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Beauty and Sublimity
Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in neuroscientific and

related research treating aesthetic response. This book integrates this
research with insights from philosophical aesthetics to propose new
answers to long-standing questions about beauty and sublimity. Hogan
begins by distinguishing what we respond to as beautiful from what we
count socially as beautiful. He goes on to examine the former in terms of
information processing (specifically, prototype approximation and non-
habitual pattern recognition) and emotional involvement (especially of
the endogenous reward and attachment systems). In the course of the
book, Hogan examines such issues as how universal principles of aes-
thetic response may be reconciled with individual idiosyncrasy, how it is
possible to argue rationally over aesthetic response, and what role per-
sonal beauty and sublimity might play in the definition of art. To treat
these issues, the book considers works by Woolf, Wharton, Shakespeare,
Arthur Miller, Beethoven, Matisse, and Kiran Rao, among others.
p a t r i c k c o l m h o g a n is a professor in the Department of English,

the Program in Cognitive Science, and the Program in Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He
is the author of seventeen scholarly books, including What Literature
Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge, 2011), and How Authors’ Minds
Make Stories (Cambridge, 2013).
Beauty and Sublimity
A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts
Patrick Colm Hogan

University of Connecticut
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107115118

C Patrick Colm Hogan 2016
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2016
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-107-11511-8 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For Lalita
Contents
Acknowledgments page viii
Introduction: why beauty? 1

1 Literary aesthetics: beauty, the brain, and Mrs. Dalloway 19
2 The idiosyncrasy of beauty: aesthetic universals and the
diversity of taste 46
3 Unspoken beauty: problems and possibilities of absence 76
4 Aesthetic response revisited: quandaries about beauty
and sublimity 107
5 My Othello problem: prestige status, evaluation, and
aesthetic response 162
6 What is aesthetic argument? 178
7 Art and beauty 215
Afterword: a brief recapitulation, with a coda on
anti-aesthetic art 245
Works cited 257

Index 277
vii
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of part of Chapter 1 appeared as “Literary Aesthetics:

Beauty, the Brain, and Mrs. Dalloway,” in Literature, Neurology, and Neu-
roscience, ed. Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and François Boller (Boston,
MA: Elsevier, 2014), 319–337. An earlier version of some additional
sections of Chapter 1 appeared as “Attachment System Involvement
in Esthetic Response” in Archives of Neuroscience 1.3 (2014). An
earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Idiosyncrasy of Beauty:
Aesthetic Universals and the Diversity of Taste,” in Investigations into the
Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art: What Are Artworks, and
How Do We Experience Them?, ed. Peer Bundgaard and Frederik Stjern-
felt (Dordrecht, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2015, C Peer Bundgaard
and Frederik Stjernfelt and Patrick Colm Hogan, 2015). (The latter
“book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com”; the chapter
of that volume “is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author(s) and source are credited.”) I am grateful to the publishers
for permission to include the revised versions here. Earlier versions of
Chapter 1 and parts of Chapter 3 were presented at the University of
Mainz, the University of Vienna, Duke University, and the University
of Connecticut in 2013. An earlier version of part of Chapter 6 was pre-
sented at the Shakespeare 450 conference (Paris 2014). I am grateful to
the organizers of these events for giving me the opportunity to share my
thoughts on these topics and to the participants for their stimulating com-
ments and questions. I should particularly mention Sibylle Baumbach,
Martha Cutter, Deborah Jenson, Christa Knellwolf, Vanessa Levine-
Smith, Anja Mueller-Wood, Letitia Naigles, Alejandra Rodriguez,
Margarete Rubik, and William Snyder. Many of the ideas of the book
were presented in my seminar on beauty and sublimity at the University
of Connecticut. I would like to thank my students for their comments
and help in clarifying these ideas: Carla Calandra, Nicole Haiber, Rachel
Kinstler, and Paige Kolakowski, with special thanks to Katie Hires, Chris
viii
Acknowledgments ix
McDermott, Georgina Paiella, Evan Reardon, and David Smith. My

good friend Frederick Aldama graciously translated Lorca for Chapter 3.
Keith Oatley facilitated the progress of the manuscript with his usual,
unflagging kindness. Hetty Marx of Cambridge University Press was
everything one could ask for in an editor – thoughtful, communicative,
always helpful. Carrie Parkinson, also of Cambridge University Press,
was an invaluable resource on permissions questions.
Introduction
Why beauty?
The topic of this book is beauty and sublimity – or, rather, the subjective
experience of beauty and sublimity. The opening chapter draws a fun-
damental distinction between what we judge to be “beautiful in itself” –
what I call “public beauty” – and what we experience as beautiful, more
or less what Palmer and colleagues refer to as “feelings that would elicit
verbal expressions such as, ‘Oh wow! That’s great! I love it!’” (189). This
is roughly the difference between works of art that we acknowledge are
aesthetic masterpieces and works of art the affect us aesthetically. In his
memoir, Youth, J. M. Coetzee explains that he stood for fifteen minutes
“before a Jackson Pollock, giving it a chance to penetrate him.” But it
did no good: the painting “means nothing to him.” In contrast, spying
Robert Motherwell’s Homage to the Spanish Republic 24 in the next room,
“He is transfixed” (92). Given the resonances of Motherwell’s title, and
the “Menacing” quality of the work, it is probably better to say that Coet-
zee experienced it as sublime rather than beautiful, but the same point
holds. Both the Pollock and the Motherwell might be publically sublime,
but only the Motherwell was personally sublime for Coetzee.1
The focus of this book is on describing and explaining experiential
or “personal” beauty. In that description and explanation, it draws on
two primary sources: first, empirical research in cognitive and affective
1 In keeping with this distinction, I should, throughout the following pages, write either
“public beauty” and “public sublimity” or “personal beauty” and “personal sublimity”
(or “aesthetic response”). However, in order to avoid tedium, I will often use the simpler
“beauty” when the context makes the precise topic clear.
In connection with this, I should also stress something that should be obvious –
that aesthetic response is different from aesthetic theory as a discipline. It is standard
to begin discussions of beauty with a history of the discipline of aesthetics, most often
narrowly conceived in relation to the use of the term, “aesthetics.” As, for example,
Costelloe notes, “To speak of the ‘birth’ of the discipline and its desiderata, however, is
to say little or nothing about the pleasure (or pain) people have long taken in the states
they experience” (“The Sublime” 2). The usual practice would be akin to trying to
understand cancer not by looking at cancer, but by looking at the history of speculations
coming from people who used the word “cancer.”
1
2 Beauty and sublimity
science; second, works of art.2 In this respect, it continues the project

