonds, and flowers stopped looking good. As the art-critic Dave Beech has observed in the introduction to Beauty—his collection of essays on the revival of interest in beauty in contemporary art—the Anti-Aesthetic “critique of beauty is rarely a critique of beautiful objects but often of ideas, ideologies, social practices, and cultural hierarchies” (Beech 12). When Anti-Aesthetic thinkers contest objects of beauty, they frequently allow them to stand for “objectionable conceptual frameworks.” For example, “the feminist critique of beauty is typically a critique of how the social status of women is codified in and maintained by beauty” (12). Theodore Adorno (1903–69) focuses on how commodity exchange has abolished beauty’s “seemingly neutral and universal value” (12). This is how to read Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) “avowed visual indifference” (12) in selecting his ready-mades. If you take beauty away from the definition of art, then, Beech argues, the “dominant forces within culture are denied their privilege” (12). In Part 1, we encounter such critiques of beauty from a wide range of critical and philosophical perspectives.

8  General Introduction Beauty-Revivalist texts that inform affirmations of beauty are collected in the second and third Parts of this book, “Philocaly” and “Kallistics.” Since the 1990s, and up until the present day, critical theorists, artists, and philosophers have begun to recognise and identify a thematic “return to beauty” in art and philosophy.5 The seeds of Beauty Revivalism can be traced back to New Theory of Beauty (1975; republished 2016) by Guy Sircello (1936–92) and Beauty Restored (1984) by Mary Mothersill (1923–2008), which are the earliest attempts to “retrieve” the concept of beauty. However, the “revival of beauty” perhaps begins properly with Dave Hickey’s “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty.” It is not that subsequent writers adopt Hickey’s argument; rather, Hickey “opens the possibility of affirmations of beauty that exceed his framework” (Beech 13). In Beauty and Being Just (2000), Elaine Scarry, for instance, argues that beauty is etymologically, conceptually, and experientially linked to justice, while Alexander Nehamas in Only a Promise of Happiness; The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007) and Roger Scruton in Beauty (2009) attempt to restore beauty as a legitimate, central philosophical concern as well as a necessary life experience. It is the work of these final three scholars on which my account of Beauty Revivalism is predominantly based, for reasons I explain in Part 2. Plan of Inquiry This book is divided into three parts, each of which is itself divided into three chapters. In the first two Parts, I provide descriptive accounts of two schools of thought in the philosophy of beauty: (1) the 20th-century “AntiAesthetic” movement and (2) the 21st-century “Beauty Revival” movement. In the third Part, I develop my account of Beauty Revival. I offer (3) an account of the experience of beauty by drawing on features of that experience identified by the Beauty Revivalists. I argue that Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism employ two different notions of beauty, “Sensual Beauty” and “Revived Beauty,” respectively, and that only the latter notion gives way to an account of the experience of beauty. Such evident differences of opinion about what beauty is put us in a position to make a choice about beauty: Tertullian, a theologian active in the 3rd century CE, thought that beauty was evil, “a surreptitious diversion of earthly delights planted by the devil” (McMahon, Beauty 1); Plotinus, his contemporary, saw it as “a manifestation of the divine on earth” (Plotinus, Enneads 1.6, Chapter 2, 102). My wager is that Tertullian and Plotinus are not referring to the same thing. Similarly, the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty-Revival movements employ two different, largely incommensurable notions of beauty. The decision we make about which one is the most accurate and meaningful

General Introduction  9 has considerable implications about the role, if any, that beauty ought to play in our lives. In Part 1, “Kalliphobia,” my primary aim is to provide a descriptive account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century, with an emphasis on developing the notion of “Sensual Beauty.” I present a carefully curated anthology of Anti-Aesthetic texts and argue that close analysis of these texts reveals that the Anti-Aesthetic movement is devoted to a decisive negation of beauty—denying its importance as a philosophical notion, as well as its significance in our lives. I have three secondary aims represented in each of the three constituent chapters of the part. In Chapter 1, I draw out what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism: namely, a conceptualisation of “Sensual Beauty,” of beauty as being “merely sensuous,” linked to pleasure and appearance. I look to the genesis of Anti-Aesthetic ideas in texts written in the first part of the 20th century, specifically the work of three key thinkers: Leo Tolstoy (1854–1936), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). In Chapter 2, I question why—based on this conceptualisation of “Sensual Beauty”—beauty is said to have no essential role in our moral and political lives. I focus on the middle of the 20th century. I offer a case study of Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902–2003) film Triumph of the Will (1935), alongside an analysis of Theodore Adorno’s philosophy of beauty. I finish the chapter with some comments on the feminist critique of beauty as represented by Andrea Dworkin. In Chapter 3, I show how beauty is excised from our philosophical lexicon and artistic repertoire by Anti-Aesthetic thinkers. I suggest that Conceptual Art is one of the best examples of how the Anti-Aesthetic movement divorced the idea of beauty—“Sensual Beauty,” as perceptual pleasure, based on appearance and sensation—from ideas in art. I suggest that Arthur Danto defends a definition of art separate from aesthetics. Finally, I offer some comments about the transgressive art of Andres Serrano. This collage of texts functions as broadly representative of the underlying themes and assumptions of Anti-Aestheticism, and so, in presenting them thus, my project in “Kalliphobia” ultimately amounts to a charitable reconstruction of the Anti-Aesthetic position. In Part 2, “Philocaly,” my primary aim is to provide a descriptive account of Beauty Revivalism in Western Europe during the 21st century, with an emphasis on developing notions of beauty employed by the Revivalists, which I term “Revived Beauty.” I argue that the Beauty Revivalists are committed to re-affirming the experience of beauty as one of fundamental importance. To expand my account of the Beauty Revival movement and “Revived Beauty,” I have three auxiliary aims, represented in each of the three constituent chapters of the part. In Chapter 4, I explain how Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry, and Roger Scruton respond to the

10  General Introduction Anti-Aesthetic movement, by outlining one of the major concessions they make towards the Anti-Aesthetic and outlining three of the key challenges they pose for Anti-Aestheticism. In Chapter 5, I suggest that the Revivalist’s notions of beauty share common features in that they all portray beauty as an apprehensive feature of our experience, which causes us to recognise higher value concepts. In Chapter 6, I indicate how the Revivalists’ arguments refurbish certain aspects of the Kantian and Platonic accounts of beauty. I suggest that the Revivalists appropriate Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) attitude to beauty in (at least) two ways: first, the Beauty Revivalists, like Kant, think that beauty ought to be distinguished from other forms of aesthetic judgement. Second, the Beauty Revivalists, like Kant, view beauty as a species of reflective judgement. I also suggest that the Revivalists appropriate the Platonic attitude to beauty, in that they think that particular beautiful things refer us to an abstract universal. My project in “Philocaly” ultimately amounts to a construction of the Beauty Revivalist position. The primary aim of Part 3, “Kallistics,” is to provide an account of beauty as a lived experience by drawing on features of that experience that are identified and described by the Beauty-Revivalists. I offer an exploration of what I describe as beauty’s experiential qualities and characteristics, according to the Beauty Revivalists. I argue that, from the Revivalists, it is possible to extrapolate descriptions of (at least) three structural features that compose our experiences of beauty. I refer to these features as “moments” which occur in the process of our cognition of beautiful objects, and I explore each of these moments in the three constituent chapters of the part. I argue that the first moment described by the Revivalists in our experience of beauty consists of the sensory conditions that constitute an experience of beauty. I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, these conditions can be articulated through reference to the Acquaintance Principle. The second moment in our understanding of beauty points at what attitudinal features are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced. I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, these attitudinal features can be described through reference to Aesthetic Attitude Theories. The third and final moment in our experience of beauty has to do with what the experience of beauty results in. I suggest that, for the Revivalists, the effects of beauty can be described through reference to specific aesthetic emotions. In identifying each of these three features, my project in “Kallistics” ultimately amounts to an original account of the experience of beauty. At heart, this book is devoted to exploring the rejection of beauty in the 20th century, and the subsequent repudiation of that rejection in the 21st century. Today, studies of beauty exist at this tense intersection. Given the current sparse adumbration of (i) the Anti-Aesthetic, (ii) the Beauty Revival, and (iii) contemporary accounts of the experience of beauty, this

General Introduction  11 book offers these three accounts as original contributions to scholarship in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Notes 1 Since Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz’s seminal History of Aesthetics (1974), there has been only one book printed which is dedicated to a study of beauty in the history of ideas—that is Bredin and Santoro’s Philosophies of Art and Beauty (2000), a textbook which is based on Tatarkiewicz’s work. 2 Philosophical material dedicated to studies of beauty before the introduction of the term “aesthetic” in the 18th century is relatively narrow. It is difficult, in Classical and Medieval philosophy, to find systematic treatments of beauty. In secondary sources or commentaries, it is even more challenging to find whole essays (or even book chapters) devoted exclusively to the concept of beauty. Commentaries are narrow in part because scholars select primary material devoted specifically to beauty. There are only two such treatises: Plotinus’s first Ennead and the account that Pseudo-Dionysius gives of “the beautiful” in Divine Names. The Pythagoreans left fragments which refer to beauty— and these exert some influence on contemporary ideas of beauty, particularly in mathematics—but they probably did not compose treatises of this kind; at least, no such treatise is known. The Hippias Major is attributed to Plato, but its authorship has not been firmly established, and, in any case, Plato expounds his main ideas about beauty in other works—Symposium, Phaedrus, and Laws. In Politics, Aristotle promises to write a treatise about beauty, but he appears not to have done so. Augustine informs us in the Confessions that he wrote one and then lost it. Aquinas says more about beauty in sprinkled remarks in the Summa Theologica than others have said in entire books, but he did not dedicate a single chapter to it in any of his works. Thus, in studying Classical and Medieval ideas about beauty, it is not sufficient to consider only those comments expressed under the subject heading of beauty. Instead, to develop in sufficient detail the problems beauty posed for Classical and Medieval philosophers, and to capture the significance of their responses, it is necessary to draw surveys of the use of the word “beauty” from a wide range of texts. 3 Many great thinkers from various periods of history have tried to define beauty. In Foundations of Aesthetics (2001), for instance, Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards list 16 different ways in which the word beautiful has been employed. 4 Taking my cue from Baumgarten, I have suggested that the term “aesthetic” is roughly synonymous with “sensuous experience,” and I employ it as such. But the term “aesthetic” can be (and has been) used liberally to characterise such a vast array of objects, judgements, descriptions, qualities, properties, attitudes, values, emotions, and experiences that my usage might seem unfit for purpose. Aesthetic theories tend to focus on questions regarding one or other of these designations, meaning that aestheticians tend to be engaged in debate over questions such as the following: are artworks ever, or always, aesthetic objects? Are aesthetic judgements objective or subjective? Should we define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological content? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic emotion? Does such and such a thing have or lack aesthetic value? However, there are also more general—what we might call “meta-aesthetical”—questions. Is aesthesis in fact best defined as an unelaborated elementary awareness of sensory stimulation? Can the use of the term

12  General Introduction “aesthetic” be explicated without reference to some other concept or at all? Is any single specific use of the term able to ground meaningful philosophical debate? Does the term answer to a particular ideological purpose? The scepticism conveyed by these more general questions prompts us to ask whether the concept of the aesthetic is itself inherently problematic. Many philosophers question whether the category of the aesthetic is reducible to sense perception. To vindicate the concept of the aesthetic, I give an account of it as “sensuous experience” because the Beauty Revivalists do likewise, and because this helps us to make sense of the categorisation, and I have done so by remaining faithful to the term’s literal meaning and its etymological roots. Thus, in this book, my assumption is that the concept of the aesthetic is in good working order. 5 See Beech, Beauty; Elkins and Montgomery, Beyond the Aesthetic; and Beckley and Shapiro, Uncontrollable Beauty.

Part 1

Kalliphobia1 The Case Against Beauty

Part 1: Introduction

My primary aim in this Part of the book is to provide an original descriptive account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century. The Anti-aesthetic movement is composed of a core group of key texts and thinkers devoted to the most decisive negation of beauty. Indeed, in my view, the Anti-Aesthetic defines itself by its assault on beauty. And, as we shall see, the Anti-Aesthetic charges against beauty are many, and strong. Beauty has been understood as representative of objectionable ideological frameworks, according to which dominant forces in culture are afforded undue privilege. Beauty has been seen as a distraction from justice, a weapon of evil, an instrument of oppression and a material commodity. It is said to arouse gratuitous and compensatory pleasure, which sublimate vital energies that should be directed towards social and political justice. Beauty has been associated with Fascistic politics and linked to pornography, sadism, discrimination, madness, futility, impotence, and death. What all these critiques share is a common conception of beauty as a “merely sensuous” pleasure. It is on these grounds that the Anti-Aesthetic attack on beauty is played out. The key feature of my account of Anti-Aestheticism is an exploration of the notion of beauty that texts and thinkers belonging to the Anti-Aesthetic movement employ: “Sensual Beauty.” I have three secondary, or auxiliary, aims, represented in each of the three constituent chapters of the part: (1) to draw out what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism, namely, a conceptualisation of beauty as the “merely sensuous”; (2) to discover why, based on this conceptualisation, beauty is said to have no essential or necessary role to play in our moral and political lives; (3) to show, as clearly as possible, how beauty, as the “merely sensuous,” is excised from our artistic repertoire. My project in this part of the book ultimately amounts to a charitable construction of the Anti-Aesthetic position, stressing Anti-Aesthetic arguments against beauty.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-3

16  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty The Avant-garde and the Anti-aesthetic To begin an analysis of Anti-Aestheticism in 20th-century Europe, it is important to note that modernism, unlike the avant-garde (distinguished by its explicitly social agenda) that emerges from within it—bore no fundamental hostility towards beauty. As Hal Foster, who coined the term “anti-aesthetic,” has maintained: “I still want to use the term ‘avant-garde’ to distinguish that critical project from the autonomy project of Modernism” (Elkins and Montgomery 29). What was at stake for the modernists was the question of modes of beauty and the aesthetic experiences that accompanied those modes. The modernists did not aim to denounce beauty but to modernise it, to subject beauty to the same mandate to which the modernists subject everything else—to “make it new.”2 Indeed, most contemporary discussions about beauty miss this fact about modernism. Neither Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Dave Hickey, nor Arthur Danto3 distinguishes between modernism and the avant-garde. As a result, their accounts miss the historical specificity of the problem of beauty in the first half of the 20th century and the conditions under which the debate continues in the second half. Next, it is necessary to distinguish between the terms “Anti-Aesthetic” and “Avant-garde.” I use the word “Anti-Aesthetic” to refer to a trend within the Avant-garde. Anti-Aestheticism explicitly rejects, and is deeply hostile towards, the notion that aesthetic activity—and, by implication, beauty—is a necessary, significant, or even relevant aspect of our lives. The American art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto has described this response to beauty as a sort of fear, which he terms “kalliphobia” (Danto, “Kalliphobia” 2). As the “defining syndrome” of the 20th century, the predominant symptom of kalliphobia is a decision to “suppress beauty as a gesture of contempt” (2). Indeed, so rampant has this pandemic been that, by the end of the 20th century, it seems a merely “historical” view that beauty should be of any serious philosophical concern. I characterise those theories and artworks which express kalliphobic (or ‘beauty-fearing’) tendencies as belonging to the Anti-Aesthetic movement, to distinguish them from the broader parameters of Avant-garde activity. The French military used the term Avant-garde to refer to a reconnaissance group that conducts primary surveillance of an opponent ahead of the main offensive. The word became associated with left-wing radicals agitating for political reform and social change. The French reformer Olinde Rodrigues (1795–1851) coined the term in its now customary sense. He  called on artists to “serve as [the people’s] avant-garde,” insisting that “the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way to social, political and economic reform” (Călinescu 75). However, historians and theoreticians of art are far from unanimous on

Part 1: Introduction  17 the reach of the phenomenon called the Avant-garde and its offspring, Anti-Aestheticism. Some connect it with the rise of Saint-Simonianism (a French political, religious, and social movement of the first half of the 19th century) while others link it with the rise of Dadaism, Impressionism, and Cubism. Generally, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain—a readymade sculpture consisting of a porcelain urinal, submitted for an exhibition in New York in 1917—is regarded as a significant landmark of the Avantgarde and the Anti-Aesthetic. Art critic Clement Greenberg’s (1909–94) essay Avant-garde and Kitsch, published in 1939, offers some early insights into the Avant-garde. Greenberg argues that “vanguardism” is opposed to “high” culture and “artificially synthesised mass culture,” both of which are driven by “profit-fixated motives” (Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” 34). Some of the earliest analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon include The Theory of the Avant-garde by Renato Poggioli (1962), Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde (1974), and Călinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity (1977). These texts argue that, in collaboration with the “tradition,” “art as an institution neutralises the political content of the individual work” (Călinescu 76) and that a “realignment with social and political reform” (76) is necessary to oppose mainstream cultural values. There are not necessarily any common features in the attitudes of Avant-garde theorists to the problem of the aesthetic. Some Avant-garde movements (Anti-Aesthetic movements) repudiate the aesthetic generally, and beauty in particular. Others postulate aesthetic neutrality. Some produce new aesthetic features and concepts in their work. The Avantgarde heralded a plea to extend aesthetics into the “dainty and dumpy” (as in John Austin’s “A Plea for Excuses”); the “innocent, modest, and tender” (terms used by Kant in the Critique of Judgment §59); the “every day” (Duchamp’s “anaesthetic”); and the “silly” (Kant’s pre-critical proposal for the opposite of the sublime). Other aesthetic qualities, like “ugliness” or “the disgusting,” are also used, against society, as a “moral mirror.” In addition to these new aesthetic values, the Avant-garde also uses new materials and means. Dada, Fluxus, Art Povera, and Body Art are examples of modern art currents extending the stock of materials used in artwork. These materials include ready-mades and collage, “poor art” (made of earth, rocks, clothing, paper, or rope), and the human body. The sensual qualities of such materials act to shock, repel, confront, intoxicate, and so on, with the cognition of our primitive existence. The Avant-garde is thus engaged with and utilises sensual aspects of the aesthetic. In contrast to the Avant-garde, there has been very little conceptual or philosophical analysis of the Anti-Aesthetic movement. In my view,

18  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty Anti-Aesthetic trends within the Avant-garde renounce outright the ­aesthetic generally, and beauty specifically. Practices later identified as ­Anti-Aesthetic first emerged before World War I as part of a project within the broader parameters of Avant-garde activity. The Anti-Aesthetic focuses the lens of the Avant-garde surveillance of the aesthetic into an attack on the aesthetic and, thus, (since, as we shall see, Anti-aesthetic thinkers conceive of beauty as a purely aesthetic quality) on beauty. Trends within this movement engage in a self-professed “denial” of any aesthetic values, especially beauty. Duchamp’s Fountain became a symbol of the AntiAesthetic movement because its aesthetic aspects (balance, colour, material, symmetry, composition) are ridiculed by the object’s function (as a urinal). Thus, in some ways, the Avant-garde and Anti-Aesthetic conceptions of beauty overlap. However, the rejection of that conception is crystallised by, and defines, Anti-Aestheticism. The prefix “anti-” (“against” or “oppositional”) can reasonably be interpreted as entailing a full-fledged rejection of all things aesthetic. This “negative” philosophy involves the mention of beauty only as something one aims to deny. Apophasis is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it or denying that it should be mentioned. Apophatic theology, for instance, describes an unimaginable or incomprehensible God. The Anti-Aesthetic attitude to beauty is apophatic because it intends to remind us that our word for beauty and its related concepts fall far short of reality. The term “anti-aesthetic” was coined by art critic and historian Hal Foster (1955–) in a collection of essays that he edited titled The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983).4 Foster’s preface to the book ­provides the most sustained elaboration of the concept to date, yet— extraordinarily—none of the volume’s nine essays employs the term. Neither do the different discussions add up to a single, coherent approach to the notion. The label “anti-aesthetic,” therefore, has been used to name a concept that is in widespread use. However, its usefulness has not depended on the concept possessing a clear meaning or having underwritten a single programme or set of ideas. As glossed by Foster, the ­Anti-Aesthetic “encompa­ sses models of cultural criticism that call into question the notion of the aesthetic and its concomitant conceptual schemes,” (Foster vii) including beauty. He comprehends the aesthetic as one of the “grand discourses of modernity” (vii) and sketches an outlook that jettisons that view. The volume indicates cross-disciplinary and critical approaches that recognise artistic and moral discourse entanglements with socio-political commentary.5 In this way, the anthology’s authors and their formulations establish room to discuss and describe Anti-Aesthetic activities, which had been busy without a label for the better part of a century by the time of the collection’s publication.

Part 1: Introduction  19 As Foster defines it, the Anti-Aesthetic is meant to denote art and/or an attitude to or critique of art, as something made without explicit aesthetic purpose. As he explains in his introduction to the collection: ‘Anti-aesthetic’ signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without ‘purpose,’ all but beyond history, or that art can now effect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal—a symbolic totality. Like ‘postmodernism,’ then, ‘anti-aesthetic’ marks a cultural position on the present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid? (For example, is the model of subjective taste not threatened by mass mediation or universal vision by the rise of other cultures?) More locally, ‘anti-aesthetic’ also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g., feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular—that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm. (Foster vii) According to Foster’s adumbration, then, Anti-Aesthetic theories engage in a “denial”: denial of the “very notion of the aesthetic,” and denial of the “privileged aesthetic realm.” They share a common disdain for the idea of “the aesthetic”: Anti-Aesthetic “practise” (vii) opts to represent ideas that are socio-political (including questions of identity, gender, or ethnicity) and believes that this entails a disregard for principles relating to aesthetics and, by extension, to beauty. Given the relatively sparse analysis that Foster’s anthology grants to the term “anti-aesthetic,” it is worth considering why it has gained currency. Like the philosophy of beauty on which it depends, and which will be explored in what follows, the Anti-Aesthetic cannot be exhaustively identified with Foster’s founding document, or with any single outlook. We can, nevertheless, see the Anti-Aesthetic (in part) as unfolding as follows: concepts often come by their name belatedly or haphazardly when forms, methods, and ideas they denote have been in existence for some time.6 Thus, by offering the term “anti-aesthetic,” Foster provided a label that allows artists and theorists to locate themselves in relation to a confluence of partially conflicting commitments and participate in a forum where these allegiances address and reshape one another. Ultimately, however, as we shall see, the rubric “anti-aesthetic” is a convenient portmanteau expression, which assumes a broad critique of aesthetic forms and concepts, and elaborations of the negative value of beauty. As stated above, the primary aim of this part of the book is to provide an original descriptive account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century, with an emphasis on developing an understanding of the notion of beauty which Anti-Aestheticism employs: “Sensual

20  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty Beauty.” Kalliphobic tendencies are expressed across various texts, including critical theory, artists’ manifestos, works of art, and philosophical reflections. The texts I have chosen to discuss in this book as representative of Anti-Aestheticism by no means offer a complete representation of that movement. They function in this book merely to represent the “tip of the iceberg,” and thus indicate possibilities for future research into Anti-Aestheticism. There is no clear and demonstrable link between these texts, but they are loosely associated in that they express kalliphobic tendencies and conceive of beauty as a “merely sensuous” experience. I have been obliged to select material from a range of authors who reveal these underlying Anti-Aesthetic trends and commitments, when presented alongside one another. To introduce coherence to my narrative description of Anti-Aestheticism, and to show the development of the Anti-Aesthetic position, I organise the material, in the first instance, by emphasising its chronological order. Notes 1 Kalliphobia is a neologism invented by Arthur Danto, formed by the Greek words for beauty (kalos) and fear (phobia). See Danto, “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art; Or, What Ever Happened to Beauty?” 2 For example, one might recall the “Bloomsbury group,” led by the novelist Virginia Woolf. This group of critics and artists were inspired by G. E. Moore and his statement “By far the most obvious things, which we can know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” (Moore 237). 3 See Scarry, On Beauty; Steiner, Venus in Exile; Hickey, The Invisible Dragon; and Danto, The Abuse of Beauty. 4 The term “anti-aesthetic” had appeared sporadically before Foster’s book was published. The painter Marinetti uses the term in the Manifesto of Futurism (1909). The artist Marcel Duchamp used terms such as anti-retinal, anti-artist, and anti-aesthetic throughout his career, from 1915 to 1968. 5 The collection of essays in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post-Modern Culture harbours, for instance, feminist deconstructive art (advocated by Craig Owens); Foucauldian accounts of institutions of art, including museum practices (proposed by Douglas Crimp); and Jürgen Habermas’s insistence on the yet-to-be-completed project of modernity. 6 The introduction of the notion of the “Anti-Aesthetic” in 1983 gives new meaning to such diverse 20th-century artistic movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Situationism, and Conceptual Art, as well as the Avant-garde. Among the web of meanings embodying Anti-aesthetic positions also include racialised, gendered, class-inflected, and sexualised discourse. Many other sources animate Anti-Aesthetic projects: Marxist readings, structuralist anthropology and linguistics, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, critiques of colonial aesthetics, Foucault’s approaches to subjectivity, and Derridean deconstruction.

1

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”

There is no doubt that many people use the term “beauty” as a synonym for being the cause of sensuous pleasure, and it is, to my mind, this notion of beauty which Anti-Aesthetic thinkers use to think about beauty, and it is also, therefore, the notion of beauty they reject. In other words, I argue, Anti-Aesthetic thinkers hold the view that beauty is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or sensory experience, and they think that, based on this recommendation, beauty has no role to play in our moral, political, and artistic lives, for reasons I explore in what follows. To take an accomplished modern advocate of the theory of beauty as pleasure: “Beauty,” says George Santayana, is “pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing” (Santayana 33). If beauty is a subjective pleasure, then, according to the Anti-Aesthetic view, it would seem to have no higher status than anything else that entertains, amuses, or distracts, and so it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to “transcendentals” such as truth or goodness, for example. The question of beauty, according to Anti-Aesthetic thinking, is a chimera, and so we should leave it behind or alone. Another way of describing the Anti-Aesthetic view of beauty is by labelling it as a form of “aesthetic hedonism.”1 Aesthetic hedonists—and Anti-aesthetic thinkers—hold that beauty has a special kind of hedonic value: beautiful things give pleasure when experienced. Monroe Beardsley (1915–85), for instance, leads with this simple formulation of hedonism: “The aesthetic value of an object is the value it possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification” (Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View, 21). Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature: “Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence” (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 299). After all, who would deny that our encounters with the beautiful are often DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-4

22  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty a source of great pleasure? However, where aesthetic hedonists believe that “hedonic” beauty has an intrinsic sort of positive value—in that an item’s aesthetic value is constituted by its relation to such pleasure or valuable experience—Anti-Aesthetic thinkers believe that hedonic beauty has no value or is a source of negative value—for reasons we shall explore. Anti-Aestheticism thus shares a conception of beauty with aesthetic hedonism, but the two groups are quite differently oriented regarding the value of beauty, so conceived.2 Anti-Aesthetic thinkers are, in this sense, hedonophobes as well as being kalliphobes. In this chapter, I aim to draw out what I see as the main feature of AntiAestheticism, namely, a conceptualisation of “Sensual Beauty.” I look to the genesis of Anti-Aesthetic ideas in texts written in the first part of the 20th century, specifically the work of three key thinkers: Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Duchamp, and Walter Benjamin. First, I suggest that the idea of “Sensual Beauty” receives clear articulation in Tolstoy’s book What Is Art?, which was first published in 1898. Tolstoy provides an overview of the modern field of aesthetics, from its foundation by Alexander Baumgarten to the time of his writing, and explicitly decides that the best definition of beauty available to us is of beauty as identical to pleasurable “sensual experience” (Tolstoy 12). Next, I turn to Duchamp, the self-proclaimed “anti-artist” (Duchamp 156). I suggest that Duchamp’s outright rejection of aesthetic features from his art is a re-affirmation of Tolstoy’s articulation of beauty defined as a merely “sensual pleasure” (Tolstoy 12). I offer some analysis of Duchamp’s interpreter, Peter Bürger, who explains why beauty—defined as a “merely sensuous” pleasure—started to be viewed as problematic in Anti-Aesthetic arenas of the Avant-garde. Finally, I turn to Benjamin’s text “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age” (1935). I argue that Benjamin’s theoretical analysis predicts the catastrophic consequences of admitting beauty—again, conceived of as “merely sensory” pleasure— into our moral and political lives. Ultimately, this chapter draws out what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism: a conceptualisation of “Sensual Beauty.” Leo Tolstoy (1854–1936) Leo Tolstoy is the first 20th-century writer to explicitly define beauty as a “merely sensuous” (Tolstoy 32) experience. He does so in his book What is Art, published for the first time in English in 1900. Tolstoy thus brings into focus issues that remain close to the heart of the 20th-century AntiAesthetic movement. Tolstoy’s first move against beauty in What Is Art? is to redefine what he thinks the “pedestrian” ought to mean when he uses the word “art” in the context of the word “beauty.” Tolstoy suggests that “the average educated

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”  23 man” (10) thinks that “art is the activity which manifests beauty,” and accordingly “a ballet and an operetta” as much as the “activity of the tailor, the hairdresser and the costume-maker” (10) belong to the realm of art. In thinking this, Tolstoy says, the average man is mistaken. The only “art” to which the word “beauty” is linked is the “art” of sense perception (10). According to Tolstoy, “many aesthetic systems” (11) recognise that the “beauty” of which they speak is limited to the following five “arts”: -

The art of the sense of taste. The art of the sense of smell. The art of the sense of touch. The art of the sense of hearing. The art of the sense of sight.(11)

Tolstoy thus indicates to the reader that beauty, far from being an activity manifested by the art of literature, music, painting, and so on, is, in fact, reducible to the “science of sensation” (11). Here, he includes some ordinary language analysis, showing that it is good Russian to use the word beauty, krasota, only for “that which pleases the senses” (13). Accordingly, “a man, a horse, a house” may be beautiful, but “of actions, thoughts, character” we can only say that they are “good” (14). Thus, we can only say that what is “beautiful” is that which is “pleasing to our senses” (13). The meaning of the word “beauty” as an alternative word for the expression “sensuous pleasure” is, Tolstoy thinks, “very simple and clear” (13). However, he says that, despite this, beauty has always been treated as a complex “riddle” (13), which has been resolved, in their own fashion, by “learned men” in “hundreds of different ways” (13). To support his claim that our understanding of beauty has been made more complex than necessary, Tolstoy offers a comment from the German 19th-century Romantic writer, Wilhelm Heinrich Schussler (1821–98). In the preface to his Critical History of Aesthetics, Schussler says, “One hardly finds in any other area of philosophical science such methods of research and exposition, crude to the point of contradiction, as in the area of aesthetics” (quoted in Tolstoy 16). This judgement, Tolstoy thinks, is “more than correct” (14). Tolstoy then cites many of those definitions of beauty most widely used in existing aesthetic systems and concludes that they fall into two main classes: either they are “metaphysical” and “mystical” (in which beauty is defined as transcendent and divine) which is, he thinks, a “fantastic definition, founded on nothing” (Tolstoy 31). Otherwise, they consider “beauty to be that which pleases the senses” (32). This second definition, according to Tolstoy, is “the only one worth considering” (33). Tolstoy begins his review of theories of beauty with the German Enlightenment philosopher Alexander Baumgarten who, according to Tolstoy,

24  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty says that the object of “aesthetic (that is, sensuous) knowledge is beauty” (Tolstoy 17).3 The aim of beauty itself is thus to be “pleasing and to arouse desire” (17). Tolstoy claims that writers who come directly after and are influenced by Baumgarten (including German writers Schutz, Sulzer, Mendelssohn, and Moritz, and English writers Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, and Hogarth) define beauty quite differently. Sulzer says that only that which “contains the good can be recognised as beautiful” (17), while for Mendelssohn, the beautiful “is perceived in some vague sense” as carrying us “to the level of the true and the good” (17). This understanding of beauty, thinks Tolstoy, is not retained by later aestheticians, such as Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder, who take “completely opposite views” of beauty as “merely plastic” (Tolstoy 18). Kant, Tolstoy believes, “clarifies the essence of the concept of beauty” (20) by defining it as the “power which forms judgments without concepts and produces pleasure” (20); this is also how Tolstoy believes that Kant’s follower, Schiller, defined beauty. “What,” Tolstoy asks, “then follows from all these definitions of beauty offered by the science of aesthetics?” (30). He concludes that the first definition (adopted by Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) is an “objectivemystical definition of beauty,” and the second (adopted by Kant) is of beauty “as a certain pleasure” (31). The first is “based on nothing,” while the second is “very simple and clear.” Tolstoy concludes that beauty is “that which pleases our senses” and “affords us a certain kind of pleasure” (32). The only problem with this definition, says Tolstoy, is that it is “imprecise” because it “expands” in other directions, meaning that it includes the pleasure derived from “drinking, eating, touching soft skin, etc.” (31). Tolstoy is not, however, concerned with this problem: he does not suggest any ways in which we might make this definition of beauty more precise, perhaps because Kant had already done so. Tolstoy is right to think that the immediate and original source of the association between beauty and sensual pleasure is most likely derived from Baumgarten, who, as I noted in the General Introduction, coined the term “aesthetics” in his Metaphysics (1742). It is also clear that many Anti-Aesthetic notions of “beauty,” such as Tolstoy’s, use the word “beauty” in the sense that Kant would have instead associated it with the term “agreeable.” Throughout the third Critique, the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant outlines four “reflective” aesthetic judgements4. The first is “the agreeable,” a purely sensory judgement based on inclination and thus strictly subjective. The second is “the beautiful,” which is not only based on a concept and is, therefore, subjective, but which also depends on agreement from the “universal voice.” The third is “the good,” which is identified by an ethical judgement: that is, it conforms with moral law, coheres with notions of reason, and is purely objective. The fourth is “the

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”  25 sublime,” which, like “the beautiful,” does not depend upon a concept and does depend upon agreement. However, unlike “the beautiful,” “the sublime” must be an object of fear, even if it is not actually threatening. “The agreeable” raises no claim on others, “the good” claims universality based on objective concepts, principles, or laws, and “the beautiful” and “the sublime” are indeterminate since they are both subjective and want to make a universal claim. Tolstoy’s conception of beauty as “sensuous pleasure” (31) can be described as a confusion between Kant’s notions of “the agreeable” and “the beautiful.” One of the features of aesthetic experience, according to Kant, is the way our apprehension of it relates to the “feeling of pleasure” (Critique of Judgment §1). This is true of all aesthetic experiences (also known as reflective judgements), including our apprehension of “the beautiful” and “the agreeable.” The Kantian account of aesthetic experience makes pleasure an essential component of that experience, but the pleasure component is represented very differently in different types of aesthetic experience. However, Tolstoy’s confusion is perfectly understandable, given that, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant says very little about actual pleasures or even the general character of aesthetic pleasure, beyond his emphatic assertions that there are distinctions between kinds of pleasures. In “Part 1: Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” Kant takes pains to distinguish Section A, “On the Feeling of the Agreeable, or Sensuous Pleasure in the Sensation of an object,” from Section B, “On the Feeling of the Beautiful,” which is glossed “The Partly Sensuous, Partly Intellectual pleasure in Reflective Intuition or Taste.” This distinction between “the agreeable” and “the beautiful” might seem hazy to Tolstoy, but it appears to be evident to Kant. He expects us to understand that two different kinds of feelings are in play, one for agreeable things, the other for beautiful things.5 It is, therefore, true, of course, that according to Kant, one of the features of the aesthetic experience of beauty consists of the way our apprehension relates to the feeling of pleasure—that the feeling of pleasure is somehow in play. However, according to Kant, that does not in itself suffice to mark an object as beautiful. If pleasure is at the core of any theory of beauty, then its texture and range must matter. We must consider what sort of pleasure it is and whether it floats in parallel to some other feeling or faculty. Kant’s wager is that beauty names a specific mode of pleasure: the productive use of the imagination and the intellect. Thus those, like Tolstoy, who disparage beauty based on the pleasure it affords, often mistakenly invoke an idea at work in the agreeable, without at all involving the pleasure that beauty—and beauty alone—provides. Tolstoy goes on to dispel the notion that art is a means of experiencing pleasure, claiming that “beauty, or that which pleases us, can in no

26  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty way serve as the basis for defining art” (35). He thus severs the inveterate connection between beauty and art, recommending that we “discard the all-confusing concept of beauty” (36) entirely from our considerations of art. The word “beautiful” belongs to surface appearances, to that which merely and solely impresses and pleases the senses, and the purpose of art, whether sacred or otherwise, is not to incite pleasure. Also in this context, Tolstoy generally interprets beauty as something opposite to good: “The concept of beauty not only does not coincide with good, but is rather opposite to it, since good for the most part coincides with the victory over addictions, beauty is the basis of all our passions” (180). That is, of all the multifaceted hypostases of beauty, Tolstoy captures and recognises only one—the ability to deliver pleasure, which he considers the main obstacle on the path to moral improvement. Therefore, in Tolstoy’s opinion, the concept of beauty must be “removed” (180) from both philosophical theory and artistic practice. Tolstoy takes the assumption that beauty is pleasant to perceive at face value and claims that experiences of beauty are always accompanied by sensuous pleasure. Unlike explanations offered by his predecessors, Tolstoy argues that, in a nutshell, beauty is identical to experiences of merely “sensuous pleasure” (31). He thus provides the first clear elucidation of the concept of “Sensuous Beauty,” which is, I think, echoed by those Anti-Aesthetic thinkers who succeed him. The notion of beauty Tolstoy proposes is one where experiences of beauty are identical to experiences of sensuous (i.e., aesthetic) pleasure.6 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) The great lesson taught by the Anti-Aesthetic movement is that beauty— conceived of as a “merely sensual” pleasure—is not merely irrelevant but damaging (to our moral and political lives, to our artistic endeavours). One of the main teachers of that lesson is Marcel Duchamp. Danto, for instance, attributes to Duchamp the “drawing to a close … of what we might call ‘The Age of Aesthetics’” (Danto, Abuse 44). Danto contrasts Duchamp’s ideas with those of critic Roger Fry (1866–1934): Loosening the beauty-mimesis ligature made it possible for Fry to become a great formalist art critic, but because he continued to see the ligature between art and beauty as that of a necessary connection, so that of necessity art is always beautiful, it failed to occur to him, as a theorist, that whole artistic traditions have existed in which beauty was never the point at all. Beauty was not the rainbow that awaited us as the reward of sustained looking. It was never the case that the only proper way to address art was that of aesthetic contemplation at all … Fry’s

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”  27 one contemporary who appears to have understood this was Marcel Duchamp. (44) Duchamp’s ready-mades,7 then, are a critique of what Danto identifies as the modernist “ligature” between art and beauty. Duchamp’s introduction of Anti-Aesthetic art was the necessary foundation for the post-war neoAvant-garde, within which, according to Duchamp’s critic Roger Rothman, “the institution of art—previously an institution of aesthetic experience— was refashioned as an institution of social critique” (Rothman 70). Beauty is conceived of as an impediment to this change, due to the pleasure it arouses. Duchamp was a self-proclaimed “anti-artist.”8 However, since he continually produced art objects, we can take him to mean he was “Anti-Aesthetic.” Duchamp is quite clear, in his notebooks, letters, and interviews,9 that his ready-mades (works made from manufactured objects) are designed to defy the notion that art must be pleasing to the senses: “It’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! If I had the chance to take an anti-retinal attitude …” (quoted in Cabanne 43). In a 1961 interview, Duchamp claims to have chosen everyday objects to function as art objects “based on a reaction of visual indifference” (quoted in Kuh 92). In the same interview, he says that “the concept behind those objects might be the most important single idea to come out of my work” (93). In June 1967, Duchamp, anticipating his passing a few months later—“Quite simply, I am waiting for death” (93)—elaborates on his concept of the ready-made: “Ultimately, it should not be looked at … It’s not the visual aspect of the Readymade that matters, it’s simply the fact that it exists … Visuality is no longer a question: the Readymade is no longer visible, so to speak. It is completely grey matter. It is no longer retinal” (quoted in Collin 37). Duchamp’s attitude is further articulated in a letter to the Dadaist Hans Richter: “When I discovered the ready-mades, I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada, they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty” (quoted in Richter 207–08). Duchamp thus, quite explicitly, expresses an Anti-Aesthetic attitude. But why did Duchamp consider aesthetics generally and beauty particularly so problematic? The answer is to be found in the distinction Marx provided in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx and Engels 36). The imperative of the Avant-garde—to change the world rather than interpret it—fundamentally alters the implications of aesthetic experience in general and beauty in particular. Changing the world requires a fundamental rethinking of aesthetic experience, because beauty inhibits

28  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty what Peter Bürger refers to as a “critical cognition of reality” (Bürger 50). Bürger observes, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, that, with the rise of the “bourgeoisie” (Bürger 50), art becomes “an autonomous institution”: [T]he (relative) freedom of art vis-à-vis the praxis of life is at the same time the condition that must be fulfilled if there is to be a critical cognition of reality. An art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it, along with its distance. (50) If art is to speak truths about the world, it must “stand at a remove from the world it seeks to critically cognize” (Rothman 68). Beauty, according to the Anti-Aesthetic, impedes this process. Because pleasure is the primary attribute of the beautiful, the desire to experience beauty pacifies rebellious desire and the desire for social change. The reason Duchamp considered beauty problematic thus concerns the affective dimension of the beautiful. Bürger gestures towards the problem with pleasure as it appears in Herbert Marcuse’s essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture.” Marcuse begins by noting that “pleasure is the primary attribute of the beautiful” and locates the origin of this idea in Hume’s claim, in A Treatise of Human Nature, that “pleasure is not merely a by-product of beauty but constitutes its very essence” (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 299).10 For Marcuse—and by extension, if only implicitly, for Bürger it is precisely the fact that the essence of beauty is pleasure that is the root cause of its inescapably problematic nature for the Anti-Aesthetic. The problem is this: once pleasure is experienced in art, it threatens to function as a substitute pleasure, a compensatory pleasure that simulates desires unmet outside the institution of art, in the world. Vital energies that would otherwise be directed towards changing the world are thus released in the momentary pleasure of beauty. The problem with beauty is that it risks socially transformative energies being sublimated. In this sense, “beauty is not simply a promise of (future) happiness. It is also, and more problematically, a moment of happiness in the present” (Rothman 69): “By exhibiting the beautiful as present, art pacifies rebellious desire” (Marcuse 89). Thus, for Marcuse, the only proper solution to the problem of beauty and its pleasures is its negation, since “even keeping alive the desire for fulfilment is dangerous” (Marcuse 89). Only after the “annihilation of culture” (89) will it be possible to re-affirm beauty and its pleasures. “Until that moment, however, beauty’s effect is to sublimate revolutionary desire and thereby inhibit the material transformation of society” (90). So, the Avant-garde’s critique of the institution of art is, in fact, a critique of aesthetic pleasure. Art, when it is beautiful, will always induce pleasure.

