'BEAUTY': SOME STAGES IN THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA BY JEROME STOLNITZ \JOU

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We have to catch ourselves up in order to recognize that 'beauty' has receded or even disappeared from contemporary aesthetic theory. For, like other once influential ideas, it has simply faded away. Far more venerable than the concepts of 'fine art"- and 'aesthetic,' 2 'beauty' has been, traditionally, the dominant concept in aesthetic theory, art criticism, and ordinary aesthetic discourse. But when we catch ourselves up, we see how little the word 'beauty' occurs in works published in this century, relative to 'art' and 'aesthetic.' "What is beauty?," the question which has been at the center of aesthetic theory since the Hippias Major, is not the question put by many recent thinkers. They devote themselves to the analysis of 'fine art' and the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, inquiries in which 'beauty' is treated only casually and incidentally or else ignored altogether. As the generic value-term, 'beauty' has been replaced by some such locution as 'aesthetic value.' It is in the discussion of aesthetic value that 'beauty' gets most attention, but even here it is only one among other value-categories, and its treatment is fairly perfunctory. Only rarely is the approach of the contemporary aesthetician set forth so consciously and explicitly as it is by H. N. Lee, who says of 'beauty' that it "is best used to denote only a part of the general field of aesthetic value, and that part need not be carefully delimited, but can be left more or less vague." What is most striking about the use of 'beautiful' in current art criticism and discourse is not that the term is just one among a host of value-predicates. It is, rather, that 'beautiful' seems now often to be used pejoratively or invidiously. One can say on behalf of a work of art, "It may not be beautiful, but. . . ." Something more and, implicitly, something better than beauty is appealed to. Those modern artists who will not have it that the creation of beauty is their goal, have fostered the transvaluation of the term. When a work is only beautiful, it is inoffensive, or it is in an orthodox style or genre, or it is excessively trim or neat. Most important of all, it can be beautiful without being expressive. The latter term, more than any other probably, has supplanted 'beautiful' in our aesthetic vocabulary. It refers to those works which suggest more than they 'say,' and/or those which expose the soul of the artist, and/or those which are 'moving,' 'stirring,' 'gripping.' Beauty, if it has the characteristics cited above, must seem pallid by comparison and to demand beauty will almost certainly obstruct the purposes of expression and expressiveness. 1 Cf. below, note 8. 2 Cf. below, text after note 26. 8 H. N. Lee, Perception and Aesthetic Value (New York, 1938), 98.