of my earlier book, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion, maintain-
ing that successful works of literature and art function much like highly
elaborated thought experiments that can in principle contribute to our
understanding of psychological and social processes. (The esteemed neu-
roscientist, Semir Zeki, recently made much the same point about “Neu-
robiology and the Humanities” in his article of that title.) For example,
successful literary works often have a wealth of details integrated into
highly effective depictions of complex, socially embedded emotions and
interactions. Such details and complexities are usually missing from nec-
essarily simplified empirical research. In this respect, literary works are
a particularly appropriate resource for the study of emotion, including
aesthetic feeling. Of course, literary works do not have the important
experimental controls that characterize research in cognitive and affec-
tive science or social psychology. Thus we would not wish to rely sim-
ply on literary or related representations of, say, emotion. Rather, we
should examine the ways in which works of art converge with the find-
ings of empirical research – perhaps offering new interpretations of those
findings, or extending the range of questions and hypotheses we might
consider.
Aesthetics and Politics

Before we get to any of this, however, we need to consider a prior issue –
is there something politically wrong about aesthetics? The study of beauty
has a long history in the humanities and it has recently been of consider-
able concern in neuroscience and related disciplines. However, in at least
some Humanistic disciplines, it has fallen on bad times. For example, in
literary study, it is rare today to find writers concerned with the aesthetic
value of a literary work. They are far more likely to be interested in its
political merit. Indeed, there seems to be some tendency to view the two
forms of value as, if not mutually incompatible, at least in some degree
2 Some readers have been uncertain about how to understand my characterization of this
project as “cognitive.” There are at least three senses in which “cognitive” is used in
psychology and cognitive science. One usage is opposed to social. My use of “cognitive”
is not at all intended to exclude social psychology – quite the contrary. A second usage
is opposed to “affective” and means, roughly, information processing. I sometimes use the
term in that sense, as should be clear from context. There is, finally, a third, general
sense, where “cognitive” refers to a mental architecture that is distinguished from those
of such alternatives as psychoanalysis and behaviorism, or even folk psychology. In this
sense, “cognitive” encompasses “affective,” rather than being differentiated from it. For
example, cognitive architecture includes emotional memory. I often use “cognitive” in
this broad sense, including in the title of the book. This too should be clear from context.
Introduction 3
of tension with one another. When I discuss beauty in public talks, I

am sometimes faced with this as a worry. I have been fortunate in not
yet confronting outright hostility to discussing aesthetics, but rather the
more subdued concern that there is something politically problematic
with paying attention to beauty.
The possible problem is compounded by the fact that my analysis does
not lead to a critique of beauty – indeed, quite the contrary. The following
chapters are concerned primarily with describing and explaining aesthetic
response, a relatively neutral undertaking. Even so, it will no doubt be
clear to readers by the end of this book that I like beauty quite a bit and feel
that aesthetic enjoyment is a valuable, even crucial part of life. In keeping
with this, I agree with Wendy Steiner that “the pleasures of art, however
scandalous they have come to be seen, are valuable and worth protecting”
(Scandal 80; Steiner contends that there is a certain “hysteria behind the
current condemnation of aesthetic pleasure” [81]). Indeed, I would go
so far as to say that a great deal of what makes a human life worthwhile –
what gives rise to eudaimonia, the experience of “flourishing” (as John
Cooper translates the term) – is the presence of beauty. One of the most
wretched elements of Oceania in Orwell’s dystopia, 1984, is its terrible
lack of beauty. This is not, I think, accidental or some mere idiosyncrasy
of Orwell’s. Of course, the lack of beauty is not the main problem with
the society of Big Brother. But the misery of life there is inseparable from
its ugliness.
This does not mean that having decent shelter and adequate food, or
fundamental civil liberties, is unimportant. These are crucial and neces-
sary. Food is more important than art. Even from an aesthetic point of
view, there is nothing beautiful about people being famished, ragged, and
homeless. However, adequate provisions are only the necessary condi-
tions for existence. The beauties of nature, daily existence (e.g., ordinary
architecture), art, and science are part of what make life more intensely
valuable. I should note that I include science in this list because the
understanding produced by science is not only functional in the satis-
faction of needs or the facilitation of satisfying desires. It is also highly
beautiful. As the Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann has remarked, the
experience of beauty is fundamental to physics. Another Nobel laureate,
S. Chandrasekhar, goes so far as to say that “in the arts as in the sciences,
the quest is after the same elusive quality: beauty” (52).3 The beauties
3 Gell-Mann defines beauty by reference to mathematical simplicity. In terms of the anal-