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”  29 The Avant-garde has no alternative but to abandon beauty altogether— precisely because of the pleasure from which it is derived. Here is where Duchamp’s work becomes crucial. Duchamp’s r­ eady-made works of art are a critique of what Danto identified as the modernist “ligature” between art and beauty (Danto, Abuse 44). Duchamp’s readymades provide, for the first time, a way for the Anti-Aesthetic to maintain art’s critical distance without the risk of aesthetic sublimation. By choosing objects in a state of “aesthetic indifference” (“complete anaesthesia”) (Duchamp 207), Duchamp managed to avoid the “total annihilation” (Marcuse 89) of art while still abiding by the Anti-Aesthetic imperative of the Avant-garde. Severed from its connection with the beautiful, art is for the first time capable of functioning as a tool of social change. So long as the imperative is to change the world (not simply interpret it), the pleasure afforded by beauty functions as an inhibition. This rejection of beauty from art is ultimately derived from beauty having been conceived of as a “merely sensuous” pleasure in the first place. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) Written during the period of the Nazi regime in Germany, Walter ­Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), presents a theory of art that is “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in politics” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 217). As Benjamin saw it, “the secular cult of beauty” (217) had turned beauty into its own theology: “a negative theology” which “denied any social function of art” (218). The “beautiful” illusion of art was meant to provide aesthetic compensation for society’s failings. Benjamin’s wager, however, is that this changed when political regimes began to adopt aesthetic practices: Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses ­without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life … (219) Benjamin argues that aesthetic spectacles such as the Nuremberg rallies allow “the masses” to express themselves without seeing their rights recognised. Benjamin thinks that, typically, the aesthetic element of politics attributes beauty to forms of politics that do not follow the logic of a critical

30  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty public sphere. Fascist regimes emphasise style rather than substance and play to the emotions rather than relying on reason. Benjamin thinks that aestheticised politics deceive people into accepting manufactured needs as real needs, simplifications as full pictures, and illusions as reality. For instance, we might say, retrospectively, that fascination with style is abhorrent because the myth of Aryan beauty led to genocide. Thus, aesthetic categories became weaponised for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art by Fascistic regimes. In Benjamin’s original formulation, the Nazi “aestheticisation of politics” is presented in opposition to the “politicisation of aesthetics” (220). The former is indicated as an instrument of “mythologising” (220) totalitarian Fascist regimes, and the latter is associated with an authentic revolutionary praxis. Dadaism, for instance, which emerged during the World War I, was a Swiss-based, politically neutral artistic movement. According to Max Ernst, a German Dada painter who served on both the Western and the Eastern fronts: “to us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful” (Dachy 27). For art to function as a “moral mirror,” it, too, was to be robbed of beauty. As Benjamin himself observed: “All love of beauty is idle dreaming” (182). On the other hand, we see the beginnings of an “aestheticisation of politics” in Fascistic war-cries and manipulative imagery. There are numerous instances of the “aestheticisation of politics” in Hitler’s regime, including Leni Riefenstahl’s films, Albert Speer’s architecture, and Hitler’s own oratory (Benjamin 10). Anti-Aesthetic theorists argue that these constitute an insidious super-effective mind control, making the German people convert to National Socialism. The submission by the citizens to “aestheticisation” was thus a means to justify the pacification of the masses and the unchecked exercise of state power (Benjamin 10). Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925) reports his feelings upon learning, in October 1918, that Germany had capitulated and did so in highly aestheticised language: And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions who died. Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open, the graves of those who with faith in the Fatherland had marched forth never to return? Would they not open and send the silent mud-and-blood covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland which had

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”  31 cheated them with such mockery of the highest sacrifice which a man can make to his people in this world? (124) Hitler combines moral language (“duty”; “heroes”; “faith”) with aesthetic language (“hunger and thirst’; “clutching our hearts”; “mud-and-blood”) to exacerbate the underlying social tensions in post-war Germany. This host of vengeful spirits, these 2 million dead, were indeed to come home and haunt Germany: it was ostensibly to restore their honour, and accord meaning to their sacrifice, that Hitler re-armed the nation. Benjamin argues that Nazism, like the “cult of beauty,” is a “death cult” (36). Indeed, this gruesome image, the graves opening, the fallen arising, bloodied and smeared with mud, as spirits of vengeance, was later to find further expression in the skull-and-crossbones emblem of the SS. Benjamin concludes (correctly) that Hitler’s ultimate purpose is war, and that he accomplishes this goal by using aesthetic features. Benjamin quotes from the Futurist artist Marinetti, who states the formula as follows: For twenty-seven years, we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic. Accordingly, we state: War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others… (Marinetti 76) During most of the 20th century, political discussions that admitted beauty described it as a tool of fascistic regimes. Most critiques of aestheticised politics are governed by a powerfully negative image of fascism, according to which the term “aesthetic” itself conjures up images of the swastika, Nuremberg rallies, the gates to Auschwitz, and anorexic or dead bodies. This collage image of fascist, aestheticised politics, determines the negative implications of aestheticised politics. Thus “Mankind[‘s] … self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin 38). The “aesthetic pleasure” to which Benjamin refers is beauty. Benjamin thus draws a definitive connection (a typically Anti-Aesthetic connection) between aestheticisation and politics in their paradigmatically right-wing form, fascism, and militarism. Benjamin’s statement has become an article of faith for many

32  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, according to whom any aestheticisation, including particularly the aestheticisation of politics, is reprehensible. Conclusion In this chapter, I have started to tell a story about the emergence of Anti-Aestheticism in the 20th century. I have suggested that Leo Tolstoy’s analysis of beauty demonstrates an underlying assumption adopted by later Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, which reduces our understanding of beauty to the “merely sensual,” based on pleasure. Tolstoy reaches this conclusion after conducting an overview of philosophical aesthetics, from its foundation with Baumgarten until the time of his own writing. My analysis of Marcel Duchamp illustrates why, according to artists, beauty, on this recommendation, is so threatening: it acts as a compensatory pleasure which pacifies rebellious desire. Walter Benjamin drew a natural conclusion from this: if beauty were to be used in revolutionary practice, it could only be thus used in disastrous fashion—to justify the unchecked exercise of State power. To see the full realisation of Benjamin’s prophecies, we must now turn to the advent of World War II. Notes 1 Aesthetic hedonism is the influential view in the field of aesthetics that beauty or aesthetic value can be defined in terms of pleasure, e.g., that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure. Many thinkers of the 18th century accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. 2 There are of course many other ways in which beauty might be and has been conceived of, but these, I think, are not relevant to Anti-Aesthetic discourse. One alternative conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. 3 See the General Introduction for my initial comments on Baumgarten’s definition of the aesthetic. 4 I discuss the nature of “reflective” judgements in more detail in Part 2, Chapter 6. 5 Kant draws the distinction between “the agreeable” and “the beautiful” along many other axes. First, there is the fact that some objects are associated with one or the other form of pleasure. Then, he tells us that taste is the capacity for judging something to be beautiful based on an entirely “disinterested” delight, making it quite distinct from the judgement of the agreeable, which is based on “inclination.” Third, judgements of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity: I take my judgement of taste to be universally valid. Finally, Kant distinguishes amongst “the agreeable”—pleasure derived from “enjoyment” on the one hand and “the act of judging” on the other. The former not only “pleases” but also “gratifies,” while the later causes “delight,” which occurs when the subject relates the representations of an object to “a feeling

Beauty as the “Merely Sensuous”  33

6 7

8 9 10

of the promotion of life” that beauty “directly brings with it” (Critique of Judgment §23). Experiencing beauty does not have to involve pure pleasure, i.e., pleasure without pain. The ready-mades are a diverse set of objects ranging from the Bottlerack of 1914 to the urinal titled Fountain of 1917. They were acquired by Duchamp from commercial suppliers or plucked from everyday circulation and given art status via minor adjustments such as titles. The term “anti-art” is generally agreed to have been coined by Duchamp around 1913 when he made his first ready-mades. See Swartz, ed., The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. Hume’s claim about beauty and pleasure is made in A Treatise on Human Nature: “beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain” (299).

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Beauty and Evil

The relationship between beauty and goodness has been well documented throughout history1: but what is the relationship between beauty and evil? Is there something unethical about beauty? Can experiences of beauty also be a source of harm? When someone implies that beauty is immoral or dangerous, what do they mean? These questions have been given surprisingly little philosophical attention, even though evil is often personified as beautiful in fiction. George Eliot’s initial presentation of beauty in Daniel Deronda, for instance, contains a scepticism that is unusual in love stories: it is unclear whether the beauty of the heroine Gwendolen Harleth draws the observer, Daniel Deronda, towards good or evil. He first sees her engaged in a game of roulette, and wonders: Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as longing in which the whole being consents? (Eliot 1) Daniel Deronda cannot reconcile in his mind the incongruity of beauty sans virtue as represented by the gambling Gwendolen, nor resist being drawn to her. The restlessness animating Gwendolen’s face draws Deronda to it with the pull of fear and desire “felt as coercion” (7).2 The mysterious and seductive force of Gwendolen’s beauty constitutes its power. To understand our susceptibility to beauty, then, one might argue, we need to acknowledge the dynamics of power. In this chapter, I approach the problem of beauty and evil from several different Anti-Aesthetic perspectives. I examine the claim that beauty can make bad (immoral) things look good: as is the case with fascism’s idolisation of beauty and strength, unity, and the glamourisation of death. Just as the devil wraps evil in a beautiful package hoping to appeal to our senses, DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-5

Beauty and Evil  35 Nazism reshaped common ideas of beauty to render aesthetic pleasure a direct extension of political terror: a form of violence in the service of future warfare. I also examine the claim that the desire for beauty corrupts—with the pursuit of beauty, we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration. Finally, I question whether our love of beauty can have morally corrosive effects—directing our longings towards the unattainable and causing us to go mad with desire in the process. Throughout this chapter, I continue to narrate my story about AntiAestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century, with an emphasis on developing my primary theme: an account of the notion of beauty that Anti-Aestheticism employs: “Sensual Beauty.” In Chapter 1, I drew out what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism and “Sensual Beauty”: namely, a conceptualisation of beauty as “merely sensuous,” linked to pleasure and appearance. In this chapter, I indicate why, based on this conceptualisation of beauty, Anti-Aesthetic thinkers believe that beauty ought to have no essential role in our moral lives. I focus on the middle of the 20th century. First, I offer a case study of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1935). Then, I move into an analysis of certain aspects of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy. The chapter closes with an examination of the feminist critique of beauty, with an emphasis on Andrea Dworkin’s rejection of beauty “standards.” I suggest that, according to Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, when conceived of as a “merely sensuous” experience, beauty can cooperate in the promotion of moral folly and even of evil. Triumph of the Will (1935) Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will is a documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rally of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi party). Philosopher Mary Devereaux examines this film as a particular case to investigate the more “general problem of beauty and evil” (Devereaux 228). In the case of this film, Devereaux argues, “beauty” cooperates in the promotion of “evil” (228). Devereaux thus exhibits an Anti-Aesthetic attitude. She describes Triumph of the Will as aesthetically beautiful, but morally evil. Devereaux argues that while the film is formally and aesthetically sensitive, the moral content is repugnant. The film portrays Hitler as Christ-like and arguably inspired Germans to turn to Nazism. I need to briefly describe the historical background of the film—and provide some sense of what Devereaux thinks its artistic strategy is—before turning to the more general problem of beauty and evil. Triumph of the Will was made at Hitler’s request to record the 1934 Nuremberg rally, one of the rallies sponsored by the Nazi party between 1923 and 1939. Devereaux’s research shows that the rally “lasted seven days, involved tens

36  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty of thousands of participants, and drew as many as 500,000 spectators” (Devereaux 228). She claims that Hitler gave the film its title, helped with preproduction, and orchestrated the spectacle that it records. Riefenstahl had a crew of 172 people, uniformed as SA officers, who rehearsed scenes beforehand (228). Due to the nature of the event, which included long speeches and parades, Riefenstahl needed to expand the innovations of mobile photography: she built tracks and rails and “instructed the crew to practise roller skating” (228). The final, the two-hour film was “distilled from sixty-one hours of footage,” which took Riefenstahl “over five months” (228) to produce. The film premiered at the Ufa Palast in Berlin in March 1935 before an audience that included foreign diplomats, army generals, party officials, and Hitler himself. It won recognition nationally in Germany, where it was awarded the National Film Prize in 1935, and internationally, where it won the Gold Medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1935 and the Grand Prix at the Paris Film Festival in 1937. Devereaux argues that the film’s beautiful, formal, “aesthetic” (228) elements are intrinsically linked to, and, indeed, create, enthusiasm for Hitler and the National Socialists. Thus, the aesthetic aspects of the film are linked to its moral content. Devereaux claims that the main aesthetic features used in the film to accomplish this are its structure and vision. Both elements contribute to the film’s overall effect, which is, she thinks, a perfect conjunction of “beauty and evil.” These three features collaborate, in the film, to present “a beautiful vision of Hitler and the New Germany which is morally repugnant” (236). First: structurally, the film has “twelve sections or scenes, each focused on a particular rally event” (230), which create a “rhythmic … dramatic succession of highlights and retreats, peaks and valleys” (230). This, Devereaux thinks, is manifest in scenes such as the third section “The City Awakening” during which the camera travels above the “quiet, mist-covered rooftops of the old city” to the sound of church bells and then “dissolves into a lively shot of morning activity in the tented city used to house rally participants” (230). The tempo increases, climaxing in shots of “healthy, bare-chested youths, working and singing old German folk songs” (230) as they prepare for the rally. This “crescendo” (230) generates for the audience of the film the same enthusiasm and excitement felt by the rally participants. Thus, structurally, the film creates enthusiasm for Hitler and the National Socialists. Second: the film’s “vision” also collaborates in creating enthusiasm for Hitler and the National Socialists by establishing three key principles, encapsulated in the Nazi slogan: “One People. One Leader. One Empire” (231). Devereaux argues that, in part, Riefenstahl achieves this by working with motifs such as the “swastika, the German eagle, flags, Albert Speer’s towering architecture, torches and burning pyres, moon and clouds, the

Beauty and Evil  37 roar of Hitler’s voice” (231). Riefenstahl establishes a vision of Hitler as the hero of a grand narrative. Devereaux argues that the idea of the leader is the most important and has its roots in “messianic Christianity”—the “idea of a great man who has the will and power to actualise the true will of the people” (232). From its “very first frames,” Hitler is presented as a “God-like, mystical figure who descends—literally—from the clouds” (232). Devereaux suggests that the idea of “One People” is evoked by the fact that all the people depicted in the film support Hitler—the “crowds that fill scene after scene are staggering in number, their enthusiasm unending” (232). Several scenes seem to have been “explicitly constructed to demonstrate that Hitler’s support knows no class or regional boundaries” (234). They thus show us that Hitler’s supporters are a unity, “One people,” and that it is Hitler, “One leader,” who brings them together. The third and final principle of the film’s vision—“One Empire”—is most prominent in the film’s final sequences. Riefenstahl shows the enormous military strength that stands behind Hitler. The effect is one of national purpose. Thus, Devereaux thinks, the film presents a beautiful vision of Hitler and the New Germany. As a documentary, Devereaux thinks, the film is “disquieting because the events it portrays are disquieting” (234). However, Devereaux argues, the film does “more than document historical events” (236). It is also “designed to propagate the Nazi faith”—and “mobilize the German people” (236). Riefenstahl denied that Triumph of the Will was a work of propaganda and claimed that her concerns were aesthetic, not political—it was the “cult of beauty and not the cult of the Fuhrer” (236) that she worshipped. This claim, Devereaux thinks, is undermined by the film itself, which is aimed “not simply at stylistic innovation and beautiful images, but at using these means to create a vision of Hitler and National Socialism” (237). Nevertheless, precisely because of its beauty, the film can be distinguished from other works of propaganda. It offers a “beautiful, sensuous presentation—a vision—of the German people, leader and empire” (Devereaux 241). This is a vision that, as history was to prove, falsified the true character of Hitler and National Socialism. To find the film’s message appealing is to be stirred by its beauty, and to be stirred by its beauty is thus, Devereaux thinks, concerning. It is concerning not merely because one may be led to support Neo-Nazi movements but also because, Devereaux thinks, “certain kinds of enjoyment, regardless of their effects, may themselves be problematic” (Devereaux 241). “Pleasure” in the beauty of this film is like “pleasure” in a work that “celebrates sadism or paedophilia” (241). “If virtue consists (in part) by taking pleasure in the right things and not in the wrong things, then what is my character now such that I can take pleasure in these things?” (242). These questions highlight the “longstanding problem of beauty and evil”: aesthetic and

38  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty moral considerations may “pull in different directions” (242). Devereaux thinks that distancing ourselves from the film to appreciate it as a film could, in this case, itself be an immoral position. Additionally, in the case of this film, distancing ourselves for the purpose of appreciation is impossible since its formal features are so closely intertwined with its “horrifying” (242) vision. If we omit the message to appreciate the beauty, we miss an essential dimension of the film’s beauty. The film’s purely formal elements cannot, in other words, be abstracted from its content. Devereaux’s claim, then, is that to appreciate the aesthetic aspects of the film, we must engage with its content. Nevertheless, Devereaux argues, we are justified in watching the film—if we do so for the right reasons. First, it is “worth watching because of its historical value as a chronicle of the rise of fascism in Germany and events leading to the second world war” (251). Second, it is worth watching for much the same “reason some feminists examine works of pornography: so that, in confronting these works, we may learn something about a way of seeing the world which we reject” (251). A third reason for watching the film is that “part of preventing a recurrence of Fascism involves understanding how fascism came to be thought attractive” (251). Finally, and most importantly, we ought to watch Triumph of the Will because it provides the very “conjunction of beauty and evil that allows us to see how evil can be beautiful” (251). Stuart Greenstreet addresses Devereaux’s rejection of “formalism” as one of the usual solutions for tackling the problems that can arise when beauty becomes intertwined with evil in a work of art in his paper “Beauty Versus Evil.” Formalism divides the “form”—the aesthetic features of an artwork, such as colour, balance, or symmetry—from its “content”—the meaning or message “contained” in the artwork. Formalism asks us to “evaluate art in terms of its aesthetic features and asks us to keep that assessment apart from any evaluation of its social, political, or emotional content” (Greenstreet 2). Greenstreet asks us to consider two descriptions of a work of art, first in terms of its formal features: The work opens in C major but then changes to a minor key; the theme introduced by the oboe is taken up by the violins; the rhythms become increasingly syncopated… Now in terms of the emotions expressed (the work’s ‘content’). After a serene and joyful opening the music becomes progressively more disturbed and anguished until at last it issues in a final outburst of grief. Try to imagine a critical description of Beethoven’s 9th symphony (The Choral) that ignored its content and referred solely to its formal features. By failing to mention the symphony’s optimism and nobility,

Beauty and Evil  39 the critic would defraud us. But suppose that we could make a purely aesthetic evaluation of a work’s formal properties without discussing its content. That would let us ignore the Nazi propaganda in Triumph of the Will and judge it (as ‘art for art’s sake’) purely in terms of its formal qualities. In that case we would be free to judge it artistically good even if we know that it is morally bad. However, as we shall see, this isn’t a practical solution, let alone a morally acceptable one. (3) In the “best works of art,” form is fused with the content (Devereaux 253). The “value of such a work is not something that can be judged apart from the moral qualities of its content” (Greenstreet 3). This is what F. R. Leavis means when he says, “works of art enact their moral valuations” (Leavis 8). When we examine the formal features of Jane Austen’s Emma, for instance: [W]e find that it can be appreciated only in terms of the moral preoccupations that characterise the novelist’s peculiar interest in life. Those who suppose it to be an ‘aesthetic matter,’ a beauty of ‘composition’ that is combined, miraculously, with ‘truth to life,’ can give no adequate reason for the view that Emma is a great novel and no intelligent account of its perfection of form. (Leavis 8) In Emma, the form of the text “enacts” (8) its content. Thus, a well-made work of art integrates form with content. To clinch this claim, Greenstreet offers a further piece of evidence in the form of Picasso’s Guernica (1937). A Basque town in northern Spain, Guernica was a stronghold of Republican resistance during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). On 26 April 1937, Guernica was bombed by Fascist warplanes. The town was destroyed, and thousands of civilians were killed. Guernica commemorates the bombing. According to Greenstreet, the painting enacts its “moral valuation” (Greenstreet 3): it is impossible to make a formal evaluation of Guernica and set aside its “content,” that is, “the anger and the pity it projects” (4).3 Picasso explained in the early summer of 1937 that the painting was inspired by his “abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death”; he produced it as a “weapon” in the war against fascism (Barr 264–65). According to Greenstreet, “Guernica was his instrument of war; and Triumph of the Will was Hitler’s instrument in the mobilisation for war. They are committed works, engaged as opponents in a battle, and both should be judged as such” (Greenstreet 5). There is thus “a connection between the artistic value of works of art and the moral attitudes of those who bring them about” (5). This connection is necessary, not contingent. This necessity is an “intrinsic” sort of necessity, one that inheres in the work.

40  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty “How, in the light of these conclusions, should the fact that Triumph of the Will is evil feature in our evaluation of it as a work of art?” Greenstreet asks (5). The film is of formal and aesthetic value, but “despite its mastery, we must condemn it because it serves (is indeed ruled by) a vile vision.” It “lies about the real nature of Nazi Germany: it presents as beautiful and good things that are categorically evil” (5). It is, according to Devereaux and Greenstreet, impossible to ignore the portrayal of Hitler and National Socialism when we evaluate Triumph of the Will’s formal or aesthetic features, because the film’s vision is essential to it being the work of art that it is. The evil quality of its content is “enacted” (Leavis 8) by its beautiful form, and “therefore it is impossible to judge the formal elements in isolation from the vision they instantiate” (Greenstreet 9). Thus, according to the analysis of Devereaux and Greenstreet in the case of Triumph of the Will, beauty conceived of as a “merely sensuous” aesthetic quality does indeed cooperate in the promotion of evil. Theodore Adorno (1903–69) Theodore Adorno, too, offers a grim assessment of beauty (conceived of as the “merely sensuous”) in the modern West. In this section, I assess two of his works to consider their Anti-Aesthetic preoccupations. First, I explore an essay titled “On the Concept of Beauty,” which appeared in Aesthetics, a collection of Adorno’s lectures. Delivered between 1958 and 1959, Aesthetics formed the foundation for his later (posthumously published) Aesthetic Theory. Second, I investigate the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), co-written by Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Each of these texts makes two claims about beauty; the first is about the cause of our admiration of beauty, the second about why we should not, on this recommendation, give in to our admiration of it. Both claims are related to the promissory note of beauty, a belief which, Adorno thinks, always contains an aspect of moral folly. In his essay “On the Concept of Beauty,” Adorno discusses beauty in Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus. According to Adorno, this dialogue directly associates “fear” and “disaster” with beauty (Adorno, Aesthetics). Adorno claims that “what the Platonic theory of beauty essentially states” is that beauty “is a splendid motif of pain” (2). “Pain” is derived from a longing for that which is desired but unattainable, and the resulting feeling of futility induces “madness” (2). According to Adorno, Plato characterises this “madness” as “the kind which occurs when someone sees beauty here on earth and is reminded of true beauty. His wings begin to grow, and he wants to take to the air on his new plumage, but he cannot …” (Phaedrus 246a). Discussing this passage in Plato, Adorno invokes Benjamin’s analysis of Romantic longing: “one need think only of Faust’s ‘I weep, I am for

Beauty and Evil  41 the earth again’ to understand” (Adorno, “On the Concept” 2). Adorno interprets the human failure to “take to the air” and the related disappointment, as illustrating that “we behave aesthetically the moment we—to put it quite bluntly—are not realistic” (4). This behaviour, he says, “always has the aspect of folly” because a false promise causes the impossible desire to “fly.” He cautions his listeners that beauty’s power to transform the real world is at best limited and fragile, making belief in beauty “dangerous.” Adorno thus considers “potential collapse as inherent in the idea of beauty itself” and suggests that, correspondingly, the presence of beauty makes the beholder keenly aware of his limits and failures (4). Belief in beauty is akin to belief in ghosts—a kind of “folly,” of “suffering, pain and dissonance” that are “fundamental parts of beauty, not simply accidental” (3). Beauty thus inspires a paradoxical experience of pain derived from (the false promise of) pleasure, in which our view of ourselves and our abilities is first diminished and then reduced to impotence. Adorno’s analysis of Phaedrus in “On the Concept of Beauty” predicates our experience of beauty on a desire for the unattainable and then reduces it to the “merely sensuous.” Adorno argues that since Plato “openly admits the relationship between beauty and desire,” Plato must also think that “immediate erotic appropriation” is “already predetermined for us when we believe we are acting aesthetically” (3). In Adorno’s view, “Plato seeks to determine the concept of beauty at this point by its effect, namely the effect it has on us.” Adorno argues that since this effect is described in male and female sexual imagery, it refers to “sensual pleasure” (3). As Adorno observes, in the first half of the dialogue, Plato clearly states that “irrational desire” is always “led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty” and that, by these, the soul is “fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away” (2). Beauty, Adorno thinks, is experienced by the man “who has become corrupted” and “is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness … and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure …” (Plato, Phaedrus 250b). Adorno’s version of the insights of Phaedrus maintains that there is only one limited way in which we can realistically experience beauty, and that is through “sensual pleasure” (3). In the second half of Phaedrus, which Adorno excludes from his analysis, Plato describes another type of beauty, which has positive (rational) effects. Plato develops the metaphor of “wings,” to say that when a philosopher: [R]eceives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens, and he warms. And as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which had been hitherto closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting forth, are melted, and as nourishment streams upon

42  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty him, the lower end of the wings begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends under the whole soul. (Phaedrus 260a) Plato is suggesting that there is some intellectual apprehension at play in our recognition of this second kind of beauty, that beauty originates from philosophy and philosophical living. Those who love beauty live the best lives and have seen the most of being. The effect is always unique and powerful, as when “the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one; there arriving and quickening the passages of the wings, watering them and inclining them to grow” (Plato, Phaedrus 261b). Beauty is “palpable to sight” but not restricted to it, also “shining in company with the celestial forms … shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense” (Phaedrus 261b). Adorno does not even consider this second “type” of beauty. For Adorno, the “Platonic motif” of the forms has “dominated the discussion of the concept of beauty.” “The realm of beauty is a very precarious one—it never fully succeeds” (“On the Concept” 5). In Adorno’s view, the aesthetic subject falls into the sphere of “immediate desire,” or “loses itself in that madness of which Plato very rightly says that … is an integral aspect of the experience of beauty.” For Adorno, beauty thus inspires moral “folly” which results in “pain” and “madness” (5). Adorno acknowledges that there is no absolute definition of beauty in Phaedrus. However, it is worth noting that Plato does offer a definition of sorts in the Symposium—a text that Adorno excludes from analysis in “On the Concept of Beauty.” In the Symposium, beauty is not defined discursively but rather apophatically—in the negative. The Greek word apophanai, meaning “to deny,” is derived from apo, “away from,” and phanai, “to say.” Socrates reports that his teacher, Diotima, had described the “Form” of beauty by telling him what beauty is not. Beauty [A]lways is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes… it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea of one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or on earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater not suffer any change. (Plato, Symposium, 211a–211b)

Beauty and Evil  43 Here is the most extended description of any Form in Plato’s work.4 It is described by stating the characteristics beauty does not have, conveying meaning through implication. The repetitive (and alliterative) use of the words “neither,” “not,” and “nor” characterises the apophatic nature of the passage. Nevertheless, since “the beautiful” is described as a “Form,” we know that it, like goodness, is a supreme archetype, an ontological or epistemological model. We are to understand that the material objects we encounter in the empirical world—the world of the senses—are imitations (copies or reproductions) of the Form. While he does not address the Symposium in “On the Concept of Beauty,” Adorno does adopt Plato’s rhetoric of negation. In this essay, Adorno argues that the Phaedrus offers the most complete formulation of beauty in the history of the philosophy of beauty. Adorno emphasises the aspect of “pain as a fundamental component in any experience of beauty,” which arises when we are suddenly made aware of our mortal fallibility and incompleteness (“On the Concept” 4). Adorno bisects Plato’s concept of beauty, discarding the aspect which makes it philosophical, redemptive, expansive, and nourishing. Like the philosopher mocked as a “stargazer” by a ship’s crew, the beholder of beauty is deemed a “madman” by Adorno (4). In the Symposium, Plato also engages the rhetoric of negations: Diotima’s speech is an instance of linguistic performance in which, Adorno might argue, the value of beauty is performed through a continuing series of retractions. Adorno elaborates on his understanding of beauty as the “merely sensuous” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer. Again, employing erotic language, Adorno and Horkheimer say that beauty “springs from the pretty curve of a hip” (Adorno and Horkheimer 84). It is commodified and “summons the thought of sex,” which in turn “condemns it as repulsive” and “degrades, demeans and cheapens” the person who apprehends it (141). According to the view proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, we should circumscribe beauty, by which we have been and will continue to be betrayed: “beauty is the serpent which displays the wound where once the fang was implanted” (207). For Adorno and Horkheimer, aesthetic value lies precisely in the opportunity it provides for us to reject beauty. Our refusal or permanent deferral of pleasure (and thus, too, the deferral of “pain” and gratification) is a source of “strength” needed to reclaim the “power” of which we have been “deprived” (26). Adorno thus destabilises beauty’s place in our hierarchy of values, subordinating it to irrationality and fear—thus Danto’s kalliphobia. The promise of pleasure, like the promise of beauty, has no higher status than anything else distracting. It has even lower status, for “behind man’s admiration for beauty always lurks the ringing laughter, the boundless scorn, the barbaric obscenity vented by potency on impotence, with which it numbs the

44  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty secret fear that it is itself enslaved to impotence, to death …” (20). We are reminded of Benjamin’s claim that beauty is an appeal “to join the majority of those who are dead” (Benjamin 252) and Duchamp’s statement: “Quite simply, I am waiting for death” (Kuh 92). For Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, death is the purest form of beauty. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, as in “On the Concept of Beauty,” Adorno (with Horkheimer) turns beauty into a folly—seduction by the promise of a pleasure that is non-existent. Adorno and Horkheimer draw attention to the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy of the Bedroom. They “suggest that instead of calling it a duty for everyone never to use anyone else as a means to an end, the sadist does just that. The sadist seems to be saying: let us call it a right for everyone always to use and abuse anyone else as a means to one’s own end—no matter how wicked” (De Duve, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant” 262). Adorno and Horkheimer thus suggest that Sade has written “poetry after Auschwitz” long before Auschwitz. In terms of poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno salutes the playwright Samuel Beckett. In a much later solo work, Adorno admits, after mentioning Beckett’s Endgame, that “it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems” (Kant after Duchamp 262). In Adorno’s view, Beckett is the only writer, in his literary work, to have reacted adequately to the situation of the concentration camps. However, Adorno retracts this statement a few pages later, saying, “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture had failed,” and a little further on declares that “all post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage” (Kant after Duchamp 78). Adorno is reluctant to amend the claim that he made 15 years earlier, even as he rests his case on the work of the one great writer who, he accepts, has proved him wrong. For Adorno, the promise of pleasure is the promise of beauty, and it is a false promise, the desire for which leads us only towards madness, moral folly, and death. Thus, as recently as 1984, Adorno drew the conclusion that “even the innocent ‘How lovely!’ becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely and there is no longer beauty or consolation except for the gaze falling on horror” (Adorno and Jephcott, Minima Moralia 1). Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminists have long documented beauty’s coercive and harmful effects on women,5 and it would be remiss, in any study of beauty and evil—and, more broadly, in any account of the case against beauty—not to include some mention of their critiques.6 As noted by Carolyn Korsmeyer and Peg Brand Weiser in their article, “Feminist Aesthetics”: “Of all the concepts within aesthetics, for feminist consideration there is none so central, so contested, so rejected, as beauty” (4). Some reference to the feminist

Beauty and Evil  45 critique of beauty is especially relevant to the current study since it is the case that, when feminists speak about beauty, they usually speak about physical beauty, particularly the physical beauty of women, which tends to be roughly equated with (women’s) appearance, or what might be called “embodied beauty”: “One of the central exemplars of beauty has been the (young, pretty, pale-skinned) female body, which exerts erotic attraction and promises satisfaction of physical desire” (4). In other words, feminists are interested in “Sensuous Beauty”: the kind of beauty available to, and attractive to, immediate sensory perception. “Second wave” feminism issued a fundamental and sustained challenge to beauty, partly by drawing attention to the beauty industry. For instance, in 1968, the group New York Radical Women organised a picket of the Miss America Pageant. About 400 women gathered in Atlantic City, some parading (and crowning) sheep to protest models being judged like animals at a fair. These activists set up a “Freedom Trash Can” into which they piled bras, false lashes, high-heeled shoes, curlers, hairspray, girdles, corsets, and copies of magazines such as Playboy: items the protestors called “instruments of female torture” (The label “bra-burner” stuck as an all-purpose pejorative to characterise “radical” feminists). Among that group were authors of a statement accompanying the protest, which read “Women in our society are forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards that we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously” (Brownmiller 24). Beauty standards—the qualifications women were expected to meet to embody the “feminine beauty ideal” and thus succeed personally and professionally—were under attack. The protests spread, and, in November 1970, a group of feminist activists from the Britain’s Women’s Liberation Movement stormed the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, disrupting the Miss World Beauty contest. It was the most dramatic feminist event since Emily Davison threw herself under the king’s horse in 1913 in the name of women’s suffrage. In front of a seated audience and millions who were watching on TV around the globe, approximately 60 women—along with a relatively harmless arsenal of rotten vegetables, flour bombs, football rattles, and water pistols filled with ink—stormed into the hall, shouting the words: “We’re not beautiful! We’re angry!” Their rhetoric, their outright and outraged denial of their own beauty, was charged with an Anti-Aesthetic tone. These women were deliberately, aggressively, selfconsciously rejecting a notion of beauty which they thought was inhibiting their freedom. Their critique of the pageants centred on “beauty as a tool of patriarchal domination, seen to entrap women in narrow and restrictive norms of femininity, objectify their bodies, contribute to their subjugation, and make them ill” (Elias et al. 6).7 Indeed, “the politics of appearance” might be said to be foundational to the feminism that emerged in the West in the 20th century, with beauty

46  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty taking its “place alongside reproductive rights, violence against women, workplace and pay equality, and sexual freedom as a key issue of feminist concern” (Elias et al. 6). Many feminists have “analysed the phenomenon of feminine beautification as a crucial and oppressive moment in an overall patriarchal structure” (Cahill 42). Feminists in the 20th century gave fundamental critiques of the use of physical beauty as a set of norms to control women’s bodies or to “constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in profound and disabling ways” (Sartwell 4). Implicitly or explicitly, feminists have sometimes encouraged women to throw off the demands of physical beauty—the beauty of appearances—to gain social and political equality. Feminists have good reasons to distrust the discourse of beauty. For one thing, the philosophical language of the beautiful and the sublime has historically been strongly gendered.8 Feminist art historians have also exposed the ways in which the “beauty” of a painting has, in the history of Western art, long been conflated with representations of women (especially the nude) and with ideologies of gender. It has been essential to challenge such assumptions about beauty and to examine the ways in which such an aesthetic both obscures and reproduces the politics of gender. Amelia Jones has recently argued that questions of beauty are unavoidably compromised and that, regarding images of the naked female body in Western art, “there is always leakage polluting the supposedly disinterested authority of the discourse of beauty” (Jones 220). Another important focus of feminism’s kalliphobia is the political project shared more broadly with the aesthetic Avant-garde. As we have already seen, the artists such as Duchamp, whom Danto refers to as the “Intractable Avant-garde,” have been implacably and necessarily committed to aesthetic deprivation and the denial of beauty (Danto, Abuse 118). At the simplest level, this is because, as in the case of the famously confrontational and Anti-Aesthetic 1993 Whitney Biennial, such artists have political aims, and their work has non-traditional contents. “Theirs were contents it would have been wrong to beautify. Their aim was to change people’s moral attitudes. And beauty would have gotten in the way” (Danto, Abuse 118). The Anti-Aesthetic is premised on the recognition of the seductive, and de-politicising, effects of aesthetic pleasure, and the potential of “alienation effects” to awaken critical consciousness in the audience. From the point of view of feminist art practice, this involves deploying formal strategies of shock and unsettlement that, in the face of the critical-political content of art, disallow aesthetic distance, catharsis, or the consolations of beauty. One classic formulation puts it like this: “It is only through a critical understanding of ‘representation’ that a representation of ‘women’ can occur … Both the social constructions of femininity and the psychoanalytic construction of sexual difference can be foregrounded if the artwork

Beauty and Evil  47 attempts to rupture traditionally held and naturalised ideas about women” (Barry and Flitterman 117). In the remainder of this section, I offer an overview of the arguments against beauty which were made by second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005). There are very few feminist writings so clear and unequivocal on the harms of and need to eliminate what are considered natural beauty practices in the West as Dworkin’s. (Indeed, it is easy to overestimate the extent to which the sort of radical politics that Dworkin possessed in the early 70s were actually written down.)9 “Everyday beauty practices, such as the use of makeup or hair removal, were central to the feminist critique of beauty” (Jeffreys 14) launched by Dworkin in the ’70s. In Women Hating (1974), Dworkin writes in detail about how beauty practices both come from and feed into women’s oppression. She thinks that participation in socially demanded forms of beautification necessarily hinders women’s ability to function as equal, autonomous beings. She thus articulates a radically Anti-Aesthetic perspective by offering a scathing critique of the role that beauty plays in patriarchal socialisation. Dworkin thinks of beauty as an oppressive cultural practice that is damaging to women. In Woman Hating, she identifies the pressures within male dominance that cause women to feel they should “diet, depilate, and make up” (MacKinnon 42). Dworkin “rejects a masculine aesthetics” that causes women to feel their bodies are “inadequate” and to engage in expensive, time-consuming practices that leave them feeling that they are “inauthentic and unacceptable” (Jeffreys 15) when barefaced: “Plucking the eyebrows, shaving under the arms … learning to walk in high-heeled shoes,” Dworkin writes in Woman Hating (1974), “having one’s nose fixed, straightening or curling one’s hair – these things hurt. The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful” (85). Dworkin expresses how norms regarding women’s embodiment function to contain women thus: Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one. (85) Here, Dworkin argues that a woman’s pursuit of beauty is antithetical to her exercise of agency. The beauty standard is represented as an external force, so that the woman applying mascara or shaving her legs demonstrates

48  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty the extent to which she has been encroached upon by wider social forces: “These concepts of beauty and status defined women: as ornaments, as sexual playthings, as sexual constructs” (77). The analysis of beauty Dworkin offers in Woman Hating initially takes the form of literary criticism,10 specifically an aggressive fairy-tale critique. Dworkin focuses on Snow White and Sleeping Beauty as the embodiments of “passive beauty” (15). The texts teach us that “for a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as close to it as possible” (42), Dworkin thinks. Sleeping Beauty is “a beauteous lump of ultimate sleeping good” (17), while Snow White is “desirable in her beauty, passivity and victimization” (29). Both characters are “the object of every necrophiliac’s lust” that all “girls aspired to become” (16). “Beauty,” in other words, “meant male admiration, male alliance, male devotion” (19) but it also means women’s “end annihilation—death or complete submission” (31). Thus, Dworkin writes “in most fiction the female characterisation is synonymous with the figure’s beauty, its type, and most importantly, its effect on the male figures in the book” (42). Dworkin reads the tales as mimetic reflections of reality. Her assertion is that fairy tales have shaped our cultural values and understanding of gender roles by invariably depicting women as beautiful and passive while portraying men as active and heroic. Dworkin goes on to spell out, at length, the history of women’s debasement—using in particular the examples of the ancient Chinese practice of foot-binding and the widespread burning of alleged witches in Europe during the Middle Ages. Such challenges to appearance-related practices have longstanding roots. “Consider the magnitude of the crime” Dworkin writes, “Millions of human beings, over a period of 1,000 years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name of beauty” (81). Dworkin includes such Western technologies of beauty in her discussion of the painful acts women undergo to meet beauty standards. For instance, she ends her chapter on Chinese foot-binding with a graphic titled “Beauty Hurts,” which depicts an exaggerated female figure and lists a variety of Western interventions, such as suntanning and silicone breast implants alongside bound feet (117). The conclusion she reaches is that “the body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint and girdles and all varieties of crap” (86). Only through the rejection of beauty can women break the chains by which they are entrapped. The other oppressive elements of beauty that Dworkin remarks upon are that it is “vital to the economy” and “the major substance of male-female role differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman” (112). “We have the joining together of politics and morality coupled to produce their inevitable offspring—the oppression of women based on totalitarian standards of beauty and a rampant sexual fascism” (75), she writes. Beauty practices are “necessary so that the sexes

Beauty and Evil  49 can be told apart, so that the dominant sex class can be differentiated from the subordinate one. Beauty practices create, as well as represent, the ‘difference’ between the sexes” (Jeffreys 16). Dworkin’s own appearance is relevant in discourse about beauty surrounding her, since it seems that her embodiment, to some extent at least, animated her feminist stance and was reflective of it. Perhaps, recognising the dehumanising effects of not being able to define the terms and contours of one’s own embodiment and having one’s body continually regulated and judged, Dworkin purposely maintained an appearance that was dismissive of feminine norms, wearing her hair shaggy and regularly donning oversized overalls, regardless of the context. Katha Pollitt, writing for The Nation, remembers Dworkin in the following manner: “Andrea Dworkin was a living visual stereotype—the feminist as fat, hairy, makeup-scorning, unkempt lesbian.”11 Amplifying his disdain for Dworkin, Jonathan Gornal, in his obituary for the Times of London wrote that “Dworkin seemed to have only contempt for the body given her by nature, altering it to lend physical shape to her self-image—in Dworkin’s case not by plastic surgery, but by swallowing whole far too many portions of Susie Orbach’s maxim that fat is a feminist issue.”12 There is a lack of discussion regarding or a refusal to accept Dworkin’s strategic and purposeful efforts to eschew beauty norms for women. Some writers indicate that Dworkin’s appearance was used as a strategy of vilification, but they simultaneously combine that analysis with commentary that further grounds Dworkin in her body. For example, The Economist states that her appearance was “used as a tool of derision of stereotypical beauty standards,” but in a second breath, the magazine suggests that she “qualifies as a feminazi”: “While some of her critics simply disagreed with her analyses, others mocked her as too fat, too slovenly, too humourless … too strident, too man-hating. When the term ‘feminazi’ became a right-wing tool of derision in the early 1990s, many of its users probably had Ms. Dworkin in mind.”13 Writing for The Guardian, Katherine Viner notes, and details, a similar strategy of mockery: “Dworkin was famous for being fat. She was the stereotype of the Millie Tant feminist made flesh—overweight, hairy, un-made-up, wearing old denim dungarees and bad trainers—and thus a target for ridicule.”14 For others, however, Dworkin’s appearance is the subject of admiration, as some pay tribute to Dworkin’s refusal to conform to ideas of attractiveness. Dworkin herself was contemptuous of reactions to her appearance. “When women write about me,” she said, “they always talk about how they think I must feel about how I look. I find all of this close to absurd.”15 Dworkin’s own words provide some context for her decisionmaking. She did not pluck, shave, paint, coif, or engage in any of the other rituals women often follow. Derided and admired, Dworkin’s embodiment

50  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty was a strategic rhetorical response to women’s oppression, and she used it to reveal, question, and subvert standards of beauty for women. Her AntiAestheticism, her refusal to make any concessions for beauty, was deeply bound up in her philosophy. Twenty-five years after Dworkin published Woman Hating, Naomi Wolf (1962–) wrote The Beauty Myth (1990). She, too, argues that beauty norms continue to work as a mode of subjugation for women: “Like any economy, [beauty] is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact” (14). There is, according to Dworkin and Wolf, no rationale that could justify the obsessive preoccupation with beauty, and policing of, women’s appearance and sexuality.16 Feminist scholars have long written about the oppressive nature of beauty ideals and mandates for women, connecting feminine beauty ideology to the reproduction and maintenance of gender inequality. The politics of beauty remains a key set of issues and debates for feminism, stressing— for example—oppression by beauty norms, cultural domination, and an entrenched suspicion of the beauty-industrial complex. Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reaches one variety of radical critique and conclusion: “It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 60). Mulvey, like many other feminists and Anti-Aestheticians, locates beauty in pleasure, and also “at the heart of our oppression” (60). Dworkin represents this view in its most extreme form. In Woman Hating, she analyses the idea of beauty as one aspect of the way women are hated in male supremacist culture, and she indicts woman-hating culture for the deaths, violations, and violence done to women. Dworkin says that feminists ought to “look for alternatives—ways of destroying culture as we know it, rebuilding it as we can imagine it” (Dworkin 26). According to Dworkin, this must necessarily involve the rejection of beauty, which has extensive, harmful effects on women’s bodies and lives. Perhaps, no one was more opposed to the creation or appropriation of beauty than Dworkin. She expresses an unambiguously Anti-Aesthetic attitude. Conclusion In this chapter, I have developed my descriptive account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century. Based on the conceptualisation of beauty as sensual pleasure, I have indicated that, according to several key Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, beauty has been said to have no essential role in our moral and political lives. To do this, I have offered a reading of Mary Devereaux’s case study of Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, alongside an analysis of Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy and Andrea Dworkin’s

Beauty and Evil  51 feminist critique of beauty. I have suggested that beauty, when conceived of as a “merely sensuous” experience, can cooperate in the promotion of moral folly, and even of evil. We must now turn to the latter part of the 20th century, to see how this conception of beauty has led to both the concept and the experience of beauty becoming extracted from our lives. Notes 1 In the Western world, one concept which has been linked to beauty is kalokagathia, which is a contraction of to kalon and to agathon, “the good” and “the beautiful.” This ideal unites physical beauty and moral value in a human being. The scholastic philosophers William of Auvergne and William of Auxerre, according to Tatarkiewicz, identified “good” and “beautiful,” while Aquinas, among others, thought the concepts were merely coextensive. Tatarkiewicz’s volumes are very informative on this whole topic. 2 Gwendolen, as we later discover, takes “delight in her fortunate self” (18) and uses her beauty as collateral to justify her faults and bolster her self-assurance. Eliot reserves little in her negative depiction of Gwendolen’s vanity, her reliance on her beauty, and her willingness to rationalise away her failings with the aid of social approval. 3 Danto holds that “Picasso’s Guernica, for example, is not elegiac. It expresses shock and outrage. It too is black and white, but it would be false to call it beautiful” (Danto, Abuse 111). 4 For further discussion of Plato, see Chapter 6. 5 Feminist debates about the harms of beauty and beauty practices are ongoing, and any complete account of them is impossible here, where my aim is merely to introduce some Anti-Aesthetic themes. In addition to this, there are so many different perspectives on beauty among feminists that we can by no means speak of a singular perspective. Radical feminism, Marxist feminism, black and anti-racist feminisms, and postcolonial scholarship all offer contrasting accounts. See Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny; Davis, “Remaking the SheDevil”; Felski, “Because It Is Beautiful: New Feminist Perspectives on Beauty”; and Rhode “Appearance as a Feminist Issue.” 6 There are many summaries of beauty studies and some attempts to periodise the “lifespan” of feminist debates on beauty. See Chancer, Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography and the Future of Feminism; Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race; and Jha, The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body. 7 One of the other important critiques of beauty contests is that the participants are used for advertising questionable consumer goods like cigarettes and alcohol and hence become instruments for commercial gain. 8 See, for instance, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, by Edmund Burke. 9 Feminist historians have focused mainly on social, political, and legal events in describing the sex wars. Historians of feminism narrate the sex wars through the formation of radical and liberal feminist activist groups, conferences, protests, legal actions, antipornography city ordinances, censorship trials, and high-profile conflicts between major feminist figures. 10 In 1970, Kate Millett inaugurated the field of feminist literary criticism with Sexual Politics.