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The decline of 'beauty' has taken place tacitly and, so to speak, unofficially in our own time. My purpose in this paper is to trace out the causes and the pattern of this decline. Thus far I have spoken only of the present century, roughly. But the great watershed in the history of 'beauty,' as of other aesthetic concepts, is the XVIIIth century. That century uniquelysuch is the argument of the paper set going the forces which displace 'beauty' from the position it had enjoyed in classical and Renaissance thought. What is now an unthinking gesture is the result, several times removed, of a concerted effort of reason in the XVIIIth century. The discussion will be confined to the British thinkers of the period, in whom aesthetic theory, as we know it, very largely originated' They can be readily treated together because, from the beginning of the century to its end, they share substantially the same presuppositions, methods, and purposes. And they were the prime movers in the demotion of 'beauty.' Their congenital resistance to the authority of alien traditions, their determination to make a fresh start and to think it out for themselves, their vigorous and sensitive, if often unsystematic thinking, together shattered the old intellectual frameworks and altered, for good and all, the concept which was at the heart of them. I Much of the speculation about the arts which was carried on prior to the XVIIIth century was devoted to the artistic genres. The 'rules' were formulated out of the conviction that the genres, like the genera of natural objects, "have their immutable and constant forms, their specific shape and function." 5 The compendious statement of their proper laws was the goal of innumerable Renaissance and neo-classical treatises patterned on Aristotle, Horace, and Vitruvius. But are these treatises works in 'aesthetics'? This is a large question, deserving of a fuller answer than can be given here; yet it must be raised if we are to understand the achievement of British thought. Bosanquet holds that there was "an intermission of aesthetic philosophy . . . from the time of Plotinus to the eighteenth century of our era." 6 The treatises seem to bear him out. What we now consider 'aesthetic philosophy' both employs and analyzes concepts
Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Koelln and Pettegrove (Boston, 1955), 312; Paul 0. Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics," this Journal, XII (1951), 496-497, XIII (1952), 27; W. J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), vii, 171. Also, cf. below, note 11 et seq. 5 Cassirer, op. cit., 290. 6 Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London, 1922), 166f.
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which refer to artistic and aesthetic phenomena T generally. The treatises are often little more than technical manuals. Moreover, they are usually devoted to just one of the arts or to some genre, e.g., the epic, within a particular art. And yet, they are not to be ignored altogether. A treatise approaches aesthetics, so far as it analyzes, though it be only in relation to the specific genre, aesthetic concepts which have a reference beyond the genre. The use of such a concept evidences the belief that there is a larger field of datacall it, waiving the historical solecism, 'the aesthetic'to which the genre is related and of which it is a part. The belief may be and doubtless was largely inarticulate. If it is there at all, however, Bosanquet's dictum must be qualified. Which aesthetic concept, then, unifies the various treatises? That of 'fine art,' hardly or not at all. Prior to the XVIIIth century, this concept had not yet arisen or it was only tentative and inchoate. 8 If the treatises are to be classified as 'aesthetics' at all, it can only be by reference to the concept of 'beauty.' 9 Again, there will be little or no analysis of 'beauty' in general, in a treatise devoted to the proportions of the human body or the subjects appropriate to the ode. Yet beauty is the ultimate concern of the writer, for he takes it to be the goal of the art-form he is discussing. The whole point of formulating the `rules' is that when they are satisfied and the genre thereby attains its perfection, the object is 'beautiful.' Thus Alberti, speaking only of architecture, calls for the "Number, Finishing and Collocation of the several members," but when these are present, he says, 'beauty' results." 'Beauty' is not, for the Renaissance and neo-classical theorist, limited to his particular art-form. It has a general and inclusive reference which 'fine art,' when it is used at all, lacks. 'Beautiful,' the generic term which designates the value of each of the arts, unites the studies of all of them. But even if Bosanquet's judgment is too severe, there can be no question that XVIIIth-century British thought is a major turningpoint. Addison gives the lead. In the first, at all systematic statement in British aesthetics,n the conception of aesthetic theory justifies
How much more convenient it would be to have a collective term, other than `aesthetic' itself, to designate these phenomena. 8 Cf. Kristeller, op. cit., 498, 510ff. 9 Cf. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), 262. 10 "On Architecture," in Elizabeth G. Holt, ed., Literary Sources of Art History (Princeton, 1947), 133-136. 11 Shaftesbury antedates the Spectator papers by a few years, but cf. Jerome Stolnitz, "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory," Philosophical Quarterly (1961).
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Addison's claim that it is "entirely new." 12 Following "the new way of ideas," which catalogues experience in terms of the faculties of awareness, the central concept in aesthetics is that of the faculty of aesthetic responsiveness. So "the pleasures of the imagination" make up the subject matter of the Spectator papers on aesthetics (nos. 411-421). Like his predecessors, of course, Addison did not use the word "aesthetic." But he began to move toward the conception of `the aesthetic' which was to become conspicuous in later thought. The imagination was set off from the faculties of sensation and understanding. Neither of the latter can appropriately define the subject that Addison wished to discuss. The pleasures of sense are, at once, too "gross" 13 and insufficiently "innocent." 14 The pleasures of understanding are "refined," 15 but they involve cognitive activity, a "bent of thought." 15 When, however, "we are struck, we know not how, with the symmetry of any thing," 11 there is not, nor could there be any reflective examination of the "causes and occasions of it." 13 The "pleasures of the imagination" are further specified by their disinterestedness. Addison did not work out this concept in any detail, but he distinguished the satisfaction of "a man of polite imagination" on viewing the "fields and meadows" from that of a man who delights in their possession." `Aesthetic experience' provides the conceptual generality and unity which was lacking in earlier thought. Addison does not confine himself to a single art or genre. He discusses literature, music, and painting, sculpture, and architecture, because they all have common. effects upon the imagination." Moreover, natural objects have comparable effects.21 Therefore nature is, in respect of its aesthetic worth, grouped together with the fine arts and studied along with them. The Renaissance and neo-classical treatises are constricted and unsystematic by contrast. But Addison extends the range of the aesthetic even farther. He speaks perceptively of the aesthetic quality to be found in history, the sciences, 22 and intellectual activity generally: 4C . . a truth in the understanding is as it were reflected by the imagination ; we are able to see something like colour and shape in a notion." 23 For Addison, indeed, "almost every thing about us" 24 can be aesthetically valuable. 12 Spectator no. 409, in The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. Greene (New York,
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1856), VI, 321. First edition, 1712. 14 Ibid., p. 325. Is Ibid., p. 324. 13 Spectator no. 411, op. cit., p. 324. 16/bid., p. 325. 17/bid., pp. 324-325. 18 Ibid., p. 325; cf., also, no. 412, pp. 329-330. "Spectator no. 416, pp. 347-349. 19 Ibid., p. 325. 21 Spectator no. 414. 22 Spectator no. 420. 24 Spectator no. 413, p. 334. 23 Spectator no. 421, p. 370.
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But if the concepts of 'art' and 'the aesthetic' take on new prominence in Addison, just the opposite is true of 'beauty.' Aesthetic experience has become the chief concern of the theorist and, as we shall see in detail in the following section, he devotes himself to the examination of its felt quality. He no longer, in the first instance at least, looks outward to the genres. Addison's argument that the 'rules' are not of the first importance in criticism,25 has its counterpart in his aesthetic theory. The search for 'rules,' i.e., the conditions under which an object in a given genre achieves beauty, becomes a secondary question. Even so considered, however, 'beauty' is no longer unique. For objects can be aesthetically valuable in other ways than just being beautiful. Addison finds that 'the pleasures of the imagination' can be aroused not only by what is beautiful, but also by things that are 'great,' i.e., sublime, and by things that are 'novel' or 'uncommon.' 26 Here, then, is the significance of Addison's 'entirely new' approach for the concept of 'beauty': insofar as 'aesthetic theory' occurs at all prior to the XVIIIth century, it is for the most part relatively illdefined. Far more than any other, 'beauty' is its distinguishing concept. Speculation centers upon 'the nature of beauty' and 'beautiful' is used to designate aesthetic value of whatever kind. Addison makes a conscious attempt to define the field of study. The distinguishing concept is "the aesthetic," i.e., "pleasures of the imagination when experience is non-sensual, non-cognitive and disinterested." This concept is logically prior to and inclusive of 'art' and 'beauty.' Therefore 'beauty' is no longer the central concept in aesthetics; its meaning is no longer the sole or even the chief problem for the theorist; and it is not the sole category of aesthetic value. II The British were buoyed by the Lockean conviction that, as Hutcheson put it, "we need little reasoning or argument, since certainty is only attainable by distinct attention to what we are conscious happens in our minds." 27 The aversion to abstract theorizing is shared by all our philosophers, but it is most virulent in Burke, who announces that he will proceed by "a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts." 28 The job of the aesthetician is that of 'the new way of ideas,' viz., to inventorize 'the pleasures of
no. 409, p. 321. no. 412, p. 327; cf., also, no. 415, p. 346. 27 [Francis Hutcheson], An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (London, 1728), 2. Italics omitted. 28 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. Boulton (London, 1958), 1.
Spectator 25 26 Spectator

Cf.