ysis presented in Chapter 1, this is a form of pattern recognition. The same point holds
for Chandrasekhar, who cites Werner Heisenberg’s definition of beauty as “the proper
conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole” (Chandrasekhar 52; Chan-
drasekhar subsequently cites Francis Bacon to bring out the importance of “surprise”
of nature, quotidian design, art, and science are inseparable from our
cognitive and emotional makeup, the way our minds operate to process
information and the ways we feel about experience and action. Again,
that relation is just what this book sets out to examine.
On the other hand, it is clear that there are some political problems
surrounding beauty. For example, Frederic Spotts has argued convinc-
ingly that Hitler’s success was due at least in part to his manipulation of
aesthetic response. Indeed, Spotts goes so far as to maintain that Hitler
had “two supreme goals.” The first was “racial genocide.” The second
was “the establishment of a state in which the arts were supreme” (30).
Spotts’s book provides at least a caution for writers in literary study who
would like to see art as the salvation of a divided society, bringing empathy
and pro-social action into an otherwise egocentric and cruel world.
In the end, however, Spotts’s argument does not suggest anything
about aesthetics per se (nor would Spotts claim that it does). It rather
indicates two things. First, it points to the prestige value of cultural
achievements. The pursuit of in-group (here, German nationalist) dom-
ination may involve physical force. But it cannot continually be a matter
of force. It must establish itself in times of peace as well as war. Cultural
superiority – prominently including the “high culture” of the arts – is
crucial for that ongoing affirmation of in-group superiority.
But Hitler’s aestheticism is not purely a matter of gathering national or
personal “trophies” (as Spotts rightly characterizes Hitler’s collection of
paintings [219]). The second thing suggested by Spotts’s analysis is that
beauty and sublimity are emotionally powerful in themselves. Moreover,
his work hints that the manipulation of aesthetic feelings may facilitate
the manipulation of other emotions, such as group pride. Indeed, this
is in keeping with most moral discussions of art. In the standard view,
a work’s ethical teachings are made both acceptable and effective by the
pleasure it affords. As Philip Sidney put it, poetry serves “to teach and
delight” and the delight operates “to move men to take that goodness in
as well [71], thus the non-habitual quality of the pattern, which will also be important
in Chapter 1). It is, however, necessary to qualify some of the more enthusiastic com-
ments from scientists. As May points out, “an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory” (20).
The key point is that the isolation of unexpected patterns produces aesthetic pleasure
in science as well as the arts. It does not follow from this that a particular pattern is
true simply because it is very aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, by this analysis, questions
such as “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” (Wilczek 43) are not the right sorts
of questions. It is not that there is some objective property that constitutes beauty and
that may or may not turn up in the world. Rather, our isolation of unexpected patterns
gives us aesthetic pleasure. Thus the proper form of the question would be “Does the
world embody unexpected patterns?” – though the answer to this question is perhaps too
obvious to be interesting.
Introduction 5
hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger” (138).
The problem with Hitler, of course, was that the teaching was perverse;
it was not goodness, but the contrary. The implication is simply that, like
any other feelings, aesthetic sentiments may be oriented to good, bad, or
indifferent ends.
Other political problems concern human beauty. For example, Deb-
orah Rhode has presented compelling evidence that beautiful people
have unfair advantages in our society – for example, in terms of earn-
ings. “On the whole,” Rhode writes, “less attractive individuals are less
likely to be hired and promoted, and they earn lower salaries despite the
absence of any differences in cognitive ability” (27). Rhode is certainly
correct that this is a serious problem. However, this is not a problem
with beauty per se, not to mention the study of beauty. It is a prob-
lem with the use of irrelevant criteria in evaluation. Clearly, the “beauty
bias” identified by Rhode does not show that beauty is not an impor-
tant object of research. It does not even show that it is not a real value
(nor does Rhode claim otherwise [see, for example, 2]). Indeed, people
who may or may not be beautiful themselves make decisions that favor
others who are beautiful precisely because beauty is pleasing, precisely
because beauty is a value for us. The key point is that our values are not
strictly partitioned and confined to relevant targets of evaluation. Thus
we prefer beautiful people even when their relevant skills are inferior.
This is a general problem with human bias, not a problem with beauty as
such.
There is the further difficulty, directly relevant to the present study, that
a great deal of what Rhode and others address under the label of “beauty”
is not aesthetic response. It is sometimes a matter of conformity –
wearing the sort of clothing one is supposed to wear, for example. It
is often glamour – wearing clothing that is expensive and high prestige,
or simply having an extensive wardrobe. One of Rhode’s examples con-
cerns a taboo on wearing the same outfit to events that are a full year
apart (xii). Surely, this is not a matter of beauty, but of glamour. When
glamour and conformity are combined, we have fashion. As Jacobsen
notes, fashion can lead to such extremes as the association of “(self-)
mutilations” with “an ideal of beauty” (36). Indeed, Rhode stresses that
“dress, grooming, and figure are crucial signals . . . of wealth” (8). There
is no reason to believe that signals of wealth as such promote aesthetic
pleasure. The fact that people commonly use aesthetic terminology for
these signals and related prestige phenomena does not mean they have
much – or anything – to do with actual aesthetic response.
Similar objections to beauty come from feminist writers, such as Sheila
Jeffreys, who see “masculine aesthetics” (1) as highly distortive and
ultimately cruel to women.4 Jeffreys’s analyses are important and conse-