52  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty

3

Art without Beauty

Must art be beautiful? Hegel famously characterises true art as beautiful and is critical of work that claims to be “art” but fails to meet the criteria of beauty. As we have seen, all of this changed when Tolstoy declared that: Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure … (42) According to Tolstoy, works of art need not be beautiful for us to consider them important. This view, I think, is typical of and prevalent in Anti-Aesthetic thinking more generally, where beauty is not considered a necessary condition of the art object. Indeed, the late-20th-century view of beauty sees it as irrevocably opposed to any form of responsible politics. As we have seen, beauty is understood by Anti-Aesthetic thinkers as an ability of some objects (artworks included) to occasion in viewers a distinctive type of unmediated/pure pleasure—aesthetic pleasure. However, as Maria-Alina Asavei has noted “many contemporary critical artists and politically engaged artists deliberately produce an art as unappealing to the senses as possible (their attitude could be called, following Arthur Danto, ‘beauty phobia’)” (27720). Critical art is a type of art which usually does not strike us with beauty at first sight because this “political art” usually deals with “issues of social injustice and political struggles, rendering contemplation and aesthetic pure pleasure counterproductive” (27720). Therefore, the question is: to what extent is the category of “beauty” (as a merely sensuous pleasure) still valid and workable for political-critical art? As we shall see, according to Anti-Aesthetic thinkers: it isn’t. As Barnett Newman has observed, “The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty” (Newman 16). Beauty, according to Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, is at odds with political engagement, critical awareness, and the struggle for DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-6

54  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty social justice. After noticing these contemporary theoretical critiques of beauty, one could argue that there is no way to reconcile beauty and political-critical art since each of them “nullifies the other” (27720). My primary aim in this part of the book is to provide an account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century. In Chapter 1, I drew out what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism: namely, a conceptualisation of beauty as the “merely sensuous.” In Chapter 2, I  attempted to discover why, based on this conceptualisation, beauty is said not to have any essential role in our moral, political, and artistic lives. In this chapter, Chapter 3, I aim to show the ways in which beauty—based on these recommendations—has been excised from our artistic repertoire. I suggest that Conceptual Art is one of the best examples of how the AntiAesthetic movement divorced the idea of “Sensual Beauty,”—beauty as perceptual, sensory experience—from the ideas of art. I also suggest that Arthur Danto defends a philosophical definition of art divorced from aesthetic experience. Finally, I offer an interpretation of Andres Serrano’s The Morgue, which, I argue, highlights some of the major consequences for beauty of Anti-Aestheticism in art. Conceptual Art Conceptual Art is an art movement which was initially active in the 1960s and 1970s. It originated in Germany and spread quickly around Europe and America, where Piero Manzoni (1933–63), Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), and Joseph Kosuth (1945–) were part of the “first wave.” In 1961, Henry Flynt (1940–) coined the term “Concept Art” in an article which appeared in the An Anthology of Chance Operations (Flynt 25). “Concept Art,” Flynt maintains, is meant to “supersede the formalistic element to art” (25) then current in art circles. The term was used by Joseph Kosuth and the English Art and Language Group (Art after Philosophy 232). In 1969, they “discard[ed] the conventional art object in favour of a documented critical inquiry into the artist’s social, philosophical, and psychological status” (232) in their magazine Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art (1969–85). Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects— the first Conceptual Art exhibition—took place in 1970 at the New York Cultural Centre (Godrey 19). Today, the label “Conceptual Art” names a broader trend in art, taken to begin with Duchamp’s Fountain in 1917, and including second- or third generation “Conceptualists” such as Martin Creed (1968–), Andrea Fraser (1965–), and Damien Hirst (1965–). Conceptual Art emerged as a movement in “part as a reaction against formalism” (Greenberg, Art 59). In the introduction to Art and Culture (1961), Clement Greenberg (1909–94) claims that modern art and art criticism ought to follow a process of refinement towards defining

Art without Beauty  55 the “essential nature of each medium” (Greenberg, Art 59). The task of painting, for example, is to “define what kind of object a painting is” (59). Since it is “the nature of paintings to be flat objects with surfaces onto which pigment is applied, extraneous features such as figuration, 3-D perspective illusion and references to the external subject matter” (Rorimer 11) should be removed. Some argue that Conceptual Art continues this “dematerialization” of art by “eliminating the need for objects all together” (Wood  37). Lawrence Weiner (1942–) says: “Once you know about a work of mine, you own it. There’s no way I can climb inside somebody’s head and remove it” (quoted in Knight 63). Many Conceptual Artists’ works can be judged through documentation, such as “photographs, written texts or displayed objects, but they are not reduced to these manifestations” (64). Sometimes, as with the work of Robert Barry (1936–) and Yoko Ono (1933–), artworks can be “reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work but stopping short of making it”; such a phenomenon emphasises the “idea as more important than the artifact.” Thus, in Conceptual Art, the ideas involved in the work take precedence over “aesthetic, technical and material concerns” (Wood 19). The main difficulty that any inquiry into Conceptual Art faces is about how to identify the object under scrutiny. “Conceptual Artists have created works that are so different from each other that it seems impossible to find common elements in their productions” (Sauchelli 1). According to the art historian Paul Wood: [I]t is not at all clear where the boundaries of ‘conceptual art’ are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include. Looked at in oneway, conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists … Then again, regarded under a different aspect, conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present. (6) However, Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens have singled out some common features of Conceptual Artworks in the introduction to their collection of edited essays, Philosophy and Conceptual Art: We would like to advance the following characteristic features of conceptual art, with the caveat that, in doing so, we wish firmly to avoid advancing a conclusive definition as such. 1 Conceptual art aims to remove the traditional emphasis on sensory pleasure and beauty, replacing it with an emphasis on ideas and the view that the art object is to be “dematerialized.”

56  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty 2 Conceptual art sets out to challenge the limits of the identity and definition of artworks and questions the role of agency in art-making. 3 Conceptual art seeks, often as a response to modernism, to revise the role of art and its critics so that art-making becomes a kind of art criticism, at times also promoting anti-consumerist and anti-establishment views (Goldie and Schellekens xii–xiii, my italics). The foremost feature shared by Conceptual artworks is, the editors propose, a tendency to “remove the traditional emphasis on sensory pleasure and beauty, replacing it with an emphasis on ideas.” Here, authors explicitly associate the term “beauty” with the expression “sensory pleasure” and indicate that, for Conceptual artists, they are near synonymous. The Conceptual Art commitment to “the idea behind the work” is something we can refer to as the “Work = Idea view” (Hanson 247). Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), an artist linked to the original movement in the 1960s, claimed in his artistic manifesto that “in conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work” (79). Thus, if the “artist explores or carries through her idea into a visible form, then all the steps in the process are of importance” (LeWitt 14). The execution, or the work, is “merely perfunctory” (14): The material realisation can be a constitutive part of the work but should be seen as subordinate to concepts and ideas. Other characterisations of Conceptual Art emphasise this ‘dematerialisation’ of the object of art: given that ideas can also be works of art, their concrete realisations are not the principal point for their evaluation. (Sauchelli 1) Conceptual artists and critics claim that “the art exists only as an invisible, ethereal idea” and “the actual works of art are ideas” (Sauchelli 1). Thus, in the case of Conceptual Art, “the work of art is identified with an idea rather than an object” (Hanson 247).1 To give one example of the Work = Idea view: in 1953, Robert Rauschenberg procured a drawing by the artist Willem de Kooning (1904–97) and erased it. He then “exhibited the resulting nearly blank piece of paper as his own artwork” (Hanson 247) titling it Erased de Kooning Drawing. This work is thought to raise essential questions about the nature of artwork. It could be described as “ghostly, audacious, or poetic” (247), but seeing it in a gallery-setting will not necessarily help us to know whether or not we agree with these judgements. Erased de Kooning Drawing subverts the traditional, perceptual, conception of artistic meaning. If there is artistic value to de Kooning’s piece, it resides in the background knowledge we have about it, not

Art without Beauty  57 in what we see in it. Such background knowledge can, for instance, be the knowledge that there was previously a painting where there is now an almost blank canvas; that the painting was a de Kooning; that it is now erased; that Rauschenberg erased it; and that even though Rauschenberg erased it and it is no longer there visually, it is still with mount and frame and positioned in a prominent place on a gallery wall. (Konigsberg 153) Since Erased de Kooning Drawing has no real aesthetic properties (they have been erased), “we are in just as good a position to judge the work based on a description of it, as we would be if we were standing in front of it” (Hanson 250). We do not need to be immediately physically acquainted with the object of Erased de Kooning Drawing to legitimately form beliefs about it. Such works can be assessed, even fully understood, and appreciated, through reading or listening to accurate descriptions of the author’s intention and the work’s presentation, irrespective of any first-hand experience of the work. Anyone who believes that artwork requires aesthetic judgements may claim that these Conceptual works are not relevant to art, simply because they do not seem to have “relevant aesthetic properties” (Hanson 250). One could also reply to the work (or the theory) in this way, without claiming that contact with a work is required for the “ascription of artistic qualities”—only that contact is necessary for the “ascription of aesthetic qualities,” which means, in the first instance, “sensual qualities” (Hanson 250). If we draw a distinction between aesthetic and artistic value, we may claim that appreciation of artistic value does not require immediate acquaintance, while the appreciation of aesthetic value does. Noel Carroll puts it this way, when speaking about Duchamp: I conjecture that quite often commentators who have not directly encountered Fountain have nevertheless made insightful remarks about it or, at least, have thought them to themselves when they have heard or read about Fountain second hand—that is, so to say, “gotten it,” but without eyeballing it. Have they not then had an aesthetic experience? (“Aesthetic Experience” 78) If the commentators’ remarks are about the subsequent influence of the work for the history of art, they are not about specific aesthetic features of the work, though they may perhaps be artistic judgements. One might claim that Duchamp’s Fountain is an “artistically influential and theoretically rich work of art” (Sauchelli 3), even without inspecting it. The “supposed object of Fountain—a urinal—was never designed or manufactured as an object for aesthetic appreciation” (Konigsberg 21). Indeed, in the

58  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty case of Fountain, it is the fact that something which is not a work of art has been placed in a context for aesthetic appreciation by a renowned artist that makes it into a work of art. It is effectively this act that transforms the urinal into something deserving of artistic appreciation (Konigsberg 154). In the contemporary art world, it has been widely recognised that esteemed curators, collectors, and artists have a “Midas-like ability” to call attention to a work. By installing it in a gallery, they “inaugurate it as belonging to the art world and consequently endow it with a value of some sort” (Konigsberg 154) as Andy Warhol did with Brillo Boxes (1964). Other times the factor that establishes a work as a work of art is not “who the person is that does the artistic inauguration but rather the context within which the work is located” (Konigsberg 154). Catellana’s Comedian (2019), for example, consists of a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall at an Art Basel exhibition in Miami Beach. None of this says anything about Fountain, Brillo Boxes, or Comedian as objects of aesthetic appreciation. A Conceptual work that seems to be a counterexample to the claim that the realm of art need not include aesthetic features is Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. The work consists of three objects: a chair, a photograph of that chair placed on the wall, and, besides the picture on the wall, a dictionary definition of a chair (Sauchelli 1). “One might argue that, to appreciate, gauge, evaluate, and express aesthetic judgments about One and Three Chairs, we need a description of it, and some information about Plato’s theory of Forms and Kosuth’s philosophical readings. We do not need to investigate the real installation itself” (1). One and Three Chairs, however, shows us three possible representational means of reality: “material objects, photographic representation, and linguistic description” (1). To become aware of the relationships between them, relying solely on a description would miss the point entirely: we appreciate only one possible way of representation, “the dictionary or linguistic one.” “In confining ourselves to a description, we are thereby confined to the linguistic means of representing reality, which prevents us from appreciating the work in its entirety” (1). To understand the work fully, “in all its aspects, we need to stand in front of a real chair, a photograph of it, and a linguistic definition of it” (1). One response would be to say that One and Three Chairs is not a Conceptual Artwork. Given that Conceptual Art does not require direct contact (because of work’s non-aesthetic nature or the immateriality of its objects) to ground our judgements, we must either (1) contend that art is a notion that denotes more than, or completely excludes, that which can be perceived or (2) deny that Conceptual Art is art. If the Work = Idea view (Hanson 256) is correct, then the objects we see in galleries are not the actual works. If Erased de Kooning Drawing, for example, is an idea, then the thing displayed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, whatever it is, is not the

Art without Beauty  59 work (Hanson 258). “The claim commonly made by those who hold the Work = Idea view is that the object is a means of documenting the work. If Work = Idea and the object is just a documentation of it, then the object’s ­destruction would leave the work intact” (Hanson 258). Conceptual art’s commitment to the cognitive value of art calls for the rejection of aesthetic value, and, by extension, to the rejection of beauty, conceived of as a “merely sensuous” pleasure. The Australian art critic and theorist Donald Brook attempts to explain the “anti-aesthetic” connotations of Conceptual art. First, he thinks conceptual art is “sensory mode indifferent” (Brook 49). In other words, the concept takes precedence over the percept, and thus “conceptualism is an anti-aesthetic form of art.” Conceptual art is also “sensory mode independent” (49) in the sense that it is “indifferent to the senses as it is anti-aesthetic but is also independent of the senses as it upholds the idea whether or not there is a physical manifestation of it” (49). Finally, Conceptual art is a restricted “meta-activity” (50). This is an “essential quality of conceptual art because it properly appreciates the fact that conceptual art comments on the notion of art itself” (50). Thus, Brook argues, Conceptual art carries the mantel of suspicion that grew from Anti-Aesthetic discourse. The fact that the Anti-Aesthetic movement associates the term “beauty” with aesthetic, aka “merely sensuous,” experience, makes it inappropriate to ask the most tempting question: can ideas be beautiful? As Goldie and Schellekens point out, the one final “question we have to turn to in order to establish the extent to which conceptual art really is anti-aesthetic, if indeed at all, is this: can the ideas constitutive of conceptual artworks have aesthetic value?” (Goldie and Schellekens 75). Since Anti-aesthetic thinkers understand beauty to be an aesthetic category—that is, a property apprehended merely by the sense—their wholesale rejection of aesthetic experience includes the loss of beauty, so conceived. Conceptual art may be intellectually stimulating, interpretively rewarding, and interesting, but it is not intended to be sensuously beautiful. In his paper “The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art,” James Shelley rejects the assumption that aesthetic principles must be perceptual, thereby posing the possibility that the disputed conceptual works may possess aesthetic properties. Shelley considers the following three propositions: (R) Artworks necessarily have aesthetic properties that are relevant to their appreciation as artworks. (S) Aesthetic properties necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses. (X) There exist artworks that need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks (Shelley 364).

60  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty Shelley claims that “the independent plausibility and apparent joint inconsistency of these three propositions” gives rise to what he refers to as “the problem of non-perceptual art” (364). According to Shelly, there are three ways of solving the problem. The first solution affirms (R) and (S) while denying (X). The second solution affirms (S) and (X) while denying (R), and the third solution affirms (R) and (X) while denying (S). (Shelley indicates that advocates of the first include Clement Greenberg and Monroe Beardsley, while advocates of the second include Arthur Danto and Noel Carroll.) Shelley himself advocates for the third solution. In other words, for Shelley, aesthetic properties do not necessarily depend on “properties perceived by means of the five senses” (364). One point that Shelley makes in support of this claim is that “it is hard to see how literary works can be aesthetic” (373): another is the “parallel difficulty posed by the aesthetic status of theorems and proofs” (377). Noel Carroll replies to Shelley in his paper “Non-perceptual aesthetic properties: Comments for James Shelley.” As Carroll sees it, Shelley probes “the question of whether certain kinds of art – notably the sort of conceptual art often referred to as anti-aesthetic – truly lack aesthetic properties. This view is often supported by presupposing that aesthetic properties necessarily depend on properties perceived by the five senses. But many conceptual works do not require being perceived in order to be understood and processed appropriately” (413). Carroll agrees. He says “we can traffic with aesthetic properties without perceiving them, so to speak, face-to-face” (414) and “artworks may have non-perceptual aesthetic properties” (419). Much of the discussion between Shelley and Carroll is centred on Duchamp’s Fountain. Shelley argues that we can attribute properties such as “daring, impudence, irreverence, wit and cleverness to Fountain” (Shelley ­ 370) and that we have no grounds on which to deny these properties aesthetic status. “Wit and cleverness” are “relevant as reasons for judgment” no less than “grace and elegance” (Shelley 370)—especially since some claim that aesthetic properties are merely properties we take pleasure in (as opposed to perceptual properties). To this, Carroll adds that “one might not literally see humour when one looks at Fountain: it may not be detectable by sight. But it is felt.” Shelley and Carroll thus depict the “sense of humour” (Carroll, “Non-Perceptual Aesthetic Properties” 418) as an “aesthetic property” despite its not being “dependent on the operation of the five senses” (418)—they are “registered in sensation sans precepts” (418): “Thus a conceptual piece like Fountain may be said to possess aesthetic properties – properties intimately connected with feeling – even though they need not be literally perceived by one of the five senses” (418). In this regard, Shelley and Carrol both offer arguments which “establish that a great deal of what has been called anti-aesthetic art might have been more

Art without Beauty  61 accurately called ‘anti-perceptually aesthetic art’” (419). Considering all this, one might well ask, as Schellekens does, “whether the anti-aesthetic conceptual project actually succeeds, and whether it is philosophically sound. After all, are conceptual artworks really always non-aesthetic …” (Goldie and Schellekens 72)? Arthur Danto (1924–2013) According to philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, for the most part, the 20th century rejected beauty as the primary goal of the arts.2 In the early part of his career, Danto himself defended a definition of art separated from aesthetics. He conceived this elimination of beauty from art “as a device for dissociating the artists from the bourgeois society they held in contempt” (Danto, Abuse 69). In the later part of his career, Danto claimed that beauty can be present in art but is not essential to it, nor, indeed, a necessary part of it. Danto thus joins the Anti-Aesthetic movement because he claims that what is sensorially discernible no longer enables one to distinguish between works of art and other objects. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1974), Danto claims that Conceptual artworks, for instance, “share a tendency to replace the emphasis on sensual pleasure and beauty with a focus on ideas and show that while the material realisation can be a constitutive part of the work, it should be seen as subordinate to concepts and ideas” (Sauchelli 5). Danto was impressed by Warhol’s display of wooden constructions painted to resemble the boxes, in which Brillo pads were packed, and incorporated this development in the art world into his analysis of art by presenting a non-perceptive criterion for art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto explains the “ontological difference” between “works of art” and “mere objects” (vii), which, for him, ultimately depends on knowing the theory behind the art: “what in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory” (180). Danto argues that the properties available to perception underdetermine the difference between art and non-art. In other words, aesthetic appreciation is irrelevant to what makes Brillo Box a work of art. Danto argues that the “two necessary conditions for a philosophical definition of art” (“Embodied Meanings” 121) are (a) that art is “about something and hence possesses meaning,” and (b) that an artwork “embodies its meaning,” which is what art criticism addresses (121): That art need not be constrained by aesthetic considerations was probably the major conceptual discovery in twentieth-century art. It effectively liberated artists from the imperative to create only what is beautiful, and at the same time freed the philosophy of art from having to concern

62  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty itself with the analysis of beauty. (Danto, “Beauty for Ashes” quoted in Benezra and Olga 184) Following this line of argument, Danto implies that those things the eye can decry, such as beautiful, “visually pleasurable” things (184), are unnecessary to art: “to see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art-world” (“The Artworld” 61). As we have seen, Conceptual artists of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s reject the aesthetic definition of art and aim to produce an art not aesthetically pleasing but drawing attention to its meaning. Consequently, aesthetic properties as part of the idea of art disappear at that time, which explains why Danto did not consider analysing their role in art until recently. As Danto remembers, “the artists that mattered were predominately Duchamp and Warhol, Eva Hesse, the Minimalists and the Conceptualists, in whose work aesthetics are of negligible significance” (“The Artworld” 61). Thus, in much of his early work, Danto affirms the essential conceptuality of the artwork. He argues that “the sensible” is not sufficient to capture the meaning of a work of art, and since beauty is “the sensible” (for him, as for other Anti-Aestheticists), he denies any necessary link between art and beauty (“The Artworld” 574). According to Danto, the rejection of beauty from art became a “device for disassociating artists from the society that they held in contempt” (Barranco 139). “Beautifiers” had been turned into “collaborationists” (Danto, Abuse 36). The politicisation of beauty led those amongst the Avant-garde to create Anti-Aesthetic art (145). As a result, the “political critique of bourgeois society was made under the guise of a critique of the aesthetic values with which those who mounted that critique associated bourgeois society” (145). Indeed, Danto later commented that he “might then have proposed that every beautiful work can be viewed as an allegory of political well-being, and disharmonic work as an allegory of social pathology” (Steiner, Venus in Exile 130). Danto never says that art cannot or should not be beautiful, and in this sense, Danto is not committed to Anti-Aestheticism. He maintains only that art need not be beautiful and, often, is not. Considering this view, we can discover in more detail the role that beauty does play in Danto’s philosophy of art. In his more recent work, such as Beyond the Brillo Box (1992) and The Abuse of Beauty (2003), Danto develops an analysis of beauty in art by examining his previous reflections, and questioning why he did not, at first, include beauty in his definition of art. Danto’s critic Cascales concludes that “beauty was not part of his definition because it is not part of the essence of art. If beauty were part of the essence of art, he [Danto] argues, it could not be said of so many works of art that, despite not being beautiful, they are, without a doubt, works

Art without Beauty  63 of art” (Cascales 248). It is worth noting that the separation between art and beauty is not something Danto proposes as an original contribution (248). It is something Cascales observes as having already occurred in the work of the artists themselves, the artists Danto theorises about, such as Duchamp and Warhol, and those he calls the “intractable avant-garde” (Danto, Abuse 36). These artists show that beauty—when understood as “purely perceptual” or “purely pleasurable”—is not an essential property of art (Danto, Abuse 36). Danto’s view that beauty is not a necessary condition for art is thus based on a descriptive account of art. His approach is fraught with difficulty, since it is a prior question of what the field of description should encompass—some might claim that Brillo Boxes and Fountain are not art. One might argue this precisely because they think those ready-mades are not beautiful. According to Danto, these artists and their work show that beauty is “not consubstantial to the concept of art” (Cascales 248) but rather clarifies an understanding that an object can be a work of art, even a good work of art, without being beautiful. The claim that beauty is not part of the essence of art does not, according to Danto, mean that beauty can no longer be present in art—only that it is not a necessary property. Danto affirms that “even if beauty proved far less central to the visual arts than had been taken for granted in the philosophical tradition, that does not entail that it is not central to human life” (Abuse vii). Danto also maintains that beauty can become relevant and important when interpreting certain works of art. To account for and explain the kinds of artworks that can be considered beautiful, Danto institutes a contrast between “external” and “internal” beauty. He says that the former refers to the external appearance of the work—the “agreeable” or “sensuous” qualities, which are commonly required (at least in the Anti-Aesthetic postmodern art world) to judge a work as “beautiful” (Danto, Abuse vii). He dismisses the idea that beauty, so conceived, is a necessary and sufficient condition of art. Next, Danto turns to “artistic” beauty, which, he explains, is his term for the type of beauty “linked to the content of a work” (Abuse 95), the beauty which forms a constituent part of its “internal” meaning. Danto refers to this second type of beauty as “artistic beauty” since he considers that it is found exclusively in art. By “artistic beauty,” he means the “coherence between the idea and its sensible expression in the artwork” (Cascales 3). In Danto’s words: [A]rtistic beauty plays a role in the meaning of the work to which it belongs. One can say 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. (Danto, Abuse 97)

64  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty “Purely sensible pleasure” is not, according to Danto, sufficient to capture the meaning of a work of art, but it can contribute to meaning in cases of “internal” beauty (Abuse 98). Danto’s analysis of art and beauty thus illuminates one of the problematic implications of the “Sensual” understanding of beauty. According to the Anti-Aesthetic notion of beauty as the “merely sensuous,” beauty is an aesthetic feature, and, again according to the Anti-Aesthetic position, the designation that a work is aesthetic does not and cannot distinguish it as art. Andres Serrano (1950–) The term “transgression”3 was first used to denote art that outrages or violates basic moral and artistic norms and sensibilities by the American filmmaker Nick Zedd (1958–2022). He used the word “transgression” to describe the aims of his Cinema of Transgression Movement—a New York-based underground film movement composed of a loose-knit group of artists. Zedd composed the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto in 1985. He writes: Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition. Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men … This act of courage is known as transgression. (Zedd 1) A new group of transgressive artists emerged, among them the Canadian artist Rick Gibson (1951–) who in 1989 made a pair of earrings out of human foetuses (the sculpture was titled Human Earrings) and ate human tonsils and a human testicle.4 In 1998, the Chinese artist Zhu Yu (1970–) published images of himself eating human brains (titled The Foundations of all Epistemology) and what appears to be a dead baby (Eating People). Among the most notorious works of transgressive art are Andres Serrano’s (1950–) photographs of classical statuettes submerged in various fluids, including the infamous Piss Christ (1987)—a photograph depicting a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass tank of the artist’s urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946–89) photographs of sexual torture, anal fisting, and urophagia.5 Such well-publicised cases are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There are scores of other artists producing work that is equally transgressive: Ron Athey (1961–), an HIV positive performance artist, sliced abstract designs into the flesh of another man and then mopped up the blood with paper

Art without Beauty  65 towels and suspended them above his audience on clotheslines (4 Scenes of a Harsh Life); Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) slowly unravelled a text from her vagina while reading it aloud to her audience (Interior Scroll); Vito Acconci (1940–2017) spent eight hours a day over three weeks crawling around and masturbating in an attempt to scatter his semen as his audience walked above him (Seedbed); Sigalit Landau (1969) rotated a hula-hoop made from barbed wire around her naked body (Barbed Hula), and so on (it would be a simple matter to produce an anthology of such examples). The term “transgressive” can be applied to literature as well: for instance, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all focus on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways. When we step back to consider the nature and significance of transgressive art, from the perspective of the current study, one of the foremost peculiarities is the negligible role that beauty plays. Indeed, such transgressive arts as those mentioned above, produced in pursuit of aesthetic iconoclasm, are firmly a desecration of “Sensuous Beauty”—in that they are not intended to produce pleasure. They are intended to “challenge,” “change,” and “shock” (Zedd 1)—we might do well to recall Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx and Engels 36). Proponents of transgressive work claim that it is capable of incisive social commentary, unbound by usual restrictions of taste and artistic convention. For this reason, beauty in transgressive art is always subordinate to the work’s ideological functions in negotiations of class and power, gender, and politics. Beauty is seen at best an evasion or escape from the problems of social reality and political engagement. In transgressive art, the very ambition to produce beautiful works is otiose. Consider, for example, Andres Serrano’s work The Morgue (The Causes of Death) (1992), a series of almost three dozen large-scale photographs of unidentified cadavers in an undisclosed morgue, bearing individual titles such as Rat Poison Suicide, Knifed to Death, Gun Murder, and Jane Doe Killed by Police. Originally displayed in Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City’s SoHo district, all the separate images which compose the collection are set against a black backdrop in a mortuary and show dead bodies in different stages of decomposition, ready to be cremated, having died from various causes—AIDS, pneumonia, poison, stab wounds, burning, hanging, and drowning. Rather than traditional memento mori symbols—skulls, withering flowers, ticking clocks—Serrano confronts the modern viewer with actual corpses to remind us that we will all die, some of us violently.

66  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty Serrano is quite explicit about the fact that this is his only intention. In an interview with Bomb Magazine, Anna Blume asks Serrano to explain the point of The Morgue. She says: “You bring us close, very close to details of dead bodies, which sets off an alarm of feeling and thinking, but all this stops on the surface, and we are left as voyeurs rather than as witnesses of death. I wonder as I look at the photographs what are you trying to do with this show, what are you doing with dead bodies?” (Blume 3). To which Serrano responds: The morgue is a secret temple where few people are allowed. Paradoxically, we will all be let in one day. I think you’re upset and confused that I’ve brought you there prematurely. My intention is only to take you to this sacred place. The rest is entirely up to you. I explored this territory with fresh eyes and an open mind. I want the audience to do the same … (Blume 3) How might the philosopher of beauty explore this “sacred place,” this “territory,” The Morgue? Is there anything here for her to contemplate? What are the philosophical links between beauty and death6? Are they “facets of the same experience, or perennial opposites?” French philosopher Julia Kristeva (1941–) asks in her book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989). “Can the beautiful be sad?” she continues, “Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destruction and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death?” She concludes that “beauty represents an artificial, imaginary conquering of death that allows life to continue” (Kristeva 97–98). Kristeva suggests that the opposite of beauty is not ugliness: it is death, that the absence of beauty precisely constitutes the presence of death7. I would not go so far as to say that all representations of death lack beauty. I would not even venture to say that all representations of violence lack beauty. Serrano’s series, of course, echo a tradition that is more than two millennium old: death and violence are two of the most pervasive themes in art history, especially in religious painting. According to Ben Lifson (1941–2013), who was among the most influential minds in late20th century photography criticism: We live with art concerning death because in it beauty, love, and the imagination contend with the horror of mortality, conceding to it from the outset all its power; in order to transcend, imaginatively, momentarily, but repeatedly, what Walter Benjamin called simply “the fear”; and for the sense, created ultimately by aesthetic pleasure, that something human is at least as great as the enemy and (like love) gets up for every

Art without Beauty  67 round despite our particular defeats. Taken as a whole, humanity’s responses to death, from children’s dead-baby jokes to Lear’s lament over Cordelia’s body, run the gamut of our emotional and imaginative responses. But Serrano’s pictures fall within the realm of social, not aesthetic, responses. They resemble the attention-seeking utterances of a bore trying to impress us with his sangfroid, his blasé, deadpan, yet somehow sanctimonious urbanity, as he rubs our noses in mere fact. (Lifson 130) No one could not claim that Serrano’s work lacks aesthetic features: the images which compose The Morgue series clearly owe much to the Italian Renaissance and the early Baroque era—the evocative lighting, the thick, black background of velvet-like curtains, the simplicity of forms, the closely cropped, emphatic narratives, the subtle tones, and the rich colours. All this seems to be a successful demonstration of the relationship between the history of painting and postmodern aspirations for photo-based art. The polychrome flesh is like stained fabric, and the way it is punctuated by hairs, wounds, crevices, and body fluids oozing from wounds is exceedingly painterly. It is almost as if Serrano wants to trick the viewer; to manipulate her into finding beauty where there is none. The work’s aesthetic features—the light, the emphasis, the drapery, the arrangements— frame scenes of horrific violence, torture, neglect, and criminality. Serrano thus rejects the humanist impulses of the Renaissance towards maintaining the dignity and integrity of the body. The corpses are disconnected from personal identity and biography, bereft of connotation alluding to family, community, and loved ones. As Serrano himself admits: “I never knew them as human beings. I never knew what languages they spoke, what their religious or political beliefs were, how much money they had, or who they loved. All I know about them is the cause of death” (Blume 1). But “causes precede death” Lifson urges, “Serrano gives us only effects” (130). Serrano’s aestheticisation of death and violence in The Morgue provides a final twist to Anti-Aesthetic thinking, and a new attack on beauty. Serrano’s painterly compositions and rich tonalities create strange juxtapositions with his confrontational subject matter. The work’s formal aesthetic features tease and promise beauty and pleasure which are denied by its content: dead bodies immortalised in excruciating conditions. Serrano thus reclaims the aesthetic domain in his art without embracing beauty. Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how beauty was excised from our artistic repertoire. I have suggested that Conceptual Art is an example of the way in which the Anti-Aesthetic movement divorced the idea of beauty—as

68  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty a perceptual, sensual pleasure—from ideas in art. I have argued that Danto defends a philosophical definition of art detached from aesthetics, and that his philosophy highlights this split between art and beauty as one of the major consequences of Anti-Aestheticism. I have also suggested that, for transgressive artists such as Andres Serrano, beauty is otiose, in that it  serves no practical purpose. It is now appropriate to turn our sights, in the next part of the book, to the Beauty Revival movement and their response to Anti-Aestheticism. This will enable us to further assess some of the deeper implications of Anti-Aesthetic thought, and to offer a critique of some of their negative ramifications. Notes 1 See, for example, Alberro and Blake, eds., Conceptual Art; Dickie, “The Institutional Conception of Art”; Goldman, “Interpreting Art and Literature”; Sibley, “Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic.” 2 Danto explores this decline of interest in artistic beauty during the 20th century across a range of texts, most explicitly in his book The Abuse of Beauty (2003). 3 The concept of “transgression” was developed in the framework of the continental philosophy of postmodernism by such authors as Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), and Michel Foucault (1926– 84). Indeed, the starting point for the popularity of the word “transgression” is Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression,” an essay written in the 1963 memorial issue of the review Critique devoted to Georges Bataille, who had died the previous year. The essay uses Story of the Eye by Bataille as an example of transgressive fiction. 4 Because England does not have a law against cannibalism, Gibson legally ate donated human tonsils in Walthamstow High Street, London, on 23 July 1988. A year later, on 15 April 1989, he ate a slice of human testicle in Lewisham High Street, London. When he tried to eat another slice of human testicle at the Pitt International Galleries in Vancouver on 14 July 1989, the Vancouver police confiscated it. However, the charge of publicly exhibiting it was dropped and he finally ate it on the steps of the Vancouver courthouse on 22 September 1989. 5 The Mapplethorpe obscenity trial marked the first time a museum was taken to court on criminal charges related to works on display. In 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, Ohio, held an exhibit of photographs by the late artist. The CAC’s director, Dennis Barrie, attempted a pre-emptive strike aimed at heading off an obscenity prosecution. The CAC filed an action for a declaratory judgement, asking the court to declare the exhibit not obscene, but on 6 April 1990, the court refused and dismissed the action. The next day, the Hamilton County Grand Jury indicted CAC and Barrie for criminal violations of the Ohio obscenity statute. The trial began on 24 September 1990, and on 5 October 1990, the eight jurors found CAC and Barrie not guilty of the charges of displaying obscene material. “The expert testimony in the Mapplethorpe trial, that photographs of transgressive acts should be valued for their arcs and diagonals, turned beauty into the form of a joke” writes Wendy Steiner in Venus in Exile (123).

Art without Beauty  69

Part 1: Conclusion

In Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004), Jacques Rancière acknowledges that “aesthetics has a bad reputation. Hardly a year passes without a new book proclaiming either that its time is over or that its harmful effects are being perpetuated” (Rancière 2). I have attempted to understand this phenomenon by providing the kind of account of Anti-Aestheticism that an adherent would give. As Alasdair MacIntyre maintains, “Within any welldeveloped school of thought, the question of precisely how its history up to this point ought to be written is characteristically one of those questions to which different and conflicting answers may be given within the school of thought” (Macintyre 4). The narrative task itself involves participation in that conflict. It is, nevertheless, with an emphasis on the narrative form that I have begun. What Anti-Aestheticism has to say, both to those within and outside it, cannot be disclosed in any other way. During the 20th century, beauty was stripped from art and intellectual discourse to free both art and philosophy from “bourgeois values’” embedded in traditions that seemed inappropriate for the time: Artists and philosophers responded, and one of their predominant themes was that art must be a quest for reality, however brutal, not beauty. For Anti-Aesthetic thinkers, beauty is a subtle but devastating problem. Beauty involves an intimate relation to desire and gratification; it arises from somatic urges—not the intellect or the spirit; it is carnal, appetitive, seductive, indulgent, fleshy, base, vulgar, primitively interested, hedonically toned, and—above all else—pleasurable. And, since physical pleasure does not point to anything beyond itself, the experience of beauty is, ultimately, both meaningless and destructive. Thus, by the end of the 20th century, had Anti-Aesthetic thinkers reduced one of the central concepts in the history of European culture and philosophy. My primary aim in Part 1 has been to provide a descriptive account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century, with an emphasis on developing an account of the notion of beauty which

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-7

Part 1: Conclusion  71 Anti-Aestheticism employs: “Sensuous Beauty.” I had three secondary aims, represented in each of the three constituent parts of the chapter: (1) to draw out what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism: namely, a conceptualisation of beauty as “merely sensuous,” linked to pleasure and appearance; (2) to discover why, based on this conceptualisation, beauty is said to have no essential or necessary role to play in our moral, political, and artistic lives; and (3) to show, as clearly as possible, how beauty was excised from our philosophical lexicon and artistic repertoire. My project in this chapter ultimately amounts to a charitable reconstruction of the Anti-Aesthetic position—with an emphasis on the reconstruction of AntiAesthetic arguments against beauty. In the first part of the chapter, I described the advent of Anti-Aestheticism in the first decades of the 20th century. I showed that Tolstoy advocated for an understanding of beauty as sensuous pleasure in What Is Art. I illustrated why, on this recommendation, Duchamp rejected beauty as a basis of artistic enterprise and “revolutionary praxis.” I demonstrated why Benjamin, again based on this recommendation, rejected beauty as a basis of moral and political life. In Part 2, I described the development of Anti-Aestheticism before and after the events of World War II. I used a case study of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to describe the conjunction of beauty and evil and referenced Adorno and Dworkin’s subsequent rejections of beauty. In Part 3, I provided an account of Anti-Aestheticism after the 1960s. I examined the rejection of aesthetic properties, including beauty, by Conceptual Artists, alongside some insights offered by Danto and the practice of transgressive artists. I have suggested that Anti-Aesthetic and kalliphobic tendencies are visible in each of these thinkers and artistic endeavours across a disparate range of texts. When placed together, they tell a coherent story about Anti-Aestheticism. Coda Since the beginning of the 21st century, there have been two conferences held to discuss Anti-Aestheticism. The first, “Aesthetic/Anti-Aesthetic,” was a session organised by James Meyer and Toni Ross for the 2003 College Art Association annual conference. The papers given were published, together with contributions developed especially for the issue, in Art Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, 2004. The second conference, “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic,” was held in 2010 at the Stone Art Theory Institute of Chicago and was presented, in book form, as Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, edited by James Elkins and Harper Montgomery, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2013.

72  Kalliphobia: The Case Against Beauty The cluster of essays that compose the “Aesthetic/Anti-Aesthetic” edition of Art Journal address the contemporary art world’s renewed engagement with aesthetics. In the introduction, the editors claim that: [T]he aim of this effort has been to bring anti-aesthetic and aesthetic positions into closer proximity than has typically been the case. Our working assumption or hope is that the historical split between the aesthetic’s focus on visual affect or pleasure and the critical or political aims of the anti-aesthetic may not be reconciled, perhaps, but calibrated in a less polarized way. (Meyer and Ross 20) However, most of the essays collected retain the tone of the aesthetic/AntiAesthetic polarity. Reprising elements of The Abuse of Beauty, Arthur Danto’s “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art” examines why 20th-century Avant-gardism rejected beauty as art’s highest ambition. Defining kalliphilia, “a love of beauty, as an essential human value allied with such positive notions as fortune and happiness, life at its best, and a world worth living in,” Danto explores how this concept became “anathema to advanced artistic practice” (“Kalliphobia” 24). In his essay “Transformations of the Image in Post-modernity,” Fredric Jameson describes the current “restitution of beauty as an ideologically motivated repression” (Meyer and Ross 20) of modernism’s deconstruction of these interests. Moreover, he sees “this revival as a thorough penetration of spectacle, of the late-capitalist commodity form of the image, into the aesthetic sphere” (Meyer and Ross 20). In “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Alexander Alberro “explores the present-day nostalgia for beauty within the art world and art criticism specifically” (Meyer and Ross 20). Alberro analyses the common themes that inform the recent literature on beauty, arguing that these accounts “consistently marginalize a critical engagement and a historical understanding of subjectivity made possible by such discourses as poststructuralism, cultural studies, feminism, and psychoanalysis” (Meyer and Ross 20).1 The second collection, Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, edited by James Elkins and Harper Montgomery, was published in 2013. The text addresses the fact that now, “more than 30 years after Hal Foster defined the Anti-Aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art” (Elkins and Montgomery xii). In the book’s introduction, the editors explain that “as a small subject, the anti-aesthetic is associated with Manhattan in the early 1980s” where it has been a “useful label for the activities of students and young artists” (1). The editors acknowledge, however, that the AntiAesthetic is also an “enormous subject” (1) and agree that this is not a well-studied subject, even though it includes a “bewildering profusion of texts” (1). Thus, there is “little hope” that Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic will have any real “coherence” (14).

Part 1: Conclusion  73 Nevertheless, the contents help elucidate the current condition of the Anti-Aesthetic. During the opening seminar, the five faculty—Hal Foster, Jay Bernstein, Eve Meltzer, James Elkins, and Diarmuid Costello—sketch various positions in relation to the aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic and introduce some of their interests in the theme. Eve Meltzer proposes a formulation of what she considers to be the “gap between these two critiques” (26). She claims that the Anti-Aesthetic rejects “sensuous pleasure” and “appearances,” and all that could be thought of in terms of “effect” (26). Much of the “artwork that gets categorized under the term ‘antiaesthetic’ could be said to reflect, refract, consider” (26) these claims, she thinks. Later, Meltzer says that “the aesthetic of disaffection” is another way of “characterising the anti-aesthetic” (58). Hal Foster, for his part, claims that “the formulation of the ‘anti-aesthetic’ thirty years ago” was a “superficial reading (we were young then and not widely read) … we totalised the aesthetic and reified it as a bad object for our own purposes. Mea culpa! But we were critics, not philosophers” (26–27). Later, he says, “I really don’t want to be the anti-aesthetic answer man here: I feel distant from the kid who proposed that opposition, and I was just one of a few critics …” (31). He concludes: I don’t think the anti-aesthetic was (is) a coherent project. My title, The Anti-Aesthetic was not deeply thought through (I was twenty-seven). It wasn’t like, ‘I will now rally the forces of the anti-aesthetic and make war with the empire of the aesthetic.’ More importantly, the positions in the book aren’t coherent as a group … most of us want to hedge a little on this old opposition of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic: certainly, I do at this point. (32) James Elkins then mentions the James Meyer/Toni Ross intervention in the Anti-Aesthetic question. According to Elkins, the problem that Meyer and Ross pose is how to develop a position about the development of the Anti-Aesthetic. The answer is that “it is only made possible by developments within and after the Anti-Aesthetic” (Elkins and Montgomery 33). However, the editors conclude, “now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art” (33). There has thus been no successful effort, to date, to bring Anti-Aesthetic and aesthetic points of view into closer relation. Note 1 See Part 2: Coda for further remarks on the essays of Jameson and Alberro.

Part 2

Philocaly1 The Case for Beauty

Part 2: Introduction

My primary aim in Part 2 is to provide a descriptive account of the “Beauty Revival”—a philosophical movement that has gained momentum since its outset in the early 1990s and continues to grow, unabated, today, as we enter the third decade of the new millennium. One might be surprised at such talk of a “Beauty Revival.” As we have seen, beauty fell from favour in part because it was deemed politically and morally suspect, both as complicit with the socio-political structures that yielded WWII and as a tool of oppression wielded against women, for example. But did beauty itself ever go away? The beauty of nature was there all the time, throughout the 20th century, and so was the beauty accumulated in the course of human history, in museums and galleries. And there has never been a time when beautiful human beings were in short supply. If anything, what we had less of in the 20th century was talk about beauty. That is now changing. After a long time during which aestheticians spoke little of beauty, they have now started discussing it again. It is not that the phenomenon of beauty has returned, but rather that a discourse on beauty is being produced on the intellectual stage. I will not, therefore, speak of a return of beauty as such, but only a return to beauty, and a revival of the topic of “beauty.” My account of the Beauty Revival in this part provides a parallel to that of Anti-Aestheticism in the previous part. There, I claimed that, under the influence of Anti-Aestheticism, our notion of beauty became reduced to that of an experience apprehended merely by the senses.2 In this chapter, I suggest that three of the most influential Beauty Revivalists—Elaine Scarry, Alexander Nehamas, and Roger Scruton—show that the Anti-Aesthetic notion of beauty is a misunderstanding of beauty. Their notions of beauty—which I collectively term ‘Revived Beauty’—accommodate sensuous experiences. They also accommodate suprasensory experiences (or experiences that transcend somatic experience), in that the Revivalists embrace mental products (or cognitive functions/activities) and affective states evoked by those experiences. The development of Revived Beauty invites a fundamental change in our essential attitude to the philosophy DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-9

78  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty of beauty, which upends and dramatically alters the 20th-century Anti-Aesthetic notion of beauty. In the General Introduction, I claimed that we can understand a “school of thought” (or intellectual tradition) as a group of people who share common goals, influences, outlooks, and unifying beliefs. A “school” thus represents the broad views of many or several individual thinkers on related ideas and doctrines. In the case of the Anti-Aesthetic movement, the common goal is a denial of the significance of beauty. In the case of Beauty Revivalism, the common goal is an affirmation of the significance of beauty—“Revived Beauty,” perceptible to the intellect, or the emotions, not just the senses. In this Part, I identify other principles which unify the Beauty Revivalists as a school of thought. First, I identify a common influence, arguing that Beauty Revivalism is an explicit response to Anti-Aestheticism. Second, I identify a common outlook, arguing that the Revivalists ground their arguments for beauty on the conviction that there is an intimate bond between the experience of beauty and the higher value concepts to which it refers us. Finally, I identify a set of unifying beliefs, represented by the (a) fact that the Revivalists share similar Kantian attitudes to beauty as an aesthetic category, and as a form of reflective judgement. They also (b) share certain Platonic attitudes to beauty, in that they, roughly, conceive of beauty in terms of the relationship between universals and particulars. Ultimately, Beauty Revivalism can be described as a philosophical movement as well as a school of thought, in the sense that it marks a broad but identifiable sea-change in 20th-century attitudes to the philosophy of beauty. Kant used the phrase “revolution of the way of thinking” (Critique of Pure Reason B XI) to refer to Greek mathematics and Newtonian physics. In the 21st century, Beauty Revivalism represents a paradigm shift: a revolution in our way of thinking about basic concepts, attitudes, and experiences in the philosophy of beauty. The Beauty Revival The last 30 years have witnessed the budding of a new movement in the philosophy of beauty, which has not previously received conceptualisation as a movement. Philosophers whose work is a part of this school of thought—which I term the “Beauty Revival”—propose ways to advance arguments for beauty as a valuable human experience. They stress the fact that beauty’s presence in our lives and our experience of it is important, worthwhile, and instructive. Their task is rife with difficulties. Not only have 21st-century philosophers inherited a confusing set of concepts about beauty, but, as we saw in Part 1, there are numerous and forceful arguments against beauty. As a result of Anti-Aesthetic impulses generated by 20th-century thought, some academics and members of the art-world

Part 2: Introduction  79 believe that beauty is a distraction from justice, or even an instrument of evil. Claims for beauty’s essentiality to art have also been continually undermined. Despite all this, Beauty-Revival philosophers (as well as critical theorists and artists) have begun to comment on a “return to beauty” as an intellectual theme. Nowadays, Beauty Revival activities and ideas are discussed with increasing frequency. As a result, interest in beauty is moving, after more than a century of suspicion and interrogation, towards a full-blown resurgence in academic discourse. The advent of the Beauty Revival can be traced back to the 1990s. Guy Sircello’s New Theory of Beauty (1975) and Mary Mothersill’s Beauty Restored (1985)3 could, however, be considered early pioneers of Beauty Revivalism. While too early and too isolated to be included in my analysis of the 21st-century Beauty-Revival movement, these two texts represent attempts to characterise what would be needed by a theory of beauty to re-inscribe it into our philosophical lexicon. In 1993, the art-critic Dave Hickey published a landmark collection of essays titled The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. Hickey reports that he responded “beauty” to a question posed to him in a panel discussion entitled “What will be the issue of the nineties?” (Invisible Dragon 1). Hickey explains that he was surprised by his own response—a “free association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where”—and that his proposal was met with “total, uncomprehending silence” (1). He had opened a “dead zone, a silent abyss”; a “vacancy,” (2) which he later felt compelled to understand and to fill. In all four essays of The Invisible Dragon, Hickey gives voice to a desire to rid contemporary art of the “hoary mantle of therapeutic value” bestowed on it by what he describes as a “loose confederation” of “institutions that exhibit, fund, teach, and generally support it nowadays” (2). Michael Bérubé located the “return to beauty” in Scott Heller’s 1998 article “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty,” in which Heller declares aesthetics to be the “forbidden subject” (15). Soon after, Michael Clark championed a return to beauty in Revenge of the Aesthetic (2000), a collection of essays in which a group of theorists “grapple with the question of how literature should be treated in contemporary theory” (Clark xi). In Beauty Unlimited (2012), Carolyn Korsmeyer lists many other titles in the ever-growing discourse on philosophical concepts of beauty, published in the short period between 1996 and 2008, illustrating the astounding vitality of a subject that people had previously written off.4 Korsmeyer’s list of titles is astonishing given that, only 20 years earlier, many people had, with utter confidence, declared the “death” of beauty. Thus, by the early 2000s, there were signs of revived interest in beauty.5 In my view, the dominant contributions to (or paradigm examples of) the dialogue about beauty are three authoritative philosophical studies in the academic field of aesthetics, published in book-form by preeminent

80  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty scholars in the first decade of the 21st century. This group of texts includes, On Beauty and Being Just (2000) by Elaine Scarry, professor of aesthetics at Harvard University; Only a Promise of Happiness (2007) by Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at Princeton University; and Beauty (2009) by Sir Roger Scruton who was, until his death in 2020, a senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. The books by Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton are fully developed attempts to resuscitate philosophical notions of beauty, and the rest of this Part and the next will focus primarily on these works. As we enter the third decade of the century, their authors’ efforts dispose aestheticians, once again, to see beauty as a serious philosophical issue and an essential aspect of our lives and experiences. My primary aim in Part 2 is to provide a descriptive account of the Beauty Revival project, by identifying some commonalities in notions of beauty that some of its adherents employ. I thus argue that those notions of beauty employed by the Revivalists do, in fact, share some common features. I refer to this collection of shared features as the notion of “Revived Beauty.” To ground my account of Revived Beauty, I examine the three Beauty-Revival texts by Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton identified above. These texts have enjoyed public and academic influence, giving them a wide general readership and near mainstream popularity. More importantly, the arguments that these three texts present are, in my view, broadly illustrative or representative of Beauty Revival thinking for three main reasons. First, the new conceptual frameworks offered by these authors aim to solve the previously intractable problems posed by Anti-Aestheticism. Second, the authors provide original arguments in defence of beauty by linking beauty to higher value concepts (such as justice, happiness, and sanctity). Third, the authors develop certain features of (a) the Kantian account of beauty as an aesthetic category and as reflective judgement and (b) the Platonic account of beauty as a relation between universals and particulars. Explaining and addressing these three main reasons for selecting the three texts as seeds of the still-flowering Beauty-Revival movement provide the structure of this Part of the book. Like the previous Part, this Part is divided into three chapters. As we see in Chapter 4—that is, the first chapter of Part 2—the first reason I have selected the three texts as the principal exemplars of Beauty-Revivalist thinking is that their authors recognise and respond to the Anti-Aesthetic position. They thus display a common influence. Nehamas, Scarry, and Scruton demonstrate a capacity to translate Anti-Aesthetic terms into their own and judge its theses, arguments, and procedures by the same standards they would use to evaluate their own propositions. The adherents of the Beauty Revival likewise recognise that Anti-Aesthetic standpoints are formulated within and in terms of common norms of intelligibility.