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the imagination' or 'the emotions of taste' and reduce them to psychological simples. Thus Alexander Gerard analyzes 'taste' into the following 'simple principles': novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, the ridiculous, virtue." He intends this to be an exhaustive enumeration of the 'perceptions' which are peculiar to taste and therefore of their corresponding objects. In more recent jargon, it is an enumeration of the kinds of aesthetic response and of the various classes of aesthetic objects. I want to call attention, first, to the very complexity of Gerard's scheme. The XVIIIth century, far more than any previous age, concentrated upon the nature of the aesthetic response. When aesthetic thought was directed principally to the art-form or genre, the effect upon the spectator was either ignored altogether or referred to by means of some omnium-gatherum term such as 'pleasure' or 'delight' s The new way of ideas' puts a premium on, is indeed devoted to the meticulous discrimination of different kinds of 'ideas' or 'perceptions' from each other. The lumping together of diverse aesthetic responses therefore gives way to a great proliferation of the 'species' of such response. So Gerard, a half-century after Addison, takes over the latter's triad and adds several more. He does so because of the deliverances of introspection. Since it is 'perceptions' which are in question, what is experienced as a difference in kind is a difference in kind. Therefore Gerard regards Addison's scheme as not adequate to "the sentiments of taste in all its forms." 81 Hence the second thing that I would emphasize is that, for Gerard, the 'principles of taste' are 'simple' 32 and therefore irreducible to each other. Like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, Gerard affirms this by saying that "the powers of taste are . . . to be reckoned senses." 33 And he describes a sense as "a power which supplies us with such simple perceptions as cannot be conveyed by any other channel." 34 Third, we can now see how 'beauty' stands in Gerard's theory. `Taste' is the foundational concept, as 'imagination' was for Addison. Logically, 'beauty' is one among a number of 'principles' which are subordinate to 'taste' and coordinate but independent among themselves. Psychologically, novelty, sublimity, and the rest are not derivative from or compounded out of it. It might be added that, of the various 'principles,' 'beauty' is not even the most interesting, for
Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (Edinburgh, 1759 1 , 17642 ). " Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (London, 1955), I, 21. $1 Op. cit., 74. 32 Phenomenologically though not, for Gerard, analytically; cf. 94, 151-153n. Only the former concerns us here. 84 Ibid., 150-151n. Italics omitted. 88 Op. cit., 151n.
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Gerard. For though he devotes much more attention to beauty and sublimity than to the others, he treats beauty and sublimity at equal length. At the beginning of the century, the traditional view that "Whatever, indeed, is sublime, is beautiful," 85 is still held. At the very same time, however, Addison sets off 'sublimity' from 'beauty' 36 and he, Gerard, and others, introduce various other categories into aesthetics alongside that of "beauty." Of all these concepts, "sublimity" is incomparably the most important. For the impact of 'sublimity' upon aesthetic thought is the single most potent force in dislodging 'beauty' from its formerly unchallenged primacy among the value-categories. To show this, we must turn to Edmund Burke who, of all the British, set forth the opposition between "beauty" and "sublimity" most vigorously and uncompromisingly. Addison described the experience of the sublime as one of "astonishment . . . stillness and amazement," 87 that of beauty as "cheerfulness and delight." " Moreover, he took beautiful objects to be symmetrical," whereas sublime objects are "too big" 40 for the mind to grasp. Yet he believed that the properties of beauty and sublimity can be united in the same object and that, when they are, our pleasure is increased 4 1 Lord Kames asserted that the emotions of beauty and sublimity are clearly different, as are most of the properties. Yet he argued that an object cannot be sublime unless it possesses some of the attributes of beauty, e.g., proportion." Gerard, as we have seen, considered beauty and sublimity irreducibly distinct. Still he took the experience of the sublime, like that of beauty, to be pleasurable." For Burke, however, beauty and sublimity are, conceptually, not only distinct but mutually exclusive; existentially, they are not only separate but very nearly irreconcilable. Like the century generally, Burke marks the distinction between them by examining felt experience. Whereas beauty arouses pleasure ("love")," "sublime" is defined by reference to "delight," 45 an affective state which is not pleasurable and yet not merely painful, but rather "blended with . . . uneasiness." 46 The sublime induces "that
85 Joseph Trapp, quoted in Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1935), 59. Italics in original. On the meaning and use of "sublime" prior to the XVIIIth century, cf. Monk, op. cit.,

chaps. III. 86 Cf. above, before reference to note 26. ST Spectator no. 412, p. 328. 88 Ibid., p. 329. 39 Spectator no. 411, pp. 324-325. 40 Spectator no. 412, pp. 327-328. 41 Ibid., pp. 328, 331. 42 [Henry Home], Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), 7th ed. (Edinp burgh, 1788), I, 211-213. 48 Op. cit., 11. " Op. cit., 91. 46 Ibid., 46. 45 Ibid., 36.