quential. Like some earlier writers (e.g., Susan Faludi), as well as later
writers (including Rhode [see 35–42]), she shows that the beauty indus-
try is harmful to women’s bodies and minds. However, her arguments
too do not undermine either the study of aesthetic response or the accep-
tance of beauty as a value. (I should note that, as far as I am aware,
Jeffreys has never claimed the contrary.)
There are three points to make about Jeffreys’s analyses, points that
should clarify and extend the preceding observations regarding Rhode.
First, to a great extent, the problems isolated by Jeffreys concern not
beauty but sexual desire. The two are, of course, related. Specifically,
there are emotion systems that enhance one another and others that
inhibit one another. In the opening chapter I argue that aesthetic response
is related to attachment feelings. The attachment system is neurochemi-
cally related to sexual feelings (see, for example, Fisher 103 on oxytocin
and vasopressin). Moreover, sexual desire seems to be inhibited by dis-
gust, while beauty tends to involve properties that inhibit disgust system
activation. In consequence, we would expect a man’s or woman’s beauty
to enhance an observer’s sexual response to him or her.5 This is perhaps
the main reason why we tend to think of beauty as sexually arousing –
and why we (perhaps less fully) think of what is sexually arousing as
beautiful. But, despite this tendency, the two are not the same.6 To a
great extent, what Jeffreys identifies as male aesthetics is actually some-
thing more like male fetishism. It is unsurprising that, in sexual relations,
men would often try to force their sexual preferences on their partners.
4 Indeed, the point is more general than the reference to “masculine aesthetics” may
suggest. For example, Yasmin Nair maintains that her cohort of “radical queers and
trans people . . . are heavily invested in their own hierarchies of beauty” (40; see also
Rhode 32).
5 This would be one way of explaining why “a man’s physical symmetry can predict the
likelihood of his female lover having an orgasm” (Chatterjee Aesthetic 18). The removal
of arousal-inhibiting asymmetries may enhance the likelihood of orgasm. Indeed, this
is consistent with work cited by Chatterjee suggesting that “rather than approaching
attractiveness, what we are really doing is avoiding features we find unattractive” (44).
6 Unfortunately, the common tendency to confuse beauty and sexual attractiveness has
consequences for research. For example, research indicates that women’s “preferences”
regarding what they “find attractive in a man . . . vary during their menstrual cycle”
(Chatterjee Aesthetic 15). The point is potentially relevant to aesthetic response, particu-
larly as it bears on changes in attachment sensitivity. However, its most obvious bearing
is on sexual desire.
It is perhaps worth noting that sexual desire is not the only propensity that is confused
with aesthetic response. Much research on “preference” is vague, or even apparently
misdirected. For example, some research on natural beauty involves isolating places that
people “would like to live in or visit” (Chatterjee Aesthetic 49). But aesthetic feeling is
not the same as wanting to live or visit somewhere.
Introduction 7
That is, of course, wrong. But it tells us little about beauty. The proper
way to respond to it is through opposing deleterious sexual practices
and supporting equality in sexual relations as elsewhere – very important
objectives, but irrelevant to the study of beauty.
The second point to make about Jeffreys’s analysis is that many of
the harmful practices she rightly criticizes seem to bear less on aesthetic
response and more on prestige standards of public beauty. It is difficult to
say whether people (men or women) actually find extremely thin, blonde,
button-nosed, teenaged women more beautiful (or, for that matter, more
sexually attractive) than plump, dark-haired, Roman-nosed women in
their mid- to late-thirties. What does seem clear is that a “trophy wife” –
thus a wife satisfying prestige standards – is excessively slender, extremely
young, and so on.7 The idea of a trophy wife is nicely illustrated by a
comment from one of the characters in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime:
“Mark did not want [his wife] to sleep with other men. At the same time
he wanted other men to see what kind of woman he had married, and
to envy him for it” (27). In short, at least some of the “beauty” crite-
ria deplored by Jeffreys are criteria for giving a woman high appearance
prestige. They are not necessarily criteria that guide people’s aesthetic
response to her. Of course, it may be that many people happen to feel
greater aesthetic pleasure in women who are excessively slender, and so
on. Nonetheless, it seems clear that there is at least much more diversity
in aesthetic taste (i.e., what people experience as beautiful) than there is
in public prestige standards for beauty. In other words, if virtually every-
one agrees that a trophy wife is exceedingly thin, far fewer people are
likely to find exceeding thinness greatly beautiful. Indeed, if the anal-
ysis of the following chapters is correct, our aesthetic responses are in
part a matter of averaging across cases. Thus we would expect to find
that almost everyone’s aesthetic response would not be strongest for the
model-like thinness of the trophy wife. Rather, everyone’s observation of
ordinary women would make his or her aesthetic response at least some-
what more like the average woman, thus less extreme in slenderness.
The same point probably applies to many racial preferences, such as skin
7 Chatterjee notes that cultures differ in preference for slenderness versus plumpness.
He explains that this is related to whether food is plenteous. If it is, then slender is
preferred; if it is not, then plump is preferred. He gives an evolutionary explanation for
the phenomenon (see Aesthetic 20). There may be an element of that. But prestige is
fairly clearly a function of scarcity. Thus the data are at least as compatible with the
view that changes in scarcity produce changes in prestige. Indeed, it is difficult to see
how individual, aesthetic preferences could track the sorts of social trends noted by
Chatterjee. Thus, at least prima facie, it seems more likely that changes in slender/plump
preferences are a matter of shifting prestige standards.
blanching and hair straightening.8 These are commonly seen as a matter

of aesthetic response, but they are probably at least in part a matter of
prestige standards – in some cases, bound up with concrete employment
or other benefits.
Perhaps the most surprising research finding on beauty and politics is
that people tend to support social hierarchies more when they consider
themselves to be attractive (see MacBride for a brief summary of the
findings).9 Belmi and Neale show that thinking of oneself as attractive
fosters a belief that one is part of a higher social class or elite, which in turn
fosters support for social hierarchies. It seems likely that this too is linked
less with aesthetic feeling than with prestige standards and the partial
derivation of prestige standards from class hierarchies. As Belmi and
Neale write, “prescriptive standards of beauty often reflect features that
signal wealth and upper social class membership,” and “most societies
derive the standards of beauty from the features of the upper social class”
(134).10 This again suggests that the political problems with beauty are
at least in most cases not a matter of aesthetic feeling, but of prestige
standards.
On the other hand – and this brings us to the third point about Jeffreys –
it probably is the case that there are some effects of the beauty indus-
try that do bear on aesthetic response to human beauty. These include
some of the deleterious practices discussed by Jeffreys. Specifically, if the
analysis in Chapter 1 is correct, our response to human beauty should
largely be a function of averaging across experiences. As just noted, this
implies that observers’ aesthetic responses to women will favor women
that are heaver than fashion models. However, the prominence of exces-
sively thin women in mass media will also mean that observers’ responses
will favor women who are perhaps much thinner than the actual average.
The result of this is that the majority of women will appear aesthetically
flawed in being “overweight,” not because they are medically overweight,
but because they are heavier than the distorted average produced in one’s
mind by the over-representation of pencil-thin models and actresses. This
is likely to contribute to the distortion of women’s self-perception as well
as their perception by others (both men and other women), thereby fur-
thering body dysmorphia with its resulting pathologies. A parallel point
holds for men and athletic musculature. (On body dysmorphia and mass
media, see chapter 3 of Giles.)
Though body weight is widely discussed in the context of beauty
standards, other issues involve the same general principle. As we will see
8 I am grateful to Bhakti Shringarpure for reminding me of the relevance of these practices.