Part 2: Introduction  81 For instance, the Beauty Revivalists examined in this book all concede that beauty is, in some ways, a morally ambivalent notion on the grounds suggested to them by the Anti-Aesthetic position. Beauty Revivalism also displays a capacity for identifying and characterising the limitations and failures of the Anti-Aesthetic. For instance, Nehamas challenges the notion that beauty is identical to sensual experience, Scarry challenges political arguments she thinks have been generated by beauty’s critics, and Scruton rejects Anti-Aesthetic art as art. In these ways, Beauty Revivalism confronts Anti-Aestheticism as a rival school of thought about beauty, including analysis of the Anti-Aesthetic within its own narrative. The Beauty Revivalists identified here thus provide the means for an informed discussion of disagreement and progress towards its resolution. The second reason for identifying these three texts (On Beauty and Being Just; Only a Promise of Happiness and Beauty) as foundational to the Beauty Revival is that—in my view—all three authors (Scarry, Nehamas and Scruton) offer defences of beauty that are grounded in the conviction that there is an intimate bond between the experience of beauty and the higher value concepts to which it refers us. They thus display a common outlook. In Chapter 5, I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, beauty can be seen as an apprehensive feature of our experience that affords our recognition of higher value concepts. Nehamas claims that beauty is the object of love and thus manifests a promise of happiness. Scarry argues that beauty leads humanity towards the just. Scruton suggests that beauty connects us to the sacred. Though the higher concept each thinker links to beauty differs, their arguments all refer to beauty to as an essential value in our lives. In thinking this, the Beauty Revivalists complement one another and reveal similar lines of argument. The final reason for selecting these three texts is that they share some defining beliefs and standards of thought about beauty, thus illustrating a set of unifying beliefs. In Chapter 6, I suggest that (a) all three thinkers demonstrate specific features of the Kantian account of beauty in their analyses of the subject. They share similar attitudes to the apprehension of beauty as (i) an aesthetic category and (ii) a reflective judgement. Nehamas, Scarry, and Scruton acknowledge that while beauty should be compared to other aesthetic categories, it also outstrips the bounds of a purely aesthetic category. In this sense, beauty is a sensual experience, but it also includes additional cognitive content. I suggest that the Beauty-Revivalist conception of beauty revives and refurbishes the Kantian account of beauty as a reflective judgement. For the Revivalists, the judgement of beauty proceeds from given particulars to the discovery of a general concept, under which the particulars may be subsumed. In this sense, a beautiful object can be seen as the cause of recognising a higher concept (justice, love, happiness, or the sacred, respectively). I also suggest that (b) the Revivalists also invoke

82  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty (at least) one important feature of the Platonic account of beauty. One crucial issue that arises in the relationship between the universal and the particular, and this, I argue, that animates the Beauty Revivalist attitude. Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton have initiated a fundamental change in our essential attitude to the philosophy of beauty. I make a case for them as the instigators of the Beauty Revival, illustrating how they establish new philosophical arguments in beauty’s favour. Their efforts to articulate the value of beauty amount to a re-inscription of the largely discredited notion of beauty into philosophical discourse. During the 20th century, many philosophers became deeply suspicious of beauty, suggesting that it distracts us from justice and political messages. Thus, intellectuals consigned beauty to the margins of aesthetic inquiry, replacing it with the anaemic alternative, “sensory pleasure.” The Beauty Revivalists, however, offer arguments for why beauty holds an indispensable part in shaping the human world. By re-establishing connections between beauty and higher value concepts, including happiness, wisdom, justice, and the sacred, the Revivalists not only defend beauty from arguments against it, but argue that beauty continually renews our search for value and presses us towards greater concerns. Ultimately, as a school of thought, the Beauty Revivalists display common influences, unifying beliefs, common outlooks, and a common goal: the (re-)affirmation of the significance of beauty. Given that there has been very little, if any, conceptual analysis of the Beauty Revival, I offer my account of the movement as a point of departure for future research. Notes 1 St. Augustine says that “Philocaly and Philosophy are nearly the same names, and they want to be seen as members of the same family, as in fact they are. What is Philosophy? The love of wisdom. What is Philocaly? The love of beauty. (Just ask the Greeks!) What, then, is wisdom? Is it not true beauty itself? Hence, they are sisters born of the same father” (Against the Academicians 4). 2 Nehamas asks, “Is this purification or impoverishment?” (Only a Promise 2). 3 Sircello and Mothersill agree that we lack an adequate definition of the predicate “is beautiful.” 4 These include, but are not limited to: Beauty in Context by Wilfried Van Damme (1996); The Gift of Beauty by Stephen David Ross (1996); Real Beauty by Eddy M. Zemach (1997); Beauty by James Kirwan (1999); Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art by Ruth Lorand; The Metaphysics of Beauty by Nick Zangwill (2001); Venus in Exile by Wendy Steiner (2002); Six Names of Beauty by Crispin Sartwell (2004); The Secret Power of Beauty by John Armstrong (2004); Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics by Paul Guyer (2005); Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics beyond the Arts by Ronald Moore (2007); Aesthetics and Material Beauty by Jennifer A. ­McMahon (2007); Kant on Beauty and Biology by Rachel Zuckert (2007); Functional Beauty by Glen Parsons and Allen Carlson (2008); Plato and the

Part 2: Introduction  83 Question of Beauty by Drew A. Hyland (2008); and Beauty’s Appeal: Measure and Excess, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (2008). 5 There have also been also revivals of beauty in Christian scholarship. Karl Barth (1886–1968), for example, argues in Church Dogmatics that beauty is the means by which people are persuaded or awakened to faith. Contemporary scholars also draw on the work of Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) and his interest in ways beauty reveals the eternal dimension of objects. The German religious writer Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) produced a two-volume work titled Aesthetics, in which he argues that beauty is central not merely to art, but also to ethics and theology.

4

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic

Introduction The primary aim of Part 2 of this book is to provide a descriptive account of the Beauty Revival movement, as represented by Elaine Scarry, Alexander Nehamas, and Roger Scruton. I have three auxiliary aims, represented in each of the three constituent chapters of the part. In this chapter, I suggest that one of the unifying principles of Beauty Revivalism is a common influence: Beauty Revivalism is a deliberate and self-conscious response to Anti-Aestheticism. To argue this point, first, I outline one of the Beauty Revivalists’ major concessions towards the Anti-Aesthetic—namely, that beauty can be a morally ambivalent notion. As we saw in the previous Part, one of the origins of the distrust of beauty appears to be primarily rooted in the notion that meanings of the beautiful and the good are always somehow intertwined. This interconnection is problematic when beauty makes evil look good and lures onlookers into thinking that something evil is in fact good. The Beauty Revivalists accede to this vital aspect of the argument about beauty: beauty is not necessarily related to the good. Beauty can be, according to the Revivalists, morally neutral and beauty as such need not, on its own, be defined as either bad or good, sinful, or righteous, right, or wrong. Second, I outline the key challenges the Beauty Revivalists pose for Anti-Aestheticism. In the previous part, I suggested that (a) the AntiAesthetic position identifies beauty with “merely” sensory pleasure. Here, I argue that Nehamas challenges this notion by pushing back on the idea that beauty is reducible to physical appearance. In the previous part, I also suggested that (b) for the Anti-Aesthetic, beauty is said to have no essential role in our political lives. Here, I suggest that Scarry challenges political arguments she thinks have been generated by beauty’s critics. Finally, in the previous part, I suggested that (c) beauty was excised from our artistic repertoire by the Anti-Aesthetic movement. Here, I argue that Scruton rejects Anti-Aesthetic art from its status as art. Thus, the Revivalists DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-10

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic  85 repudiate three central Anti-Aesthetic tenets outlined in the previous Part. Additionally, as a group, in making this concession and posing these challenges, the Beauty Revivalists reconstruct some of the critical arguments made by the Anti-Aesthetic movement. The Beauty Revivalists position themselves in relation to the Anti-Aesthetic from the very beginning of their books. On Beauty and Being Just, Only a Promise of Happiness, and Beauty all open with some form of acknowledgement, from the authors, that beauty has been an unpopular subject in both intellectual discourse and artistic practice since the beginning of the 20th century. For instance, throughout On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry gestures towards at least half a dozen arguments which she thinks have been generated by beauty’s critics and that have served to “banish,” “marginalise,” and “disparage” beauty (Scarry 3). Nehamas attests to the fact that “the twentieth century gradually came to doubt beauty itself” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 3) and that “the beauty that mattered to philosophy, to criticism, and often to the arts themselves, if it mattered at all, was separated from the beauty that mattered to the rest of the world, to whom it seemed irrelevant and empty” (2). In the preface to Beauty, Roger Scruton laments the fact that beauty is “vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter” (Scruton, Beauty ix). This “crisis,” our authors think, prompts us to ask if there is any point in making judgements of beauty at all (161). According to the Revivalists, “such sceptical thoughts about beauty are unjustified” (xii). Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton thus position themselves and their work in response to the Anti-Aesthetic movement from the outset, responding to perceived hostility towards beauty, gesturing towards many arguments that diminish the importance of beauty and supplying a rejoinder to them. Concessions The Beauty Revivalists are willing to accept that beauty is not necessarily related to the good but is a morally ambivalent notion. As we saw in the previous chapter, one of the origins of the distrust of beauty appears to be primarily rooted in the idea that meanings of the beautiful and the good are somehow intertwined. Philosophical aesthetics are notable in the 20th century for their general lack of interest in beauty and their separation of aesthetic and moral value. A general distrust of beauty arose, partly spurred by moral condemnations of beauty as a social value by artists like the Dadaists and by feminist critics, and partly by the worry expressed by Mary Devereaux in her analysis of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The development of this separation between aesthetic and moral value was itself based on a moral objection to beauty: beauty, as a form of “merely sensuous” pleasure, is trivial and potentially irresponsible in the

86  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty face of serious ethical and political concerns. Such an objection only arises if aesthetic value and moral value are independent of one another, a view that gained traction in the 20th century due to the relegation of beauty to a merely sensible phenomenon of pleasure and enjoyment. In acceding to some extent to this Anti-Aesthetic tenet, the Beauty Revivalists show that they are oriented towards reducing adversarial debate so that the parties can move on towards more constructive tasks. This major agreement between the Beauty Revival position and the Anti-Aesthetic position marks the resolution of one discussion point, moving future conversations in a new direction. Scarry suggests that beauty can be morally good or morally bad, but in either case, she thinks that it provides the preconditions for moral action. Scarry says that perceiving beauty can assist us in recognising moral feelings associated with moral actions—correct or incorrect. For instance, our responses to “pleasure-filled perception” (Scarry 41) can be “morally good” or “morally bad” (42), in the following ways: “Passive perception—looking or hearing without any wish to change what one has seen or heard—(as often happens in the presence of the beautiful),” can be “morally bad” (41). On the other hand, Scarry discusses “instrumental perception” (looking or hearing as a prelude to intervening) and “aversive perception (as when one turns on the radio and hears with distress one point of view being systematically suppressed)” as examples of “morally good” forms of perception. All these forms of perception, she says, including those involved in perceiving beauty, give us a sense of “moral urgency,” but the perception of beauty itself does not provide the “distributional mandate” of our “ethical direction” (55). Thus, Scarry argues that while beauty increases our awareness of moral questions, our response to those questions can be good or bad, depending on how we are influenced. Nehamas, too, agrees with the Anti-Aesthetic view that beauty is not necessarily linked to the good. “Beauty’s relation to morality is always in question,” he says (Nehamas, Only a Promise 127). “Again, and again,” Nehamas says, “history has smashed to pieces Plato’s assurance that to love the beautiful is to desire the good” (127). Nehamas echoes the AntiAesthetic sentiment when he says that “the contrast between helping the suffering and painting them, between fighting for them and writing about them, became starker and deeper” during the 20th century. He adds that against the background of World War I and World War II, “beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder,” citing the Dadaists (3). Beauty’s moral ambivalence has, he thinks, become hard to deny: “the stories of SS officers who read Goethe and listened to Schubert while running the gas chambers of Belsen and Auschwitz are too ingrained in our contemporary sensibility to lead to an easy denial” (7). The moral ambivalence towards beauty that Nehamas draws from this—whether beauty is perverse,

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic  87 dangerous, or evil—is made more explicit when he rejects the idea that there is a direct relationship between beauty and goodness as claimed by Plato: “For Plato and the long tradition that came after him,” Nehamas writes, “beauty is the object of love, the quarry of eros. But beauty can be deceptive, and love has its dark side: who knows what beauty will bring eventually to light? Who knows what we find beautiful and why we love as we do?” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 9). According to Nehamas, Plato and his followers “tried to answer such questions.” They also tried to “escape the dangers they indicate” by means of a “vast philosophical picture … according to which beauty, when it is properly pursued, provides a path to moral perfection, and is aligned with goodness and virtue” (9). For Nehamas, this “alignment” has gradually been lost, the picture has faded, and the dangers of beauty remain in the traces left behind: beauty’s “connection with goodness was severed” (10) by the 20th century. Nehamas also acknowledges the Anti-Aesthetic view (articulated in the previous part by Adorno and Dworkin) that the implications of the erotic elements associated with beauty can be appalling. “If beauty inspires the desire to possess and own its object or to use it for some further purpose, especially if it involves sex,” he writes, “it might be reasonable to believe that those who value art for its beauty are either philistines or perverts” (11). Nehamas thinks that our reaction to beautiful things includes the urge to “make them our own, which is why Plato called eros the desire to possess beauty” (54). Nehamas admits that this is “a sour note to contemporary ears, to which it sounds as if he [Plato] is condoning a wish to dominate, exploit and manipulate that we have learned officially to disparage” (55). The desire to possess seems to be the mark of the consumer rather than the lover; “to want to own something is to be prepared to use it as a means to one’s own ends—even if only to prevent others from using it—while love, which values its objects for themselves, must find such a willingness unthinkable” (55). These observations amount to an unambiguous recognition by Nehamas of the moral ambivalence of the notion of beauty, which is one of the major Anti-Aesthetic arguments, as demonstrated in the previous Part. Scruton, too, concedes that beauty is a morally ambivalent notion that is not necessarily connected to the good. He thinks that beauty can be “disturbing,” “chilling,” and “profane” and can “affect us in an unlimited variety of ways” (Scruton, Beauty xi). Thus, the moral “status” of beauty, Scruton argues, is “questionable” in a way that “the status of truth and goodness are not” (3). For Scruton, beautiful art offers us the best means to comprehend the morally neutral status of beauty. Art, he thinks, is ethically neutral and has its own way of making and justifying moral and immoral claims. Indeed, many of the aesthetic faults incurred by art are, he thinks, “moral faults—sentimentality, insincerity,

88  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty self-righteousness, moralising itself” (3)—all of which involve a deficiency in “truthfulness” (139). Scruton uses T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and James’s The Golden Bowl to describe “true” beauty in art (3). These poems and novels, Scruton thinks, all describe “what is seedy and sordid in words so resonant of the opposite, so replete with the capacity to feel, to sympathise and to understand, that life in its lowest forms is vindicated by our response to it. This ‘redemption-through-art’ occurs only because the artist aims at beauty” (140). Art in the tradition of Baudelaire “floats like an angel above the world beneath its gaze. It does not avoid the spectacle of human folly, malice, and decay …” (140). On the other hand, postmodern art, Scruton thinks, denies us anything like such a vision. He argues that postmodernism “cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own” (ix). This, he thinks, downgrades beauty into something “too escapist and too far from reality” (x) to be so-called. Beauty may be morally ambivalent, Scruton believes. However, it can still show us a world in which the “worthwhileness” (Beauty x) of human life is perceivable—for moral or immoral reasons, even amidst “addictive pleasure and routine desecration” (141). Thus, Scruton characterises moralising and “propagandistic” (141) art as a retreat from the “real task of artistic creation,” which he thinks is to “challenge comforting illusions and show life as it is” (141). This, he thinks, gives beauty an undeniable morally neutral quality, which, depending on the object of beauty and our response to it, can be morally good or morally wrong. We can now establish the first tenet of Revived Beauty: the Beauty Revivalists are unanimous in their willingness to concede that beauty can be a morally ambivalent notion. None of them admits that beauty cannot operate as an access point for the good (indeed, they all maintain that it can operate precisely thus, which would be an issue for another study). However, they all acknowledge that beauty can also serve as an access point for wrongdoing. Scarry says that perception itself can be morally good or bad, depending on our private responses to beautiful objects. Nehamas maintains that it is impossible to deny the impact of 20th-century events on our aesthetic and moral consciousness. Scruton claims that beautiful art is morally neutral. The Revivalists thus characterise beauty as something which provides conditions within which ethical evaluations can occur, for better or worse. Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have often associated the good and the beautiful. This association has roots dating back to the Ancient Greek philosophers, running through Medieval philosophy, and is reflected in 18th-century accounts of aesthetics. However, the Beauty Revivalists affirm the Anti-Aesthetic position on the

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic  89 moral neutrality of beauty. The intellectual work, the artistic products, and—perhaps most importantly—the historical and political events of the 20th century show irrefutably that beauty is a morally ambivalent notion. The Beauty Revivalists’ willingness to accept this feature of beauty marks a point of agreement between them and the Anti-Aesthetic position. The Revivalists thus agree with the Anti-Aestheticists that there is no necessary connection between the beautiful and the good, but that it can be redemptive, and it can be precursive, or preparatory, for an understanding of the good—making the concession somewhat qualified. Despite beauty’s purported moral-neutrality, and according to the Revivalists, our discussions of beauty will remain deeply enmeshed in questions of morality. As Peg Zeglin Brand argues in the forward to her Revivalist text, Beauty Matters: We are forever interrogating the guilty pleasures we derive from beauty with such questions as, is beauty a form of tyranny? Is it exploitative? Is our response to beauty a moral choice or is it externally determined—a matter of social conditioning, or a function of inalterable biological, physiological, or evolutionary factors? Is the embrace of beauty politically incorrect? When the focus is turned specifically to physical beauty, the level of discomfort intensifies. Does our enjoyment of beauty reveal biases of class and race? What are the implications of studies that find attractive people are more trusted and successful than unattractive ones? In an era of wide-spread plastic surgery, what has become of Orwell’s dictum: ‘After fifty, everyone has the face he deserves’? Does beauty undermine the egalitarian ideal? (Zeglin Brand xiv) “Beauty,” as Zeglin Brand acknowledges, “is inseparable from all that is best and worst in human experience” (xv), in that it is deeply embedded in that “inchoate matter from which our judgments of value are formed” (xv). In other words, aesthetics and ethics are both related to evaluations and judgements. Aesthetic and moral judgements are accordingly to be classed together; they both involve judgements of value (as opposed to judgements of fact). As this Part of the book unfolds, the Beauty Revivalists’ orientation towards the question of beauty’s relationship to value will become increasingly important. It is therefore germane to offer a few preliminary remarks about it here. Roughly speaking, a value judgement is a claim about something’s (in this case, moral or aesthetic) worth. I do not claim that the Revivalists see the ascription of beauty to something as a value judgement: they do not see beauty “merely” as an assessment of something as good or bad in terms of one’s own standards or priorities. Rather, the Revivalists

90  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty portray beauty as a feature of our experience that causes us to apprehend (other, higher) value concepts. Rather than being a “mere” judgement, per se, beauty, according to the Revivalists, and as we shall see, is itself intrinsically and uniquely able to reveal our values to us, to bring our most fundamental values to light. Insofar as this is the case, our assessments of our own values are essential to any attribution of beauty. In other words, that which we call beautiful is that which we hold in the highest regard, for good or for ill. Challenges Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton all directly identify and characterise some of what they perceive as the limitations, failures, and inadequacies of the Anti-Aesthetic position. In the previous Part, I suggested that (a) the Anti-Aesthetic identifies beauty with sensual pleasure. Here, I argue that Nehamas challenges this notion. In the previous part, I also suggested that (b) beauty has no essential role in our political lives, according to the AntiAesthetic. Here, I suggest that Scarry challenges political arguments that she thinks have been generated by beauty’s critics. Finally, in the previous part, I suggested that (c) Anti-Aestheticism as a practice excised beauty from our artistic repertoire. Here, I argue that Scruton rejects Anti-Aesthetic art as art. Thus, between them, the Revivalists achieve a full-fledged rejection of three central Anti-Aesthetic tenets outlined in the previous Part. In these ways, the Beauty Revivalists are not only responsive to Anti-Aesthetic arguments—including those outlined in the previous Part—but also begin to herald the claim that beauty’s role in our lives has been reduced and trivialised by the Anti-Aesthetic. Nehamas challenges the fundamental Anti-Aesthetic assumption that beauty is identical to sensory pleasure. He disagrees with the notion that “beauty is identical with attractive appearance” or with the “merely sensuous” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 19). He says, “if ‘but opening the eye’ is enough for beauty to strike, everyone whose eyes are working will perceive every kind of beauty—simple or complex, high, or low, vulgar, or refined—and its rewards at the same time” (17). It is not the case that we are always identically able to perceive all types of beauty. Understanding beauty as a sort of “appearance” has profound ramifications: “As long as we continue to identify beauty with attractiveness and attractiveness with a power of pleasing quickly and without much thought or effort, we can’t even begin to think of many of the 20th century’s great works as beautiful. Even when they are, their value must be sought elsewhere” (30). As we shall see in Chapter 5, for Nehamas, the value of beautiful objects depends on features that lie deep within the things themselves, which can make

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic  91 beauty challenging to discern and appreciate. It also means that it can be revealed through the laborious efforts of criticism. Nehamas thus claims that when we tie beauty to the senses, we ignore other, more dynamic, layers of our experience. However, although beauty is never limited to appearance, beauty is “always manifest in appearance” (24), according to Nehamas. Thus, for instance, one might paint something as beautiful which may have been hideous, or vice versa: to be beautiful, a representation does not have to be faithful to the original appearance of its subject. It is often, he thinks, necessary to “falsify appearances in order to produce a beautiful representation” (24). One of the central characteristics of Anti-Aesthetic art, however, is an effort “to detach the value of art from its appearance” as in Conceptual Art (22). This, Nehamas thinks, is a mistake. While appearance is not (for example) where the value of a painting resides, it is where the value is found, at least in the first instance. Beauty “induces us to look for the aesthetic features of things” (120), which are the things which “constitute their most distinctive and individual aspects” (120). Beauty is the “visible image” that calls us to “look attentively at the world and see how little we see” (131). As we begin to see a thing’s features, we begin to understand what makes them unique, and then we become engaged in the process of interpretation that takes us beyond the thing we first saw and into the realm of making value judgements. In the previous Part, I suggested that, according to the Anti-Aesthetic position, beauty has no positive role to play in our political lives—indeed, that it has a malign role as a distraction. Scarry challenges “political” (Scarry 16) arguments she thinks have been generated by beauty’s critics. In the first half of On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry addresses problems that have arisen for beauty, due to what she calls “cultural difference” (16). Scarry sees this problem as represented in arguments “intended to show why caring about beauty is bad …” (17). To her mind, people “think that if we attend to the beauty of objects in our own place and time, then we will care less for beautiful objects in other cultures” (17). Scarry believes that our love for one thing cannot cause, or contribute to, our failure to love another. Our minds can give an infinite amount of space to beautiful things, and our attention to one thing “heightens, rather than diminishes, the acuity with which we see the next” (17). Scarry’s opponent might respond as follows: styles of beauty in culture A induce pathways of appreciation that are not only different to those of culture B, but make it more difficult to treat the pathways required for culture B. For instance, culture A might find mathematical precision beautiful, but culture B might find imperfection beautiful.

92  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty To which Scarry might reply, “there is no reason A might not appreciate B as well.” By raising an objection such as this, we can see that Scarry is opening a dialectic about beauty, to which Scruton contributes. He considers this “cultural relativism” as a “crisis” that has led some people to dismiss judgements of beauty as purely subjective (Scruton, Beauty 4). In the second half of On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry focuses on what she sees as the most significant Anti-Aesthetic issue. This is a “political complaint” which she thinks is “responsible for the banishing of beauty from the humanities in the last two decades,” an issue which she variously refers to as “the act of looking,” “the gaze,” and “perception” (Scarry 56). The complaint, according to Scarry, involves two claims: “The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements … The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object …” (58). The first position says that beauty preoccupies us and thus distracts us from seeing and then working to correct injustice; the second “holds that the very act of regarding an object of beauty is destructive to the object itself” (58). To begin with, Scarry argues that these two views contradict one another. The first assumes that if our “gaze” could “just be coaxed over in one direction and made to latch onto a specific subject (an injustice in need of remedy or repair), that object would benefit from our generous attention” (58). The second assumes that generous attention is inconceivable, and “that any object receiving sustained attention will somehow suffer from the act of human regard” (58). Scarry says that beauty is not susceptible to harm of this kind. Scarry’s response to the first claim—that beauty preoccupies and distracts our attention— composes the rest of her thesis: that beauty is aligned with justice. I will turn to Scarry’s positive arguments (showing how beautiful things assist us in remedying injustice) in the next chapter, Chapter 5. Scruton’s primary challenge to the Anti-Aesthetic is to reject Anti-Aesthetic art, which, for him, means art without beauty. Scruton claims that, in a work of art, any attempt to moralise destroys beauty. It is, he thinks, a failure of a work of art if it is “more concerned to convey a message than to delight its audience” (Scruton, Beauty 110). Thus, works of propaganda, such as the socialist realist sculptures of the Soviet period or (their equivalent in prose), such as Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, “sacrifice aesthetic integrity to political correctness, character to caricature and drama to sermonising” (110). This, of course, raises for us the possibility that Scruton and Scarry are somewhat at odds with each other. Scarry finds value in beauty because it promotes justice, whereas Scruton thinks that the promotion of any moral end detracts from beauty. However, according to Scruton, part of what we object to in such works is their untruthful

Reply to the Anti-Aesthetic  93 quality. “A work of art that moralises, that strives to improve its audience, that descends from the pinnacle of pure beauty to take up some social or didactic cause, offends against the autonomy of the aesthetic experience, exchanging intrinsic for instrumental values and losing whatever claim it might have had to beauty” (110). Like Scarry, Scruton thinks that beauty lies in a work’s ability to open our eyes to the world “beyond” (110). Scruton’s aesthetic values emerge with his attacks against specific forms of “pseudo-art,” as he calls them. His first charge is directed against Duchamp and Warhol, whose works, he says, began as “a good joke” but are “downright stupid today” (99). The final two chapters of Beauty, “Art and Eros” and “The Flight from Beauty,” contain criticisms of “pornographic art” (126) and other forms of postmodern art, especially kitsch. The argument against pornography in “Art and Eros” says that “pornography lies outside the realm of art because it is incapable of beauty” (126). It is “incapable of beauty because its purpose is to arouse vicarious desire, whereas art that deals with sexual desire aims to portray sexual desire” (126). In the final chapter of Beauty, “The Flight from Beauty,” Scruton distinguishes two types of 20th-century artists. The first he calls “modernists,” represented by “Eliot, Matisse and Schoenberg” who, as we have seen, Scruton characterises as deeply worried about art detaching itself from true artistic intentions—the quest for beauty. The second type has “Rothko, de Kooning, and Pollock as exemplars,” whose aims or at least whose products, according to Scruton, constitute “a flight from beauty” (126) or, as he puts it more bluntly, a “desire to spoil beauty, in acts of iconoclasm” (174). Scruton considers this “desecration” of beauty in detail. These pages contain sections on idolatry, profanation, and the addiction to pleasure, which, Scruton claims, have no ideational content. It is no accident, Scruton thinks, that the “arrival of kitsch on the stage of history coincided with the hitherto unimaginable horrors of trench warfare, of the holocaust and the Gulag …” (159). The world depicted in such objects is, for Scruton, a world where human dreams and aspirations are defiled, a world of commodities to be consumed, rather than icons to be revered: Imagine a world now in which people showed an interest only in replica Brillo boxes, in signed urinals, in crucifixes pickled in urine or in objects similarly lifted from the debris of life and put on display with some sort of satirical or ‘look at me’ intention—in other words, the increasingly standard fare of official modern art shows in Europe and America … it would be a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the transcendent, and in which mounds of rubbish cover the sites of our ideals. (85)

94  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty To Scruton’s mind, it matters what kind of art we adhere to. Beauty may not always offer an accurate expression of our moral life—our virtues and our goodness—but beauty does express our aspirations, ideals, and values. His thought is that, by removing beauty from art, Anti-Aestheticism has denied us access to the wings of higher, governing principles, such as sanctity. Each of the Beauty Revivalists addressed in this book initiate at least one key challenge to the Anti-Aesthetic position. Nehamas challenges the notion that “beauty is identical with attractive appearance” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 19) or with the “merely sensuous.” Scarry challenges political arguments she thinks have been generated by beauty’s critics, and Scruton rejects Anti-Aesthetic art as art. Thus, between them, the Revivalists initiate a full-fledged rejection of all three central Anti-Aesthetic tenets outlined in the previous part. By posing these challenges, the Beauty Revivalists, as a group, also succeed in reconstructing some of the critical arguments made by the Anti-Aesthetic movement. An examination of the challenges posed by the Beauty Revivalists to the Anti-Aestheticists demonstrates how deeply at odds with one another the two movements are. Conclusion In their own way, each of the Beauty Revivalists addressed in this chapter make concessions towards, and pose challenges to, the Anti-Aesthetic position. Thus, one of the unifying principles of the Beauty Revivalists as a school of thought is that they share a common influence. Beauty Revivalism is, in part, a reaction against Anti-Aestheticism. Regarding the AntiAesthetic arguments presented in Part 1, the Beauty Revivalists concede that beauty is not necessarily related to the good and is a morally ambivalent notion, which can nevertheless lead towards the good. On the other hand, as a group, Nehamas, Scarry, and Scruton challenge three major tenets of Anti-Aesthetic thinking: that beauty is a “merely sensual” experience, that beauty has no role in our political lives, and that art can exist without beauty. Nehamas challenges Anti-Aesthetic arguments, according to which beauty is linked to the “merely sensuous”; Scarry rejects political arguments against beauty; and Scruton defends beauty as a principle of art. The Revivalists thus engage their rival school of thought—the AntiAesthetic movement—in a debate, according to which some of the issues between them are clarified, key terms are made explicit, and a dialectic begins to emerge.

5

Arguments for Beauty

Introduction The primary aim of this Part of the book is to provide a descriptive account of the Beauty Revival, by outlining the common features of a notion of beauty that I think the Revivalists share: Revived Beauty. As opposed to Anti-Aestheticism, the Revivalists see beauty as something more substantive, profound, and meaningful than mere “sensuous pleasure.” In this chapter, I suggest that the Revivalists portray beauty as a feature of our experience that causes us to apprehend higher value concepts. For the purposes of this book, value concepts can be considered non-perceptual or suprasensory qualities, which furnish an object with worth. I reconstruct the arguments for beauty which are found in Only a Promise of Happiness, On Beauty and Being Just, and Beauty, to show how the Revivalists ground their defences of beauty on the conviction that there is an intimate relationship between our recognition of beautiful objects and our recognition of higher value concepts. Scarry argues that beauty guides us towards the just. Nehamas claims that beauty is an object of love and manifests a promise of happiness. Scruton suggests that beauty connects us to the sacred. Justice, love, happiness, and the sacred are all higher value concepts in that they are suprasensory qualities that furnish an object with worth. Though the specific higher value concept to which each thinker links beauty differs, their arguments all suggest that beauty is the apprehensive feature of some sort of suprasensory quality or higher value concept. Thus, what is distinctive about judgements of beauty (as the Revivalists explain them) is that they involve attempts to subsume beautiful objects under higher value concepts. This common outlook is one of the principles which unify the Beauty Revivalists. The Beauty Revivalists complement one another and reveal similar lines of argumentation, in that they all present this trait of “Revived Beauty.”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-11

96  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty Elaine Scarry In my view, the Beauty Revivalists think that beauty is the apprehensive feature of higher value concepts. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry composes a defence of beauty constructed through an analogy she draws between beauty and the higher value concept of justice. Scarry’s analogy between beauty and justice is based on what she sees as their shared features: fairness and symmetry. Scarry argues that symmetry is an essential attribute of beauty, and that social justice consists of a kind of symmetry of persons—in that all persons are to be treated as equal. Thus, in her view, the intrinsic qualities of beautiful objects directly inspire the search for social equality. Scarry also seeks to persuade us that this analogy between the recognition of beauty and the recognition of just social arrangements proceeds through the pleasure we find in “fairness”—in the equitable fitting together of disparate elements. Thus, in defending the relationship between beauty and justice, Scarry must account for the notions of symmetry and fairness as the attributes which link them together. Symmetry, Scarry argues, is an aesthetic attribute that is found in most instances of beauty. She also thinks that we can speak of “the symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another” (Scarry 93) in talking of justice. Scarry claims that symmetry is the attribute most steadily identified over the centuries and, especially in “some eras,” in reference to beauty: not always symmetry alone, but sometimes “symmetry companioned by departures and exceptions from itself” (96). Scarry includes a note regarding several articles which appeared in science journals such as Nature in the 1990s, claiming that “symmetry” is chosen “by birds, butterflies and other creatures … in mating over every other feature (such as size, colour)” (96). She discusses St. Augustine’s sixth book of De Musica, which refers to equality, symmetry, and proportion, comparing his comments to Aristotle’s description of distributive justice in Nicomachean Ethics, where he claims that justice has “geometrical proportions” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.3).1 Thus, Scarry argues, the “aspiration to political, social, and economic equality entered the world in the beauty-loving treatises on symmetry in the Classical and Christian periods” (97). In addition to the notion of symmetry, Scarry’s connection between beauty and justice relies on the idea of “fairness.” Her etymological analysis of the word “fair” links the “beautiful” with the “just.” Fairness, Scarry argues, is used in referring to “loveliness of countenance” and to “the ethical requirement for ‘being fair,’ ‘playing fair’ and ‘fair distribution’” (91). She claims to have reached this conclusion by studying several “scholars of etymology” who are, she thinks, “all in accord with one another” (91). The word “fairness,” she says: “travels from a cluster of roots in European languages (Old English, Old Norse, Gothic) as well as cognates in both Eastern European and Sanskrit. They all express the aesthetic use of ‘fair’

Arguments for Beauty  97 to mean ‘beautiful’ or ‘fit’—fit in the sense of ‘pleasing to the eye’ and in the sense of ‘firmly placed’” (91–92). This analysis of the word “fair” allows Scarry to construct a connection between beauty as “fairness” and justice as “fairness,” using the “widely accepted definition by John Rawls” as a “symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other” (93). Far from distracting from justice, she concludes, beauty teaches a kind of fairness—the fairness of balance and symmetry. This sense of fairness, Scarry argues, is precisely the quality that defines justice and spans to cover “the beautiful.” In On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry includes a description of how beauty operates in relation to justice. The activity of perceiving beauty, she thinks, involves bestowing our attention on a beautiful person, place, or thing. She argues that this “quality of heightened attention” (81) is extended out to other persons or things. For instance, caring for a “perfect vase” introduces a standard of care into our behaviour. We will then extend this care to more ordinary objects, just as our reverence for a beautiful God might extend to nearby angels. Beauty exerts pressure towards the “distributional and symmetrical,” and so “puts us in mind of,” or “imparts a beneficent momentum towards,” or “assists us in our attention to” justice (81). Beauty “presses on us to bring its counterpart into existence, acts as a lever in the direction of justice” (100). This pressure towards justice is partly due to the fact that the symmetry of beauty is present to the senses, whereas the symmetry of just social arrangements is not. The perceivable symmetry of beauty asserts a sort of corrective pressure that compels us to enact suprasensory symmetries in the realm of social justice. So, for Scarry, what is distinctive about judgements of beauty is that they involve attempts to subsume beautiful objects under the higher value concept of justice. Major critiques of Scarry’s book have focused on its core thesis: that there is an analogy between beauty and justice. The objections to this analogy focus on (1) Scarry’s perceived failure to illuminate a cause-and-effect relationship between beauty and justice; this is connected to (2) (what has been seen as) her rejection of beauty as an instrument of oppression; and (3) the absence of any real account of the notion of symmetry. I will respond to each of these objections in turn. First, Scarry does not illuminate any cause-and-effect relationship between beauty and justice but instead limits her analogy to connections between beauty and justice through the idea of symmetry and the etymology of the word “fair.” Though Scarry identifies some parallels between beauty and justice, those parallels are not causes. However, Scarry’s defender, Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004) says that the connection by analogy “proceeds through the pleasure we find in just balances and the equitable fitting together of disparate elements” (Hampshire 5). Scarry is forced to fend off claims that beauty is incompatible with justice: an equally

98  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty overblown claim to that of causal connection. Scarry does not need to say that there is a causal connection—an analogy will do. Second: Given the common coincidence of beauty and injustice in the world, Scarry’s argument that the experience of beauty leads to a predisposition towards justice needs further work. As we saw in the previous chapter, “history gives us no reason to believe and many reasons to doubt a causal connection between beauty and justice” (Nehamas, “The Return of the Beautiful” 397). Nehamas agrees whole-heartedly with those who say beauty has not, historically, prepared us for justice in his review of Scarry’s work, arguing that sometimes even symmetry represents an oppressive arrangement: Consider, for example, the Athenian trireme, whose ‘170 oars and 170 oarsmen could, like a legislative assembly, be held within the small bowl of visual space of which a human perceiver is capable’ (Scarry 104). Scarry finds the ships’ beauty analogous to Athenian democracy … It may mirror the beauty of democracy—to an Athenian. But when the ships appeared off the coast of Melos, coming to raze the island, murder its men, and take its women and children to slavery, they were a spectacle of cruelty and terror, not beauty and equality. (Nehamas, “The Return of the Beautiful” 394) Scarry claims that “beauty intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries” (395), but Nehamas finds the “most extraordinary aspect” of Scarry’s view to be her “total and uncompromising rejection” of beauty as an “instrument of oppression” (Nehamas, “The Return of the Beautiful” 398). Third: Scarry’s analogy between beauty and justice depends on the links she makes with symmetry and fairness; of the former, she gives no account. When we see a beautiful thing, she says, our own importance is diminished, and this feeling is “produced by things that somehow exhibit some sort of symmetry,” which she refers to as “the single most enduringly recognised attribute of beauty” (96). Nehamas makes the point that what “counts as symmetry in aesthetics is constantly changing, even within the same medium.” He cites “Cimabue’s gigantic Madonna, Duci’s immense Christchild” and the small saints who surround them and claims the symmetry they display “differs in kind” from the symmetry expressed by Bellini’s geometrically proportional figures (396). He asks, “Can such a shifting feature—if we can call it symmetry at all—be similar to the invariant reciprocity justice requires?” (396). Also, at several points, Scarry “urges that laws themselves may be beautiful and prompt the creative acts that beauty prompts. Yet she is never specific about, nor does she offer examples of, beautiful law” (Torke 327). Can a law be beautiful? If it can, “is a beautiful law especially significant or interesting?” (Torke 327) Is a beautiful law

Arguments for Beauty  99 better? The practice of law might be called an art in the sense that it may employ the craft of rhetoric in the service of justice, but this is “not beauty indigenous to law as law” (Torke 327). Perhaps, a particular application of the law could be described as “fitting” and, therefore, according to Scarry’s etymological analysis, “fair.”2 Nancy Perkins Spyke has defended the links that Scarry makes between beauty and justice, by proposing a new connection between Scarry’s notion of beauty-as-fairness and the conception of justice-as-compassion made by Simone Weil (1909–43). This is, she thinks, more helpful than the connection Scarry makes between beauty and justice, using Rawls’s conception of justice. Scarry may have discussed Rawls’s philosophy when giving her account of justice because of its near-canonical mainstream popularity, rather than its unique fit with her thesis. At the very least, Scarry’s reference to Rawlsian justice suggests that she feels her theory is aligned with justice-as-fairness to some extent. What makes this connection initially appealing is her etymological analysis of the word ‘fair’ in which she links the notion of ‘fairness’ Rawls endorses with her concept of beauty. (Perkins Spyke 463) However, “the very personal, emotive, and real experience of beauty that Scarry depicts seems a mismatch for a vision of justice that emerges from Rawls’s position” (463). Weil’s theory of justice stands in sharp contrast to that of Rawls; while Rawls focuses on fairness, Weil asks us to think of justice as compassion, a “new virtue” of caring that holds the promise of social transformation. According to Perkins Spyke, Weil’s idea of justice-as-compassion is active, arises directly from interpersonal relationships within communities, and requires attentiveness to those in need. “Attention, according to Weil, is a skill that demands selflessness and the ability to discern what others experience. It requires one to empty all thoughts of self and lose oneself in the plight of those who suffer” (464). The precondition for attentiveness, compassion, and selflessness is “rootedness,” which, for Perkins Spyke, “refers to the special relationship each of us has with our community and with others” (465). A number of phenomena facilitate “rootedness,” including our “families, education, or professional life” (465). Weil “alludes to the importance of beauty in helping us become rooted” (465). She notes that life’s rituals and its web of environments are often marked by beauty. For Weil, beauty is a snare that links us to the things outside of ourselves and our minds to our bodies and the world. She also sees beauty as a sort of harmony or order: a reduction of contradictions between our moral duties and thus a testament to and manifestation of balance.