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state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror" 47 ; the beautiful does not paralyze, but rather 'relaxes' and 'melts.' 48 The upshot is that it is 'hard' or 'impossible' for the experience of beauty to be had at the same time as that of sublimity, without detriment to the distinctive character of each." When Burke turned to the objects of these experiences, he ranged their attributes in mutual opposition: the sublime is vast," the beautiful, small, the sublime is rugged, the beautiful, delicate, and so on.51 Burke grants that these properties may, 'in the infinite variety of natural combinations,' 52 sometimes co-exist in the same thing. Even then, he concludes, they remain 'opposite and contradictory.' 58 This theory admits into the realm of the aesthetic and legitimizes elements not only different from those traditionally associated with. beauty but antithetical to it; the experience thus described, furthermore, is taken to be of greater value than that of beauty. On the side of the percipient, such terms as 'pleasure' which had. been used casually by earlier theorists to describe the aesthetic response," were doubtless excessively vague. Still they betokened the belief that the aesthetic experience is free of 'negative' feelings. For Burke, the feeling of horror, though only in 'some degree,' occurs in veritably aesthetic experience,55 in the perception of poetry, music, and the other arts, and of nature as well." On the side of the object, the property of beauty had traditionally been identified with some kind of formal ordering, 'harmony," symmetry,' etc." For Burke, sublime objects are 'vast' and 'infinite,' 58 i.e., they defy and transcend. any formal ordering and bounds. Closely related to the classical insistence on form is the demand for clarity and lucidity in the object. For Burke, another of the attributes of sublime objects is their 'obscurity.' 59 "[A] great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions," 6 whereas we are moved most greatly by what is 'dark, uncertain, confused.' 61 It is this last aspect of the experience of sublimity, i.e., its intense emotion, which seems to make it of greater value than the experience of beauty, for Burke. He nowhere says this explicitly. Throughout, however, he is concerned with intense emotional arousal and he in sists that the sublime "is productive of the strongest emotion which
47 Ibid., 57. Burke is here describing "astonishment," the "highest" effect of the sublime. 48/bid., 149-151. 49 Ibid., 113-114. 50 Cf., however, 57. 51 Ibid., 124. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 125; cf., also, 5, 159. 54 Cf. above, note 30. 55 Ibid., 73. 56 Ibid., 59ff. Cf. below, note 77ff. 57 58 Ibid., 72-74. 69 Ibid., 58-60. 60 Ibid., 60. 61 Ibid., 59.

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the mind is capable of feeling." 62 The experience of beauty comes to seem slight by contrast and beauty itself, fragile and attenuated."' " In common with all of the XVIIIth-century British thinkers, but to a greater extent than any of them, Burke pushes back the boundaries of the aesthetic. The final step logically would be to make room for ugliness within the realm of aesthetic value. As the contradictory of 'beauty,' it had necessarily been excluded. Such necessity no longer obtains, however, when 'beauty' is no longer identified with 'aesthetic value' and when the 'negative' feelings of pain and aversion, usually associated with the perception of ugliness, are admitted into aesthetic experience. As a XXth-century philosopher has put it, once aesthetics accepts "the sublime, the terrible, the satirical . . . why not the ugly as well?" 65 Burke's discussion of ugliness is very brief and unsatisfactory. Yet it is important to note that he takes it to be "consistent" 66 with the sublime, which is a kind of aesthetic value, and he holds that ugliness can become sublime when "united with such qualities as excite a strong terror." 67 The concept of sublimity has been less prominent in recent thought than it was for Burke and most XVIIIth-century thinkers. If there is any one category which has supplanted 'beauty' in our own time, it is probably, I suggested earlier, 68 'the expressive.' It is remarkable, however, how many of the characteristics of Burke's `sublimity' have attached themselves to 'expressiveness,' viz., the absence of formal preciseness, emotional power, the stimulation even of painful emotions, 'obscurity.' Sublimity is, almost in its very nature, a relatively rare phenomenon. 'Sublime' cannot, therefore, serve as the garden variety predicate which designates the most frequent kind of aesthetic value. 'Expressive,' by contrast, can function in this way because it has a much wider denotation. It can be and is applied to works of art which are highly diverse in their scale, style, and content. But if 'expressive' now parallels 'beautiful' in importance, it is largely because the concept of 'sublimity' first pointed up the limitations and deficiencies of 'mere beauty.'

III
The three sections of this paper treat the concept of 'beauty' at levels of decreasing generality. I tried to show first that, in the XVIIIth century, the field of aesthetics was no longer organized around the concept of 'beauty' and second, that 'beauty' was no
62 Ibid., 39. 68 Ibid., "Introduction," lxxv. " Lord Kames later says that the sublime "raises the most delightful of all emotions." Op. cit., I, 248. Kames is not, of course, using 'delightful' in Burke's sense. 65 W. T. Stace, The Meaning of Beauty (London, 1929), 82. 68 Cf. above, second paragraph. 66 Ibid., 119. 67 Ibid., 119.