9 I am grateful to Marilyn Wann for drawing my attention to this work.
10 See Bourdieu’s Distinction on class and aesthetic judgments outside personal beauty.
Introduction 9
in Chapter 1, there are differences in male and female facial luminance

patterns such that there is a larger difference between the luminance of
women’s eyes and cheeks, for example, than between men’s eyes and
cheeks (i.e., the difference between circum-ocular skin and the skin of
one’s cheeks is greater in women than in men). The same point holds
for luminance differences between lips and facial skin. (There is some
reason to believe that the difference is natural [see Russell 1104–1105].
However, the consequences for differential response to male and female
faces follow even if the difference is created by the use of cosmetics.)
One result of this is that we judge women’s faces more beautiful to
the extent that they enhance these contrasts beyond the actual average.
Makeup and lipstick do just this. This is already problematic, given
the effects of makeup and lipstick (see chapter 6 of Jeffreys). However,
it has the further harmful consequence that the makeup distorts our
sense of the average such that women without makeup may come
to appear aesthetically flawed, due to “reduced” facial luminance
contrasts.
Aesthetic response also bears on racial issues. Again, if averaging is a
key factor in the production of aesthetic feeling, then the representations
of beauty in mass media may have a disproportionate effect on aesthetic
feeling. If an African American sees mostly blonde European women in
mass media, then his or her aesthetic preference will be for considerably
lighter skin and considerably straighter hair than if he or she saw only
Africans. In a racist society, then, it is likely that aesthetic preferences will
be distorted. It is important to recognize that aesthetic preferences are
still almost certain to be much less biased than the prestige standards. For
example, the prestige standard may not be influenced by African skin and
hair, whereas an individual’s aesthetic preference will almost certainly be
affected by his or her experience of Africans. Indeed, it is important
to note that the effects on aesthetic preference go in both directions. A
white person living among a large black population – in South Africa or
on a plantation in the pre–Civil War southern United States – is almost
certain to have his or her aesthetic preference strongly affected by African
features, such as skin color. Nonetheless, at least in a society dominated
by mass media, racial hierarchies are likely to have biasing effects on
actual aesthetic preferences, not just on prestige standards, and thus on
personal as well as public beauty.
These are, of course, serious issues. However, they too are not
problems with beauty as such. Class, race, and other biases in aes-
thetic response are, rather, problems with the representation – or
misrepresentation – of women and men in mass media. Moreover, it is
only through analyzing the operation of aesthetic response that we can
come to understand the way dysmorphic and related effects develop. In
short, far from indicating that beauty is not a fit topic for study, they
indicate that it is important to study beauty in part due to its political
consequences.
A further feminist objection to the study of beauty involves the iden-
tification of beauty with femininity. For example, Wendy Steiner notes
that there is a “traditional model” in which the “artwork . . . is gendered
‘female’” (Venus xxi). In connection with this, Steiner sees art as often
involving misogyny. But there are two crucial points here. First, the iden-
tification of beauty with femininity means that the rejection of beauty is
linked with misogyny (xix), so rejecting beauty is hardly the solution to
this problem. Of course, if we continue to identify beauty with femininity
and place beauty on a pedestal, then we are still engaging in a patriar-
chal practice. The second, and more important point, then, is that the
identification of beauty with femininity is itself a function of patriarchy.
Beauty is involved with a wide range of targets – male as well as female,
nonhuman as well as human, abstract as well as concrete. This is why
Steiner is right to say it is an important “task” for us “to imagine beauty”
in a way that is consistent with “empathy and equality” (xxv).
Indeed, in all these cases, the fundamental problem is that women are
not being treated as ends in themselves, but as mere means to sexual plea-
sure, social prestige, or even aesthetic enjoyment. Contrary to common
views, there is nothing wrong with treating someone as a means (e.g.,
in seeking a friend’s advice), as long as one consistently modulates that
impulse by treating the person simultaneously as an end in himself or
herself. The latter requires, for example, restricting one’s self-interested
actions to those that respect the autonomy and well-being of the other
person. In this way, even when beauty is genuinely involved, the fun-
damental issue is the ethical qualification of one’s actions, rather than
beauty per se.
In short, apparent political problems with beauty do not for the most
part concern aesthetic response as such. They bear, rather, on a series
of practices and conditions that surround or, in some cases, substitute
for such response. Even when there are political difficulties with aesthetic
response per se, that should motivate a response to the political conditions
affecting aesthetic response, not a rejection of any value to beauty or the
understanding of beauty. Indeed, such difficulties give us further reason
to study and comprehend beauty.
Beauty and Art

Before continuing, however, we should briefly consider an objection to
the study of beauty that derives not from politics, but from a surprising
Introduction 11
corner – aesthetics. As Wales notes, “aesthetic describes the percep-

tion and appreciation of what is ‘beautiful,’ and is most used in the
criticism of works of art” (9). The problem is that “aesthetics” may
refer to the study of beauty and sublimity, including but not confined
to the study of beautiful or sublime works of art. (As Vartanian points
out, “Aesthetic experiences are common phenomena” [261], not con-
fined to the experience of art.) Alternatively, it may refer to the study
of art, including but not confined to works that are either sublime or
beautiful. The difference is particularly stark in relation to modern and
postmodern art. In fact, I find modern and postmodern art sometimes
exquisitely beautiful. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is, to my mind, a won-
drously beautiful composition; Elliott Carter’s string quartets are deeply
aesthetically pleasing. This response is not, I think, wholly idiosyncratic.
For example, in visual art, Jean-Paul Sartre goes so far as to claim that
“in abstract art the fundamental link between creativity and beauty” is
“revealed in its pristine purity” (Essays 61), having been obscured by
traditional, representational painting. He goes on to Picasso’s Guernica –
a representational work, paradigmatic of Modernism – praising “its calm
plastic Beauty” (63). Indeed, in Sartre’s view, “The fundamental pur-
pose of experimentation is to give to Beauty a finer grain, a firmer and
richer consistency” (64). Nonetheless, it is clear that some modern and
contemporary works of art – such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (an
inverted urinal)11 – have nothing to do with beauty or sublimity. More-
over, even beautiful and sublime works may have various other purposes
and effects. In consequence, writers such as Silvia criticize aestheticians
for confining themselves to beauty and sublimity because “[t]he emo-
tional aims of literature are many” and “people experience a wide range
of emotions in response to the arts” (263; for an overview of some topics
in emotion and art, as treated by writers from Plato to the present, see
Neill).
Theorists such as Silvia are certainly correct that a great deal is lost if
we fail to recognize that there is more to art than beauty and sublimity.
But this does not in any way diminish the value of studying beauty or the
relation between beauty and art. Indeed, there is a converse danger. Silvia
is right that there are many emotions that bear on works of art. I myself
have discussed many of those other emotions in What Literature Teaches
Us About Emotion. But that does not mean those emotional responses
collectively form a coherent object of investigation. When examining,
say, jealousy in literature, I confined myself to jealousy; I did not try to
combine it with the various other emotions of literature. The same sort
11 See http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25853
of restriction should hold for aesthetic response (i.e., the experience of