100  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty The contrast between Rawls and Weil is stark. “Weil’s conception of justice has nothing to do with the fair distribution of goods; instead, it focuses on making people fair and just. Rawls’s fairness is symmetrical and horizontal; Weil’s compassion is asymmetrical and vertical” (466). Rawls is free of context; Weil is deeply rooted in communities. Weil’s intimate sense of justice, like Scarry’s depiction of the experience of beauty, is “immediate, personal, and organic” (466) in the sense that they both involve highly contextualised life settings. Perkins Spyke notes that “Beauty’s ability to radically decentre us (Gravity and Grace), one of the essential features of Scarry’s theory,” helps us to respond to those around us (467). Furthermore, as beauty “coaxes us to escape from ourselves, we are free to pay attention to the narratives and environments surrounding us” (467). Scarry argues that our apprehension of beauty guides us towards the higher value concept of justice. Her defence of beauty is constructed through an analogy between beauty and justice based on their shared features of fairness and symmetry. Scarry argues that beautiful objects directly inspire the search for social equality and seeks to persuade us that this analogy between the recognition of beauty and the recognition of just social arrangements also proceeds through the pleasure we find in symmetry and in “fairness.” Scarry argues that there is an intimate relationship between beauty and justice. Beauty leads us towards justice and compels us to furnish it with worth. Thus, alongside the other Revivalists, Scarry suggests that beauty is best understood as an apprehensive feature of our experience which refers us to a higher value concept—in this case, justice— and, in so doing, awakens us to the value of that concept. Alexander Nehamas In my view, the Beauty Revivalists think that beauty functions as an apprehensive feature of higher value concepts. We have seen that Scarry composes a defence of beauty constructed through an analogy she draws between our twin apprehensions of beauty and of the higher value concept of justice. For his part, Alexander Nehamas demonstrates numerous links between beauty and the suprasensory qualities of love, knowledge, and happiness. In Only a Promise of Happiness, Nehamas claims that beauty is the object of love. He argues that our love of beautiful objects compels a desire for greater knowledge about them. The pursuit of this knowledge and understanding constitutes an experience of happiness. Thus, Nehamas, like Scarry, holds a deep conviction that there is an intimate bond between beauty and higher value concepts. Two of Nehamas’s most substantial claims about beauty are (1) that “beauty is the object of love” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 3) and (2) that finding something beautiful (loving something) entails wanting to

Arguments for Beauty  101 understand what makes it beautiful (why it is loveable). For Nehamas, our apprehension of beauty is composed of our dedication and devotion to objects which we desire. Objects which answer to our desires are “nothing but beauty itself,” and the relationship with the object will also “show me that other desires, which I don’t now have, may be worth having as well” (3). Ergo, beauty inspires a search for knowledge and understanding. In his review of Only a Promise of Happiness, Malcolm Budd puts it thus: The crucial question is how strong the links are between beauty understood as the object of love and the possession of understanding of a thing’s beauty. The principal line of thought consists of three main propositions. The first is that loving something and finding it beautiful are one and the same thing: to love something is to find it beautiful and to find it beautiful is to love it. (It is not possible to love something you find ugly). The second is that finding something beautiful entails wanting to understand what makes it beautiful. And the third is that full understanding of something’s beauty is incompatible with experiencing the object as being beautiful. (Budd, “The Love of Art” 81) For the sake of argument, Budd accepts the first claim (that loving something and finding it beautiful are one and the same thing), but he questions the second and third claims. The second assertion is a point that Nehamas insists on. For example: “To love something and to want ... to understand it cannot possibly be separated from each other” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 120); “to find something beautiful is inseparable from the need to understand what makes it so, the features that make it stand out in my world” (131); “Every judgement of beauty prompts, or rather includes, the question ‘Why is that thing beautiful?’” (84); and “[t]he experience of beauty is inseparable from interpretation” (105). Nehamas’s idea is that our aesthetic judgements: literally determine the course of our lives: the desire to understand what makes things beautiful prompts us to communicate with others about their beauty and beauty in general, to explore other objects, and especially to acquire a great deal of information about a variety of matters and understanding of different things, all of which has an unpredictable, uncertain effect on our lives, for better or worse (Budd, “The Love of Art” 85). Budd disagrees. He thinks that it is not integral to finding something beautiful that we want (or need) to understand what makes it beautiful: “In fact, the truth would seem to be that hardly anyone who has ever lived has had the desire to analyse their loved ones’ beauties: they have just admired

102  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty and enjoyed them. Likewise, we can love a piece of music, for example, and revisit it many times, without reflecting on what makes it beautiful” (83). Nehamas might reply that for nearly all of us, there are many works and people of whom or of which we have some idea of what makes them beautiful, and we wish to pursue this knowledge—and, by doing so, we are engaged in the act of love. We attempt to clarify what makes a work of art or a person beautiful and are usually concerned about what constellation of features account for it. Thus, according to Nehamas, beauty is envisaged as the kind of quality in an object that leads us to attend to, appreciate, and understand the object better, which could arguably be called “love.” The third proposition in Nehamas’s line of thought appears to posit a connection between achieving a complete “understanding of a thing’s beauty and the disappearance of the beauty you once found in it” (83). Budd thinks that: this train of thought linking the achievement of understanding with the loss of love might well be thought to be counterintuitive. For greater understanding of a work one loves certainly can increase one’s admiration (love) of it, and why shouldn’t greater and greater understanding continue to go hand in hand with greater love—love not disappearing but reaching its peak with complete understanding. (82) Additionally, Budd says that “if complete understanding entails the loss of love and happiness, the rational thing to do is to resist the supposedly imperative urge to understand ever more completely what one loves” (82). Nehamas might well respond to this by saying that the goal of complete understanding is always unattainable. So, the goal of complete understanding is not incompatible with the continuance of love. Nehamas’s emphasis is that beauty “leads us beyond appearances, instilling in us the strong desire for greater knowledge” (82) (although not necessarily a desire for the completeness of that knowledge). The interesting feature of this argument is that it is Socratic in the sense that not-knowing (with certainty) what the beautiful is does not stop us from loving it or wanting to know it better. This not-knowing is conducive to our more profound understanding. Nehamas demonstrates how beauty inspires a search for conceptual understanding by forging a series of links between the ideas of beauty and interpretation. He objects to the notion of criticism as an attempt to gain complete knowledge of all the component parts of a work, put them together, and give a “verdict” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 44). The main aim and the main end of criticism is not, according to Nehamas, to determine the formal or final value of artworks or people (or any other beautiful things).3 What is more important, he thinks, is that criticism “expresses

Arguments for Beauty  103 my sense that you have more to offer me—that we have more to offer each other—and my desire to make you, to some extent or another, a part of my life so that I can find out what it is” (53). Nehamas believes the reason we cannot fully explain why we find something beautiful is that the judgement of beauty is simply not a conclusion at all: “Whenever we try to say why something is beautiful, we end up disappointed, with a sense that language has failed once again, to capture experience fully and, as always, has left out something essential to it” (75). Beauty, therefore, in Nehamas’s view, contains a sense that there is more to learn about the object before us that is valuable in ways we cannot now specify, something that “goes beyond the available evidence” and cannot “follow from what is already in hand” (76). Thus, for Nehamas, beauty acts as an endlessly explorative feature of our experience. Nehamas uses his relationship with Manet’s Olympia as a case study to describe how beauty can influence us and inspire us to love, to learn, and to value, and to illustrate how this loving, learning, valuing process develops. “In the story he tells, Nehamas’s theoretical arguments find a convincing example in practice. Initially, the experience of beauty may well be overwhelming, but it is future-oriented; it moves beyond sensation and immediacy of response into cognitive inquiry—a quest to understand the object of beauty better” (Winston 125). The relationship with Olympia motivates Nehamas to revisit several paintings (and discover many he never knew before) that might have influenced Manet. He reads what critics have had to say about Olympia and responds to what they suggest he must learn about the society of the time. He must learn about the historical context of prostitution in 19th-century France, the history of female nudes in painting, the institution of the salon, the history of the black population of Paris, the conventions of Byzantine iconography, and the impact that the rise of photography had on 19th-century painting (Winston 125). The list goes on. There is a comparison between Olympia and the work of the mid-18thcentury painter Francois Boucher. There is a need to reflect closely on specific points of detail—not only the position of the model Victorine’s hand but the style of her hair and the direction of her gaze. The deeper he goes into the work, the broader the parameters of his quest become. (Winston 125) Here, Nehamas seems to be arguing that “breadth” and “depth” are indispensably related—not things to choose between when it comes to learning about beauty. To know something in its particularity, “we need to know how it is similar to and different from the rest of the world” (125). We can, of course, be misguided in our quest. But the quest for beauty, as Nehamas

104  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty describes it, strikes a parallel with the quest for happiness and his book provides a convincing exposition of how they interrelate and the learning they can engender. Nehamas concludes his work on beauty by asking directly where the value of beauty lies. He suggests that the value of beauty does not lie in pleasure since “love can survive dislike, disapproval, disgust, contempt and hate” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 61) and “the desire for beauty can produce the deepest suffering” (131). Nor does the value of beauty lie in passive contemplation, since “erotics and hermeneutics … go hand in hand and enter every aspect of life” (131). Value is also not present in any single formal property or feature of a beautiful object: I don’t think that beauty is a single specific quality. There may be such a thing—we could call it ‘prettiness’ or ‘good looks,’ though such a feature changes with time and culture. Beauty, by contrast, is the most general quality that applies to everything—object or person—to which we are attracted and connects with objects and persons to whom we are attracted, where the attraction can range from a mild appeal to the most passionate love. Beauty, as Plato put it, is the object of love. (quoted in Kubala 2) To find something beautiful, Nehamas asserts, is inseparable from the “need to understand what makes it so, the features which made it stand out” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 131). In other words, the value of beauty aspires towards the identification of other values of distinction and individuality. Ultimately, Nehamas’s argument for beauty is that beauty makes us happy because it is always leading us onwards: “The value of beauty lies no further than itself: it is its own reward—a thought that, finally, brings me to Socrates … For Socrates, virtue was nothing but its own pursuit. And only the promise of happiness is happiness itself” (Only a Promise 138). Whenever we find something, or someone, beautiful, we are engaged in interpretation, attention. This leads us to see things as distinct and individual—and inspires love of the object and a pursuit of knowledge about the object: all of which amounts to a project of happiness and a claim of beauty. Thus, Nehamas’s analysis of beauty helps us begin to see how beauty inspires our search for understanding of a spread of other higher value concepts. Roger Scruton Roger Scruton, too, envisages beauty as a feature of our experience which refers us to higher value concepts. We have seen that Scarry composes a defence of beauty constructed through an analogy that she draws between beauty and the higher value concept of justice. Nehamas demonstrates

Arguments for Beauty  105 numerous links between beauty and the suprasensory qualities of love, knowledge, and happiness. Scruton’s defence of beauty is connected to his understanding of the sacred. Scruton does not say that beautiful objects are themselves sacred, but that “the experiences which focus on the sacred have their parallels in the sense of beauty” (Scruton, Beauty 52). He thinks that “the sense of beauty and reverence for the sacred are proximate states of mind, which feed into one another and grow from a common root” (57). He also claims that “the beautiful and the sacred are adjacent in our experience, and that our feelings for the one are constantly spilling over into the territory claimed by the other” (78). These “parallels” between our experience of the sacred and our experience of beauty stem from the fact that both occasions “flow from the same source” (78). Scruton outlines three main ways in which to understand these parallels. First, Scruton argues that experiencing beauty is like experiencing the sacred, in that both experiences involve recognising forms of “fittingness” and “harmony” (12). “Fittingness is judged in terms of how things look, and in terms of the meaning contained in how they look” (96). Recognising “fittingness” applies to many ordinary things, such as a room arrangement or a street scene looking “just right,” or a musical refrain sounding “just right” (96). Beauty of this sort “points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic” (156). Harmoniousness, too, is recognised in appearances but constitutes the search for a viable metaphysical order: We know what it is to love and be rejected and thereafter to wander in the world infected by a bleak passivity. This experience, in all its messiness and arbitrariness, is one that most of us must undergo. But when Schubert, in Die Winterreise, explores it in song, finding exquisite melodies to illuminate one after another the many secret corners of a desolated heart, we are granted an insight of another order. Loss ceases to be an accident and becomes instead an archetype, rendered beautiful beyond words by the music that contains it, moving under the impulse of melody and harmony to a conclusion that has a compelling artistic logic. It is as though we looked through the contingent loss of the song-cycle’s protagonist to another kind of loss altogether: a necessary loss, whose rightness resides in its completeness. Beauty reaches to the underlying truth of a human experience, by showing it under the aspect of necessity. (Beauty 156) The insight that beauty and the sacred provide is available only in the form they are presented: they both reside in a direct experience of “harmony” and “fittingness” that removes arbitrariness from the human condition and endows experience with meaning by referring it to a higher plane of reality.

106  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty Second, Scruton argues that beauty’s connection to the sacred is derived from the needs humans have in virtue of being “transcendental subjects” (8). Scruton argues that reason, freedom, and self-consciousness characterise the metaphysical condition “of a creature who does not merely think, feel and do, but who also has the questions: what to think, what to feel and what to do?” (43). The human point of view is one in which “we are both in the world and not of the world” (8). According to Scruton, this metaphysical condition gives rise to the human need for beauty and sanctity. He argues that we “wander through this world alienated” (145), and that we have two different existential options: we can remain “resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves.” The experience of beauty, Scruton thinks, like the experience of the sacred, guides us along this second path: “it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us” (146). People become at home in the world only by acknowledging our “fallen” condition, our place in the gutter, from which we can, at least, look up and see the stars, see beauty, “floating like an angel above the world beneath its gaze” (146). The sight of beauty, for Scruton, is therefore proximate to the religious frame of mind because it arises from a sense of living with imperfections while also aspiring towards the highest states of being. If there seems to be a “direct relationship between beauty and the sacred in Scruton’s writings, it is because, for him, only self-conscious subjects are capable of ordering their world in response to both” (Bryson 146). Third, in Scruton’s mind, the pursuit of beauty is connected to the impulse to sanctify human life through sacrifice. The most appropriate attitude to beauty, he thinks, contains respect for the “higher concepts” (Beauty 160) of sacrifice and redemption: “when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that ‘bears looking at’, and which attracts our admiration and our love” (161). Scruton offers as an example the English poets who, amidst the carnage of the Great War, tried to make sense of the destruction that lay all around them. Their effort was not to deny the horror, but to find a way of seeing it in sacrificial terms, and from this effort were “born the war poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and much later, the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten” (161). Unlike Dada, which “rejected all logic and reason” (161), their poetry redeemed the men from the horrors of war by seeing their experience in the light of sacrifice, Scruton thinks. “Beauty,” he says, “redeems what it touches, showing that the griefs and troubles of human life are, in the sum of things, worthwhile” (Scruton, “Beauty and the Sacred” 271). Rational beings have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them, but they can also save themselves from it with sacrifice and redemption. As the path out of desecration and towards the sacred, beauty enables us to choose the second option.

Arguments for Beauty  107 One could raise several critiques about Scruton’s analysis of the relationship between beauty and the sacred. For one thing, Scruton supports Thomas Aquinas’s suggestion that beauty is “transcendental” (Scruton, “Beauty and the Sacred” 271). Transcendentals are “features of reality possessed by all things” (271). As a transcendental, beauty is a real, “universal and objective” value anchored in our “rational” nature. Scruton’s “dual-hypothesis (the existence of transcendentals in general and beauty in particular) does not help us address one of the primary complaints against the notion that beauty is real, objective, and knowable and communicable” (Buhler 1). Namely, the difficulty (impossibility?) of answering the question, “Is object x beautiful or not?’” (1). This question—whether beauty is subjective (located “in the eye of the beholder”) or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things—is “perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty” (Sartwell, “Beauty” 9). Scruton claims that beauty is “objective” (Scruton, “Beauty and the Sacred” 271). Yet, at the same time, he acknowledges that a pure version of either of the subjectivist/objectivist accounts seems implausible. This is not a debate I wish to enter here: responding to Scruton’s claim that beauty is objective is not possible within the confines of this book. In relation to Scruton’s thesis that our experiences of beauty parallel our experiences of the sacred, however, Scruton makes another claim that I would like to address. This has to do with the fact that he invokes—in such a way as to explain our experience of beauty—the theological “argument from beauty.” In the “philosophy of religion, the ‘argument from beauty’ (or the ‘aesthetic argument’) is an argument for the existence of God. The ‘argument from beauty’ says that the existence of beauty testifies to the existence of God” (Bryson 98). This is a view which Scruton quite explicitly defends. He says that “there is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it [beauty]. Why, then, do so many artists today refuse to tread that path? Maybe because they know that it leads to God” (Scruton, “Beauty and the Sacred” 278). Richard Dawkins describes the “argument from beauty” in his book, The God Delusion: Another character in the Aldous Huxley novel just mentioned proved the existence of God by playing Beethoven’s string quartet no. 15 in A minor (‘Heiliger Dankgesang’) on a gramophone. Unconvincing as that sounds, it does represent a popular strand of argument. I have given up counting the number of times I receive the more or less truculent challenge: ‘How do you account for Shakespeare, then?’ (Substitute Schubert, Michelangelo, etc. to taste.) The argument will be so familiar, I needn’t document it further. But the logic behind it is never spelled out, and the more you think about it the more vacuous you realize it to be. Obviously, Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there, and they are sublime if he

108  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare. A great conductor is credited with saying: ‘If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?’ (Dawkins 110) According to Scruton’s critic philosopher James Bryson, the argument Dawkins has in mind runs along these lines: (P1) Beethoven’s quartets, Shakespeare’s sonnets, etc., are beautiful. (P2) If there were no God, then there would be no beauty (and thus no beautiful things). Therefore, there is a God. (Bryson 99) The premise “enlisted to do the heavy lifting” (99) in this argument is (2). Scruton “ought to explore why anyone would believe (2) to be true since denying this premise would be the most obvious route to discrediting the argument.” Surely a “responsible evaluation of ‘the argument from beauty’ ought to probe a little deeper; it ought to ask why the argument is so common (if indeed it is) and what sort of reasoning typically lies behind it” (101). Are there, for instance, any promising lines of support for (2) that spring to mind?4 At a minimum, “Scruton ought to try to present the most credible version of the argument. (If there’s no credible version of the argument, why waste ink on it?)” (101). Scruton says that he is reluctant to pursue theological speculation as it has been traditionally practised, preferring to identify a secular (Kantian) transcendental for the non-believer. However, whether intentional or not, Scruton makes several statements that have theological import. He re-imagines many religious themes and symbols in the territory that he inhabits: Art has an indisputable place in religious worship—not only in the pagan worship of antiquity but also in the Christian church and the rituals that take place there … This habit of offering what is most beautiful in a place of worship can be witnessed all over the world, in Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, in the simple mosques of the desert and the glorious shrines of the Christian saints. And our response to beauty is similar in many ways to our response to sacred things. (Scruton, “Beauty and the Sacred” 271) Scruton could—and perhaps ought to—use this and other such statements as starting points for deeper theological reflection on the nature of beauty. Scruton concludes Beauty with a re-affirmation that his defence of beauty is grounded in the conviction that there is an intimate bond between

Arguments for Beauty  109 beauty and the higher value concept of sanctity: “in a nutshell” he writes, “what beauty teaches us” is that there is a path “towards the sacred” (Beauty 194). Scruton argues, therefore, alongside Scarry and Nehamas, that beauty is best understood as an apprehensive feature of our experience that refers us to higher value concepts. Conclusion The primary aim of this Part of the book is to provide a descriptive account of the Beauty Revival, with an emphasis on developing an account of the notion of beauty that the Revivalists employ: “Revived Beauty.” In this chapter, I reconstructed the Beauty Revivalists’ arguments for beauty. On Beauty and Being Just, Only a Promise of Happiness, and Beauty offer defences of beauty grounded in the conviction that there is an intimate bond between beauty and higher value concepts. Scarry argues that beauty leads us towards the just; Nehamas claims that beauty is an object of love and, as such, manifests a promise of knowledge and happiness; and Scruton suggests that beauty connects us to the sacred. Though the specific concept each thinker relates to beauty differs, their arguments all link beauty to higher values essential for human beings to flourish. The Revivalists show us that, in the first instance, Revived Beauty is best understood as an apprehensive feature of our experience which refers us to higher value concepts (such as happiness, justice, and sanctity). In thinking this, the Beauty Revivalists complement one another and reveal similar lines of argumentation, despite the difference between the values to which they think beauty refers us. In summary, the Beauty-Revival movement I have identified relies on a notion of beauty not as an end in itself (as some earlier, pre-modernist, perhaps neo-classical notions of it assumed) but as both a sensory phenomenon and a means to a group of “higher” ends. Notes 1 Notably, Scarry does not mention Plotinus’s famous refutation of beauty as symmetry in Book 1.6 of the Enneads. 2 Plotinus offers his own compelling objections to symmetry in Book 6 of The Enneads. His critique of what was (at that time) a popular and widespread theory connecting symmetry and beauty, said that if symmetry is sometimes a component of beauty, it is an effect rather than a cause. 3 Nehamas often extrapolates from the beauty of persons to the beauty of art. He thinks that “like beautiful people, beautiful works spark the urgent need to approach, the same pressing feeling that they have more to offer, the same burning desire to understand what that is” (Only a Promise 73). Budd’s objection to this is to say that people differ from (nearly all) works of art in two vital respects: it is impossible to know everything about a person at a certain time, every  aspect of their character, their unrevealed thoughts and desires, and

110  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty so on—everything that might make them beautiful or detract from their beauty—and people change over time in ways that affect their beauty, while a work of art is frozen in time and its beauty is, at least often, in principle fully understandable. (Budd “The Love of Art” 81) There are some clear responses Nehamas might make to these objections. For example, although a person is living while a work of art is not, and a person is a natural object while a work of art is not, it is not clear that either of those facts make the person more complex than the work of art. So, in terms of the possibility of knowing “everything” about persons and art, it is not clear that one is deeper than the other. The only way to explore this would be to start appealing to putative ways in which a person was deeper or more complex than a work of art, testing each of those claims. In many cases, we might find that a person is not more complex, not deeper, and not more difficult to know. The “change over time argument” is a red herring, but it does indicate how strong the influence of Kant and subsequent philosophy has been over what constitutes an artwork. An artwork is partly constituted by its relations, to us, to history, to context, and is not fully constituted by its local or formal properties, so that what the artwork is changes over time just like a person. Art is often enriched or impoverished contingently as a result of these relations, just as a person is. Other things being equal, what holds for the person also holds for the artwork as far as change over time goes. 4 Moreover, when someone sees a sunset, for instance, and exclaims, “It really makes you believe in God,” it’s not obvious that they are thinking in terms of an argument for God’s existence. They may just be articulating non-inferential beliefs.

6

Neo-aestheticism

Introduction The primary aim of this Part is to provide a descriptive account of what I identify as the “Beauty Revival,” with an emphasis on developing the notion of “Revived Beauty.” In Chapter 4, I suggested that Beauty Revivalism is a response to Anti-Aestheticism. In Chapter 5, I reconstructed the arguments for beauty found in three highly influential and representative texts: On Beauty and Being Just, Only a Promise of Happiness and Beauty. I argued that their authors, Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton, respectively, share a common outlook in that they all offer arguments for (and defences of) beauty, which are grounded in the conviction that there is an intimate bond between beauty and higher value concepts. In this chapter, I identify another feature of thought that coalesces the Beauty Revivalists, by underscoring some of their unifying beliefs. I suggest that the Revivalists re-appropriate the attitude to beauty of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Plato (427–347 BC). They re-appropriate Kant in two ways.1 First, the Beauty Revivalists, like Kant, think that beauty ought to be distinguished from other aesthetic categories. These distinctions enable them to provide a more explicit description of the experience of beauty than the Anti-Aesthetic provides. Second, the Beauty Revivalists, like Kant, view the experience of beauty as a species of “reflective judgment” (Critique of Judgment §10). The experience of beauty transcends merely somatic experience, in that it includes the exercise of a faculty that makes it possible to bring objects under concepts. While not itself a cognitive state, the experiencing of beauty arises when the cognitive faculties engage in this activity. In this respect, the Revivalists also offer a re-appropriation of Plato. In Plato’s thought, I argue, one crucial issue that arises when trying to explain the experience of beauty is the relationship between objects (or particulars) and concepts (or universals): beautiful objects can be understood as the abstraction of a concept (or a universal) from an object (or a particular). This DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-12

112  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty cognitive process, this process of abstraction, I argue, is decisive to the significance of the Platonic attitude for the Beauty Revivalists. Beauty Revivalist notions of beauty are thus refurbishments of these features of the Kantian and Platonic accounts of beauty.2 In making this claim, I aim to show how the Beauty Revivalists enrich and counter the 20th-century Anti-Aesthetic concept of beauty. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Beauty as an Aesthetic Category

The Beauty Revivalists recognise beauty as an aesthetic category because they acknowledge that beauty is linked to sense perception. The Beauty Revivalists acknowledge that the term aesthetic has traditionally been used to denote “the science of sensation or feeling” (Baumgarten xii). Scruton mentions the fact that “most thinkers have retained the term aesthesis,” recognising that this denotes a “sensory frame of mind” (Scruton, Beauty 20). Nehamas says that “strictly speaking, the term ‘aesthetic’ [is] from a Greek word connected with perception” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 139). Scarry variously describes our aesthetic experiences as a sort of “crisscrossing of the senses” (4); as belonging to the “realm of sensations”; as being “sensorially present” (6); as having “emphatic sensory properties” (12); as being a “striking sensory event” (13); as having “vivid sensory detail” (29); and as “available to sensory apprehension” (101). The Revivalists are thus unanimous in the view that beauty is connected to our sense perception. What matters “first and foremost” is that beauty is a “certain kind of judgment, for which the technical term ‘aesthetic’ is now in common use … It is important to understand beauty in its general sense, as the subject-matter of aesthetic judgment” (Scruton, Beauty 14). Thus, the Revivalists think, beauty is a part of the “aesthetic realm” (3). The Beauty Revivalists, however, all acknowledge that the crux to understanding beauty is to compare our orientation to the object that we judge as beautiful, to a range of alternative kinds of aesthetic judgements—or alternative types of sense perceptions. In this sense, they rejuvenate Kant’s distinctions between different forms of aesthetic judgement and assert the need for aesthetic criteria. In the Critique of Judgment, in the first two “Moments of the Judgment of Taste,” Kant attempts to draw a sharp distinction between two varieties of aesthetic appraisal, which he calls judgements of the “agreeable” and of “the beautiful” and the pronouncements of the “taste of the senses” and the “taste of reflection,” respectively (my italics, Critique of Judgment, §3–4). Nehamas, Scarry, and Scruton are in accord. Distinctions between different kinds of aesthetic judgement help us

Neo-Aestheticism  113 to recognise the beautiful: while the former judgement—the judgement of the agreeable—is a “merely sensual” experience, the later judgement, the judgement of beauty, involves an act of reflective cognition. According to Kant’s view in the Critique of Judgment, there are four kinds of aesthetic judgement: judgement of the agreeable, the good, the beautiful, and the sublime. Like Kant, Nehamas and Scruton both differentiate, in the first instance, between three of these four kinds of aesthetic judgement: the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful. Pleasure in the agreeable is the satisfaction of desires and physical needs: it is, according to Scruton, “merely a statement of preference” (Scruton, Beauty 14). Nehamas describes the agreeable as “anything that we like and enjoy in the most everyday sense of the word—strawberry ice cream, the smell of jasmine, silk, a large house or a good meal and perhaps canary wine (Kant’s own example) to go with it.” We want these things to “continue to be,” along with other things like them, “available to us” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 4). That is, as Kant says, we have a serious interest “in their existence” (4). This is an attitude we also have towards good things—“things that are either useful or morally valuable” (4). Pleasure in the good is pleasure in content or concept and involves measuring an object against a set of criteria. In this sense, according to Scruton, the good is for “utility” (Scruton, Beauty 14). Good design is like this, “where we judge an object to be good based on the fit between its design and function” (McMahon, “The Significance” 28). Following Kant, Nehamas and Scruton both argue that pleasure in beauty is distinct from pleasure in the agreeable and the good: beauty demands its own distinct orientation towards an object. As Nehamas puts it, “such a judgment is not the conclusion of an interpretation, which is why, as Kant saw, it doesn’t follow from any description of its object: we can’t ever give sufficient reasons for it” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 78). Scruton agrees: “less important than the final verdict is the attempt to … identify the aspect of the thing that claims our attention” (Scruton, Beauty 13). Kant grounds the experience of beauty in what we can understand as the exploitation of certain perceptual principles. Certain objects cause us to deploy our mental faculties (the “imagination” and the “understanding”) in such a way that in economising their normal function, or perhaps deploying them in unprecedented ways, they draw our attention to an aspect of perception itself. We are not aware of the source of the experience. Instead, we attribute the experience to something about the object. Scarry, too, identifies beauty as an “aesthetic category” (83). She also describes beauty as one of the “aesthetic attributes” (57) and as part of the “sphere of the aesthetic” (107). For Scarry, pleasure in beauty must be understood as distinct not merely from the agreeable and the good but also

114  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty the sublime. She argues that “the demotion of beauty” has come about “as a result of its juxtaposition with the sublime” (82): In the newly subdivided aesthetic realm, the sublime is male and the beautiful is female … The sublime resides in mountains, Milton’s Hell, and tall oaks in a sacred grove; the beautiful resides in flowers and Elysian meadows. The sublime is night, the beautiful day. The sublime moves (one becomes ‘earnest … rigid … astonished’). ‘Beauty charms.’ The sublime is dusk, ‘disdain for the world … eternity’; the beautiful is lively gaiety and cheer. The sublime is great; the beautiful can also be small … the sublime is principled, noble, righteous; the beautiful is compassionate and good-hearted … Formerly capable of charming or astonishing, now beauty was the not-astonishing; as it was also the not-male, the not-mountainous, the not-righteous, the not-night. Each attribute or illustration of the beautiful became one member of an oppositional pair, and because it was almost always the diminutive member, it was also the dismissible member. (Scarry 83–84) Scarry thinks that the “bifurcation of the sublime and the beautiful” (84) occasioned the “demotion of the beautiful” (84) because it was seen as a “counterpoint” (84) to the sublime rather than a distinct category in its own right. Scruton’s way of distinguishing the sublime from the beautiful differs from that of Scarry. Scruton says that there are two critical distinctions between the sublime and the beautiful. The first is that one originates in love, “the other in fear” (Scruton, Beauty 11). Thus, both experiences are elevating, both invite disinterested contemplation, and both form part of the “core of aesthetic experience” (11). The other important distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, according to Scruton, is that the former is a judgement of taste. In contrast, the sublime “invites another kind of judgment” (Beauty 63) in which we are “presented with an intimation of our own worth” (63). Thus, while Scarry juxtaposes the sublime and the beautiful, placing them in competition with one another as aspects of the same affection, Scruton distinguishes them as (a) different forms of judgement and (b) as having different affective sources. Having established that beauty is an aesthetic judgement, the Beauty Revivalists acknowledge the crucial distinction between beauty and other categories of sensual experience, including the agreeable, the good, and the sublime. The experience of beauty, according to the Revivalists, is distinct from the experience of the agreeable, the good, and the sublime. Beauty demands its own distinct orientation towards an object, which is grounded in the exploitation of certain perceptual principles. This opens the ground

Neo-Aestheticism  115 for a further claim made by the Revivalists (examined in the next section) that beauty alone, unlike the agreeable, the good, and the sublime, gestures to something beyond itself (another concept under which it can be subsumed—such as happiness, wisdom, justice, or sanctity). So, beauty is “the supreme” (Scruton, Beauty 3) aesthetic value: “to speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm” (11). Beauty as a Reflective Judgement

In the previous chapter, I put forward the view that the Beauty Revivalists portray beauty as linked to higher value concepts, such as happiness, justice, or sanctity. I thus suggested that Revived Beauty is best understood as an apprehensive feature of our experience that refers us to such a concept. In this section, I elaborate upon this view by proposing that the Beauty Revivalist notion of beauty is a species of the sort of thinking that Kant calls “reflective judgment” (Critique of Judgment §10). Making a reflective judgement involves exercising a faculty that makes it possible to bring objects under specific concepts. I further claim that the Revivalists invoke the Kantian notion that beauty is purposive, to explain the distinctive sort of reflective judgement occasioned by experiences of the beautiful (as opposed to other aesthetic experiences). I outline the general character of reflective judgement in so far as it pertains to purposiveness, while illustrating the Beauty-Revivalist orientation towards Kant’s account. “Reflective Judgment” in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

What role do Kant’s theories about the significance of aesthetic judgement play in the Beauty-Revivalist notion of beauty? The Critique of Judgment is a critique of reflective judgement. According to Kant, aesthetic judgements, including judgements of beauty, are supposed to be a species of such reflective judgements (presumably along with teleological judgements). In what follows, I suggest that Revivalist thinking also portrays the judgement of beauty as a kind of reflective judgement. But, first, we must ask, what is a “reflective judgment” (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, IV)? “Judgment in general,” Kant writes, “is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal” (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, I) or the “faculty for subsumption of the particular under the universal” (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, II). To say that a concept is “universal” is to say that it is common to several objects. The question of how we are to “think the particular as contained under the universal” would thus appear to be the question of how we can think of a particular thing (say, Socrates) as having a feature that can at least in principle be shared with

116  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty other objects (say, philosophers). Any individual task of subsumption, Kant suggests, may take one of two forms. First, a “determining judgment” involves the “subsumption” of a particular individual (Socrates) under a universal concept (the concept of being a philosopher). In this case, “the universal” is given, and it is the task of judgement to find a particular that can be subsumed under it. Second, in a “reflective judgment,” a particular may be given “for which the universal is to be found” (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, II). In the first case, judgement is “determining” or “determinant”; in the second, it is “reflecting” or “reflective” (Critique of Judgment, Introduction IV). The key distinction between “determining” and “reflective” judgements thus has to do with the direction in which we think—from the universal to the particular, or vice versa. Suppose we already possess the universal and are deciding whether the particular is to be subsumed under it. In that case, the judgement is “determinative.” But if “only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective” (Critique of Judgment, Introduction IV). In “reflective judgment,” the presentation of the object acts as an “occasion for reflection that throws thought back from the object to the concept” (Dalton, “How Beauty Disrupts Space” 14). The difference between the two uses of judgement has to do with how the “structure of a judgment is interpreted” (Pippin 551). Kant thinks it is also possible to “interpret predication in the reverse direction” (Pippin 551). This is the “reflective” interpretation of predication in a judgement. It moves from an individual or particular object to a universal or more general concept. In the previous chapter, I argued that Revived Beauty is best understood as an apprehensive feature of our experience which refers us to higher value concepts. Beauty-Revivalist formulations of the notion of beauty thus suggest, in loosely Kantian terms, that judgements of beauty assume the character of reflective judgement. What is special about judgements of beauty (as the Revivalists explain them) is that they involve attempts to subsume individual (beautiful) objects under higher value concepts (justice, happiness, or the sacred) in a reflective sense. Scarry, for instance, explains how the light which “trips rapidly” (On Beauty and Being Just 34) through the leaves of “young slip of a palm” tree “set in motion” (35) a “brush with beauty” (36) because her mind begins “turning backwards” (46) until she can see the “stiped leaf light everywhere in the room” (34) and this “puts her in mind of … distributional justice” (66). Viewed in this way, aesthetic appreciation would be “mischaracterized if discriminated on a concept-application model such as a determinate judgment” (Pippin 549). Reflective judgement—“the activity by which judgment strives to proceed from particular experience to a general concept” (Pippin 552)—the Revivalists show us—is an essential aspect of aesthetic appreciation itself.

Neo-Aestheticism  117 In their analyses of beauty, the Revivalists explore what makes individual experiences of beauty arrive at a location that is conceptually rich. The Revivalist suggests that in our experience of beauty, we are “reflecting”— attending somehow—to the possible concept which would unify such an experience. The Beauty Revivalists show us that a higher value concept, such as justice, happiness, wisdom, or sanctity, is discoverable through the reflective judgement initiated by the experience of beauty. Thus, according to the Revivalists, when we judge beauty, we enact a reflective judgement, moving from the particular to the universal. “Purpose” and “Purposiveness” in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

The notions of purpose and purposiveness in Kant’s aesthetic philosophy must also be addressed if we are to fully understand the unique form of reflective judgement that I think the Beauty Revivalists assign to judgements of beauty. Understanding purpose is important if we are to see the key difference between Beauty Revivalist accounts of reflective judgement and the Kantian account. For Kant, reflective judgements of beauty never arrive at a concept. However, I have suggested that, for the Beauty Revivalists, reflective judgements of beauty do arrive at a (higher value) concept. How so? Purposiveness is a sign that a particular—an object—was created following the pattern provided by a concept—a universal. Identifying an object’s “purpose” is the clue by which, in a reflective judgement, we are led from the particular to the universal. For instance, if all mortals are people, and Socrates is mortal, then Socrates is a person. Socrates’ mortality is the “purpose” which enables us to subsume him as a particular individual under the concept, or universal, “personhood.” “Hence, we think of a purpose if we think not merely, say, or our cognition of the object, but instead of the object itself (its form, or its existence) as an effect that is possible only through a concept of that effect” (§10). To think purposively “is to think in reverse: from the particular to the universal, from the object to the concept that made it possible” (Pippin 469). When we regard something “as if it had a purpose, but we have no particular purpose in mind” (Pippin 469), then Kant says, the thing is experienced as having “purposiveness without purpose” (Critique of Judgment §10): We … call objects, states of mind, or acts purposive even if their possibility does not necessarily presuppose the presentation of a purpose; we do this merely because we can explain and grasp them only if we assume that they are based on a causality [that operates] according to purposes, i.e., on a will that would have so arranged them in accordance with the presentation of a certain rule. Hence there can be a purposiveness without a purpose … (§10)

118  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty What differentiates the purposiveness associated with a judgement of beauty from other forms of purpose, for Kant, is the fact that its “reflective movement never arrives at a concept” (Dalton, “How Beauty Disrupts Space” 5). A beautiful object is presented to consciousness as if it had a correlated universal, but “no concept will ever be found because the beautiful has no concept” (29). Thus, according to Kant, “Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose” (Kant, Critique of Judgment §17). For Kant, a judgement of beauty is not founded on a concept, even though it seems that it is (§5). Therefore, the purposiveness of the beautiful is a “purposiveness without a purpose” (§17). The concept (the purpose) is “never presented, yet it is accepted by thought as a requirement of thought” (§17). From the “presentation of a presence,” this “paradoxical reflection is the peculiar movement of purposiveness that we find associated with the judgment of the beautiful” (Dalton 14). The appearance, or presentation of purpose, in a beautiful object starts the reflective movement, but the reflective judgement that proceeds from given (beautiful) particulars never arrives at a general concept or universal principle. Kant’s idea of “purposiveness without a purpose” (Critique of Judgment §10) in the judgement of beauty leaves a sort of “nothingness” at the core of our experience of beauty. We detect purposiveness but find an absence of purpose. Perhaps this is why Nehamas has said (echoing sentiments expressed by Adorno and others), “I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack” (Only a Promise 67). Indeed, it is this very nothingness that opened what Dave Hickey has described as a “dead zone, a silent abyss”; a “vacancy” (Hickey 2) at the heart of our notion of beauty. In this previous Part, I suggested that, in their own analyses of beauty, the Beauty Revivalists explore what makes the experience of beauty, as an aesthetic reflective judgement, arrive at a conceptually rich location. Their defences of beauty suggest that a higher value concept, such as justice, happiness, or sanctity, is discoverable through the reflective judgement initiated by the experience of beauty. Thus, beautiful objects confirm our assumption of purposiveness for our judgement. Moving beyond this very rough sketch of Kant’s aesthetic theory would require further explication of his terminology and would not serve the aims of this book. According to Kant’s theory of purposiveness, “there has to be something that gives sense to our attending to the object in which we see beauty—something that would make the object worth the particular form of attention characteristic to the seeing of beauty” (Baz 27). The Revivalists provide us with an understanding of “where the value of beauty, and hence the intelligibility of our response to it, comes from” (Baz 27) in a way that Kant does not. The Beauty Revivalists supply us with the something. Kant, in his account of beauty, in effect portrays us all as

Neo-Aestheticism  119 continuously, necessarily, engaged in what Allison has called “the search for universals” (31) and what Longuenesse has called “the project [and, elsewhere, ‘the aim’] of constituting a whole of experience” (42). We can all be assumed to have what Paul Guyer, in interpreting Kant, has called “a cognitive craving” (Guyer, Values of Beauty 104). Once we “accept this portrayal of us as generally interested in conceptualising all that encounters” (Baz 31) us and fit it into an ever more “unified and comprehensive system” (Guyer, Values of Beauty 104), we can reward the search for “a concept as such” by outlining how beauty is related to such concepts— which is an effort that precisely constitutes the Beauty Revivalist project. Plato (428–348 BC) In addition to their appropriation of the Kantian account of beauty discussed above, the Revivalists also invoke several features of the Platonic attitude to beauty. The most important of these, in my view, is the idea that particular beautiful things refer us to a more abstract universal. As we have seen, the word Kant uses to describe “judgements” of this sort is “reflective.” There is also, I argue, a sense in which our experiences of beauty, according to Plato, involve discerning a singular object, an individual, which then “refers” us to a more general idea, or concept. The Kantian notion of a “reflective judgment” thus finds a parallel in Platonic epistemology: “At this point, Kant and Plato converge” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 76). The Forms

Already in this book I have intimated that Plato conceives of “Beauty” as a Form,3 possessing an eternal, immutable existence. For Plato, universal predicates are names of Forms, or Ideas. Plato holds that these Forms themselves are non-temporal and non-spatial and instantiated in perceptible particulars. The theory of Forms may best be understood in terms of mathematical entities. A circle, for instance, is defined as “a plane figure composed of a series of points, all of which are equidistant from a given point” (Liddell and Robert Scott 248). No one has ever actually seen such a figure, however. What people have seen are figures that are more or less close approximations of the ideal circle. Nevertheless, although the Form of a circle has never been seen, indeed, could never be seen, mathematicians and others know what a circle is, and this is evidenced by the fact that they can define it. For Plato, therefore, the Form circularity exists, but not in the physical world of space and time. It exists as a changeless Idea. Forms have greater reality than objects in the physical world both because of their perfection

120  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty and stability and because they are models, resemblance to which gives ordinary physical objects whatever reality they have: I think you are aware that students of geometry and reckoning and such subjects first postulate the odd and the even and the various figures and three kinds of angles and other things akin to these in each branch of science, regard them as known, and, treating them as absolute assumptions, do not deign to render any further account of them to themselves or others, taking it for granted that they are obvious to everybody. They take their start from these, and pursuing the inquiry from this point on consistently, conclude with that for the investigation of which they set out … And do you not also know that they further make use of the visible forms and talk about them, though they are not thinking of them but of those things of which they are a likeness, pursuing their inquiry for the sake of the square as such and the diagonal as such, and not for the sake of the image of it which they draw? And so in all cases. The very things which they mould and draw, which have shadows and images of themselves in water, these things they treat in their turn as only images, but what they really seek is to get sight of those realities which can be seen (Plato Republic 510d–510e) Circularity, squareness, and triangularity are excellent examples, then, of what Plato meant by Forms. An object existing in the physical world may be called a circle or a square or a triangle only to the extent that it resembles (participates in) the Form circularity or squareness or triangularity. According to Plato, for any conceivable thing or property, there is a corresponding Form, a perfect example of that object or thing or property. The list is almost inexhaustible. Tree, House, Mountain, Man, Woman, Ship, Cloud, Horse, Dog, Table and Chair, Goodness, Justice, Redness, Roundness, and Beauty would all be examples of putatively independently existing abstract perfect Forms. Plato says such Forms exist in an abstract state, a “place beyond heaven” (Plato, Phaedrus 247) but independent of minds in their own realm: Forms, or Ideas, are not mental images or psychological objects of mind, but objectively existing, unchanging, permanent, and eternal beings. The Revivalists do not conceive of beauty as a “Form” in the Platonic sense—as Scruton puts it: “We don’t have to accept that metaphysical vision in order to acknowledge the element of truth in Plato’s argument” (Beauty 39). But as we have already seen, the Revivalists believe that individual instantiations of beauty “refer” us to higher value concepts, such as justice, sanctity, happiness, and knowledge. I have argued that, according

Neo-Aestheticism  121 to the Revivalists, the beauty we see in individual objects puts us in mind of these “higher” concepts. What the Revivalists borrow from the Platonic picture of beauty, then, is the idea that particular instances of beauty put us in mind of, or refer us to, more abstract concepts, such as justice, sanctity and happiness. Mimesis

Plato’s most prominent contribution to aesthetics is his notion of mimesis (imitation). Mimesis derives from the idea that, for example, beautiful things are mere replicas of Beauty itself. So conceived, beautiful things participate in the Forms by means of imitation. In Plato’s view, such imitation results from a lack of knowledge of the Forms, the true essences of which artistic representations are but deficient approximations. Therefore, such representation is “far removed from the truth” (Plato, Republic 598b5). Plato famously illustrates this point through the example of a bed (597b ff.). There is a perfect Form of a bed, which exists as the nature of a bed. Then, a carpenter makes a bed. Lastly, a painter paints a picture of the bed that the carpenter constructed. The painter’s imitation is three times removed from the true nature (or Form) of the bed. As Plato says, “there are many beds and tables in the world, but there is only a single idea of a bed and of a table. The carpenter produces each of these two objects according to an idea, but it is not the idea itself that is produced” (Plato, Republic 598b). Plato says that the sensible particulars “imitate” or “participate” in the Forms of which they are instantiations. Plato takes the Forms to be archetypes in the sense that they are patterns for the production of the sensible world, and that they are, in some sense not to be dwelled upon here, more perfect than sensible particulars which imitate them. The Forms are also active causes of their own instantiation in particulars; it is in virtue of the activity of the Forms that sensible particulars may have universal traits, features, or essences. Just as there are many beds, there are many beautiful things, and just as there is a perfect Form of a bed, so too, according to Plato, there is a universal concept of Beauty itself. And it is by contemplating individually beautiful objects that we come to know Beauty itself: By contemplating beauty, the soul rises from its immersion in merely sensuous and concrete things and ascends to a higher sphere, where it is not the beautiful boy who is studied, but the form of the beautiful itself, which enters the soul as a true possession, in a way that ideas generally reproduce themselves in the souls of those who understand them. (Scruton, Beauty 34)