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longer the sole nor even the chief value-category. Yet even if it lost pride of place, 'beauty' might still have been used to denote one important kind of aesthetic experience and aesthetic value. Indeed, it was so used in the XVIIIth century. Even so considered, however, the concept suffers a profound transformation, which, I shall argue, helps to explain its present status in aesthetic theory. We have seen that when the British took the turn inward, 'beauty' came to designate one of the species of 'taste' or 'imagination.' For Addison and his successors, it marked off a kind of experience distinguishable introspectively from other kinds of aesthetic experience. This can be called the phenomenal sense of beauty. The terms 'beauty' and 'beautiful' had, however, been used traditionally to denote objects or the property of objects. I shall call this the objective sense." The transposition of the terms was marked implicitly by the introduction of such locutions as 'the emotion of beauty' or 'the per ception of beauty,' when it was not proclaimed overtly, as by Hutcheson: "Let it be observed, that in the following papers, the word beauty is taken for the idea raised in us." 7 Like all the British, however, Hutcheson also spoke of 'beauty' in things and not simply as a figure of speech. If there is any inconsistency in this, it is unimportant, so long as Hutcheson remained faithful to his original intent by construing 'beautiful' as a relational predicate. He does so when he speaks of beauty in the objective sense as the 'real quality in . . . objects' which 'excites' the idea of beauty.71 He will not consider it a property whose existence and nature are independent of perception: "[Were] there no mind with a sense of beauty to contemplate objects, I see not how they could be called beautiful." 72 Hence, that beauty is, in the first instance, an idea, does not preclude trying to determine which property or properties make things beautiful. This is an empirical question. Hutcheson treats it as such, for he speaks of 'examining' 73 or 'discovering' 74 the salient property. He finds that it is 'uniformity amidst variety.' 75 Since 'beautiful' is, for Hutcheson, relational whereas 'uniformity amidst variety' on any showing is not, the latter cannot express the meaning of the former.
Except where otherwise indicated, all future references to 'beauty' are to this sense of the term. 79 [Francis Hutcheson], An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), 4th ed. (London, 1738), 7. Italics in original. Cf., similarly, Gerard, op. cit., 43; David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Philosophical Works, ed. Green and Grose (London, 1875), III, 268-269. 71 Ibid., 7. 72 Ibid., 14-15. Italics omitted. Cf., also, 70. 79 Ibid., 16. 74 Ibid., 7. 75 Ibid., 17. Hutcheson's 'absolute beauty' only is in question here.
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It remains an empirical questiori whether objects which possess uniformity in variety do, indeed, `excite' the idea of beauty and whether only they do so. There must therefore be at least the possibility of negative evidence. Yet it seems quite clear that Hutcheson will not accept this possibility. He grants that objects which should `naturally' arouse the `pleasant idea of beauty' sometimes fail to do so and that we sometimes find "objects pleasant and delightful, which are not naturally apt to give any such pleasures." 76 But he does not take this to be negative evidence. Hutcheson nowhere admits that objects of the latter kind induce the distinctive idea of beauty. They are `unnaturally' agreeable, but they are not beautiful. Nor do objects of the former class forfeit their claim to be called `beautiful' when they fail to please. "[Men] have an aversion to objects of beauty, and a liking to others void of it, but under different conceptions than those of beauty or deformity." 77 That this is a necessary, not a factual truth, for Hutcheson, becomes clear later when he so defines `sense of beauty' that it can respond only to "objects in which there is uniformity amidst variety." 78 That beautiful objects possess uniformity in variety is not, as had at first appeared, an empirical generalization, for it cannot be otherwise. What we see here in Hutcheson can be seen, in one form or another, in all of the British aestheticians. Having taken the turn inward, they must hold that, as Kames puts it, "Beauty, in its very conception, refers to a percipient." 79 At the same time, they identify the properties in virtue of which things are beautiful to the percipient, as the properties which earlier, non-relativist theories had singled out to define `beauty' in the objective sense, viz., uniformity in variety, harmony, proportion, and utility. None of these has any inherent reference to felt response. The British had then, somehow, to establish a particularly strong connection between the occurrence of these properties and the appropriate experience in the percipient. Else, on the one hand, the relativism endemic to `the new way of ideas' or, on the other, the received theories of objective beauty, must be given up. It is this tension within the conception of `beauty' or, more precisely, among the conceptions of `beauty' which stimulated much of the dialectic of British aesthetic theory, chiefly when the besetting problem of `taste' had to be faced up to. Hutcheson guaranteed the relation between `uniformity amidst variety' and the experience of beauty by making any other impossible.
76
"

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 80; cf., also, 4, 81-83. 79 Op. cit., I, 208.

78

Ibid., 80. Italics omitted.

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Gerard held that uniformity, variety, and proportion 'render' things beautiful 8 for they 'are naturally productive' 81 of the sentiment of beauty. Yet here as elsewhere in XVIIIth-century thought, nature is found to be less stable and assured than could be wished. Gerard would not therefore abandon his theory of objective beauty: "Men. are, with few exceptions, affected by the qualities we have investigated: but these qualities themselves are, without any exception, the constituents of excellence." 82 Or one could simply deny that there is any problem, in fact. Thus Burke: "I never remember that any thing beautiful . . . was ever shewn, though it were to an hundred people, that they did not all immediately agree that it was beautiful." 83 These, and other, comparable contrivances evidence the dialectical instability of 'beauty.' The concept was therefore especially vulnerable in an age whose temper was critical, not to say irreverent. The formulas of 'unity,' 'proportion,' and the rest, which had passed muster in previous ages, were now called into question. A man would put forward his theory of objective beauty on one page and, on the next, engage in a vigorous polemic against those of his contemporaries. These polemics left their mark. As the century grew older, there was increasingly greater discouragement over the possibility of finding any formula that would work, issuing finally in skepticism that any such formula exists. When, in this latter stage, the concept of objective beauty seems to have become intractable, attention was directed to its logical character, to explain why it had to be rejected. I shall treat the critique of the various theories of beauty under the headings, the empirical argument and the phenomenological argument, and the critique of the concept itself under the heading, the logical argument. The first type of argument is 'empirical' just in the sense that it appeals to the data of aesthetic experience. For all XVIIIth-century British aesthetics, felt response is the indispensable and decisive evidence of the existence of beauty." We have seen that Hutcheson, Gerard, and Burke tried to keep out the nasty facts in one way or another. But such ad hoc devices could not long remain effective in an age committed to empiricism. Moreover, these philosophers, like their fellows, thought to ground their respective theories of beauty on experiential fact. It is therefore meeting them on their own terms to adduce evidence that objects possessing the properties which they singled out are not solely, or universally, or both, the objects of the experience of beauty.
80 0-. p

cit., 129. 82 Ibid., 74. Italics in original. 84 Cf. Karnes, op. cit., I, 378.

81 Ibid., 88 Op.

74. cit., 15.