personal beauty or sublimity).
For example, I have nothing but admiration for Gabrielle Starr’s work
to become professionally proficient in neuroimaging and I fully appre-
ciate her attempt to engage in such research. However, her book on
aesthetics places a great deal of emphasis on a study in which she par-
ticipated where test subjects were given the instruction to evaluate works
based on virtually any sort of emotional impact, “how much you find the
painting beautiful, compelling, or powerful . . . rang[ing] from ‘beautiful’
to ‘strange’ or even ‘ugly’” and encompassing “works you find powerful,
pleasing, or profound” (45). This seems simply to create uncontrolled
variables. It is far from clear that the same affective and cognitive pro-
cess governs finding something beautiful, powerful, profound, strange,
ugly, or compelling. Indeed, these seem fairly clearly to be different pro-
cesses – hence the different terms.12 (Who would claim that if they find
something strange they must therefore find it beautiful, or if they find
something profound they must find it ugly and pleasing?) Thus it is not
at all clear what the brain scans reveal in this research. Starr notes that
“being moved by a work of art means different things to different people”
(57). But that further indicates we are dealing with different psycholog-
ical phenomena, phenomena suggested by this list of diverse and vague
or ambiguous terms.
In short, to isolate aesthetic response for study is not to say that other
forms of emotional response to art are unimportant. It is merely to say
that they are different and that aesthetic response is important as well.
To set aside the study of personal beauty and sublimity due to the many
emotions in art would be like setting aside the study of companionate
love because there are many emotions involved in marriage, including not
only companionate love (which is presumably absent in some marriages)
but all other feelings that spouses have for one another, which is to say,
all other human feelings.
Chapter Outline
As already noted, the opening chapter begins by distinguishing pub-
lic from personal beauty or aesthetic response. It goes on to present a
componential account of beauty and sublimity such that the greater the
12 Of course, there are cases where apparently diverse aesthetic concerns involve beauty
under different terms. For example, Zangwill notes that “being beautiful is part of what
it is to be elegant” (328, emphasis in the original). This does not seem to be the case
with the research cited by Starr.
Introduction 13
number and intensity of components, the stronger the aesthetic

experience.13 There are two information-processing components: pro-
totype approximation and non-habitual pattern recognition. In order to
avoid misunderstanding, I should stress right at the outset that the pat-
terning of a work may be (and often is) “formal.” However, we can expe-
rience aesthetic delight in a work when we recognize a (non-habitual)
thematically defined pattern, a pattern in story structure or character
development, a pattern in narration, or other features of the work. Thus
the pattern recognition component is not simply “formalist” (though,
again, it includes formalist concerns). There are several motivational
or emotion system components, two of which are particularly impor-
tant: reward system activation (roughly, “felt need”) and attachment (or
bonding) system activation. This analysis is derived in part from empiri-
cal cognitive and emotional research on aesthetic response. But it is also
derived in part from a reading of Virginia Woolf’s breathtakingly beautiful
novel, Mrs. Dalloway.
This first chapter presents universal principles of beauty, principles
that derive from the operation of the human mind and that should
13 Here and throughout, I am using “aesthetic experience” merely to refer to an experi-

ence of aesthetic pleasure, a subjective feeling that some target is (personally) beautiful
or sublime. I am not using the term in the specialized philosophical sense where it
refers to “a distinctively aesthetic state of mind” (Iseminger 99) that is “surrounded by
an impenetrable, psychological wall . . . that experientially nullifies all relations that the
work has to things outside the experience” (Dickie Introduction, 156). In other words,
in referring to “aesthetic experience,” I do not have in mind anything “distinctively aes-
thetic” in the sense of a feeling that is removed from non-aesthetic experience. Indeed,
each component of my account (prototype approximation, pattern recognition, reward
system activation, attachment system arousal, and so on) occurs routinely outside any
special aesthetic context. Of course, their configuration is in some sense “distinctive”
of the experience of beauty – otherwise we would not speak of aesthetic pleasure at all;
there would be no reason to connect delight in the beauty of a sonata, that a landscape,
and that of a poem. But the same point holds for anything else – from being angry to
watching a baseball game. They are in part continuous with other activities and in part
unique. In this way, one might maintain that the philosophical debate over aesthetic
experience is misguided in the way a debate over a “distinctively baseball state of mind”
would be misguided.
In connection with this, I might note that I do believe that there is such a thing as
an aesthetic attitude. However, it is a simpler and more straightforward matter than
it is usually taken to be. We commonly approach targets with particular purposes in
mind. Those purposes help select what features of the target we attend to. When asking
someone for directions, I focus on certain aspects of his or her speech; when trying to
ascertain whether or not the person is upset about something, I focus on other aspects.
In the aesthetic attitude, my attention is in some ways less selective – and thus open
to patterning across a wider range of properties. At the same time, it is likely to be
oriented by a particular set of cognitive structures that I have found relevant to aesthetic
enjoyment in the past (e.g., meter in poetry). It should be clear that this is not a matter
of being “distanced, detached, or disinterested,” as the aesthetic attitude is commonly
characterized (Iseminger 105).
apply cross-culturally and trans-historically. However, by their nature,