122  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty It is this mental, or cognitive, activity—this act of “contemplation”—which the Revivalists appeal to in their descriptions of the experience of beauty. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Revivalists conceive of beauty in individual objects as referents to more general, higher value concepts, such as justice, sanctity, happiness, and knowledge. They thus suggest, alongside Plato, that the “judgment” of beauty involves a mental shift from the particular to the universal. Beautiful things “don’t stand aloof, on their own, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn” (Nehamas, Only a Promise, 77). We become familiar with the universal causes in the first place by induction from the particulars, and we relate to the particulars through perception. Scarry describes this mental process as a “search for a precedent” (Scarry 31). She says: One can see why beauty—by Homer, by Plato, by Aquinas, by Dante (and the list would go on, name upon name, century by century, page upon page, through poets writing today such as Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Allen Grossman, and Seamus Heaney)—has been perceived to be bound up with the immortal, for it prompts a search for a precedent, which in turn prompts a search for a still earlier precedent, and the mind keeps tripping backward until it at last reaches something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal. And one can see why beauty—by those same artists, philosophers, theologians of the Old World and the New—has been perceived to be bound up with truth. What is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere. (Scarry 31) Scarry’s thoughts are echoed here by Scruton, who says: “As Plato and Kant both saw, therefore, the feeling for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from the sense of living with imperfections while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental” (Beauty 145–46). Universals and Particulars

It is the direction of thought—the ascending order of exposition—regarding beauty that is decisive to what understanding we can gain of the meaning and significance of the Platonic attitude for the Beauty Revivalists: we access the universal through the particular and not the other way around. Rather than beginning at the summit of the metaphysical hierarchy and proceeding downwards through the successive stages of the universe to the material world, Plato begins from the world of everyday experience and proceeds upwards towards the Form. Similarly, in their conceptions

Neo-Aestheticism  123 of beauty, the Revivalists begin with the world of everyday experiences of beauty and proceed upwards towards the higher value concepts to which they believe beauty is linked, thinking the particular under the universal. Kantian and Platonic Accounts of Beauty Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton all in their different ways offer partly (though not exclusively) Kantian interpretations of beauty as an experience. However, as we have seen, the Revivalists also invoke features of the Platonic account of beauty. They thus indicate that there may be some significant overlap between the Kantian and Platonic accounts. In my view, Beauty Revivalist disagreements about how to interpret—and perhaps even synthesise—these two philosophical accounts of beauty pose an obstacle to making progress in the philosophy of beauty. The coherence of the Beauty Revival as a movement depends, in part, on an attempt to at best amalgamate, or at least dispel, contradictions between certain aspects of the Kantian and Platonic accounts of beauty. Without such a synthesis, we cannot reach and identify significant points of agreement about beauty, upon which future arguments can be constructed. To the best of my knowledge, there have only been three publications, in recent years, dedicated to the activity of discovering intersections between Plato and Kant on the topic of beauty: “The Significance of Plato’s Notions of Beauty and Pleasure in the Philosophy of Kant” (2007) by Jennifer McMahon; “Plato and Kant on the Problem of Beauty” (2016) by Oguz Haslakoglu; and “Plato and Kant on Beauty and Desire” (2019) by Santiago Ramos. McMahon argues that “Plato’s aesthetic theory anticipates the role that aesthetic judgment would play in Immanuel Kant’s system of the mind” (McMahon, “The Significance” 1). Her argument is based on a reading of the Laws, in which, she thinks, Plato presents us with a notion of beauty which requires us to cultivate pleasure in harmonious forms. This, she thinks, resonates with Kant’s aesthetic theory, because, according to Kant, “the feeling for beauty is a feeling for harmony” (1). Haslakoglu focuses on the difference between the Platonic and Kantian views on beauty, arguing that their inquiries produce “totally contradictory results” (Haslakoglu 1) and “two antithetical positions” (1). Ramos argues that “both thinkers do justice to the relationship between desire and beauty, while also both asserting that the proper appreciation of beauty per se—whether in an object or as an essence—requires a disinterested stance” (Ramos 1). There is no uniform agreement between McMahon, Haslakoglu, and Ramos about beauty in Kant and Plato. I have two proposals about how future studies about beauty in Plato and Kant might proceed, the first inspired by McMahon’s study and the second inspired by Ramos’s: first, as indicated by McMahon, it may be possible

124  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty to find an overlap between Kant’s aesthetic categories and the Platonic typography of beauty. As we have seen, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant differentiates between three kinds of aesthetic judgements: the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful, a list to which he later adds the sublime. Partly corresponding to the three types of liking (i.e., “judgment”) identified by Kant might be what, in Plato, can be called sensual beauty and intellectual beauty, respectively. According to the ascent theory drawn from the Symposium and the Phaedrus, there is a lower beauty borne of sensual gratification and a higher beauty marked by intellectual pleasure. It is thus possible to offer an integrated approach to Kant and Plato on the subject of the categories of beauty. Second, as indicated by Ramos, the Kantian notion of “liking devoid of interest” can perhaps be re-interpreted so that “it can be brought into harmony with the Platonic accounts of beauty in the Symposium and Hippias Major” (Ramos 6). According to Ramos, Kant and Plato “affirm similar things about the nature and judgment of beauty, and the relationship between both of these and human affection and desire” (15). Kant and Plato both see affective states or attachments or desires as “preambles to the contemplation of the beautiful” (15). They agree that beauty turns us away from “worldly concerns which condition our actions” and that our search for beauty requires an attitude of detachment or “disinterest.” We must stop desiring to possess beauty physically as a material object or conceptually, as a tidy definition, and must open ourselves to the possibility that beauty teaches us to love and admire something for what it is in and of itself. The peculiar feel-good sensation—the pleasure—derived from this lesson is unlike the lower pleasures resulting from alleviating pain, ceasing deprivation, or satisfying desires. This is a crucial point in understanding Plato’s distinction between Beauty and the Good (which we do desire) and the link to Kantian aesthetics. The 18th-century philosophers recognised this characteristic of our response to beauty when they settled for “disinterested pleasure” to denote the reaction to beauty. Attempts to fathom the similarities between Kant and Plato on the subject of beauty cannot overlook the considerable differences between them. Some of the insights offered by Kant in the Critique of Judgment are undeniably at odds with some of those offered by Plato in the Symposium and the Phaedrus and with those offered by the author of the Hippias Major. However, it seems to be the case that for both Kant and Plato, cultivating pleasure in beauty takes us beyond self-interest. In this, perhaps, beauty resembles “the Good.” If that is the case, then by approaching Platonic and Kantian theories about beauty in this way—with an eye to their shared features—one might be able—very tentatively—to broach again the controversial relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Wittgenstein famously declared that “ethics and aesthetics are one” (Wittgenstein, Notebooks

Neo-Aestheticism  125 24.17.16), but (save for the fact that they both have to do with values) it is more usual to explore their differences than their similarities, or (as we have seen) to disassociate them entirely. Nevertheless, future aestheticians may like to (re)address Wittgenstein’s claim, and, when and if so, I think that exploring the relationship between Kantian and Platonic accounts of beauty offers a promising avenue of inquiry. Conclusion The primary aim of this Part is to identify and provide a descriptive account of the Beauty Revival, with an emphasis on developing an account of the notion of beauty that the Revivalists employ: “Revived Beauty.” I had three auxiliary aims, represented in each of the three constituent parts of the Part. In this chapter, I identified those principles which unify the Beauty Revivalists by underscoring a set of unifying beliefs. I suggested that the Revivalists appropriate Kant’s attitude to beauty in two major ways: first, the Beauty Revivalists, like Kant, think that beauty ought to be distinguished from other aesthetic (or sensuous) categories of experience. Second, the Beauty Revivalists, like Kant, view beauty as a species of reflective judgement which is illustrative of “purposiveness.” I thus suggested that Beauty Revivalist notions of beauty are refurbishments of these features of the Kantian account of beauty. The Beauty Revivalists explore what makes the experience of beauty, as an aesthetic reflective judgement, arrive at a location that is conceptually rich. They are thus responsive to one of the most complex and worn aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory, and successful in revitalising Kant’s thought about judgements of the beautiful. I also suggested that the Beauty Revivalists re-appropriate the Platonic attitude to beauty in one important way: the Revivalists, like Plato, believe that there is a crucial relationship between universals and particulars, and they think the universal under the particular. Notes 1 I am claiming that the Beauty Revivalists appropriate two specific features of the Kantian account of beauty. I am not claiming that all the Revivalists appeal to all aspects of the Kantian account. Nor am I claiming that they do not disagree about—and even reject—other aspects of the Kantian account of beauty. 2 It should be noted that the Revivalists invoke numerous other philosophical accounts of beauty, including those offered by Plotinus and Hume. Given the constraints of this book, I have decided to focus on their shared relationship with Kant and Plato. 3 Plato’s theory of Forms is highly disputed and there are various interpretations of what Plato’s Forms really are. It is impossible for me to do justice to this controversy here.

Part 2: Conclusion

The Beauty Revivalists seek to remind us that beauty is essential to life as we would want to live it. “Beauty can be as dangerous as evil can be beautiful” Nehamas reminds us “But that is just another aspect of the double edge of non-moral values. Both beauty and friends can be dangerous. If you want to avoid them on these grounds, be my guest. But I wonder what your life will then be like” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 104). In this Part, I have endeavoured to show the most successful moves which have been played in favour of beauty in philosophy in recent years. The Revivalists understand that beauty is linked—perhaps necessarily—to our apprehension of the highest human values. Sometimes, when we are speaking about the beautiful—a painting, a flower, a child’s face—attributes—such as symmetry or colour or unity—anticipate parallel but much more difficult to achieve attributes in the realm of justice. Our experiences of beauty can restore our sense of the sacred, and sometimes, beauty even raises happiness. Beauty, in one way or another, reveals to us—perhaps even dictates— which higher values we treasure, recognise, and appreciate, and, if we are lucky and truly attentive, guides us to live according to them. The primary aim of this chapter has been to develop an account of the notion of beauty that the Revivalists employ: “Revived Beauty.” I had three auxiliary aims, represented in each of the three constituent parts of the chapter. In Chapter 4, I explained how the Beauty Revivalists have responded to the problems of Anti-Aestheticism. In Chapter 5, I reconstructed the arguments for beauty which are found in Only a Promise of Happiness, On Beauty and Being Just, and Beauty and argued that one of the principles which unify these Beauty Revivalists is a common outlook, in the sense that the Revivalists all offer arguments for (and defences of) beauty, which are grounded in the conviction that there is an intimate bond between beautiful objects and the higher value concepts to which they refer us. In Chapter 6, I took a further step towards identifying those principles which unify the Beauty Revivalists by underscoring a set of unifying beliefs. I suggested that the Revivalists appropriate Kant’s attitude to beauty as an DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-13

Part 2: Conclusion  127 aesthetic category and a reflective judgement that displays purposiveness. I also suggested that they re-appropriate certain elements of the Platonic account of beauty, in that the experience of beauty involves the abstraction of universals from particulars. Ultimately, Beauty-Revivalist texts, such as Only a Promise of Happiness, On Beauty and Being Just, and Beauty, introduce a new notion of beauty: “Revived Beauty.” This notion initiates a fundamental change in our essential attitude to the philosophy of beauty, which upends and replaces 20th-century Anti-Aestheticism. In my view, the Beauty Revivalist response to Anti-Aestheticism is precisely this: beauty is a way of seeing or grasping other higher value concepts. The sense of beauty is the feeling we have in ourselves or the quality we attribute to an object, which gives us a sense that there is a higher or more ultimate value. While the Revivalists accept the Anti-Aesthetic tenet that beauty is grounded in sensual experience, they insist that it would be a mistake to limit our descriptions of beautiful objects to their sensuous properties or effects, for beauty “fills the mind” (Scarry 29). Beauty involves our cognitive faculties in clearly discernible ways; it is “something presented through the senses, to the mind” (Scruton, Beauty 21). Thus, “beauty is always manifested in appearance without being limited to it” (Nehamas, Only a Promise 24). The Revivalists are concerned that we do not tie beauty too closely to the senses, but that we accept that it has a relation “of some sort to [a] higher, disembodied phenomenon” (7). In experiencing beauty, the mind leaves sense perception behind and rests in an idea, a higher concept, or a concept “as such.” Coda The much heralded “return of beauty” of which I have provided an account has not, of course, been greeted warmly by Anti-Aesthetic thinkers. Two theorists in particular—the art-critic Alexander Alberro and the political theorist Fredrick Jameson (one of the original contributors to Hal Foster’s Anti-Aesthetic)—have been explicit in their condemnation of the Beauty Revival. In his essay “Beauty Knows No Pain” (2004), Alberro describes the “call for a revalidation of the beautiful as hopelessly retrograde and unproductive” (Alberro 38). In his essay “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity” (1991), Jameson says that “all beauty today is meretricious and the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism is an ideological manoeuvre” (Jameson, “Transformations” 6). More recently, Jameson published an essay in the New Left Review titled “Gherman’s Anti-aesthetic” (2016), in which he begs to be “delivered from this reign of beauty and its disreputable ideology” (Jameson “Gherman’s Anti-aesthetic” 1). Alberro and Jameson both think of the Beauty Revival as caused by, and indicative of, more extensive and regrettable cultural

128  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty conditions. For the sake of balance and academic objectivity, I now include a very brief summary of these key Anti-Aesthetic objections to the recent “beauty turn,” together with equally short responses of my own to each one, not in a defensive spirit but as part of the ongoing narrative about the “beauty wars” adumbrated in this book, and a signpost to further research. In “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Alberro explores the present-day “nostalgia” (Alberro 37) for beauty within art theory and criticism. He suggests that contemporary beauty advocates want to restore this and other “universal concepts,” in response to rapid advances in technology and an underlying anxiety about imminent global catastrophe. “The beautiful” is a “comfort” to these critics, Alberro says (37). But he also suggests that such comfort is folly; and he critically examines the social interests at stake in what he sees as a potentially disastrous restoration of “the beautiful” as a philosophical concept and experiential category. Alberro writes: To put it polemically, then, recent attempts to revalidate the experience of the beautiful are, first, driven by intensely nostalgic impulses; they promote ahistorical views of the past in the hope of returning us to a state unclouded by the insights and advances made in a wide range of theoretical and discursive practices, including critical theory, sociology, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. Second, though it might once again toy with Schillerian Utopias of aesthetic education and political mediation, today’s writing on beauty is deeply anti-political. It is mainly unwilling to contemplate the legitimacy of artistic practices that take a stand and bring together the aesthetic, the cognitive, and the critical, preferring instead to value artworks that operate independently of any practical interest. And third, this new discourse on beauty is trenchantly anti-modernist, seeing modernism and its dialectical relation to transcendence as antithetic to, as Steiner puts it, ‘the perennial rewards of aesthetic experience, identified as pleasure, insight, and empathy’. Interestingly enough, in privileging the transcendent experience of beauty over the realities of the world’s disenchantment, the position of many of today’s champions of beauty comes to look remarkably like the one they censure, namely, that of the detached professional aesthete. (38) According to Alberro, then, there are three charges against studies of beauty; namely, that they are ahistorical, anti-political, and anti-modernist. I will comment on each in turn. An accusation of ahistoricism implies that a subject is not framed in a historical context or is framed in such a way as to disregard historical fact or implication. I have taken pains, in this book, to avoid this charge. My investigative premise in this book, on the

Part 2: Conclusion  129 contrary, is that our notions of beauty have evolved throughout history. Possibly there is disagreement here over what “counts as” “history”: for some history is a more political category than it is for others. The second charge, indeed, is that studies of beauty display apathy or even antipathy towards all political commitments. While I agree that scholarly interests in beauty and in politics are frequently inconsistent or even incommensurable, we are trapped in a century in which everyone seems to ask question: “Which side are you on?” (i.e., politically). One might exclaim with Shakespeare, “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” (Shakespeare Sonnet 65 lines 3–4) But the fact is that beauty and politics have been inter-related as well as opposed in many complex ways even before Helen’s elopement with (or was abduction by) Paris, which “launched a thousand ships and/ burnt the topless towers of Ilium” (Marlowe 81–82). The third charge is that beauty is anti-modernist. As I discussed in the introduction to Chapter 1, there are key distinctions to be made between modernism, which does not bear any fundamental hostility to beauty, and the Avant-garde and AntiAesthetic movements which arose from within modernism. It is true that many Beauty Revivalist thinkers neglect to make this key distinction, and as a result their accounts of beauty miss the historical specificity of the conditions under which Anti-Aestheticism arose. Jameson’s account of the Beauty Revival is more subtle than that of Alberro, but just as pointed. In “Transformations,” Jameson argues that the increasing hegemony of “the visual” attests to a contemporary “return of the aesthetic.” He “traces the new aesthetic of Beauty through some lower-level contemporary film genres” and concludes that a “‘beautiful’ film” is one which “disguises consumption as art” (Jameson, “Transformations” 135). For Jameson, as an avowed Marxist scholar, “the beauty of images and the music, and the sexual freedoms with which [the films are] dusted” indicate “a high-class consumer good, offered under the guise of art and aesthetics, as a distinctly European export. [Their] beauty is regressive and vacuous” (135). In “Gherman’s Anti-Aesthetic,” he argues that: [T]o isolate that particular symptom which is the image is to miss the fundamental toxin of beauty as such. ‘Beauty is evil, Yeats’, Pound quotes a fin de siècle contemporary as warning, and it is certain that it presents a trap which is in fact a double-bind. Maurice Blanchot, a specialist in the paradoxes which those of us in Hegelo-Marxian circles call contradictions, once observed that the problem with Pascal’s anguish was that it was expressed too eloquently; the beauty of its language neutralized all suffering and pain and turned them into aesthetic content. (Jameson, “Gherman’s Anti-Aesthetic” 95)

130  Philocaly: The Case for Beauty For Jameson, much of modern art and literature, seeking catharsis in its means of production, finds itself “wrestling with this dilemma” (95) Meanwhile, “on the level of present-day consumerism, perception itself is infected to the core” (95). To appreciate the “sheer appearance of the commodity is already to have been caught up in its circuits” (95). From the perspective of this book, these worries regarding beauty’s negative impact remain grounded on a narrow notion of beauty as a “merely sensuous” experience. Rather than representing new and original critiques, these condemnations of Beauty Revivalism would seem from this perspective to serve as mere re-iterations of the original Anti-Aesthetic position. In short, Beauty Revivalists are still awaiting a genuine new response from Anti-Aesthetic thinkers. We are more than two decades into a new millennium and yet artists and intellectuals are rushing to the supposed deathbed of beauty before it is too late and discovering that beauty it is still in fact alive and that it still constitutes something incontrovertibly necessary, while also in urgent need of resuscitation. The experience of beauty is still near universal: thus, the concept is still well worth studying philosophically. Sometimes, after trying new ideas and new names for them, we turn back to the old ones as somehow indispensable. We then take up the task once more of trying to redefine them, cleansing them of unwanted accretions, associations, and inconsistencies and using them again as tools of inquiry and appraisal.

Part 3

Kallistics1 The Verdict

Part 3: Introduction

No doubt, there exists a kind of beauty that is perfectly accessible to us, a beauty that we understand and that we can easily identify, that comes to us unveiled and even reveals itself flagrantly: the beauty gazed upon in the faces of our sleeping loved ones and the beauty that lights up a spring morning. We are surrounded by this sort of beauty, if not immersed in it. It is the basso continuo of an ordinarily happy life. At the same time, however, there is something enigmatic about our experiences of beauty. We grope for words to explain them and find that we have merely replaced a mystery with a commonplace. We are unable to reckon with or fully appreciate the mental and emotional attributes which have allowed us to make our judgements of beauty. All three of the Beauty Revivalists examined in this book—Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton—acknowledge that there is a non-discursive aspect to our experience of beauty. At the end of Beauty, Scruton says that “the reader will have noticed that I have not said what beauty is … I have avoided the many attempts to analyse beauty in terms of some property or properties exhibited by all beautiful things” (Scruton, Beauty 162). Scarry notes that “at no point will there be any aspiration to speak in these pages of unattached Beauty, or of the attributes of unattached Beauty” (Scarry 3). Nehamas claims that what divides him from his critics is that “they are concerned with what it is to be beautiful, whereas I am interested in what it is to find something beautiful, in the phenomenology and not the ontology of beauty” (Nehamas, “Reply” 205). The Revivalists thus share a tacit awareness that beauty is not reducible to a single or simple discursive formulation: rather, it is an experience. How are we to account for or describe these every day, first-person experiences of beauty? Do our experiences of beauty have a formal, phenomenological structure? How do we experience beauty? It seems that despite their variety almost all beautiful objects produce the same or a very similar state, state-of-mind, or mood. Wittgenstein captured the phenomenon in a notebook entry when he discusses a “poetic mood” as “a mood DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-15

134  Kallistics: The Verdict of receptivity” (Wittgenstein, Notebooks 65e). If the Beauty Revivalists were to provide a final verdict on beauty, my wager is that it would be this: we arrive at our knowledge of beauty—that is, beauty presents itself to us—once we have undergone a unique cognitive experience. This experience, I hazard, not only delivers beauty to us, but is in itself enriching and enlivening in that it is constituted by, massages and exercises distinctive apprehensive, attentive, and affective features of the human mind. In this third and final Part of the book, I aim to develop the account of “Revived Beauty” which I introduced in the previous Part. I offer an account of beauty as a lived experience, by drawing and elaborating on the central features of that experience which the Beauty Revivalists identify. In the previous Part, I argued that Beauty Revivalist accounts of beauty claim that experiences of beauty involve our faculties in certain discernible ways. Crucially, the Revivalists ground their arguments for beauty on the conviction that there is an intimate bond between beauty and certain higher value concepts to which beauty refers us. Beauty is thus a reflective judgement, in that it moves us from the particular to the universal, from the object to the concept that made it possible to perceive it as that object. In this part, I  argue that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, beauty is a particular kind of aesthetic experience. By experience, I mean something like the kind of explanation a person gives (or would give) of her response to beauty. I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, experiences of beauty contain (at least) three structural features, or “moments” (to borrow Kant’s term).2 The first “moment” involves direct, first-person exposure to beauty. The second “moment” requires that a particular kind of attitude, or type of attention, be bestowed upon that beauty. The third “moment” describes the affect that beauty has upon us. I explore each of these three structural features of the experience of beauty, as outlined by the Beauty Revivalists, in the three constituent chapters of this part. Given that there has been very little, if any, account of the experience of beauty offered in the last 50 years, I present this original account as a point of departure for future discussion. This chapter offers a descriptive exploration of beauty’s experiential qualities and characteristics, as seen by the Beauty Revivalists. I have chosen the descriptive approach because one of the key attitudes that distinguish the Beauty Revivalist approach to beauty from earlier philosophical approaches to beauty is the Revivalist effort to provide a descriptive account of the experience of beauty, as opposed to a definition of the concept of “beauty” as such. The Beauty Revivalists thus suggest that—far from definitions of beauty—we require accounts of beauty as an experience. In my view, the Revivalists offer such an account, and it is an account which, as we will see, is response to and engaged with numerous 20th-century aesthetic theories. I suggest that, for the Revivalists, experiences of beauty are

Part 3: Introduction  135 uniquely distinguishable from other forms of aesthetic experience because they involve specific forms of (i) exposure, (ii) attention, and (iii) affect. Aesthetic Experience For the Beauty Revivalists, what does the term “experience” mean when applied to the word “beauty”?3 How an experience of beauty differs from any other experience—including any other aesthetic experience—is, as we have seen, a central question in philosophical aesthetics. Yet, it resists a clear answer. That the experience of beauty is not easily articulated is one of the few insights about beauty met with consensus by beauty thinkers.4 The word “experience” seems elastic enough to cover almost any kind of thing a person does consciously, or that the person consciously experiences. Thus, a person who does or undergoes something pleasant is having a pleasant experience or even an experience of pleasure; one who looks at or sees something has a visual experience. What interests me here, is what the Beauty Revivalists think constitute, or compose, experiences that pertain to beauty. What, according to the Beauty Revivalists, is it like to have a response to beauty? Is there some unique perceptive state, attitude, or emotion that enables one to recognise that what one is having is an experience of beauty, and not some other kind of experience of other types of specifically aesthetic or sensuous experience? We can begin by acknowledging that there has been no consensus among philosophers on the question of whether there even is such a thing as aesthetic experience (let alone the experience of the beautiful), that is unique or essentially different from other experiences. Not everyone believes that “we need a theory of the aesthetic to have an aesthetic experience,” or an experience of beauty, or even that it is “possible or necessary to distinguish aesthetic experiences from other kinds of experiences” (Petts 61). In Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards (1893–1979) dedicates an entire chapter to “The Phantom of Aesthetic Experience,” asserting that aesthetic experiences “are not in the least a new and different kind of thing” (16). Richards thinks that it is an “unfounded assumption” of modern aesthetics that “there is a distinct kind of mental activity present in what are called aesthetic experiences” (Richards 11), according to which the “phantom problem of the aesthetic mode or aesthetic state arose” (16). In “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” George Dickie (1926–2020) agrees with Richards on the non-existence of aesthetic experience, or the impropriety of talking about this as a separate kind of experience. Most theorists take the view that there is something distinctive about aesthetic experience generally, but do not provide any account of experiences of beauty in particular. In Art as Experience (1958), John Dewey (1859–1952) argues that aesthetic experiences are “complete” experiences.

136  Kallistics: The Verdict One is actively “engaged and conscious of the world’s effect on one but at the same time appreciative of one’s possibilities for acting on the world. One senses an organisation, coherence, and satisfaction as well as an integration of the past, present, and future that ordinary nonaesthetic experiences lack” (Dewey 457). In Languages of Art (1976), Nelson Goodman (1906–98) cautions that what he derisively calls “tingle-immersion” theories overlook the “crucial role of the intellect” (Goodman xiv). In aesthetic experiences, the “emotions function cognitively,” he says; one “feels” a “heightened operation of both cognition and emotion” (xiv) operating together. Thus, according to some theorists, aesthetic experiences are uniquely identifiable and separate to other forms of experience. Many philosophers have suggested that aesthetic experiences might have something to do with special features of aesthetic objects. Perhaps describing aesthetic experience is more a matter of gesturing towards (some of) its properties. For instance, in Art (1914), Clive Bell (1881–1964) claims that we have emotional responses to objects exhibiting form. In Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958), Monroe Beardsley (1915–85) characterises the focus of aesthetic experiences as “formal unity” (Beardsley, Aesthetics xi). Others disagree with the formalist position and suggest that the expression of certain ideas plays a vital role in thinking about works of art. Surely thinking about their content and context is an essential aspect of our experiences. Others yet have suggested that a certain kind of viewer is required, since individuals do not have aesthetic experiences in reaction to the same things. In “On the Standard of Taste” (1760), David Hume (1711–76) and, more recently, Frank Sibley (1947) in Aesthetic Concepts (1959) have suggested that only people who have special sensitivities can respond aesthetically, or that, before one can have a complete aesthetic response, one’s moral beliefs and intellect must be engaged. For example, Noel Carroll (1947–) argues in Theories of Art Today (2000) that moral concerns may obstruct or intensify aesthetic experiences. From the above overview of philosophical attitudes to the idea of aesthetic experiences, we can see that, during the 20th century, aestheticians were active in their attempts to address, describe, and explain the notion of aesthetic experience generally. What is lacking from these accounts is any more specific articulation of what it is, precisely, that distinguishes the experience of beauty from other more general aesthetic experiences. A crucial part of my task in this part is thus to show how the Beauty Revivalists have attempted to offer an account of the experience of beauty specifically, and to show how their attempts are grounded in and influenced by more general accounts of aesthetic experience. My aim in this part is to expand upon the experiential account of beauty offered by the Beauty Revivalists, Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton. In what

Part 3: Introduction  137 follows, I argue that from readings of Only a Promise of Happiness, On Beauty and Being Just, and Beauty, it is possible to extrapolate descriptions of three key structural features, or “moments,” that occur during our experiences of beauty. In my view, for the Revivalists, the most promising approach to describing our experience of beauty has been to explain it in terms of these three structural features. The first moment is best described as the sensory conditions that constitute an experience of beauty (our presence before beautiful objects or scenes). The second moment is best described as the attitudinal features most likely to lead to beauty being experienced (the kind of attention we give to or judgement we make about such an object or scene). The third moment is best described as what the experience of beauty results in (the affect such objects or scenes have upon us). I describe each of these moments in the three constituent chapters of this part. The first moment described by the Revivalists in our experience of beauty consists of the conditions that constitute an experience of beauty.5 In the first chapter of this Part, Chapter 7, I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, these conditions can be articulated through reference to the Acquaintance Principle. The Acquaintance Principle (defined in greater detail in Chapter 7) states that our judgements of beauty require direct, first-person exposure to an object (or an identical surrogate) that is “presented” or “given” to the subject. Favouring the Acquaintance Principle, the Beauty Revivalists argue that a person cannot have an experience of beauty without having a direct perceptual encounter with a beautiful object. First-hand acquaintance with an object invites us into an awareness of our own perceptions, awakening and enlivening us to those perceptions. The second moment in our experience of beauty, according to the Beauty Revivalists, points at what attitudinal features are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced. In Chapter 8, I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, these attitudinal features can be described through reference to Aesthetic Attitude theories. As their central feature, Aesthetic Attitude theories incorporate characterisations of how we regard something when it is before us, and when we take an aesthetic interest in it. The Beauty Revivalists support these theories in so far as they think that a certain attitude—a particular state of mind, way of approaching experiences, or orienting oneself—is a necessary (if not sufficient) feature of our experiences of beauty. The Revivalists require that a specific form of sustained attention be given to the beautiful object or scene by the experiencing subject. The third and final moment in our experience of beauty is what the experience of beauty results in. In Chapter 9, I suggest that, for the Beauty Revivalists, the experience of beauty is linked to the experience of certain emotions. First, according to the Revivalists, beauty is seemingly linked necessarily to a pleasurable response. Scruton, in particular, is loyal to this

138  Kallistics: The Verdict notion. However, Scarry, and Nehamas suggest that the appellation of pleasure is insufficient to distinguish the experience of beauty from other pleasurable experiences. I indicate that, according to the Revivalists, we therefore need to identify additional emotional states associated with the experience of the beautiful, to gain a more accurate and precise understanding of the ways in which beauty affects us. I have explored the possibility that Scarry and Nehamas may have identified two such states: the desire to “possess” and the impulse to “beget” beauty. In offering an account of these three structural features of the experience of beauty, I ultimately aim to show that, while experiences of beauty can be understood generally as forms of aesthetic experience, they also include, additional, specific forms of attitudinal and affective content, according to the Beauty Revivalists. Apart from 21st-century Beauty Revivalist accounts, 20th-century attempts to discuss aesthetic experience have not included specific reference to experiences of the beautiful. I aim to show how the Beauty Revivalists ground their accounts of beauty in (pre)existing aesthetic theories and to show the ways in which, according to the Beauty Revivalists, experiences of the beautiful are unique, and distinct from other forms of aesthetic experience. Thus, the account of the experience of beauty I offer in this part is intended to act as an original contribution to the academic field of aesthetics and to the philosophy of beauty. Notes 1 Hegel was the first to work with the term “kallistic.” At the beginning of his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, he wonders whether the work he has set out to do—interpreting different forms of art as representing various stages in the history of human artistic activity, with beauty being understood as truth manifested in the particulars of sensuous form—may be called “kallistic.” Hegel deems the term “unsatisfactory, for the science to be designated does not treat of beauty in general, but merely of artistic beauty” (Hegel 3). He therefore decides to work with the notion of “aesthetics,” even though aesthetics “means more precisely the science of sensation or feeling” (3). 2 Kant analyses the notion of a judgement of beauty by considering it under four headings, or “moments” in the first section of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” The first “moment” says that judgements of beauty are based on feelings of disinterested pleasure (Critique of Judgment §§1–5). The second “moment” says that judgements of beauty make a claim to “universality” (§§6–9). The third “moment” says judgements of the beautiful do not presuppose an end or purpose which the object is taken to satisfy (§§10–17). Kant’s fourth “moment” says that judgements of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity, in the following sense: in taking my judgement of taste to be universally valid, I take it, not that everyone who perceives the object will share my pleasure in it and (relatedly) agree with my judgement, but that everyone ought to do so (§§18–22).

Part 3: Introduction  139

7

The Acquaintance Principle

Our experiences of beauty rely first and foremost on one crucial thing: that beauty itself exists. Beauty must be present in the world, and available to us, for us to genuinely experience or think about it. In other words, one must be (in some sense) acquainted with beauty. And “while we know with relative ease what a beautiful horse or a beautiful man or possibly even a beautiful pot is” as Scarry points out, “it is much more difficult to say what ‘Beauty’ unattached to any object is” (Scarry 9). When we think that something is beautiful, we are judging a particular instance or manifestation of beauty, beauty in a poem or a garden, an object or a scene, or an event or some other thing which is before us. This seems obvious, and yet, it has been suggested by numerous people in numerous different ways that a person can have an experience of beauty without having been perceptually aware of, or exposed to, the beautiful thing itself. According to the Beauty Revivalists, such thinking is erroneous. A person must be brought into direct contact with a beautiful thing in order to have an experience of it. This is the first condition of our experience of beauty: that a beautiful thing be present to us. I stated in the introduction to this Part that my primary aim in this Part is to provide an account of beauty as a lived experience, by drawing on those features of that experience which the Beauty Revivalists identify. I  proposed that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, there are (at least) three structural features, or moments, in our engagement with beautiful objects, which together compose a scene of aesthetic encounter. In this chapter, I explore the first of these “moments,” which consists of the sensory conditions that constitute an experience of beauty. I argue that the Beauty Revivalists think that these conditions can (at least in part) be described by the Acquaintance Principle (AP). This principle says that our experiences of beauty require direct, first-hand exposure to an object (or an identical surrogate) that is “presented” or “given” to the subject. I suggest that, according to the Revivalists, a person cannot have an experience

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-16

The Acquaintance Principle  141 of beauty without having a direct perceptual encounter with the object to which the beautiful properties that constitute that experience belong. The AP The AP denotes direct perceptual awareness of an object which is presented, first-hand, to the subject who experiences it. Originally an epistemological notion, the terminology was introduced by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in his paper “Knowledge by Acquaintance” (1911). Russell explains that “knowledge by acquaintance” depends on one’s encounter with the object itself, a relation in which something is “presented” or “given” to the subject. “Knowledge by description” involves some further knowledge or the application of concepts (Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance” 108). For instance, we might claim to know that Jack the Ripper was a serial killer because we have heard and read accounts of him. However, “Knowledge by acquaintance” depends on our having met Jack—having spent time in his company and having thus gained some sort of perceptual awareness of what he is like: what colour his hair is, how he dresses, smells, and speaks. Had we been acquainted with Jack in this way prior to hearing or reading accounts of him, we might not have known that he was a serial killer. Thus, it does not follow from the fact that something is “presented” to us that everything about its nature is “given”: to be acquainted with something is to be aware of it in a way that does not essentially involve being aware that it is so-and-so. Thus, we can say—in epistemological terms— that acquaintance involves first-hand, non-conceptual knowledge of the existence of an object.1 Philosophers of aesthetics have often accorded a central role to the AP, treating it crucially as a principle of judgement. The AP in aesthetics can be expressed as follows: “one arrives at an aesthetic judgment based on one’s own direct experience of the object of judgment” (Nguyen 1127). Such acquaintance is considered by many—including the Beauty Revivalists—to be the only legitimate source of aesthetic judgement and, therefore, judgements about beauty. Adherents of the AP think that aesthetic judgements, including judgements of beauty, cannot be made from a description of features of the object (no matter how accurate) or testimony of its characteristics (no matter how reliable). Furthermore, aesthetic judgements and judgements of beauty cannot be inferred from general rules. Instead, defenders of the AP, including the Beauty Revivalists, maintain that judgements of beauty must be acquired through first-hand acquaintance—that is, through direct experience of or exposure to the object or thing. The reason that many 20th-century thinkers offer defences of the AP in aesthetics is because they appeal to an understanding of aesthetic

142  Kallistics: The Verdict experience as being, in some essential way, dependent on sense perception. In Art and Its Objects, Richard Wollheim (1923–2003) refers to the AP as a “well-entrenched principle,” whose roots go back to 18th-century philosophy (22). Wollheim contrasts aesthetic judgements to other sorts of judgements, maintaining that “judgments of aesthetic value, unlike judgments of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissible from one person to another” (233). Wollheim traces the AP back to Kant’s claim that “whether a dress, a house, or a flower is beautiful is a matter upon which one declines to allow one’s judgement to be swayed by any reasons or principles. We want to get a look at the object with our own eyes, just as if our delight depended on sensation” (223). Kant suggests that aesthetic judgements and reflections, not just immediate responses, are grounded in sensations: And yet he realizes clearly that other people’s approval in no way provides him with a valid proof to judge beauty; even though other may perhaps see and observe for him, and even though what many have seen the same way may serve him, who believes he saw it differently, as a sufficient basis of proof for a theoretical and hence logical judgment, yet the fact that other have liked something can never serve him as a basis for an aesthetic judgement. (Kant, Critique of Judgement §33) Kant, of course, famously, insists that our judgements of beauty have, or make a claim to, “universality” or “universal validity” (§33). That is, in making a judgement of beauty about anything, I take it that anyone and everyone else who perceives the thing ought also to judge it to be beautiful. However, Kant follows this with the remark that judgements of beauty cannot, despite their universal validity, be proved: there are no rules by which someone can be compelled to judge that something is beautiful. To share in my judgement, other people must also, themselves, be able to perceive the object. More recently, Alan Tormey has expressed the principle as follows: In art, unlike the law, we do not admit judgments in the absence of direct or immediate experience of the object of the judgment. We require critical judgments to be rooted in ‘eye-witness’ encounters, and the indirect avenues of evidence, inference and authority that are permissible elsewhere are anathema here. (Tormey 35) Frank Sibley says that “broadly speaking, aesthetics deals with a kind of perception” (137). Philip Pettit, too, states that “aesthetic characterisations are essentially perceptual in the sense that perception is the only

The Acquaintance Principle  143 title to the sort of knowledge—let us say to the full knowledge—of the truths which they express” (Pettit 25). These comments from defenders of the AP reflect a widely held conception of first-hand acquaintance as a necessary condition for aesthetic experience, distinguishing aesthetic judgements from other sorts of judgements based on their reliance on perception. The claim made by the AP seems true intuitively. We sometimes take it for granted that grasping the complete beauty of something—be it an artefact (like a mosaic) or a natural object (like a flower)—requires a first-hand encounter with that object. In ordinary conversations, we often assume that speakers who are communicating their own aesthetic evaluations have had first-hand experience of what they are talking about: “The Birth of Venus is a beautiful painting!” If they say otherwise: “I haven’t seen it, but that’s what everyone says,” their evaluations will seem worthless or even ludicrous. Aesthetic knowledge seems to require first-hand experience if a person’s assertions about his aesthetic beliefs are to be taken seriously. It seems problematic to say: “La Dolce Vita is a beautiful film, although I have never watched it,” or “Portrait of a Lady is a beautiful novel, but I have never read it.” It is, however, also problematic to say, “I saw The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi yesterday, and it is beautiful.” The speaker might naturally add, “You ought to see it, too.” The “implication is that aesthetic knowledge must be acquired through first-hand experience of the object of knowledge” (Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle” 386). According to the AP, “one will miss something that might not be possible to convey in words if one does not encounter beauty oneself” (386). One cannot supply an accurate description of, for example, “Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, or Sakata Tōjūrō’s wagata style of acting, without, respectively, listening, reading, or watching them” (Sauchelli 1). Our doubt about the reliability of judges and critics remains salient in aesthetic matters even though, on non-aesthetic issues, we accept many beliefs from descriptions. Our knowledge about history (that Bismarck was the First Chancellor of the German Empire, to use Russell’s example), science (that there are eight planets in our solar system), and even our friends’ lives (“Ed told me that Laura and Ryan were married last year”) is frequently gained from word-of-mouth. The fact that so much of our knowledge is testimonial does not give us a good reason not to believe its propositions. In the case of aesthetic judgements, however, the AP reminds us that legitimate routes to belief seem to be more limited. Engagements with—and judgements about—an object or scene are dependent on first-hand exposure to the perceptual features of that object or scene. Thus, defenders of the AP hold that aesthetic judgements differ in kind from most other judgements on the basis that they include direct perceptual awareness of their objects.

144  Kallistics: The Verdict Challenges to the AP Defenders of the AP have been subjected to criticism from those who claim that a person can have an aesthetic experience “without having any direct perceptual encounter with the object to which the aesthetic properties that constitute that experience belong” (Konigsberg 153). Thus, the most significant challenge2 to the AP involves claims that there are alternative sources of aesthetic knowledge to first-hand perceptual experiences. Three main alternatives have been discussed. These are surrogates, “imaginings,” and testimony. A surrogate object is a substitute object that stands in for an original. A surrogate painting is, for instance, a copy of the original artwork. “Some AP theorists argue that certain aesthetic surrogates can be taken as reasonable means for transmitting the ground of aesthetic judgments for at least certain aesthetic qualities” (Sauchelli 1). AP deniers claim that surrogates can deputise for the original because scrutiny of a reproduction can serve as an adequate basis for recognising at least some of an object’s aesthetic qualities. Nehamas, for instance, is comfortable accepting an “identical replica” (Only a Promise 57). Others have gone further—“a black and white photograph of a painting will not qualify as an adequate surrogate with respect to judgments about the painting’s colours but may be a perfectly adequate surrogate when the judgment concerns other features such as the arrangement of the figures” (Hanson 247). AP deniers thus claim that legitimate aesthetic judgements can be made based on our assessments of an object’s surrogate. However, for AP adherents, it is the case that there are some judgements about works “for which no photographic reproduction counts as an adequate surrogate: judgments about the sheer physical presence of a work or the effect of looking at it from various angles” (Hanson 247). Consider, for instance, Klimt’s oil-on-canvas painting The Kiss, which is one of the most reproduced paintings in the world. The original hangs in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, under bright sunlight which falls through a window onto the painting. The light illuminates the gold leaf clothing, the almost lifesized lovers; it conceals the male’s face in shadow, while highlighting that of the woman, her closed eyes changing from ecstasy to abandonment and then terror as a cloud crosses the room. Establishing what exactly serves as an adequate surrogate for such an experience of such an artwork is not an easy task, since what “counts as an adequate surrogate for a given artwork seems to depend on the judgment that is being made about it” (Hanson 247), potentially reducing the work to separate properties and features, and not including the relationship between them. Those who found their judgements of The Kiss on representations of the painting which appear on posters, post-it notes, coffee mugs, and prints have often missed the more foreboding elements of the painting, which are more properly “brought to life” by the play between natural lighting and gold-leaf.