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Any number of examples could be quoted, but since the argument from negative instances, here as elsewhere, is fairly rudimentary, the following may suffice: Against "proportion": "Turning our eyes to the vegetable creation, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are almost of every sort of shape, and of every sort of disposition." .. . How many birds are there that vary infinitely from each of these standards [of proportion], and from every other which you can fix, with proportions different, and often directly opposite to each other! and yet many of these birds are extremely beautiful." 86 Against "uniformity in variety": "[This] definition, however applicable to one or other species, is far from being just with respect to beauty in general: variety contributes no share to the beauty of a moral action, nor of a mathematical theorem. . . . [Uniformity] amid variety among ugly objects, affords no pleasure." 87 Whereupon Kames adds a logical point: "[To] define beauty as arising from beautiful objects blended together in a due proportion of uniformity and variety, would be too gross to pass current." 88 Against "utility" or "fitness": "[A] toad is as fit for the purposes of its nature as a turtle-dove; and we may remark of artificial ornaments, that they are mostly of little or no utility." 89 This kind of argument is doubtless, as I have noted, rather facile and not very sophisticated. But its cumulative effect in XVIIIthcentury thought cannot be ignored. The theories of 'proportion' or `harmony,' `uniformity in variety' and 'utility,' and especially the first,9 are as venerable as can be, in the history of aesthetics. They could and did retain their prominence when there was no obligation in theory to put them to the test of aesthetic experience. The British turn the empirical argument against each of them and, as we shall see, it undermines belief in all of them. The phenomenological argument is used less frequently, but it is considerably more interesting. For it is based on an idea which originates in the XVIIIth century and has been a chief legacy of that century to later aesthetic theory: 'the aesthetic attitude.' That there is a mode of attention and perception peculiar to the aesthetic experience, so much a commonplace in our own time, was first explicitly recognized by Lord Shaftesbury 91 and, as we have seen, by Addison, 92
86 Ibid., 95. Burke, op. cit., 94. Kames, op. cit., I, 324-325. 86 Ibid., 325. 89 J. Donaldson, The Elements of Beauty (Edinburgh, 1780), 6. 90 "Harmony, we know, has been the accepted synonym for beauty or for the artist's goal through all the ages of a philosophy of art." Katherine E. Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Aesthetics, rev. ed. (Bloomington, Indiana, 1953), 186. 92 Cf. above, p. 188. 91 Cf. the paper referred to above, note 11. 65 87

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in the opening years of the century. Both emphasized two aspects of the aesthetic attitude: 1) The aesthetic percipient is not motivated by personal advantage; he attends to the object 'for its own sake.' 98 2) Aesthetic response is 'immediate,' in the sense that it takes place without discursive reflection." Hutcheson later united 1) and 2) by describing aesthetic "perceptions" as "pleasant and . . . painful, immediately, and that without any knowledge of the cause of this pleasure or pain, or how the objects excite it, or are the occasions of it; or without feeling to what farther advantage or detriment the use of such objects might tend." 95 The phenomenological argument is the argument that certain properties which have been thought to make things beautiful, cannot do so, because the perception of these properties is incompatible with the aesthetic attitude. Of the prevailing theories of beauty, that of 'usefulness' is most obviously vulnerable to this argument, on the grounds of 1). There is a subtle form of this theory, suggested by Hume," of which this is not true. On this view, utility is apprehended, not in relation to one's personal advantage, but as the objective property of a thing which is skilfully adapted to certain ends that someone, anyone, does or might pursue. The percipient can then be disinterested. On a more straightforward version of the theory, however, he cannot be disinterested. If the utility of the object is considered with an eye to one's "farther advantage or detriment," then, so far from being beautiful, it is not even aesthetic. Hutcheson therefore distinguished very sharply the "joy" aroused by an object "upon our apprehending ourselves possessed of it" from the experience of beauty." Indeed, if the latter is even "accompanied" by the former, then, Hutcheson admonished, we must be very great indeed, before we can have any pleasure by this sense [i.e., the sense of beauty]." 98 Burke vigorously repudiated the theory of the "inner senses," which he thought obscurantist and uneconomical." Yet he took over completely the belief in aesthetic immediacy which Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had expressed by means of this theory: ". . . the appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of heat or cold." 1" But
"

98 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics (1711), ed. Robertson (London, 1900), II, 55-56; cf., also, I, 296; II, 127-128. 94 Ibid., I, 251: II, 63, 137. 95 Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into . . . Beauty and Virtue, 4. 96 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1896), 364, 576ff. Cf., also, Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (London, 1755), I, 16. 97 Essay on . . . the Passions and Affections, 28. Italics omitted. 100 Ibid., 92. 98 Ibid., 102. Italics omitted. Cf., also, 171-172. 99 Op. cit., 27.