the components predict that there will be a great degree of idiosyn-
crasy in aesthetic pleasure. For example, our prototypes will differ from
one another, formed as they are by different experiences with different
emotional investments. In consequence, prototype approximation will
differ and we will find different targets beautiful or beautiful in different
degrees. Chapter 2 explores the range of idiosyncrasies that are likely
to develop in aesthetic response. To illustrate the point, I consider my
own reaction to a song interlude in a recent mainstream Indian film, an
interlude that I found particularly aesthetically pleasing but that I do not
necessarily expect other viewers to appreciate, certainly not in the same
manner or degree.
The nature of cognitive and affective processing also predicts that, to
a great extent, our aesthetic response to a target is a function of what we
fill in about the target, how we “concretize” (as Ingarden would put it)
or fill “gaps” (in Iser’s term). This aesthetic filling in – “implicit beauty,”
as I call it – is the topic of Chapter 3. Again, Chapter 2 moves from uni-
versality to diversity. This is important. However, there is a risk that our
account of beauty might overpredict or at least overemphasize difference.
Indeed, filling in gaps might appear to be entirely idiosyncratic, purely
a function of individual psychology. Yet, if it were, then artists could
never craft works to produce aesthetic pleasure. After all, artists cannot
anticipate the guiding peculiarities of particular readers. It would seem
to follow that they could not produce widely successful works. But, of
course, many artists do produce such works. In keeping with this, one of
the key tasks of an artist is guiding the recipients’ idiosyncratic responses
to simulate the storyworld and other aspects of the work in ways that
are partially uniform. At the same time, the artist’s skill is also a matter
of leaving open those aspects of the work that are most important for
a reader or viewer to fill in individually and even idiosyncratically – for
example, those that enable the particular activation of his or her own
attachment memories. Chapter 3 explores how artistic guidance might
be calibrated across necessary points of ellipsis or vagueness. In connec-
tion with this, it examines two works by Henri Matisse, a recent art film
from India, and a poem by Federico Garcı́a Lorca, considering a different
aspect of the problem in each case. In short, while Chapter 2 considers the
ways universals may lead to diverse particularities of response, Chapter 3
discusses how the most seemingly idiosyncratic kinds of response (related
to textual absence or indeterminacy) may develop toward forms of
commonality.
Having dealt with these two interrelated complications of aesthetic
response, the book returns in Chapter 4 to the general theoretical issue
Introduction 15
of just what constitutes such response, seeking to explain its components

more fully. Specifically, it explores four questions. First, what other emo-
tions may be involved in beauty and sublimity, and what are their rela-
tions with one another? Second, why are there two apparently unrelated
information processing components – prototype approximation and non-
habitual pattern recognition? Third, what is the nature of non-habitual
pattern recognition? Earlier chapters articulate a technical concept of
prototype approximation; however, they leave the notion of pattern iso-
lation at a more commonsense level. Finally, what is the relation between
public and personal beauty? The two are conceptually distinct, but that
does not mean they have no bearing or influence on one another. To
examine and illustrate the first and second topics, the chapter considers
parts of two novels by Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth and The Age of
Innocence. The section on the third topic very briefly treats the opening
of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. To illustrate the final issue – concerning
the relation between public beauty and aesthetic response – the chapter
considers an editorial board’s response to a poem by George Chambers.
Initially, the board members greatly undervalued the poem. They recog-
nized the worth of the poem – and, perhaps, experienced its sublimity –
only after the author’s reputation was made known to them, which is to
say when their assessment of its public sublimity was altered.
This case of editorial assessment leads us to the question of aesthetic
evaluation. Even after we have managed to set aside judgments of public
beauty, we are not simply content with our individual aesthetic responses
to works. Rather, we debate those responses and often consider other
people’s views to be mistaken. In order to begin thinking about this topic,
Chapter 5 expands the consideration of the relations among judgments
of public beauty, individual aesthetic response, and judgments about
individual aesthetic response (thus what we claim – or even believe –
that we feel about a work). Specifically, this chapter examines the effect
of Shakespeare’s reputation on my own thoughts about Othello. As it
happens, I do not much care for many aspects of the play. However, I
have hardly allowed myself even to think about what faults the play might
have as I have been so guided by the public stature of the author generally
and this work particularly.
In the course of the discussion of Othello, Chapter 5 draws on the pre-
ceding analyses of beauty and sublimity in order to consider what might
be some possible faults or qualities of the play. Chapter 6 addresses the
topic of faults and qualities at a more abstract, theoretical level. Specifi-
cally, this chapter seeks to systematize the evaluative principles that one
might rationally invoke in an argument for or against a particular aesthetic
response. These principles derive from the descriptive and explanatory
principles governing that response, as isolated in earlier chapters. For