The Acquaintance Principle  145 The most obvious candidates for the role of surrogate are accurate reproductions of visual art, recordings of music, and translations of novels. It might, for instance, be acceptable to read an English translation of The Brothers Karamazov and welcome this as a surrogate for the Russian original. A surrogate of this type is more amenable to AP theorists than imaginings or descriptions because exposure to a surrogate is quite distinct, in kind, from testimony. A picture of a beautiful object is not equivalent to a description asserting that it is beautiful, because the picture does not demand our agreement with the claim that the thing is beautiful. It does not make that claim at all. Rather, a reproduction places us in a position to experience the thing’s beauty perceptually for ourselves. For this reason, some defenders of the AP accept some surrogates as a reliable source of aesthetic belief. The use of “sensory imagination” (Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle” 12) has also been proposed as an alternative source of aesthetic knowledge to the AP. Proponents of this method think of imagining as a substitute for perception, at least in terms of its ability to elicit an effect. Malcolm Budd argues that one can form aesthetic judgements about an artwork when one imagines what it would be like to experience it (12). Errol Lord has suggested that a vivid imagining can be a way of becoming acquainted with aesthetically relevant properties (11). However, “for an imagining to capture first-hand experience, it should accurately simulate what the first-hand affective experience would be like” (Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle” 12). The imagining agent would also need to possess information regarding what to imagine. Deniers of the AP have argued that “imagining is like perceiving, in that it is sensory, perspectival, and presentational: objects seem to appear to one” (Wiltsher 1). However, experiences like imagining a colourful bird, or its song, is “unlike perceiving, in that the objects of imagination seem to be dependent on the subject, and in that investigation of the objects will not reveal anything more about their nature” (1). Those, like Budd and Lord, who approve of the use of imaginings as a legitimate source of aesthetic judgement need to account for a variety of philosophical questions. What is it like, phenomenologically, to “imagine”? What are the limits and capacities of our imagination? Since imagining involves a relation to sensible properties, it seems that it must necessarily also involve a relation to an object which has sensible properties. It seems that imaginings must in some way succeed, rather than precede first-hand exposure. Another source of aesthetic judgement that the AP excludes is the testimony of others. This includes the written judgements of critics, who are supposedly skilled at bringing us to see, for ourselves, the truth of the aesthetic claims that they make. Opponents of the AP argue that some works can be assessed through accurate descriptions of the author’s intention, the work’s presentation, and the techniques employed, irrespective of any first-hand experience of an object. As a first reply to this line of thinking, a supporter of

146  Kallistics: The Verdict the AP “need not claim that contact with a work or its aesthetic surrogate is required for the ascription of artistic qualities” (Sauchelli 1)—only that contact is necessary for the ascription of aesthetic qualities, which means, in the first instance, sensual qualities. Thus, in cases of testimonial knowledge, “we may be able to distinguish between aesthetic and artistic value” (Hanson 256). If a description could put one in direct acquaintance with a work, then the observation that one can legitimately form artistic judgements of Conceptual works, for example, based on descriptions, does not necessarily pose a problem for the AP, since the AP concerns aesthetic, not artistic, judgements. So, one might claim, “without contradicting the AP, that Duchamp’s Fountain is an artistically influential and theoretically rich work of art even without inspecting it” (Sauchelli 1). However, many philosophers remain optimistic about testimonial knowledge of aesthetic qualities and the thesis that testimony can provide the grounds for aesthetic judgement. The AP and the Beauty Revival The Beauty Revivalists are all adherents to the AP. They maintain that “being in the presence of a beautiful object is a necessary condition for the experience of beauty”; that we “cannot be argued into judgments about beautiful things”; and that a “feature is aesthetic because we cannot be aware of it unless we perceive the object whose feature it is” (Gaut 204). This is not to say that the Beauty Revivalists think of beauty as a mere sensation passively experienced, such as a headache. Beauty may befall us or happen upon us, but the AP need not or cannot be understood as mere exposure to sensations, according to the Revivalists. Rather, coming into direct, first-hand contact with a beautiful object awakens us mentally to the presence of that object and makes us conscious of our own awareness of it—in a way that encountering other (more ordinary, non-beautiful) objects does not. The experience of beauty thus involves perceptions of a thing of beauty, as well as heightened perceptions of, or awareness of, one’s own perceptions of that beauty. We, therefore, might describe the Beauty Revivalist characterisation of the AP as an occasion for selfconsciousness: an occasion that invites us simultaneously into an awareness of beauty and an awareness of our own responsiveness to beauty. In this sense, by initiating a process of deepening self-awareness, the AP contributes to the composition of a scene in which one feels animated— “brought to life”—by the encounter with beauty. Scarry describes the experience of beauty as a dynamic experience that involves both attention to an object and an occasion for self-awareness. She thinks that “the structure of perceiving beauty” consists of the fact that “one’s attention is involuntarily given to the beautiful person or thing” (81), which cannot occur when one studies a description of an object. This

The Acquaintance Principle  147 “quality of heightened attention” makes it seems as though “beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level” (81). As part of her assertion about the importance of first-person acquaintance, Scarry offers the example of a moment reported by the narrator of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: “I could not take my eyes from her face, which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to start at and which was coming nearer and nearer, letting itself be seen at close quarters, dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold” (Proust 706). The encounter with beauty increases the viewer’s self-consciousness, enabling him to describe his own orientation to the beautiful object. The narrator wishes to remain in the perceptual field, which includes the beautiful face: “to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always by her side” (Scarry 81). Thus, Scarry suggests, one has a “willingness always to revise one’s location to place oneself in the path of beauty,” and this is a “basic impulse” (7). Scarry concludes that aesthetic objects have a visceral effect: “what happens, happens to our bodies” when we come across beautiful things: “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heartbeat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living” (25). Scarry thinks that once attention has been involuntarily given to a beautiful person or thing, this “quality of heightened attention” can then be “voluntarily extended out to other persons and or things” (81). Our experience of beauty thus “explicitly confirms the value of human attention” (66): in becoming aware of a beautiful object, our self-awareness increases, our volitional abilities increase, and the quality of our attention improves as a result. Scruton, too, is an adherent to the AP. He thinks that we cannot be argued into judgements about beautiful objects, but, rather, we become cognisant to, mindful, and indeed formative of our own judgements through exposure to beauty. According to Scruton: There are no second-hand judgments of beauty. There is no way that you can argue me into a judgment that I have not made for myself, nor can I become an expert in beauty, simply by studying what others have said about beautiful objects, and without experiencing and judging for myself. (Beauty 5) Scruton acknowledges that this “platitude may be doubted” because we might “put our trust” in a critic. Doing so might be seen as “adopting my scientific beliefs from the opinions of experts or my legal beliefs from the judgments of courts” (5). This, he thinks, is incorrect: when we put our trust in a critic, Scruton believes, we are merely deferring judgement, since our “own judgment waits upon experience.” It is only when I have seen (or

148  Kallistics: The Verdict heard etc.) the object in question “in the moment of appreciation that my borrowed judgment can actually become a judgment of mine” (Scruton, Beauty 5). This is a form of self-possession which beauty enables. Scruton refers to an excerpt of dialogue from Jane Austen’s Emma: ‘Mr Dixon, you say, is not, strictly speaking, handsome.’ ‘Handsome! Oh! No—far from it—certainly plain. I told you he was plain.’ ‘My dear, you said that Miss Campbell would not allow him to be plain and that you yourself—’ ‘Oh, as for me, my judgment is worth nothing. Where I have a great regard, I always think a person well-looking. But I have what I believed the general opinion, when I called him plain. (Austen 181) Scarry and Scruton both use examples from literature to make their points about the necessity of the AP, by allowing the reader to judge a piece of prose for themselves. In this dialogue, the second speaker, Jane Fairfax, ignores her experience of Mr Dixon’s looks. In describing him as plain, she is not making a judgement of her own, but reporting the judgement of others. Thus, Scruton concludes, the judgement of beauty “is a genuine judgment” (Beauty 7). There can be no “second-hand opinions about beauty” (7) because beauty “demands an act of attention” (13). Again, we see that our self-awareness and the quality of our attention increase, in becoming aware of a beautiful object. Nehamas also thinks we must perceive an object directly to experience it as beautiful but adds that the experience also involves owning the judgement that it is so. Nehamas agrees with Scarry and Scruton that “to establish the aesthetic features (and so the aesthetic quality) of something, you must experience directly either that object or an identical copy of it” (Only a Promise 92); “we have to see for ourselves because an aesthetic feature applies only to one object” (93). Furthermore, he argues that “a feature is aesthetic not [just] because it is perceptual but because we can’t be aware of it unless we perceive or experience directly (in a sense broad enough to include reading) the object whose feature it is” (94); “our most detailed and careful accounts will always fail to capture the particular way in which … one beautiful thing differs from another. Words can only get us so far. But why does the judgment of beauty require such a direct experience of its object?” (91). Nehamas thinks that the very quality which makes a feature aesthetic is its uniqueness. He grounds this commitment to the AP in the fact that each object of beauty is unique and particular. Thus: [T]o be aware of any aesthetic features at all we must examine things for ourselves: any effort to describe them, however helpful, will in the end

The Acquaintance Principle  149 apply to features common to distinct objects, while aesthetic features, if they are shared at all, are common only to things that can’t be told apart from one another. That is another way of saying that a beautiful thing is irreplaceable. (Only a Promise 99) Nehamas is saying that the judgement of beauty addresses the aesthetic features of things, and that to experience the aesthetic features of something, you must experience that object directly. Nehamas reminds us that the Greek aesthesis means “perception.” We have also seen that, according to Baumgarten, Tolstoy, and the Anti-Aesthetic movement, “aesthetics” can be taken to mean “sense perception” (Only a Promise 139). Nehamas effectively redefines aesthetic perception as that which is experienced directly. Since beauty is an aesthetic feature, that makes it impossible to experience beauty without a direct, first-hand encounter. Thus, Scarry, Scruton and Nehamas all commit themselves to the AP and argue that direct, first-hand acquaintance of an object is required for a person to assume aesthetic knowledge, and that it invites us into an awareness of our own perceptions, awakening and enlivening us to those perceptions. Conclusion I have proposed that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, there are at least three identifiable stages, or moments, in our engagement with beautiful objects. In this chapter, I detailed the first moment in our experience of beauty, which consists of the sensory condition that constitutes an experience of beauty. I argued that the Beauty Revivalists think the AP can help to describe these conditions. According to the Beauty Revivalists, direct, first-hand acquaintance with beautiful objects or scenes invites us into awareness of a beautiful object or scene and awakens us to its perceivable qualities. Notes 1 See Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle.” 2 David Hume observed in his essay “On the Standard of Taste” that there is sociological evidence to the effect that we are strongly influenced by, and sometimes demand, the verdicts of others on artistic and aesthetic matters: we like to have excellent judges and critics to set our standards in the matter of taste (Hume, “On the Standard of Taste” 18).

8

The Aesthetic Attitude

In the introduction to this Part, I proposed that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, there are three structural features, or moments, that describe our encounter with beauty. The first stage of the experience of beauty— explored in the previous Chapter—consists of the sensory conditions that constitute an experience of beauty. At least one of these conditions is, I have suggested, best understood in terms of the Acquaintance Principle. The second moment in our experience of beauty, explored in this Chapter, points at what attitudinal features are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced. I suggest that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, these attitudinal features are best described by Aesthetic Attitude (AA) theories, which require that a specific form of sustained attention be given to the object by the subject. AA theories incorporate as their central feature a characterisation of how we regard something when it is before us, and as we take an aesthetic interest in it. According to the Revivalists, a certain attitude—a particular state of mind, way of approaching experiences, or orienting oneself—is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for experiencing beauty. In this chapter, I consider two influential AA theories of the 20th century— ­ those of Edward Bullough (1880–1934), who favours the distanced attitude, and those of Jerome Stolnitz (1925–), who promotes the for-its-own-sake attitude. I suggest that both theories imply a “disinterested” attitude to beauty. I then turn briefly to the objections to AA theories raised by George Dickie (1926–2020). Finally, I consider the Beauty Revivalists’ concept of what I term “aesthetic attention.” I argue that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, the AA is best described, when it pertains to beauty, as a mental activity that demands a particular kind of act of attention. AA Theories AA theories incorporate, as their central feature, a characterisation of how we regard something when it is before us, and we take an aesthetic interest DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-17

The Aesthetic Attitude  151 in it. AA theories maintain that a certain attitude is a necessary condition for making aesthetic judgements. Those who adopt an AA attend to features of an experience that are aesthetically relevant. For instance, in a theatre, a man may stop thinking about where he parked and instead focus on the colours and textures of the set design of Othello, which is about to be performed before him. This example suggests that the AA is a frame of mind that we can adopt (more or less) volitionally and as appropriate. Of course, difficulties can arise: if his mobile phone vibrates, if he becomes distracted by hunger, if his wife coughs, then he may find it difficult to adopt or sustain the AA. Some philosophers have thought that some people have a talent for taking the AA, while others have suggested that the attitude can be learnt, practised, and cultivated. Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz provide two of the most influential AA theories. Bullough thinks of the AA as a certain distanced attitude. In his view, the person who adopts the AA does not sensually experience objects with a view to their practical ends. So, the experience an art collector has when she evaluates a work financially and the experience she has when she evaluates a work aesthetically differ fundamentally in kind. Stolnitz characterises the AA as an attitude that involves considering or appreciating something for its own sake, not because it fulfils some desire for something else, but because we want to experience it. A visitor to the Louvre might thus spend time in the Egyptian galleries to satisfy her son’s interest in mummies. Still, she may insist on some time alone in the PreRaphaelite galleries, simply because she wants to experience the beauty of their paintings. In this section, I will provide some exposition of the accounts of the AA given by Bullough and Stolnitz, before turning to Dickie’s objections. Bullough is the first to use the term “Aesthetic Attitude” in his book Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays (published posthumously in 1957). Earlier, he had developed the theory of distance in his essay “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle.” His approach essentially involves disinterest, which he calls psychical distance. Bullough thinks that to experience an object aesthetically, the subject must “distance” herself from that object. He asks us to imagine a situation in which we are at sea on a ship in the fog. We are fearful that the ship may strike a rock; we are annoyed about the delay and irritated by other passengers. We are therefore viewing the fog under its “normal aspect,” as it “affects our everyday activities” (Bullough, “Psychical Distance” 94). Bullough suggests it is possible to put “distance” (94) between ourselves and our experience of the fog as threatening, annoying, or irritating: we can cut out the practical sides of things and our “debilitating” (94) affective attitudes towards them. We can put a distance “between our own self and such objects as are the sources or vehicles of such affections” (94),

152  Kallistics: The Verdict whether these affections be fear, annoyance, or irritation. This “inhibition of everydayness” (94), this putting of “the phenomenon so to speak, out of gear with our personal needs and ends,” enables a transformation of our experience to take place. We can then experience the fog—“objectively” (95), if we direct our attention to the fog as a “veil surrounding (us) and with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things, and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness” (94). Experiencing the fog in this way is made “impracticable” (94) because of an obsession with our private concerns: we fear what might happen, we are annoyed at the delay, or irritated by other passengers. If we give up these personal concerns, we can interpret our new “subjective” affections “as characteristics of the phenomenon” (95) itself. So, we: [O]bserve the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger; and, above all, the strange solicitude and remoteness from the world … (94) Aesthetic experience, then, is an experience in which objects stand outside the context of their existence. Bullough names this central quality of aesthetic consciousness “psychical distance” a “metaphorical extension of spatial and temporal distance” (Aesthetics xii). If we are distanced in space, we are simply far away. To be temporally distant from something is to live before or after it. Bullough characterises the experience of “psychical distance” (xii) as that of being neither too emotionally close to nor too distant from it. If we are too psychically close to it, or too psychically far away we can be under-distanced or over-distanced. Suppose a man watches a performance of Othello and becomes increasingly jealous of his wife and his friend, who are whispering beside him. This man is under-distanced; his involvement is merely personal. On the other hand, imagine an ancient Byzantine sacred chant, written in a system of musical notation which we, in the 21st-century English-speaking world, are in a very poor position to read. This is a case of over-distancing. Thus, there is a “distance limit” (xii) beyond which we are too close or too far away to have an aesthetic experience. Therefore, according to Bullough, “the essence of the aesthetic attitude is the psychological process (or act) of (proper) distancing” (Saxena 81). Stolnitz provides an elucidation of the for-its-own-sake attitude in his book Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (1960). Like Bullough, Stolnitz seeks to explain how aesthetic experience is had, either at all, or most fully. Stolnitz attempts to explain a certain special kind of perceptual

The Aesthetic Attitude  153 experience which he says is characterised by the “aesthetic attitude” ­ (Aesthetics 33). Stolnitz argues that the AA is very different from our practical, everyday attitude. Stolnitz defines the AA as “disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone” (Aesthetics 33). Consider the crucial notions in this definition: disinterest, sympathy, and attention. First, the AA is “disinterested.” Stolnitz means that we “do not look at the object out of concern for any ulterior purpose that it may serve. We are not trying to use or manipulate the object. There is no purpose governing the experience other than the purpose of having the experience” (33). If one’s purpose is to boil the kettle, then one’s focus is on the function of the kettle. In the absence of purpose, the focus is on the kettle as an aesthetic object, paying attention to its immediate perceptual qualities and nothing else. The AA is also one of “sympathetic” attention. This means that we are “open” to the object and “accept the object on its own terms to appreciate it” (33). We must take a certain stance towards an aesthetic object, which means bracketing out prejudices and ignoring our personal conflicts and biases. It is inappropriate, for instance, to read our own ideological assumptions about race and gender into a performance of Othello. We must allow the object to “show” itself. Stolnitz’s discussion of “attention” is especially crucial because the preceding characterisations of “disinterest” and “sympathy” might leave one with the impression that to perceive something aesthetically is just a “passive, blank, cow-like stare” (33). Stolnitz explains that aesthetic attention involves discrimination: “To savour fully the value of the object, we must be attentive to its frequently complex and subtle details. Acute awareness of these details is discrimination. People often miss a great deal in the experience of art because their attention lapses, because they fail to ‘see’ all that is of significance” (33). Thus, attention is selective. Taking an AA, Stolnitz thinks, allows for a comparatively richer experience than the instrumental one provides, since it takes in many more of the object’s features. “It is the attitude we take which determines how we perceive the work,” Stolnitz states. “An attitude is a way of directing and controlling our perception … an attitude organises and directs our awareness of the world. The aesthetic attitude is not the attitude which people usually adopt. The attitude which we customarily take can be called the attitude of ‘practical’ perception” (33). An instrumental attitude limits the object, allowing us to “see only those of its features which are relevant to our purposes … By contrast, the aesthetic attitude ‘isolates’ the object and focuses upon it—the ‘look’ of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colours in the painting” (Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’” 3). According to Stolnitz, the practical attitude inclines us

154  Kallistics: The Verdict to see things as useful, as related to our practical activities: to us. The disinterested AA or perception is an attitude that intrinsically enjoys its respective object. In many respects, the views of Bullough and Stolnitz complement one another. As David Fenner claims: Bullough seems essentially to say that necessary and sufficient conditions for experiencing aesthetically are (1) that one is distanced (2) that one attends to the object and (3) that one does so with the least amount of distance. Stolnitz’s conditions are essentially (1) that one is disinterested, (2) that one attends to the object and (3) that one does so sympathetically, taking the object on its own terms. The parallel here is striking. Not only are distancing and disinterest similar, but the instruction to view with the least amount of distance and the instruction to view sympathetically are similar as well. (85) According to both Bullough and Stolnitz, then, inattention to or apathy towards an object can render the experience of that object completely nonaesthetic. As we will see in the next section, it is item (2) that most interests the Beauty Revivalists. The Revivalists, I think, provide us with an account of aesthetic attention according to which experiences of beauty are made possible. Before turning to the Revivalists, it is worth noting that Kant’s theory of “disinterested” (Kant, Critique of Judgement §26) aesthetic judgement makes a claim that underscores part of what makes such judgements unique, because Kant’s theory of “disinterest” underpins the accounts offered by Bullough and Stolnitz. Kant’s claim is the following: when a person judges an object to be beautiful and takes pleasure in that object’s beauty, that person is not interested in the object’s actual existence. The person, instead, is engaging in what Kant calls liking “devoid of interest” (§24). For example, when I gaze admiringly at a red rose, I am not “interested” in the fact that the rose exists before me; I am instead focused on admiring its beauty. Nor am I desiring to “possess” (§24) the rose; I am simply contemplating it. However, the fact that human beings usually snap photographs of flowers, or indeed, that they like to pluck them and give them to other human beings as gifts, suggests that Kant’s theory might in some way miss the mark. However, beautiful objects—a landscape, a painting, or a rose—are all part of my world of concerns, loves, and interests. When I contemplate them aesthetically, I stand before them in a different, detached, receptive, disinterested way, so as to see an aspect about them that would not show up had I not taken such a stance; this aspect is their beauty. But I am still standing in the world, and I am standing before this particular beautiful object because my personal history has

The Aesthetic Attitude  155 led me to it. Heidegger captures this point most clearly when he writes that, by claiming that beauty requires a disinterested stance, Kant “asks by what means our behaviour, in the situation where we find something we encounter to be beautiful, must let itself be determined in such a way that we encounter the beautiful as beautiful” (Heidegger 28). This “behaviour” that allows the beautiful to be encountered as beautiful is marked by detachment from practical concerns. However, this behaviour does not entail a rejection of the previous affective attachments, or even the ethical attitudes that defined our relationship with objects whose beauty we now contemplate. The best way to explain this last point is through an example. I find views of Black Mountain, inside the Australian Capital Territory, to be beautiful. How did I come to make this judgement? First, the historical fact that I was born not too far from the mountain and was, therefore, able to see it first-hand during my formative years is a fact that forms a reason for my coming to see the mountain as beautiful. Moreover, the affective attachment that I have towards the mountain—born out of excursions that I made there on horseback as an adolescent, the fact that my grandfather was a project engineer in charge of building the tower on top of the mountain—is a part of the complex of details that have led to my making an aesthetic judgement of its beauty. I also associate ethical ideas with Black Mountain: ideas concerning Australian history, patriotism, and environmental preservation. The critical question is as follows: does my judgement that the view of Black Mountain is beautiful involve negating all the previous affective and ethical attitudes I have towards it? No. These other attitudes I have towards the mountain are the conditions that happened to have led to my coming to behold its beauty, because they form part of the concatenation of experiences that have led me to judge it at all. It is just the case that adopting an attitude of disinterest also happens to be necessary for the mountain view’s beauty to unfold before me. None of this is to say that affective attachments and ethical judgements are essential precursors to aesthetic judgement in general, or constitutive of it. I am merely making a case for their compatibility and describing how they can relate to each other in human experience. Rather, they allow—they clear the path, as it were—for my being able to take a receptive and open attitude before the beauty of the mountain. To use Heidegger’s words, these “interested” experiences helped me to modify my behaviour so that I might disinterestedly encounter the view of the mountain as beautiful for its own sake. George Dickie rejects the idea of the AA in his paper “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (1964)1 where he objects, in turn, to both Bullough and Stolnitz’s theories. Dickie dismisses Stolnitz’s view on the grounds that there is no such special action as “psychical distancing”: “it is improper to use the term ‘distance’ as if it refers ‘to special acts of consciousness’”

156  Kallistics: The Verdict (Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” 56). In the case of aesthetic experience, we merely attend differently, and attending thus is an unmysterious action. The jealous husband is simply not attending to the play. “To introduce the technical terms ‘distance’ … and others … does nothing but send us chasing after phantom acts and states of consciousness” (Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude”56). Regarding Stolnitz, Dickie argues that the so-called interested ways of looking are just different ways of being distracted. This is so, for instance, when the play’s director gains intellectual satisfaction from having solved the play’s technical problems. This is really a case of not attending the play. Dickie thus argues that no special mode of perception corresponds uniquely to an AA. There is only one way to perceive or attend to something, and that is just by looking at it or by noting the features of it. The aesthetic perceiver is doing just that. In Dickie’s view, “it is possible for us to be more or less attentive to a work, to attend to it for a variety of reasons, and to be distracted from it in a variety of ways” (Saxena 81). So, the way to attend aesthetically to a work is just a matter of close attention. Contemporary accounts of the AA must address Dickie’s objections to it. At the end of the next section, I return to Dickie’s objections to suggest that the Beauty Revivalists’ position on and orientation to the AA do just that. Aesthetic Attention The notion of a special kind of Aesthetic Attention is of great interest to Beauty Revivalist thinking. The Revivalists hold that experiences of beauty require sustained attention to an object. Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton introduce the concept of AAs into their accounts of beauty and relate their claims about AAs to the crucially important notion of attention. In Beauty Revivalist thinking, attention to beauty is self-reflexive, in the sense that we reflect on how the form of the object relates to our own state of mind. They suggest in short that the structure of our attention to beauty is self-reflexive; our attention to beauty is, at the same time, attention to our own inner condition as we engage with it. According to Scarry, aesthetic attention is a form of “radical decentering” (111), which causes us to “gape and suspend all thought” (29). She cites Simone Weil (1909–43), according to whom beauty requires us: [T]o give up our imaginary position at the centre … A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognise as a rustling

The Aesthetic Attitude  157 of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colours; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way. (Weil, Waiting for God 100) Weil indicates that attention is a cognitive activity that involves the bracketing or suspension of habitual ways of interpreting phenomena. In Scarry’s view, Weil’s account is “deeply somatic: what happens, happens to our bodies” (29). When we come upon beautiful things, they lift us “so that when we land, we find that we are standing in a different relation to the world that we were a moment before” (112). This “radical decentering in the presence of the beautiful” (112) is “deeply connected to states of consciousness” (112). Here, Scarry cites Iris Murdoch (1919–99), who specifies the “single best or most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for ‘unselfing’, and that is what is popularly called beauty” (The Sovereignty of Good 2). Murdoch sees a kestrel, which causes a cluster of feelings that normally promote the self—for she had been “anxious … resentful … brooding perhaps on some damage done to [her] prestige” to fall away (112). It is not just that she becomes “self-forgetful,” but that “some more capacious mental act is possible: all the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self is now free to be in the service of something else” (Scarry 113). Serving this “something else” makes it as though “one has ceased to be the hero or heroine in one’s own story and has become … the ‘lateral figure’ or ‘donor figure’” (113), and thus, “one’s participation in a state of overall equality has been brought about” (113). According to Scarry, this is the “ethical alchemy of beauty” (113)—beauty permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure. Seeing the kestrel is a somatic/sensory activity which at the same time seems to “lift” us out of both the body and (in so doing) the mind’s usual preoccupations. For Scruton, attending appropriately to an object is a crucial aspect of the experience of beauty: “Beauty is always a reason for attending to the thing that possesses it” (Scruton, Beauty 5): the judgement of beauty “demands an act of attention. And it may be expressed in many different ways. Less important than the verdict is the attempt … to identify the aspect of the thing that claims our attention” (5). Consequently, the attention we bestow upon beautiful objects is about “wanting to contemplate it—and that is something more than a search for information or an expression of appetite” (16). Here, Scruton addresses both the disinterested interest AA theory and the for-its-own-sake theory. Scruton thinks that the for-its-own-sake attitude means that “wanting beauty is not wanting to inspect it … that is something more than a search for information of an expression of appetite” (Beauty 16). This means that we are interested in it in a “certain way” (23)—that is, disinterestedly interested. This is not

158  Kallistics: The Verdict possible if “all our interests are determined by our desires: for an interest that stems from my desire aims at the fulfilment of that desire, which is an interest of mine … There is a certain kind of disinterested interest which is an interest … in it” (24). When I read a poem, my pleasure depends “upon no interest other than my interest in this, the very unique object that is before my mind” (Scruton, Beauty 25). The pleasure in a poem’s beauty results from an interest in it, for the very thing that it is. Scruton reminds his readers that Ruskin, in a famous passage of Modern Painters, distinguished merely sensuous interest, “which he called aesthesis from the true interest in art, which he called theoria, after the Greek for contemplation” (19). This implies that aesthetics does not “denote a purely sensory frame of mind” but “something presented through the senses to the mind” (20–21). Scruton thus proposes that rather than emphasising “the ‘immediate’, ‘sensory’, ‘intuitive’ character of the experience of beauty, we consider instead how an object comes before us, in the experience of beauty. When we refer to the ‘aesthetic’ nature of our pleasure in beauty is its presentation, rather than sensation, that we have in mind” (21). From this, he draws a “tentative conclusion, which is that we call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form … such complex entities are framed by aesthetic interest, held together, as it were, under a unified and unifying gaze” (22). Thus, according to Scruton, an appropriate AA is both disinterested and for its own sake and is derived from a specific kind of act of attentive contemplation. For Nehamas, “beautiful things require attention” (Only a Promise 102). He explores the idea that beauty provokes acts of attention by pointing to the way beauty leads us out into the world. He says that beauty is “a call to look attentively at the world and see how little we see” (131). Contemplation of this kind is not “a haphazard gazing into the blue but a whole mode of life that combines creative thought and considered action and transforms the desire to possess beautiful things into the urge to create beauty of one’s own” (132). As we have seen, for Nehamas, beauty is the object of love, and love can be provoked by anything—taste is the faculty one exhibits when one focuses on an object. Interpretation is the attitudinal feature of that focus. Taste is not a faculty we need to have in order to discern the aesthetic features of things, since aesthetic features “inform our every waking hour and we are all—every one of us—aware of them surrounding us” (Only a Promise 99). Taste is what one exhibits when one focuses on the right things in the right way. Thus, the “experience of beauty” is “inseparable from interpretation, and just as beauty always promises more than it has given so far, interpretation, the effort to understand what it promises, is forever work in progress” (105). Finding something beautiful means that “I am literally saying that I want to devote

The Aesthetic Attitude  159 part of my life to it—not just to look at it, but also to come to know it better, to understand it and see what it accomplishes” (105–06). Interpretation thus continues if love and beauty persist. To understand the object of our interpretation, we need to attend in ways we would not have done were it not for their beauty. As mentioned above, contemporary accounts of aesthetic experience must confront George Dickie’s well-known denial that disinterested attention can make a perceptual difference to one’s experience. The Beauty Revivalist account of aesthetic attention does indeed provide us with the resources for responding to this criticism: According to Dickie, someone might listen carefully to a piece of music because she has an exam on it the next day, while someone else might listen carefully to that same piece of music merely for the sake of enjoying the music. The motives of the listeners are different, but, for Dickie, there is no difference in the character of their attention. The distinction between “disinterested” and “interested” attention “collapses into the distinction between attention and inattention or is simply not a perceptual distinction  at all” (Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” 58). Dickie’s criticism is aimed at AA theories, which emphasise the fact that we can adopt the AA “to any object whatsoever” (Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’” 35). The Revivalists, in contrast to Dickie, are primarily concerned with the experience of beauty, which, according to them, necessarily involves an act of attention. The idea of attention offers us numerous possible responses to Dickie. First, the Revivalists could agree with Dickie that in some cases—those in whom there is a failure to “see” beauty—people are simply not attending or not attending properly. Second, the Revivalists could emphasise the fact that attending to details of an object that one would disregard for instrumental practical purposes makes a difference to one’s perceptual state, by bringing further representational content to consciousness. Furthermore, they might claim, the nature and degree of attention we bestow upon an object make a phenomenological difference to our experience. Finally, the Revivalists could say, two people attending closely to the details of an object or work of art might be affected by it vastly in different ways, and this would have an impact on their continued attention or lack thereof. What is significant about experiences of beauty, according to the Revivalists, is the way (and the fact) that they enable us to attend to and reflect on our own cognitive, perceptual, and emotional states as we attend to objects. Consider the way a great novel leads us to a second-order awareness of our own emotional reactions (on which we can then reflect). By highlighting the importance of aesthetic attention in the Beauty-Revivalist account, we can explain some aesthetic disagreements in terms of the failure to attend—and attend appropriately—to beauty.

160  Kallistics: The Verdict Conclusion This Part of the book offers an account of beauty as a lived experience: it explores beauty’s experiential qualities and characteristics. I have proposed that there are three stages, or moments, in our experience of beautiful objects. The second moment in our experience of beauty is that about which attitudinal features are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced, or that correlate with someone’s ability to determine, reliably, whether something is beautiful. I have suggested that this is best described by AA theories, which require that a specific form of sustained attention be given to the object by the subject. AA theories incorporate, as their central feature, a characterisation of how we regard something when it is before us, and when we take an aesthetic interest in it. Thus, a certain attitude—a particular state of mind, a way of approaching experiences, or orienting oneself—is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for making aesthetic judgements. Note 1 Since Dickie, the AA has—excepting the Beauty Revivalist analysis—received little attention, which may suggest a general acceptance of his objections. Roger Scruton is the most recent philosopher to have developed an AA theory, which appears in his book Art and Imagination (1974).

9

Aesthetic Emotion

The primary aim of this Part is to provide an account of beauty as a lived experience by drawing on features of that experience that are identified and described by the Beauty Revivalists. I have proposed that there are (at least) three stages, or moments, in the process of our engagement with beautiful objects. The previous two Chapters have explored the first two of these: the sensory conditions that constitute an experience of beauty, best described by the Acquaintance Principle, and the attitudinal features [that] are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced best described by Aesthetic Attitude theories. Here, in this Chapter, I explore the third and final stage in our experience of beauty: what the experience of beauty results in or (to put this another way) how beauty affects us. I suggest that, according to the Beauty Revivalists, we ought to, to some extent, speak about beauty in terms of the emotions that it elicits or consists of. For the Beauty Revivalists, the experience of beauty is uniquely linked to the experience of certain emotions. First, they say, beauty is seemingly linked necessarily to a pleasurable response. Scruton, in particular, favours the Kantian notion of “disinterested” pleasure. However, Scarry and Nehamas suggest that the appellation of pleasure is insufficient to distinguish the experience of beauty from other pleasurable experiences. According to Scarry and Nehamas, I indicate that we therefore need to identify additional emotional states associated with the experience of beauty, to gain a more precise understanding of the ways in which beauty affects us and a more nuanced understanding of what differentiates an experience of beauty from other aesthetic experiences. I explore the possibility that Scarry and Nehamas may have identified two such emotional states: the desire to “possess” and the impulse to “beget” beauty. This discussion about aesthetic emotion puts the Beauty Revivalists at odds with one another in one key respect: while Scruton prefers the Kantian account of pleasure, Scarry and Nehamas depart from Kant in their accounts of aesthetic emotion, preferring a Platonic picture of beauty connected with desire and the impulse to beget. DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-18

162  Kallistics: The Verdict Aesthetic Emotion According to the Beauty Revivalists, perceptions and judgements of beauty are not merely sensory or cognitive processes but also involve, or inspire, certain distinctive feelings or emotions. They think that one of the bases of our experience of beauty is an emotional response. However, over the last 50 years, prior to the Revivalist accounts, there has been very little has been written on aesthetic emotions. In Emotion in Aesthetics (1995), Shibles suggests that “emotion” and its synonyms are “crucial terms in the literature on aesthetics, yet the terms are typically used without definition and usually without any theory of emotion being presented” (Shibles 5). Stecker (1984) writes that “there is no one view about the nature of emotions that is generally accepted in contemporary philosophy” (Stecker, “Expression of Emotions in (some of) the Arts” 409). According to Menninghaus et al. (2019), there is no account which can “provide a detailed definition or discussion of what aesthetic emotions actually are” (Menninghaus et al. 170). Acknowledging the sparsity of successful accounts of aesthetic emotion, Skov and Nadal (2020) declare that “affective states observed during aesthetic appreciation events are not distinctly different from affective states observed during other forms of sensory valuation. We conclude that it may be time to retire the idea that aesthetic emotions constitute a special class of human emotion” (Skov and Nadal 640). One of the most lucid statements in this regard comes from Harold Osborne: “Problems that have no solution are problems to be repudiated,” he said, before offering his “advise that the entire controversy [over aesthetic emotions] be given up” (cited in Shibles 349). There are (at least) two, closely related, drawbacks to speaking in terms of aesthetic emotion. The first is that the use of the term “aesthetic emotions” might mistakenly be equated to “art-elicited” emotions. To speak in such terms implies that there is a discrete type of emotion which is only experienced as a result of exposure to artworks, which is not self-evidently the case. We need at least to “systematically distinguish between art-represented emotions, art-elicited emotions, and aesthetic emotions proper” (Menninghaus et al. 170). Once we accept that aesthetic emotions are not reducible to “art-elicited” emotions, we reach a second and more trying drawback: one might argue that virtually anything we experience sensually can be viewed with a focus on the emotion that it elicits, which means that distinguishing between distinctly aesthetic emotions and any other form of emotion becomes not only critical to the project but also very challenging. Films or novels are frequently advertised as being “beautiful” (i.e., emotion-inducing), but, at the same time, many real-life episodes can likewise be experienced as beautiful, including “weddings, funerals, acts of separation and reconciliation” (170). Kant considered “human faces and bodies, flowers, landscapes,

Aesthetic Emotion  163 and animals as elicitors of aesthetic feelings, no less so than poems, music, paintings, architecture, cognitive achievements, and so forth” (170). The Beauty Revivalists are no less inclusive when speaking about the feelings that arise during an experience of beauty. This means that the term “aesthetic emotion” has a very broad application, potentially extending to cover any emotions derived from a perceptual encounter. Despite these drawbacks, Menninghaus et al. have attempted to offer what they describe as the “first comprehensive theoretical article on aesthetic emotions” (171), drawing from Kant and Baumgarten. They explain that: To understand what is at stake in the concept of aesthetic emotions, it is helpful to reconsider what is at stake in aesthetics as a whole. The concept of aesthetic emotions was introduced against the background of the distinction between theoretical, practical (moral), and aesthetic cognition, which first motivated philosophers from Baumgarten through Kant to establish aesthetics as a third and separate discipline in addition to theoretical and practical philosophy. For Kant as well as for the modern sciences, theoretical cognition strives for valid judgments of truth (correctness) by means of strictly concept-guided lines of argument and interpretations of available empirical evidence. In this process, theoretical cognition abstracts from the particulars of individual phenomena. In contrast, aesthetic judgments are in the end—regardless of the regularities they also imply—about individual objects, and they try to do justice to subtle nuances in appearance rather than abstract from these individualizing nuances; they are hence based on the full richness of the perceptual input. For this reason, Baumgarten took recourse to the Greek word for sensory perception in general, namely, aisthesis, as he proposed a new field of philosophy under the name of “aesthetics.” (Menninghaus et al. 170) The authors continue: Baumgarten and Kant proposed that the special task demands of aesthetic perception and evaluation call for special faculties and processing routines. Both authors assumed a stronger involvement of emotional processes in this task compared with purely perceptual processes, on the one hand, and abstraction-based theoretical cognition, on the other. Put briefly, aesthetic emotions were attributed the power to evaluate, in a largely intuitive way, phenomena that by definition partially defy a strictly conceptual derivation—namely, the aesthetic virtues of individual objects or performances in all their richness and individuality. (Menninghaus et al. 172)

164  Kallistics: The Verdict According to Menninghaus et al., then, following Baumgarten and Kant, aesthetic emotions are directly linked to human powers of evaluation and thus, constitute a distinct class of emotions: “Aesthetic emotions are fullblown discrete emotions that, for all their differences in multiple emotion components, always include an aesthetic evaluation/appreciation of the objects or events under consideration” (Menninghaus et al. 172). What differentiates aesthetic emotions from any other type of emotion is the fact that they include an aesthetic evaluation. We might then say that the first and foremost characteristic of emotions associated with beauty is that they contribute to or perhaps that they include or contain the evaluation that something is beautiful. In other words, “the attribution of beauty to any given object [i.e. the evaluation of it as beautiful] amounts to simultaneously designating an emotional response that may come with this attribution” (Menninghaus et al. 172). In my view, according to the Beauty Revivalists, we can identify some such evaluation-bearing or evaluation-modified emotions. These include the feeling of pleasure (according to Scruton), the desire to “possess” beauty (according to Nehamas), and the impulse to “beget” beauty (according to Scarry). In what follows, I assess some of the things that Scruton, Nehamas, and Scarry say about these emotions as they directly link them to the experience of beauty. I suggest that ultimately the Revivalists think that it is useful—at least to an extent—to speak about beauty in terms of the emotions it elicits in us. Pleasure Most accounts of beauty connect beauty to a pleasurable response. Consider, for example, the following quotations: Beauty is pleasing … (Plato, Hippias Major 291e) The beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend. (Aquinas II.I. 27.1) To decide whether anything is beautiful or not, we refer the representation … to the subject, and its feeling of pleasure. (Kant, Critique of Judgment §1) Beauty is pleasure-producing. (Scarry 117) Pleasure is the basis on which I say that the work is … beautiful. (Nehamas, “On Beauty and Judgment” 6) Beauty pleases us. (Scruton, Beauty 5) This list could easily be made much longer to include, among many others, Aristotle, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Augustine, David Hume, Fredrich Schiller, Francis Hutcheson, and Martin Heidegger.

Aesthetic Emotion  165 There is, however, no consensus among philosophers about why an experience of beauty is seemingly always accompanied by pleasure. In Nehamas’s words: Here is a very rough picture of aesthetic judgment. I am exposed to a work of art; it can be as short and simple as a three-minute rock song, a two-stanza lyric poem, or a thirty-minute episode of Seinfeld, or as long and complex as Goya’s Los Caprichos, Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Wagner’s Ring, or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I may wallow in the work, allow it to sweep over me, or study and analyse it carefully over a long time. At some point, in some cases, the features of the work, which can range from the simplest elements of beat, meter, or colour to the most complex combinations of structures, depictions of character, or views of the world, produce in me a feeling which, for lack of a better name, I call pleasure. That pleasure is the basis on which I say that the work is funny, moving, elegant, sweeping, passionate, unprecedented—in a word (or two) beautiful or aesthetically valuable. The trouble is that it has proved impossible to establish the principles that govern the production of aesthetic pleasure. (Nehamas, “On Beauty and Judgment” 1) Rafael de Clercq has proposed one explanation which ties the experience of beauty to the experience of pleasure. The core of his account of the relationship between beauty and pleasure is this: The same event occurs when (1) a subject experiences aesthetic pleasure and when (2) it appears to her that there is something beautiful. More precisely, one’s experiencing aesthetic pleasure is the same (event) as it appearing to one that there is something beautiful. Schematically, The Identity Thesis A subject s’s experiencing aesthetic pleasure = it appearing to s that there is something beautiful. (De Clercq 124) Why should we assume that the “Identity Thesis” is true? De Clercq argues that the thesis has plausibility because “the propositions flanking the identity sign in the Identity Thesis seem to be equivalent. In other words, the relevant events seem to co-occur” (De Clercq 124). He thinks that it is plausible to think that “if one experiences aesthetic pleasure, then it appears to one that there is something beautiful” (De Clercq 124). It is also quite plausible to think that “if it appears to one that there is something beautiful, then one experiences aesthetic pleasure” (De Clercq 124). It follows

166  Kallistics: The Verdict that one experiences aesthetic pleasure “if and only if” (De Clercq 124) it appears to one that there is something beautiful. It does not follow from De Clercq’s explanation, however, that experiences of pleasure and experiences of the beauty are identical. As Scarry asserts, beauty is not “the only thing in the world that brings a state of acute pleasure” (Scarry 131). De Clercq’s explanation seems to imply that experiences of moral goodness, or experiences of the agreeable, are just as pleasurable, or pleasurable in the same way, as experiences of beauty. According to Nehamas: Kant concluded that we have a right to make aesthetic judgments only if we can answer the question, ‘How is a judgment possible which, merely from one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object, independent of its concept, estimates a priori, that is, without having to wait upon the agreement of others, that this pleasure is connected with the representation of the object in every other subject?’ … The Critique of Judgment was Kant’s effort to answer that question. It was a magnificent effort but flawed; and its failure has haunted modern aesthetics. (Nehamas, “On Beauty and Judgment” 5) According to Nehamas, we simply do not possess an adequate explanation for why pleasure derived from the experience of beauty is different in kind from other kinds of pleasure. In Scruton’s view, it is not only possible but also highly appropriate to distinguish a certain type of pleasure which is aroused in the experience of beauty. He claims that: The issue here might seem to be simple: is the pleasure in beauty a sensory or an intellectual pleasure? But then, what is the difference between the two? The pleasure of a hot bath is sensory, the pleasure of a mathematical puzzle intellectual. But between those two there are a thousand intermediary positions, so that the question of where aesthetic pleasure lies on the spectrum has become one of the most vexed issues in aesthetics. (Beauty 23) Scruton claims that “we can draw a tentative conclusion, which is that we call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form” (Scruton, Beauty 23). By this, Scruton, following Kant, means that “to be interested in beauty is to set all interests aside, so as to attend to the thing itself” (Beauty 23). “Disinterested pleasure is a kind of pleasure in. But it is focused on its object and dependent on thought: it has a specific ‘intentionality’, to use the technical term” (23). Pleasure in a hot bath does not depend upon any

Aesthetic Emotion  167 thought about the bath and therefore can never be mistaken. “Intentional pleasures,” by contrast, “are part of the cognitive life” (30): Intentional pleasures therefore form a fascinating sub-class of pleasures. They are fully integrated into the life of the mind. They can be neutralized by argument and amplified by attention. They do not arise, as the pleasures of eating and drinking arise, from pleasurable sensations, but play a vital part in the exercise of our cognitive and emotional powers. The pleasure in beauty is similar. But it is not just intentional: it is contemplative, feeding upon the presented form of its object, and constantly renewing itself from that source. (Scruton, Beauty 31) For Scruton, then, there is a particular type of pleasure which is distinctive from other types of pleasure and which is uniquely induced by experiences of beauty. Desire Nehamas claims that by introducing the notion of “pleasure” into his account of beauty, Kant “dissociated beauty from desire” (Only a ­Promise 3). For Nehamas, this is an error, since he sees the experience of desire as necessarily linked to the experience of beauty. Nehamas therefore champions Plato’s account of the experience of beauty as being inherently linked to the experience of desire. Nehamas begins his account of the relationship between beauty and desire with a repudiation of the “pleasure” aspect of Kantian aesthetics. According to Nehamas, Kantian philosophy seeks to “eliminate passion from beauty” (Only a Promise 3), replacing it with a model of “satisfaction” (Only a Promise 3): Kant disavowed the ancients. Beauty, he claimed, is manifested only through a contemplation of nature or art that produces a ‘satisfaction without any interest’. The pleasure (‘satisfaction’) we find in beautiful things is completely independent of their relations to the rest of the world—of their uses and effects. We have no interest in possessing them or in their consequences for ourselves or others. It is a pleasure bereft of desire. (Nehamas, Only a Promise 3) According to Nehamas, “nothing could be farther from Plato’s celebration of desire” than Kant’s account of “pleasure” (6). Nehamas acknowledges that Kant’s views on “the nature of beauty” and its “relationship to the rest of life” are “immensely complex” but thinks that, according to Kant, beauty should not bear “any relation to the everyday world of desires” (5).

168  Kallistics: The Verdict The “beauty that was important to philosophy” was thus “transformed from the spark of desire to the surest means of its quenching” (5). Nehamas thus heralds a return to thinking about the experience of beauty as inherently linked to the experience of desire. Nehamas sees a relationship between beauty and the “world” (5); the “rest of the world” (3); and the “everyday world” (5). According to Nehamas, “Our reaction to beautiful things is the urge to make them our own, which is why Plato called eros the desire to possess beauty” (55). This “urge” to “possess beauty” (55) brings with it a corresponding desire to engage with beautiful persons or things in much more complex ways; it is the “expression of my need to become actively engaged—sexually, psychologically, ethically—with another person” and to bring them into one’s life in a way that is often aptly (though metaphorically) described as a desire to possess them (55). By speaking of “possession,” Nehamas seems to be making an implicit reference to the following passage in Plato’s Symposium: ‘If someone were to ask us, “Why, Socrates and Diotima, is love of beautiful things?”—or to put it more clearly, the person who loves, loves beautiful things: why does he love them?’ I said, ‘To possess them for himself’. ‘But’, she said, ‘your answer still begs a question of the following sort: what will the person who possesses beautiful things get by possessing them?’ I said that I didn’t find this question at all easy to answer. ‘Well’, she said, ‘answer as if someone changed things round, and questioned you using the good instead of the beautiful: “Come on, Socrates: the person who loves, loves good things: why does he love them?”’ ‘To possess them for himself’, I said. ‘And what will the person who possesses good things get by possessing them?’ ‘That’, I said, ‘I’m better placed to answer: he’ll be happy’. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘because those who are happy are happy by virtue of possessing good things, and one no longer needs to go on to ask “And what reason does the person who wishes to be happy have for wishing it?” Your answer seems final.’ ‘True’, I said. (Plato, Symposium 204d4–205a8) Plato indicates that it is easier to answer Diotima’s question about why we desire good things than it is to answer the question about why we desire beautiful ones. We desire to possess them. The question immediately arises, then, of why we desire to possess them. We are reminded that

Aesthetic Emotion  169 possessing them will make us happy—and so, according to Nehamas, we reach an explanatory bedrock. Nehamas advocates for a return to a Platonic model for thinking about the relationship between beauty and desire, proposing that we once again talk about beauty as “identical with the spark of desire” (Only a Promise 76). He equates the experience of beauty with the experience of desire—he thinks of beauty as the thing that “speaks to our desire” (76). “What sparks my desire is nothing but beauty itself” (76). Nehamas works to vindicate the Platonic view: “So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what it has to offer, and that forward-looking element is … inseparable from the judgment of beauty” (9). The emphasis in Nehamas’s account is on the anticipation of happiness contained in the attraction we experience. Since “beauty mobilizes the emotions and always looks to the future” (68), our voyage into the realm of the beautiful bears with it a hope that our life will be endlessly enriched. In this way, desire necessarily exceeds understanding: “we can be attracted to things of which we are not fully aware” (71). This brings us to the concluding remarks of Nehamas’s book: “only the promise of happiness is happiness itself” (138). Nehamas acknowledges that, for Plato, “the only reaction appropriate to beauty is eros—love, the desire to possess it” (Only a Promise 6). Plato describes a long and difficult “ascent” that “ends in the knowledge and love of the very Form of Beauty—the essential nature of beauty that is manifested in every beautiful thing in the world and explains why it is beautiful” (6): Every new step reveals another beauty and the man’s desire to possess the boy is gradually amplified to a desire for more and more abstract things: not just the beauty of the body but also that of the soul, which is for Plato responsible for bodily beauty, the beauty of cultures whose laws and institutions produce people with beautiful souls, the beauty of the knowledge and understanding needed to establish such laws and institutions; and, at the end, the single and immutable essence of beauty, its ‘Form,’ which animates the beauty of everything that leads a lover to it—that is, of everything in the world. And though these ‘higher’ beauties are abstract and seemingly impersonal, they never cease to produce action and inspire desire and longing. (7) Through the ascent theory, according to Nehamas, Plato “reminds us that beauty cannot be sundered from understanding or desire … any satisfactory account of beauty must acknowledge this fundamental fact” (7). Nehamas thus quite explicitly affirms the role that desire plays in our experiences of the beautiful. If we are to distinguish emotions which are uniquely and distinctly linked to the experience of the beautiful, we must, Nehamas insists, include the feeling of desire.