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this is not how proportion is apprehended. For that, the mediation of discursive, rational processes is required. As Berkeley had put it, "the comparing parts one with another, the considering them as belonging to one whole [is] the work of reason. Proportions, therefore, are not, strictly speaking, perceived by the sense of sight, but only by reason." 101 Burke's argument, then, can be set out in this way: "[Beauty] demands no assistance from our reasoning"; but proportion is "a creature of the understanding, rather than a primary cause acting on the senses and imagination"; therefore, "I have great reason to doubt, whether beauty be at all an idea belonging to proportion.', 102 By the middle of the century, the empirical and phenomenological arguments made themselves felt. This is shown in various ways. Burke repudiated each and all of the traditional theories of beauty. 108 Lord Karnes did not go so far, for he continued to avail himself of "uniformity and variety," 1" "proportion," 105 and "utility." 106 But in Karnes, their logical status is altered and diminished: "It may surprise some readers to find variety treated as only contributing to make a train of perceptions pleasant, when it is commonly held to be a necessary ingredient in beauty of whatever kind." 107 Indeed, Kames became skeptical that there are any properties common to all beautiful objects.108 In later authors, the attack upon the formulas takes Et new turn. The empirical argument proceeded by the fairly simpleminded method of showing that some beautiful objects do not possess the property in question and that others which do, fail to arouse beauty, in the phenomenal sense. This argument can function at all only if such a phrase as 'uniformity in variety' is thought to have a determinate meaning and denotation. The more subtle and far more damning criticism is to show that this is not the case. Thus Donaldson says of 'uniformity and variety' that they are "terms comprehending the nature of all things, rather than containing a description alone of what is beautiful." 109 By the closing decades of the century, discouragement over the possibility of finding a successful formula of objective beauty, has turned into despair. Karnes' skepticism of any such formula was expressed almost incidentally in the middle of his chapter on humor. Twenty years later, such skepticism moved into the forefront of aesthetic thought and took a firm hold. Donaldson (1780) says at the 101 Alciphron, in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Fraser (Oxford, 1871), II,
. . .

119. Italics in original. 104 0p cit., ch. IX. -108 Op. cit., 112. 107 Ibid., 324. 109 Donaldson, op. cit., 5.

102 Op. 105 Ibid.,

199ff., 305ff.

cit., 92. 16 Ibid., 198. 108 Ibid., 273.

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very beginning of his work: "The common error of most of our modern writers on beauty has been, that they have supposed all things, in order to appear completely beautiful, subject to one fixed principle." 11 Alison (1790), similarly, fails to find "any single principle" acceptable. These "principles" are, he says, "true to a certain extent, though I believe also, that they have arisen from a partial view of the subject." 111 The fin-de-siecle theorists might have concluded that no previous theory had made out the properties which are common and peculiar to beautiful things, but that a new and more enlightened effort might do so. Yet instead of seeking other formulas, they questioned the very enterprise of seeking formulas, which is, to Alison, "altogether impossible." 112 In this, their instincts were surely right. The formulas had to be given up, ultimately, not because of this or that version of the empirical or the phenomenological argument, but because of the dialectical tension at the very heart of British aesthetics. The formulas were inherited from ways of thinking whose conception of beauty was exclusive and aristocratic. 'Harmony' or 'unity' set off a fairly limited class of objects, did so, indeed, by defining 'beauty.' For the new way of thinking, 'beauty,' in the first instance, designates some phenomenal state: 'cheerfulness' (Addison), 113 'love' (Burke ))114 or 'sweetness and gaiety' (Kames). 115 Beauty, in the objective sense, must accordingly mean "that which arouses the 'idea' or 'perception' of beauty." 116 There is therefore no a priori limitation upon the things that might become members of the class of 'beautiful objects.' If a thing does, in fact, arouse the appropriate experience, it gains entry. As we have already seen, to Addison, who initiated the new way of thinking, "almost every thing about us [has] the power of raising an agreeable idea in the imagination." 117 Gerard deplored the fact that "beauty . . . is applied to almost every thing that pleases us," 118 but the whole impulse of British aesthetics was to encourage and sanction such usage. The paramount difficulty, however, for 'harmony' or any other formula, when the range of 'beauty' becomes catholic and inclusive, is not that there are now a great many things to which `beautiful' is properly applied. The difficulty, indeed a fatal one, is
110 Ibid., 5. Cf., also, Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), 11th ed. (London, 1809), I, 92. 111 Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), 4th 112 Ibid., I, 316. ed. (Edinburgh, 1815), I, 316. 118 Cf. above, note 38. 114 Cf. above, note 44. 115 Op. cit., I, 197. 116 cf above, note 71 et seq. 117 Cf. above, note 24. 118 Op. cit., 43. Italics in original.
.

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that there can be no limits in theory to the area within which the properties of beautiful things are to be sought. The contrast between Hutcheson, at the beginning of the century, and Alison, at its end, is instructive here. As we have seen, to Hutcheson objects which lack uniformity in variety sometimes please and others which possess the property, sometimes do not, though in neither case "under the conceptions of beauty and deformity." 119 Hutcheson wished to explain these facts and the explanation must, of course, be found within the percipient. It must be something idiosyncratic, which therefore disrupts 'natural' perception. For Hutcheson it is, chiefly, association: "Associations of ideas make objects pleasant and delightful, which are not naturally apt to give any such pleasures." 120 So association is, as he says, 'accidental,' 121 an ,obtrusion, in any event foreign to the experience of beauty itself.' Yet it is Hutcheson himself, even more than his predecessors Shaftesbury and Addison, who proclaims and gives impetus to the Copernican Revolution in aesthetics. The aesthetic percipient is installed at the center of things and his response determines which objects are beautiful. Later thinkers, e.g., Hume, Gerard, and Kames, setting themselves to study the nature and conditions of aesthetic response, were all to find the mechanisms of association at work in the experience of beauty. So far from being casual or accidental, association occurs widely or pervasively. It must therefore be accredited as legitimately aesthetic. Finally, in Alison, association becomes the uniquely crucial element in aesthetic experience. It is, indeed, definitive of "the emotion of beauty." 123 Alison accepts and insists upon the conclusion which Hutcheson would not accept, viz., that even when the association is wholly personal or eccentric, when "certain qualities or appearances . . . are connected with our own private affections or remembrances," 124 the object of perception is beautiful. It is beautiful just because it has triggered the association.. At this point, there is nothing to keep 'beautiful' from being infinitely accommodating in its denotation. At this point, too, the old question, "Which properties in things make them beautiful?," becomes not so much unanswerable as irrelevant. It is against this background that the logical argument must be understood. The argument was put forth at the turn of the century. Not surprisingly, the irrelevance of the traditional question was as yet only dimly recognized. A theory such as Alison's demanded a
above, note 77. 120 Op. cit., 73, 121 Ibid., 4, 73. 122 Cf. Martin Kallich, "The Associationist Criticism of Francis Hutcheson and David Hume," Studies in Philology, XLIII (1946), 645-651. 123 Op. cit., I, 3ff. 124 Ibid., II, 422; cf., also, I, 24,84-85,287-288; II, 192-193. Cf., however, I, 130.
119 Cf.

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radically different understanding of 'beauty and it was too soon for that. But though there was nothing to replace them, the collapse of the formulas was so patent in the thought of the century that it must be explained. What is there about 'beauty' in the objective sense which makes it intractable? Appropriate to a philosophical twilight, attention turned to language and linguistic usage. The formulas had to fail because the term 'beauty' is highly polyguous or intolerably vague. The logical argument is the argument that it is systematically impossible to determine which properties are common and peculiar to beautiful things or whether there are any such properties. Lord Karnes had already thought it worth remarking that men apply 'beautiful' not only to sensory objects but also in speaking of "a beautiful theorem, a beautiful constitution of government." 125 This was a passing observation in Kames but in Dugald Stewart it became much more. Stewart surveys all of the XVIIIth century retrospectively.'" The working capital of his own theory`beauty,' csublimity,"taste,' etc.is inherited from the century. He is, however, sufficiently detached from its concerns to point to their futility and to diagnose the causes: "It has long been a favourite problem with philosophers, to ascertain the common quality or qualities, which entitles a thing to the denomination of beautiful; but the success of their speculations has been so inconsiderable that little can be inferred from them but the impossibility of the problem to which they have been directed." 127 These theories "have evidently originated in a prejudice, which has descended to modern times from the scholastic ages;that when a word admits of a variety of significations, these significations must all be species of the same genus; and must consequently include some essential idea common to every individual to which the generic term can be applied." 128 Stewart undertakes to explain the "great variety of acceptations" of "the word Beauty" 129 and he comes up with a scheme much like Wittgenstein's "family resemblances." Given objects A, B, C, D, E, Stewart points out that A may have a quality in common with B, B with C, C with D, and D with E, "while, at the same time, no quality can be found which belongs in common to any three objects in the series." 1 " The
Cit., II, 522. Italics omitted. Cf., also, I, 197, 222; also, cf. above, note 87. Stewart falls chronologically outside the XVIIIth century but, as I indicate above, his chief problems and concepts are all of a piece with its thought. Prof. Hippie describes him as "a writer who aimed to subsume and reinterpret the speculation of the century." Walter John Hipple, Jr., The Beautiful, The Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, Ill., 1957), 284. 127 Stewart, Philosophical Essays (Edinburgh, 1810), 211. Italics in original. 128 Ibid., 214. 129 Ibid., 210 130 Ibid., 217. Italics in original.
128

125 Op.

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meaning of 'beauty,' Stewart explains, has broadened and then altered imperceptibly as it has been applied successively to the objects in such a series. Thus A and E are now both called 'beautiful,' though they have no property in common. It follows from this striking and forceful argument that the traditional quest for essence is necessarily futile. No 'single principle' 131 exists. Still, even on Stewart's showing, 'beauty' retains the 'signification' of some quality, even if only the quality common to A and B. The term may, however, lose its purchase, not on some one referential meaning but on referential meaning altogether. Then it points to nothing in the object but only registers the fact that the object has induced a certain experience. Richard Payne Knight, a contemporary of Stewart, echoes Karnes in noting that 'beautiful' is applied to "a material substance, a moral excellence, or an intellectual theorem," "a problem, a syllogism, or a period." 132 But he also makes this acute observation: "The word Beauty is a general term of approbation, of the most vague and extensive meaning." 133 This dissolving of preciseness and accompanying promiscuity of application is not merely a linguistic phenomenon. The last of the XVIIIth-century British theorists called attention to it because they knew that the same thing had happened at the level of conceptual analysis throughout the century. None of their predecessors had taken. 'beauty,' in the objective sense, to be merely "a general term of approbation." Yet it is transformed in this way that the term seems to emerge out of the ferment of their thought. 'Harmony' and the other concepts with which they had thought to assign referential significance to 'beauty,' are caught in the crossfire of the empirical and phenomenological arguments. More important, when the British converted 'beautiful' into a relational predicate, they invited precisely the consequence which Payne Knight decries, viz., that the term is "applied indiscriminately to almost every thing that is pleasing." 134 They sought to restrict beauty to that particular kind of aesthetic experience which it arouses, but it was not easy to set limits to the experience. Indeed, in the absence of a scrupulous definition of "the aesthetic attitude," it was difficult to keep "beauty" from being applied even to what pleases non-aesthetically. The way is open to the view of recent thinkers, that "beauty" is nothing but, in Payne Knight's phrase, "a general term of approbation." The concept of "beauty" commended itself to traditional thought because of the assumption that it had or could be given a determinate
131 Cf. above, note 111. 132 Knight, An Analytical 133 Ibid.

Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 18052), 9. 134 Ibid., 9. Cf. above, note 118.

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meaning and therefore a viable application to objects or to the properties of objects. After the XVIIIth century, this assumption is weakened or vitiated for many thinkers. The effect can be seen in recent aestheticians. Either they give up on the concept altogether, or, like Professor Lee,'" they treat it, but with a great deal of diffidence and reserve, resigning themselves to its insuperable vagueness. Or they take a radically different approach from that of earlier thought, viz., to put it summarily, to concentrate on "use" rather than "meaning." University of Rochester.
135

Cf. above, note 3.