170  Kallistics: The Verdict Begetting Scarry opens On Beauty and Being Just with the following question: “What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?” (Scarry 3). Scarry’s use of the word “felt” here implies that, for her, the experience of beauty has an affective component, yet, like Scruton (and Kant), she also links the idea of feeling to the idea of “cognition” (3). Her answer to the question she poses is that beauty “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication” (3). She cites Wittgenstein, who says “that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it” (3). Throughout the following pages of the book, Scarry develops her argument that beauty affects or perhaps arouses this “impulse toward begetting” (6). She thus contributes to the discussion about the possible existence of aesthetic emotions by claiming that that beauty does indeed prompt specific feelings. Scarry contends that the experience of beauty elicits what she calls the “impulse towards begetting.” We might interpret her as meaning that beauty in some way brings into existence or causes reproduction (of itself). She claims that there are attributes that “without exception [are] present across different objects (faces, flowers, birdsongs, men, horses, pots and poems), one of which is this impulse towards begetting. It is impossible to conceive of a beautiful thing that does not have this attribute” (9). Scarry thus treats the “impulse toward begetting” not as accidental but as necessary to the experience of beauty (6). Scarry claims that “beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable” (6). According to Scarry, this “generation is unceasing.” Beauty, “as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person” (4). This process of continual begetting “sponsors the idea of terrestrial plenitude and distribution, the will to make ‘more and more’ so that there will eventually be ‘enough’” (4). “The beholder, in response to seeing beauty, often seeks to bring new beauty into the world” (88). “The generative object continues to be present in the ‘newly begotten object’” (88), which is why beauty “has been perceived to be bound up with the immortal” (30) but nevertheless conveys a sense of newness or “newbornness” (22). It seems that, like Nehamas, Scarry is implicitly referencing ideas that Plato puts in the mouth of Diotima in the Symposium: in Scarry’s case, the idea is that the function of love is begetting in beauty: ‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in respect to body and to soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to

Aesthetic Emotion 171 beget. We cannot do it in ugliness, but in beauty we can. The intercourse of man and woman is a begetting. And this affair is something divine: living creatures, despite their mortality, contain this immortal thing, pregnancy and procreation. But it is impossible for this to take place in what is discordant. Ugliness, however, is in discord with everything divine, while beauty is concordant … For these reasons, if ever what is pregnant approaches beauty, it becomes gracious, melts with joy, and begets and procreates; but when it approaches ugliness, it contracts, frowning with pain, turns away, curls up, and fails to procreate, retaining what it has conceived, and suffering because of it. That is why what is pregnant and already full to bursting feels the great excitement it does about beauty, because it frees it from great pain. For Socrates,’ she said, ‘love is not, as you think, of beauty … [but] of procreating and begetting in beauty.’ (Plato, Symposium 206c1–e5) Diotima’s speech is the basis for Scarry’s claim that begetting is “something divine” (206c6), in that it partakes to a degree in “immortality” (206c7). She says that the “phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsors … the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops” (Scarry 5). Scarry’s claim that the human “impulse to beget” is a component of the experience of beauty is relevant insofar as it implies that the experience of beauty includes a uniquely emotional tone. For Scarry, the “impulse to beget” acts as an emotional “prompt” which “makes” and “gives rise to” (5) our felt experience of beauty. Conclusion In this final Chapter of Part 3, I have explored the third stage in our experience of beauty: what the experience of beauty results in or the way in which beauty affects us. I have suggested that, for the Beauty Revivalists, the experience of beauty is linked to the experience of certain emotions. First, according to the Revivalists, beauty is seemingly necessarily linked to a pleasurable response. However, the Revivalists suggest, the appellation of pleasure is not enough to distinguish the experience of beauty. I have indicated that—according to Scarry and Nehamas—we therefore need to identify additional emotional states associated with the experience of the beautiful to gain a more accurate and precise understanding of the ways in which beauty affects us. I have explored the possibility that Scarry and Nehamas may have identified two such states: the desire to “possess” and the impulse to “beget” beauty.

Part 3: Conclusion

Throughout the course of the 20th century, many theorists actively inquired into aesthetic experience, but for the most part did so without expressing any specific interest in experiences of beauty. Philosophers have grappled with questions surrounding such diverse issues as the Acquaintance Principle, Aesthetic Attitude Theories, and aesthetic emotions, without considering the implications that these subjects have for our understanding of beauty. In their own ways, the Beauty Revivalists have responded to these ongoing debates in the academic field of aesthetics, and they have done so in such a way as to display their own distinct orientation to the theories’ questions, renegotiating terms so as include an account of the experience of beauty. What Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton have shown us is that, in retrospect, this broad-ranging 20th-century research into aesthetic experiences offers unique opportunities and occasions to reflect more specifically on the nature of our experiences of beauty. This Part of the book has described beauty as a lived experience: I have offered an exploration of beauty’s experiential qualities and characteristics. I have suggested that there are three stages, or “moments” (to use Kant’s term), in our cognition of beautiful objects. Each of these moments is comprehensible to, and describable by, anyone who is subject to an experience of beauty. I explored each of these “moments” in the three constituent chapters of this part. The first moment in our experience of beauty consists of the condition that constitutes an experience of beauty. This condition is, I suggested in Chapter 7, described through reference to the Acquaintance Principle. The second moment in our experience of beauty points at what attitudinal features are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced or correlate with someone’s ability to determine reliably whether something is beautiful. As I suggested in Chapter 8, this moment can be captured by Aesthetic Attitude theories. The third moment in our experience of beauty has to do with what the experience of beauty results in. In Chapter 9, I suggested that beauty can be spoken of in terms of aesthetic emotions: we need to identify additional emotional states associated with the experience DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-19

Part 3: Conclusion  173 of the beautiful to gain a more accurate and precise understanding of the ways in which beauty affects us. Ultimately, the Beauty-Revivalist account of the nature of experiences of beauty is derived from our pre-existing accounts of aesthetic experience. Adding subtlety and nuance to those accounts, the Revivalists argue that our experiences of beauty require direct, first-hand exposure to an object or scene, demand that sustained attention be given to that object or scene, and result in, or prompt, (often intense) feelings or emotions. Although the 21st-centruy Beauty Revival movement is still a (relatively) new force in philosophical aesthetics, its followers including Scarry, Nehamas, and Scruton have thus made significant progress towards explicating the structural and phenomenological features of our experiences of beauty. Coda According to Beauty Revivalism, the aesthetic experience is an important component of the human experience more generally. Yet, as we saw in Part 1, this vital experience has, for many, lost its appeal. As Adele Tomlin observed when attending a conference in London on the topic of “The Value of Aesthetic Experience”: “There did indeed seem to be, at the worst, an unspoken hostility to the notion, or at the best, a prejudiced ignorance of it” (Shusterman and Tomlin 3). I have attempted to pinpoint the main culprit of the depreciation of the idea of aesthetic experience in Western philosophy: the Anti-Aesthetic movement. The American Philosopher Richard Shusterman gives a similar account of the demise of the idea of aesthetic experience, in his essay, “The End of Aesthetic Experience” (1997). Shusterman claims that the reason for the decline of and resistance to the idea of aesthetic experience stems from a deep confusion about its forms and functions; as well as a “growing preoccupation with the anaesthetic thrust of this century’s artistic avant-garde” (Shusterman 29). Beauty Revivalists engaged in the project of re-evaluating aesthetic experience must anticipate new Anti-Aesthetic critiques. In this Part of the book, I gave a descriptive account of what the experience of beauty is like. I think that the terms of my account (which is extrapolated from the work of Beauty-Revivalists Nehamas, Scarry, and Scruton) develop a much richer and more positive idea of the experience of beauty than the Anti-Aesthetic offers us. But the Anti-Aesthetic may well ask: why is the experience of beauty, as I have described it, important and necessary? Worse, are not some of the notions to which I have appealed in my “threemoment” account inherently problematic? For instance, is it not impossible to pursue beauty under certain social, economic, and political conditions? Where and when and how are we to have these experiences? Are they not luxuries? Are these naïve experiences, or must we be trained to have them?

174  Kallistics: The Verdict To use Kant’s language: is taste an “original and natural faculty” or one that is “artificial” and “yet to be acquired” (Kant, Critique of Judgment §20)? Does not this kind of experience turn spectators into distanced, disinterested, and passive attendants? Is it not the case that, when we look at a beautiful person, we damage the person by turning it into a mere object (like in the case of the “male gaze” at female’s beauty)? Anti-Aestheticism has raised important questions, such as these implied by Brand: This new dark side of beauty is unexpected. It goads philosophers into delving into the moral, social, and political implications of a culture that finds the ugly beautiful. When anorexic girls, blood and vomit, junkies, dead sharks and sado-masochistic sex come to be revered as beautiful, we can remain disinterested, or we can honestly confront the perversity of how beauty has come to matter in distinctly non -traditional ways. (Brand 7) The Beauty Revivalists need a strong response to such questions. I have presented one possible response—namely, I have accused the Anti-Aesthetic movement of employing a faulty conceptual framework, of misunderstanding the idea of beauty, of wrongly defining it as a “merely sensuous pleasure.” However, this book is just one contribution in a resurgent trend—and the Anti-Aesthetic will think of this book and that trend as “bourgeois” at best. Anti-Aestheticism is a political orientation, and the Anti-Aesthetic critique is much broader than a mere critique of definition. Beauty Revivalists will ultimately need to move away from arguments (such as those I have engaged in) about definitions and concepts of beauty and towards questions about the moral, social, and political implications of our experiences of the beautiful. In these arenas, the main thrust of the work in the Beauty Revival is still to be done. Of course, Beauty Revivalists can appeal to (what I termed in the General Introduction) “traditional” accounts of aesthetic experience to make arguments in favour of its value. They might, for instance, rejuvenate Aristotle’s account of catharsis in the Poetics, or take a renewed interest in Aquinas’s analysis of beauty as one of the basic goods. (Indeed, for many Natural Law Theorists, aesthetic experience—alongside justice, the sacred, and happiness—is catalogued as a basic good.)1 However, engaging with the Anti-Aesthetic on its own terms will also involve the Beauty Revivalists developing new arguments for reconceiving and thus redeeming the notion of aesthetic experience. Moving forward, those allied with Beauty Revivalism must highlight and re-explore some of the aims and purposes of aesthetic experience and affirm the place of aesthetic experience—in its evaluative, phenomenological

Part 3: Conclusion  175 sense—in relation to our moral, social, and political lives. In other words, we need to tease out what exactly it is that descriptive accounts of beauty, such as the one I have offered, mean for the world. Does beauty, for instance, contribute to our mental health and well-being, social justice, and our relationship to the environment? I hope that my account of aesthetic experience will help motivate and direct further study of the sometimes maligned, yet also much-valued, idea of aesthetic experience. Note

General Conclusion

This book has provided original parallel descriptive accounts of two “schools of thought” in the philosophy of beauty: (i) the 20th-century Anti-Aesthetic movement and (ii) the 21st-century Beauty-Revival movement. It has also offered (iii) an original account of beauty understood as a lived experience, by drawing on features of that experience that are identified by the Beauty Revivalists. I have argued that, while the Anti-Aesthetic movement is, by vocation, devoted to a decisive negation of the value of beauty, the Beauty Revival is committed to a re-affirmation of the value of beauty. To these ends, the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty Revival movements engage largely incompatible philosophical notions of beauty, both of which this book constructs. The Anti-Aesthetic movement employs the notion of “Sensuous Beauty” to suggest that beauty is a merely sensuous (aka “aesthetic”) experience, which can be used, at best, as a distraction from justice and, at worst, as an instrument of evil. Beauty Revivalism employs the notion of “Revived Beauty” in an effort to defend beauty from these accusations and rehabilitate it as both a concept and a category of experience. The Revivalists advance arguments for beauty as a type of judgement which refers us to our higher values; but this book also includes an account of beauty as a lived experience, extrapolated from BeautyRevival descriptions of three key “moments” that occur in our experience of it. Given the current sparse adumbration of (i) the Anti-Aesthetic, (ii) the Beauty Revival, and (iii) contemporary accounts of the experience of beauty, this book offers an original contribution to scholarship in the field of philosophical aesthetics. In Part 1, “Kalliphobia,” my primary aim was to provide an original descriptive account of Anti-Aestheticism in Western Europe during the 20th century, with an emphasis on constructing the notion of “Sensuous Beauty.” I had three secondary aims, represented in each of the three constituent chapters of the Part: (1) to draw out, in Chapter 1, what I see as the main feature of Anti-Aestheticism: namely, a conceptualisation of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003387282-20

General Conclusion  177 beauty as “merely sensuous,” linked to pleasure and appearance; (2) to discover, in Chapter 2, why, based on this conceptualisation, beauty is said to have no essential or necessary role to play in our moral, political, and artistic lives; and (3) to show, in Chapter 3, how beauty was excised from our philosophical lexicon and artistic repertoire. In fulfilling these three auxiliary aims, my project on “Kalliphobia” ultimately amounted to a charitable construction of the Anti-Aesthetic position. In Part 2, “Philocaly,” my primary objective was to provide a descriptive account of Beauty Revivalism in Western Europe during the 21st century, with an emphasis on constructing the notion of “Revived Beauty.” In offering this account, I had three auxiliary aims, represented in each of the three constituent chapters of the part: (1) to provide, in Chapter 4, an explanation of how the Beauty Revivalists have responded to the problems of Anti-Aestheticism; (2) to reconstruct, in Chapter 5, the Beauty Revivalists’ arguments for beauty as an apprehensive feature of higher value concepts; and (3) to indicate, in Chapter 6, how the Beauty Revivalists re-appropriate features of the Kantian and Platonic accounts of beauty. In fulfilling these three auxiliary aims, my project on “Philocaly” ultimately amounted to an affirmative construction of the Beauty-Revivalist position. The primary aim of Part 3, “Kallistics,” was to provide an original account of beauty as a lived experience by drawing on features of that experience that are identified by the Beauty Revivalists. I offered an exploration of what I described as beauty’s experiential qualities, according to the Revivalists. I argued that it is possible to extrapolate from the Revivalists’ descriptions of three “moments” which occur as we experience beauty. I explored each of these moments in the three constituent chapters of the part. I argued that the first moment described by the Revivalists in our experience of beauty consists of the sensory conditions that constitute an experience of beauty. The second moment in our experience of beauty points at what attitudinal features are most likely to lead to beauty being experienced. The third and final moment in our experience of beauty has to do with what the experience of beauty results in. In identifying each of these three features, my project on “Kallistics” ultimately amounted to an original account of the experience of beauty as the foundation of the reflective account offered by the Revivalists.

~

“Beauty will save the world. Two kinds of beauty,” Dostoyevsky observes without further explanation in one of his notebooks for The Idiot (1869) (Jackson 40). Then, in The Devils (1871), Shatov (the son of Stavrogin’s valet) asks Stavrogin (the central character of the novel and the figurehead of the revolution he is attempting to spark): “Is it true that you maintained

178  General Conclusion that you know no difference in beauty between some sensual, bestial act and some worthy deed, for example, even the sacrifice of one’s life for humanity? Is it true that in both extremes, you found a coincidence of beauty?” (Dostoyevsky, The Devils 346). Stavrogin offers no reply, and his silence on the matter is indicative of his inner conflict: he has fallen into debauchery, and it is at this level of consciousness that he registers aesthetic experience. He finds pleasure (he also calls it beauty) in hurting himself and others, in cruelty, violence, and above all, sensuality; and “sensuality is always violence” (346). The “coincidence of beauty” (346) signifies the loss of aesthetic criteria; it evaporates the distinction between aesthetic categories. There is a certain fatal logic in Stavrogin: the same indifference which compels him to silence in his critical exchange with Shatov also drives him to suicide. The experience of beauty does have a sensual component, but Beauty Revivalist philosophers suggest that it differs in kind from “merely sensuous” experiences such as eating or having sex. Experiencing beauty requires thought and attention, and merely sensuous experiences can be enjoyed without thought or attention and therefore cannot be beautiful. To define beauty as “some sensual, bestial act,” as Anti-aesthetic thinkers throughout the 20th century have done, is a grave misunderstanding. Indeed, attempting to define beauty at all may be a mistake. As Emily Dickinson poeticises: “The Definition of Beauty is/That Definition is none—” (Dickinson 57). Dostoevsky first set forth his view on the role of beauty in the life of man in his article, “Mr. Dobrolyubov and the Question of Art” (1861): The need for beauty and the creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it, man, perhaps, would not want to live in the world. Man thirsts for it, finds and accepts beauty unconditionally, and just because it is beauty; and he bows down before it with reverence, without asking what it is useful for and what one can buy for it … the need for beauty develops most at the moment man is in discord with reality, in disharmony, in struggle, that is, when he is alive … (Quoted in Bowers, Katherine, 135 ) Here is an aesthetic-philosophical credo, a view of beauty with a capital “B.” The striking aspect of Dostoyevsky’s exposition is the central place he gives to the aesthetic element in human life. The feeling that people experience in the contemplation of beauty is, for Dostoevsky, of an entirely different order from the pleasure people experience in their sensual life. Dostoevsky’s position is clear: people find pleasure in sensuousness and falsely call it beauty.

General Conclusion  179 It is easy to dismiss the aphorism “beauty will save the world” as hopelessly naive or optimistic. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed in his Nobel Laureate speech: One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: ‘Beauty will save the world’. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time, I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes—but whom has it saved? (Solzhenitsyn 1) He continues: Perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three? In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? (1) It seems frightening or absurd to rest the salvation of the world upon something called beauty, especially when it seems necessary to save “beauty” itself from recent artistic and critical attempts to destroy it. As we have seen, among theorists, art critics, and philosophers, the term “beauty” has fallen into marked disfavour. The tendency in 20th-century aesthetics to discredit this word is remarkable. The notion no longer holds a central, pre-eminent position in aesthetics as a discipline. In the 20th century, philosophy, art, and theory approached the world without beauty. Beauty was avoided by the Anti-Aesthetic movement on the grounds of a series of moral, social, and political complaints against it. Beauty’s critique surfaced from a range of perspectives: from “interrogations of ‘woman as sign’ in representations of female beauty to the analysis of beauty as skewed by late capitalism and the questioning of beauty in terms of the critical values of the avant-garde” (Beech 13) to the influential strands of Conceptualist’s rethinking of aesthetics, Marxist’s critiques of aesthetics and postmodern art theory and criticism. The beauty of the work of art seemed “secondary to the work’s ideological functions in negotiations of class and power, gender, and politics” (Prettejohn 195). Beauty has been seen as trivial, subjective, socially and politically bereft, and lacking in

180  General Conclusion critical mileage. The love of beauty has seemed at best an “evasion or escape from the problems of reality” (195). Indeed, the Anti-Aesthetic position of the previous decade has lent a “subversive tinge to the very word ‘beauty’” (197). And yet Solzhenitsyn—who was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag—declared: “I insist on believing that beauty elevates human beings” (Solzhenitsyn 3). Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky, two great artist-thinkers, unambiguously affirm that beauty has an ennobling effect. Certainly, there is now plenty of thinking about beauty going on, unfashionable as it has been to acknowledge it. After about 1990, calls for a “return to beauty” began at first tentatively to emerge, then to multiply. By the turn of the millennium, leading academics in the fields of literature, cultural studies, and philosophy were publishing books on beauty and the aesthetic. Two decades later, beauty is becoming, for some, an academic obsession, as philosophers and critics resuscitate the beautiful as an ideal, recasting old philosophical arguments and forecasting new variants. This leaves us to wonder: Do you hope that when people in the 21st and 22nd centuries speak of us (the way we so effortlessly make descriptive statements about people living in the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries), do you hope these future people will describe us as beauty-loving? Or instead, as neutral with respect to beauty? Or instead, as beauty disregarding? (Scarry 118) As for how people in the 22nd century will speak of our attitude to beauty: we shall have to wait and see. Those Scarry questioned, and those whom I  have questioned, stated a hope that future generations would speak about us as beauty loving. As Peter Schjeldahl has said, “Beauty in 2096 will mean less, and mean it better, than it does today. Why not predict a happy outcome for our age of confusion in aesthetic matters? Things can hardly get worse.” One should not make the mistake of assuming that because many people today apparently lack sensitivity to beauty, beauty is not a fundamental source or marker of value. Yet it seems reasonable to suppose that many people might give a very different answer: Danto, for example, thinks that “beauty may be in for a rather long exile” (“Beauty and Morality” 37). And yet “the awful thing,” Dmitry Karamazov says in The Brothers Karamazov “is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man” (Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 134). Recent engagements with aesthetics have been marked by two poles: either a tradition of “return to beauty” thinking, leading to a philosophical defence, or the Anti-Aesthetic, a wholesale dismissal of aesthetic thinking as inevitably “bourgeois.” In this war, beauty is thus either celebrated or condemned.

General Conclusion  181 Having reached the conclusion of my project, my working assumption, or hope, is that the opposing forces of Anti-Aestheticism and Beauty Revivalism can be brought into more diplomatic relations than has typically been the case. With respect to the present, it may be too soon to say whether this is possible. When, in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Ippolit asks, “Is it true, Prince, that you once said that ‘beauty will save the world’?” (Dostoyevsky, The Idiot 232), Prince Myshkin does not reply. But later in the novel, he remarks, “It is difficult to judge beauty; I am still not ready” (376). The experience of beauty is universal: from the dewdrops on a rose petal and the double-ended rainbow to the arch of a woman’s waist and the radiating spokes of a stained-glass window, we all, in some sense, “know” what it is like to experience beauty, whatever may be our individual predilections. We cannot deny the phenomenon. But the question of how we ought to understand the nature of that experience is one of the oldest and most fascinating riddles of philosophy. How do we “know” beauty? Nearly every major philosopher has engaged with this question and its cognates, including the great figures of ancient Greek philosophy such as Plato and Aristotle. It is a primary theme among Medieval philosophers such as Augustine and Aquinas and was central to 18th- and 19th-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Kant, Hume, and Hegel. The category of the aesthetic carries with it a long conceptual history, and the power of that history resides precisely in the things it never fully resolves. Humankind has never stopped experiencing beauty and will never cease reflecting on that experience. Once upon a time, beauty was regarded as the main value of aesthetics, just as the good was deemed the ultimate value of the ethical sphere and truth the ultimate value of the epistemic domain. Over the course of the 20th century, however, beauty lost its privileged position. This book has attempted, in the spirit of recent developments, to retrieve the philosophy of beauty from the footnotes into which it has been confined—to rescue it from its current position as a marginal aesthetic concern—and return it to its once central location in philosophical thought.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. AA see Aesthetic Attitude (AA) Acconci, Vito: Seedbed 65 Acquaintance Principle (AP) 10, 137, 140–49; and Beauty Revival 146–49; challenges to 144–46 Adorno, Theodore 7, 35, 87; aesthetic philosophy 40–44; Aesthetics 40; Aesthetic Theory 40; Dialectic of Enlightenment 40, 43, 44; “On the Concept of Beauty” 40–44 Aesthetic Attention 156–59 Aesthetic Attitude (AA) 150–60; definition of 153; theories 150–56, 172 aesthetic category, beauty as 112–15 aesthetic emotion 161–71 aesthetic experience 135–38 aesthetic hedonism 21–22, 32n1 aesthetic indifference 29 aestheticisation of politics 30 aesthetics 3, 11–12n4, 11n2; definition of 5 Alberro, Alexander: “Beauty Knows No Pain” 4, 72, 127, 128 annihilation of culture 28 Anti-Aestheticism 1–3, 5–10, 15, 22, 32, 35, 50, 54, 62, 68, 70–71, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84–95, 111, 126, 127, 129, 174, 176, 177, 181; avant-garde versus 16–20; definition of 19; in Western Europe 19 Anti-Aesthetic 1993 Whitney Biennial 46

AP see Acquaintance Principle (AP) apophasis 18 Aquinas, Thomas 51n1 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando Furioso 143 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics 2, 96; philosophy of beauty 2; Poetics 174; Politics 11n2 Armstrong, John: Secret Power of Beauty, The 82n4 art 17; Avant-garde’s critique of the institution of 28–29; dematerialization of 55; political 53; Western, female body in 46; without beauty 53–69 Art Journal 72 Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art 54 Art Povera 17 Asavei, Maria-Alina 53 Athey, Ron 64–65; Scenes of a Harsh Life 65 Austen, Jane: Emma 39, 148 Austin, John: “Plea for Excuses, A” 17 avant-garde 7, 16–20, 22, 27–29, 46, 62, 63, 129, 173, 179; Anti-Aesthetic versus 16–20; “Intractable Avant-Garde” 46; modernism versus 16 aversive perception 86 Barry, Robert 55 Barth, Karl 83n5; Church Dogmatics 83n5

196 Index Bataille, Georges 68n3; Story of the Eye 68n3 Baudelair, Charles: Les Fleurs du Mal 88 Baumgarten, Alexander 23–24, 32, 163; Aesthetica 5; on aesthetic emotions 164; on aesthetics 11n4; Metaphysics 5 Baz, Avner 118, 119 Beardsley, Monroe 21, 60; Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism 136 beauth: as form 119–21; good versus 124 beauty 15; as an aesthetic category 112–15; arguments for 95–110; art without 53–69; challenges to 90–93; concessions 85–90; definition of 42; demotion of 114; and evil, relationship between 34–52; external 63; fairness 96–97; feminist critique of 44–50, 51n5; internal 63; as “merely sensuous” 9, 15, 20–33, 35, 40, 41, 43, 51, 53, 54, 59, 64, 71, 85, 90, 94, 121, 130, 158, 174, 176–78; method of inquiry 4–6; morality 86–89; philosophy of 1–4; phobia 53; physical 45, 46, 51n1; plan of inquiry 8–11; as pleasure 21; politicisation of 62; as reflective judgement 115–17, 134; revival of 8; standards 45, 49; survey of previous scholarship 7–8; symmetry 96; see also individual entries beauty-as-fairness 99 “Beauty Hurts” 48 Beauty Revivalism/Revived Beauty 1, 2, 4–9, 77–81, 84, 88, 94, 95, 109, 111, 115, 116, 125–27, 130, 134, 173, 174, 176, 177, 181; Acquaintance Principle and 146–49 Beckett, Samuel: Endgame 44 Beckley, Bill: Uncontrollable Beauty 12n5 Beech, Dave 7, 179; Beauty 12n5 begetting 170–71 Bell, Clive: Art 136

Benjamin, Walter 9, 40, 44, 71; on beauty as “merely sensuous” experience 29–32; “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” 22, 29 Bernstein, Jay 73 Bérubé, Michael 79 Birth of Venus, The 143 Blanchot, Maurice 68n3 Bloomsbury group 20n2 Blume, Anna 66 Body Art 17 Bomb Magazine 66 bourgeois values 70 Brand, Peg Zeglin: Beauty Matters 89 Bredin, Hugh: Philosophies of Art and Beauty 11n1 Britten, Benjamin: War Requiem 106 Brook, Donald 59 Brothers Karamazov, The 145 Bryson, James 108 Budd, Malcolm 102; “Acquaintance Principle, The” 145; “Love of Art, The” 101, 109n3, 110n3 Bullough, Edward 150, 154; Aesthetics 152; Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays 151; “Psychical Distance” 151–52 Bürger, Peter: Theory of the AvantGarde 17, 28 Burgess, Anthony: Clockwork Orange, A 65 Burke, Edmund: Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A 51n8 CAC see Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati, Ohio Călinescu, Matei: Five Faces of Modernity 17 Carlson, Allen: Functional Beauty 82n4 Carroll, Noel 57, 60–61; Theories of Art Today 136 Cascales, Raquel 62–63 Catellana: Comedian 58 Chappell, T. D. J. 175n1 circularity 120 Clark, Michael: Revenge of the Aesthetic 79

Index  197 coda 71–73, 127–30, 173–75 cognition 170 common goal 78, 82 common influence 78, 80, 82, 84, 94 common outlook 78, 81, 82, 95, 111, 126 Conceptual Art 20n6, 54–61, 67–68, 91; characteristic features of 55–56 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition 54 concessions 85–90 contemplation 122 Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati, Ohio 68n5 Costello, Diarmuid 73 Creed, Martin 54 Crimp, Douglas 20n5 critical cognition of reality 28 Cubism 17 cultural difference 91 cultural relativism 92

Dewey, John: Art as Experience 135–36 Dickie, George 150, 159, 160n1; “Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude, The” 155–56, 159 Dickinson, Emily 178 Die Winterreise 105 discrimination 153 “disinterested” pleasure 32, 150, 154, 159, 161 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 180; Brothers Karamazov, The 180; Devils, The 177–78; Idiot, The 177, 181; “Mr. Dobrolyubov and the Question of Art” 178 Duchamp, Marcel 7, 9, 20n4, 22, 32, 46, 62; on beauty as “merely sensuous” experience 26–29; Fountain 17, 18, 33n7, 57–58, 60, 63, 146 Dworkin, Andrea 9, 35, 87; on feminist critique of beauty 44– 50; Women Hating 47–48, 50

Dadaism 17, 20n6, 30 Dalton, Stuart: “How Beauty Disrupts Space” 116–18 Danto, Arthur 16, 26, 51n3, 60; Abuse of Beauty, The 62, 68n2, 72; Abuse, The 7, 46, 61, 63, 64; on art without beauty 61–64; “Beauty and Morality” 180; on beauty phobia 53; Beyond the Brillo Box 62; on kalliphobia 5, 7, 9, 16, 20, 22, 43, 46, 71, 176–77; “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art” 72; Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The 61 Davison, Emily 45 Dawkins, Richard: God Delusion, The 107–8 De Clercq, Rafael: on aesthetic emotion 165–66 De Kooning, Willem 93; Erased de Kooning Drawing 56–59 De Sade, Marquis: Philosophy of the Bedroom 44 descriptive analysis 6 desire 167–69 Devereaux, Mary 35–38, 85

Economist, The 49 Eliot, George: Daniel Deronda 34 Eliot, T. S.: Waste Land, The 88 Elkins, James 71, 73; Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic 12n5, 72 Ellis, Bret Easton: American Psycho 65 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Conduct of Life, The 139n4 English Art and Language Group 54 Ernst, Max 30 evaluation-bearing emotion 164 evaluation-modified emotion 164 evil and beauty, relationship between 34–52 external beauty 63 fairness 96–100 fascism 29, 31, 38; sexual 48 feminism/femininity 45–46; critique of beauty 44–50, 51n5; feminine beautification 46; “second wave” 45; social constructions of 46 Fenner, David 154 Ferree, George: “Descriptive Use of Aesthetic Experience, The” 6

198 Index fittingness 105 Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary 88 Fluxus 17 Flynt, Henry: Anthology of Chance Operations, An 54 for-its-own-sake attitude 150, 152, 157 Foster, Hal 16, 72, 73; Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, The 7, 18, 20n5, 127 Foucault, Michel 68n3 Fraser, Andrea 54 “Freedom Trash Can” 45 Freud, Sigmund: “On Transience” 69n7 Fry, Roger 29–30 futility 15, 40 Futurism 20n6 Gaut, B. 146 gender inequality 50 genocide 30 Gibson, Rick 68n4; Human Earrings 64 Goldie, Peter: Philosophy and Conceptual Art 55–56 Gomez-Lobo, Alfonso 175n1 Goodman, Nelson: Languages of Art 136 Goya: Los Caprichos 165 Greenberg, Clement 39, 40, 60; Art and Culture 54–55; Avantgarde and Kitsch 17 Greenstreet, Stuart: “Beauty Versus Evil” 38 Grisez, Germain 175n1 Grossman, Allen 122 Guardian, The 49 Guyer, Paul: Values of Beauty 119; Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics 82n4 Habermas, Jurgen 20n5 Hampshire, Stuart 97 Hanson, Louise 144, 145 harmony 105 Haslakoglu, Oguz: “Plato and Kant on the Problem of Beauty” 123 Heaney, Seamus 122 hedonophobes 22

Hegel, Georg 53; on kallistics 138n1 Heller, Scott: “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty” 79 Hesse, Eva 62 Hickey, Dave 16, 118; “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty” 8; Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, The 79 Hildebrand, Dietrich von: Aesthetics 83n5 Hirst, Damien 54 Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf 30–31 Horkheimer, Max: Dialectic of Enlightenment 40, 43, 44 Hume, David: “On the Standard of Taste” 136, 149n2; Treatise of Human Nature, A 21, 28, 33n10 Hyland, Drew A.: Plato and the Question of Beauty 82–83n4 impotence 41, 43, 44 impressionism 17 instrumental perception 86 internal beauty 63 James, Henry: Golden Bowl, The 88 Jameson, Fredric 130; “Gherman’s Anti-aesthetic” 127, 129; “Transformations of the Image in Post-modernity” 72, 127, 129 judgement 141 justice 96–100, 104, 125n3, 126; political 15; social 15, 54, 96, 97 justice-as-compassion 99 kalliphobia (‘beauty-fearing’) 5, 7, 9, 16, 20, 22, 43, 46, 71, 176–77 kallistics 5, 9, 10, 138n1, 177 kalokagathia 51n1 Kant, Immanuel 10, 110n2; accounts of beauty 123–25; on aesthetic emotion 162–63; on beauty as an aesthetic category 112–15; on beauty as a reflective judgement 115–17; on begetting 170; Critique

Index  199 of Judgment 3, 17, 24–25, 78, 111–13, 115–19, 124, 138n2, 139n5, 154, 166, 174; on “disinterested” pleasure 32, 150, 154, 159, 161; on judgement of beauty 138n2; judgements of beauty 142; “the agreeable” versus “the beautiful” 32–33n5 Karamazov, Dmitry 180 Kirwan, James: Beauty 82n4 Klimt: Kiss, The 145 Konigsberg, Amir 144 Korsmeyer, Carolyn: Beauty Unlimited 79; “Feminist Aesthetics” 44–45 Kosuth, Joseph 54; One and Three Chairs 58 Kristeva, Julia: Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia 66 La Dolce Vita 143 Landau, Sigalit: Barbed Hula 65 Leavis, F. R. 39 LeWitt, Sol 56 Liddell, Henry George 119 Lifson, Ben 66–67 Lorand, Ruth: Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art 82n4 Lord, Errol 145 MacIntyre, Alasdair 70 Macintyre, Alasdair: philosophy of beauty 2 McMahon, Jennifer A.: Aesthetics and Material Beauty 82n4; “Significance of Plato’s Notions of Beauty and Pleasure in the Philosophy of Kant, The” 113, 123 madness 40, 42, 44 Manet: Olympia 103 Manzoni, Piero 54 Mapplethorpe obscenity trial 68n5 Mapplethorpe, Robert 64 Marcuse, Herbert: “Affirmative Character of Culture, The” 28 Marinetti, Filippo: Manifesto of Futurism, The 20n4 Maritain, Jacques 83n5

Marx, Karl 65 Meltzer, Eve 73 Menninghaus, Winfried 163, 164 method of inquiry 4–6 Meyer, James 71, 73 Millett, Kate: Sexual Politics 51n10 mimesis 121–22 modernism 56, 72, 128, 129; avant-garde versus 16; postmodernism 19, 68n3, 88 Montgomery, Harper 71; Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic 12n5, 72 Moore, Ronald: Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics beyond the Arts 82n4 morality 86–89, 117 moral urgency 86 Mothersill, Mary 139n4; Beauty Restored 8, 79 Mulvey, Laura: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 50 Murdoch, Iris: Sovereignty of Good, The 157 Murphy, Mark C. 175n1 Nadal, Marcos 162 Nation, The 49 Nature 96 Nazism 31, 35 Nehamas, Alexander 9, 77, 81, 82, 84, 90–91, 136, 138, 161, 171, 172; on aesthetic emotion 166; arguments for beauty 100–4; on desire 169; “Essay, An” 3; on morality 86–87; “On Beauty and Judgment” 165; Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art 4, 8, 80, 85–87, 90, 94, 95, 100–2, 104, 109, 109n2, 111– 13, 118, 122, 126, 127, 137, 144, 148–49, 158, 167–69; “Reply” 133; “Return of the Beautiful, The” 98 neo-aestheticism 111–25 New Left Review 127 Newman, Barnett 53 New York Radical Women 45 Nuremberg rallies 29, 31, 35

200 Index Ogden, Charles: Foundations of Aesthetics 11n3 Ono, Yoko 55 oppression 47, 48, 50, 52n16, 98 Orbach, Susie 49 Osborne, Harold 162 Othello 151, 152 Owens, Craig 20n5 Owen, Wilfred 106 paedophilia 37 Palahniuk, Chuck: Fight Club 65 Parsons, Glen: Functional Beauty 82n4 passive perception 86 Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City 65 perfection 3 Perkins Spyke, Nancy 99, 100 personhood 117 Pettit, Philip 142–43 Philocaly 8–10, 177 philocaly 82n1 physical beauty 45, 46, 51n1 Picasso: Guernica 39 Pippin, Robert 116, 117 Plato 69n6, 82, 87, 111, 122; accounts of beauty 123–25; on beauth as form 119–21; on begetting 170–71; on desire 168–69; on good versus beauty 124; Hippias Major 11n2, 124, 164; Laws 11n2; mimesis 121–22; Phaedrus 11n2, 40, 41, 120, 124; philosophy of beauty 2; Republic 120, 121; Symposium 11n2, 42, 43, 69n6, 124, 168, 170–71; theory of Forms 125n3; on universals and particulars 122–23; wings metaphor 40–41 Playboy 45 pleasure 164–67; “disinterested” 32, 150, 154, 159, 161; “merely sensuous” 9, 15, 20–33, 35, 40, 41, 43, 51, 53, 54, 59, 64, 71, 85, 90, 94, 121, 130, 158, 174, 176–78; sensual 22, 24, 26, 41, 50, 61, 68, 90 Plotinus: Ennead 2–3, 11n2; Enneads 109n1, 109n2

poetic mood 133–34 Poggioli, Renato: Theory of the Avantgarde, The 17 political justice 15 politicisation of aesthetics 30 politicisation of beauty 62 politics of appearance 45–46 Pollitt, Katha 49 pornography 38, 93 Portrait of a Lady 143 postmodernism 19, 68n3, 88 Potter, Dennis: Singing Detective, The 165 Prettejohn, Elizabeth 179 profit-fixated motives 17 Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past 147, 165 Pseudo-Dionysius: Divine Names 3, 11n2 psychical distance 151–52, 155–56 purpose 115, 117–19 purposiveness 115, 117–19 Pythagoras 11n2; philosophy of beauty 2 radical decentering 156 Ramos, Santiago: “Plato and Kant on Beauty and Desire” 123 Rancière, Jacques: Aesthetics and Its Discontents 70 Rauschenberg, Robert 54, 56 Rawls, John 99, 100 reflective judgement, beauty as 115–17, 134 Revived Beauty see Beauty Revivalism/ Revived Beauty Richards, I. A.: Foundations of Aesthetics 11n3; Principles of Literary Criticism 135 Richter, Hans 27 Riefenstahl, Leni 30; Triumph of the Will 9, 35–40, 50, 71, 85 Rodrigues, Olinde 16 rootedness 99 Ross, Stephen David: Gift of Beauty, The 82n4 Ross, Toni 71, 73 Rothman, Roger 27 Russell, Bertrand: “Knowledge by Acquaintance” 141

Index  201 sadism 37 St. Aquinas: Confessions 11n2; Summa Theologica 2, 11n2 St. Augustine: Confessions 2, 11n2; De Musica 96 Santayana, George 21 Santoro, Liberato: Philosophies of Art and Beauty 11n1 Sartwell, Crispin: “Beauty” 4; Six Names of Beauty 82n4, 139n4 Sassoon, Siegfried 106 Sauchelli, Andrea 144, 146 Scarry, Elaine 9, 16, 77, 81, 82, 84, 93, 94, 104, 114, 136, 138, 161, 171, 172, 180; on Acquaintance Principle 146–47; on aesthetic emotion 166; arguments for beauty 96–100; On Beauty and Being Just 4, 8, 80, 81, 85, 91– 92, 95–97, 109, 111, 116, 126, 127, 137, 170; on begetting 170; on morality 86; Only a Promise of Happiness 81, 85; on pleasure 164 Schellekens, Elisabeth 61; Philosophy and Conceptual Art 55–56 Schjeldahl, Peter 180 Schnackenberg, Gjertrud 122 Schneemann, Carolee: Interior Scroll 65 Schussler, Wilhelm Heinrich: Critical History of Aesthetics 23 Scott, Robert 119 Scruton, Sir Roger 9, 77, 82, 84, 136, 137–38, 147–48, 172; arguments for beauty 104–9; Art and Imagination 161n1; Beauty 4, 8, 81, 85, 88, 93–95, 105, 106, 108–9, 111–15, 121, 122, 126, 127, 133, 137, 148, 157, 158, 164, 166–67; “Beauty and the Sacred” 107; on morality 87–88 “second wave” feminism 45 Sensual Beauty 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 22, 35, 54, 124 sensual pleasure 22, 24, 26, 41, 50, 61, 68, 90 Serrano, Andres 64–68; Jane Doe Killed by Police 65; Knifed

to Death, Gun Murder 65; Morgue, The (The Causes of Death) 54, 65, 66, 67; Piss Christ 64; Rat Poison Suicide 65 sexual difference, psychoanalytic construction of 46 Shakespeare, William: Sonnet 65 129 Shapiro, David: Uncontrollable Beauty 12n5 Shelley, James 59–61; “Problem of Non-Perceptual Art, The” 59–60 Shibles, Warren A.: Emotion in Aesthetics 162 Sholokhov, Mikhail: Quiet Flows the Don 92 Shusterman, Richard: “End of Aesthetic Experience, The” 173 Sibley, Frank 142; Aesthetic Concepts 136 Sircello, Guy: New Theory of Beauty 8, 79 Situationism 20n6 Skov, Martin 162 social justice 15, 54, 96, 97 Socrates 117 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 179, 180 Speer, Albert 30, 36 squareness 120 St. Augustine: on philocaly 82n1 Steiner, Wendy 16; Venus in Exile 68n5, 82n4 Stolnitz, Jerome 150–54, 156; Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism 152–53; “Beauty” 3; “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’” 153, 159 surrogate object 144 symmetry 96–98, 100 Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw 51n1; “Great Theory, The” 3; History of Six Ideas, A 3, 11n1 Times of London 49 Tōjūrō, Sakata 143 Tolstoy, Leo 9, 53; on beauty as “merely sensuous” experience 22–26; Metaphysics 24; What is Art 22–23, 71

202 Index

Van Damme, Wilfried: Beauty in Context 82n4 vanguardism 17

William of Auvergne 51n1 William of Auxerre 51n1 Wiltsher, Nicholas 145 wings metaphor 40–41 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Notebooks 124–25, 134; Philosophical Investigations 6; on poetic mood 133–34 Wolf, Naomi: Beauty Myth, The 50 Wollheim, Richard: Art and Its Objects 142 Women’s Liberation Movement, Britain 45 Wood, Paul 55 Woolf, Virginia 20n2

Wagner, Richard: Ring 165; Tannhäuser 143 Warhol, Andy 62; Brillo Boxes 58, 61, 63 Weil, Simone 99–100, 156–57; Gravity and Grace 100 Weiner, Lawrence 55 Weiser, Peg Brand: “Feminist Aesthetics” 44–45 Welsh, Irvine: Trainspotting 65

Zangwill, Nick: Metaphysics of Beauty, The 82n4 Zedd, Nick: Cinema of Transgression Manifesto 64 Zemach, Eddy M.: Real Beauty 82n4 Zhu Yu: Eating People 64; Foundations of all Epistemology, The 64 Zuckert, Rachel: Kant on Beauty and Biology 82n4

Tomlin, Adele: “Value of Aesthetic Experience, The” 173 Tormey, Alan 142 Traditional Beauty 4 transgression 64, 65, 68n3 triangularity 120 Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa: Beauty’s Appeal: Measure and Excess 83n4 unifying beliefs 78, 81, 82, 111, 125, 126