example, one information-processing principle is that aesthetic enjoy-
ment results from non-habitual pattern recognition. A negative response
to a work may be countered with an argument that there is a subtle pattern
in the work that has perhaps gone unnoticed by recipients who do not
care for the work. However, aesthetic response is, precisely, response. As
such, it may be partially explained, but not compelled by arguments such
as those regarding non-habitual pattern recognition. In consequence, an
argument of this kind is not a demonstration of beauty. However good
one’s arguments, if one’s interlocutor continues to experience no aes-
thetic delight in the work, then that work simply is not personally beauti-
ful for that interlocutor. The point of aesthetic argument is not to prove
that a target is or is not beautiful – an impossibility for personal beauty.
(One might prove that a particular work is publicly beautiful, simply by
showing that most people believe that most people judge it to be beauti-
ful. But that has no normative consequences for beauty in the personal
sense.) The purpose of an aesthetic argument is, rather, to appeal to
one’s interlocutor to reconsider the target. That reconsideration may or
may not result in an altered aesthetic response. (The main theoretical
points of the chapter are already in effect illustrated by the discussion
of Othello in Chapter 5. For this reason, the chapter itself includes only
brief examples of the main theoretical points.)
Thus Chapters 1 through 4 examine aesthetic response, while
Chapters 5 and 6 consider aesthetic justification; put differently, the
opening chapters address descriptive and explanatory issues while the
later chapters take up evaluation or norms. The final chapter turns to a
brief consideration of what constitutes art. As already indicated, some-
times the question, “What is art?” is (explicitly or implicitly) mixed up
with the question, “What is beauty?” A number of writers have, quite
rightly, rejected any simple identification of art and beauty. However, to
say that art is not necessarily beautiful or sublime is not to say that art is
unrelated to aesthetic feeling. The final chapter explores the question of
how we might argue that a given work is or is not art.
More exactly, the final chapter starts by noting that there are different
criteria by which one may categorize a work as art. I begin the chapter
by proposing one criterion that is largely consistent with the influential
“institutional” view of art and related accounts. By this criterion, which
covers cases such as Duchamp’s Fountain, a work is art to the extent that
it is produced or received as a work of art – more technically, when it
is placed in a comparison set with works of art. But this does not solve
the problem of delimiting art. We need to have some further meaning
associated with the word “art” as well. We need something that tells us
Introduction 17
what counts as art when there is no relevant comparison set, what works
may be taken to set out the category initially – more generally, how a
comparison set of art may be distinguished from other comparison sets.
Put differently, we need some criteria by which we can give rational rea-
sons for establishing the comparison set of art in a particular way. The
experience of beauty and sublimity enters crucially here. Specifically,
this final chapter argues that the analyses of aesthetic experience in the
preceding chapters give us the means of specifying non-circular criteria
for art. As with evaluations of beauty, however, these criteria do not tell
us definitively what is or is not art. Rather, they tell us what might be
rationally invoked in an argument that a work is aptly thought of as art,
as opposed to something else, such as propaganda or entertainment. (As
explained in the chapter, these three categories are not, strictly speaking,
mutually exclusive. However, they do manifest distinct and only partially
compatible cognitive and emotional tendencies.) Such an argument can-
not decisively establish a categorization. It can only suggest that one
might have good reason to reconsider a work’s categorization as art or
non-art. In other words, in the case of beauty and the case of art, ratio-
nal argument succeeds not when it establishes a putatively right answer
(which it never does), but when it provokes thoughtful reexamination in
a single case and when it develops finer discrimination and fuller appre-
ciation across a range of cases. The chapter considers several examples,
paying particular attention to Arthur Miller’s The Price. Miller’s play is
especially relevant due to its avoidance of specifiable emplotment options
that would be more characteristic of entertainment than of art.
A brief afterword recapitulates some central themes of the preceding
chapters. It goes on to argue that the account of beauty and art may
seem to be challenged by anti-aesthetic works. However, at least much
art of this sort is newly opened to systematic description and explanation
through such an account. Thus, rather than challenging the book’s main
claims, anti-aesthetic art may be understood as giving them some degree
of further support.
Beauty has been the object of philosophical study for millennia.
Nonetheless, we seem to have made considerable progress in coming
to understand the processes of aesthetic response only in recent years,
largely through the development of cognitive and affective science,
particularly neuroscience. Even if they capture important truths about
aesthetic response, as I hope they do, the following analyses are neces-
sarily to some degree preliminary. They are intended as contributions to
an ongoing research program. That research is likely be most effectively
and productively undertaken if it involves both empirical scientists and
interpretive critics, each aware of the other’s work, and taking it into
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39. The work referred to is embodied in Vol. II (pp. 521 et seq.,
562 et seq., 631 et seq.).
40. The philosophy of this book I owe to the philosophy of Goethe,
which is practically unknown to-day, and also (but in a far less
degree) to that of Nietzsche. The position of Goethe in West-
European metaphysics is still not understood in the least; when
philosophy is being discussed he is not even named. For
unfortunately he did not set down his doctrines in a rigid system, and
so the systematic philosophy has overlooked him. Nevertheless he
was a philosopher. His place vis-à-vis Kant is the same as that of
Plato—who similarly eludes the would-be-systematizer—vis-à-vis
Aristotle. Plato and Goethe stand for the philosophy of Becoming,
Aristotle and Kant the philosophy of Being. Here we have intuition
opposed to analysis. Something that it is practically impossible to
convey by the methods of reason is found in individual sayings and
poems of Goethe, e.g., in the Orphische Urworte, and stanzas like
“Wenn im Unendlichen” and “Sagt es Niemand,” which must be
regarded as the expression of a perfectly definite metaphysical
doctrine. I would not have one single word changed in this: "The
Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the
becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and
therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive
towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the
understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the
set-fast" (to Eckermann). This sentence comprises my entire
philosophy.
41. At the end of the volume.
42. Weltanschauung im wörtlichen Sinne; Anschauung der Welt.
43. The case of mankind in the historyless state is discussed in
Vol. II, pp. 58 et seq.
44. With, moreover, a “biological horizon.” See Vol. II, p. 34.
45. See Vol. II, pp. 327 et seq.
46. Also “thinking in money.” See Vol. II, pp. 603 et seq.
47. Dynasties I-VIII, or, effectively, I-VI. The Pyramid period
coincides with Dynasties IV-VI. Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus
belong to the IV dynasty, under which also great water-control works
were carried out between Abydos and the Fayum.—Tr.
48. As also those of law and of money. See Vol. II, pp. 68 et seq.,
pp. 616 et seq.
49. Poincaré in his Science et Méthode (Ch. III), searchingly
analyses the “becoming” of one of his own mathematical discoveries.
Each decisive stage in it bears “les mêmes caractères de brièveté,
de soudaineté et de certitude absolue” and in most cases this
“certitude” was such that he merely registered the discovery and put
off its working-out to any convenient season.—Tr.
50. One may be permitted to add that according to legend, both
Hippasus who took to himself public credit for the discovery of a
sphere of twelve pentagons, viz., the regular dodecahedron
(regarded by the Pythagoreans as the quintessence—or æther—of a
world of real tetrahedrons, octahedrons, icosahedrons and cubes),
and Archytas the eighth successor of the Founder are reputed to
have been drowned at sea. The pentagon from which this
dodecahedron is derived, itself involves incommensurable numbers.
The “pentagram” was the recognition badge of Pythagoreans and
the ἄλογον (incommensurable) their special secret. It would be
noted, too, that Pythagoreanism was popular till its initiates were
found to be dealing in these alarming and subversive doctrines, and
then they were suppressed and lynched—a persecution which
suggests more than one deep analogy with certain heresy-
suppressions of Western history. The English student may be
referred to G. J. Allman, Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid
(Cambridge, 1889), and to his articles “Pythagoras,” “Philolaus” and
“Archytas” in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition.—Tr.
51. Horace’s words (Odes I xi): “Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas,
quem mihi quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros ... carpe diem, quam minimum credula
postero.”—Tr.
53. In the only writing of his that survives, indeed, Aristarchus
maintains the geocentric view; it may be presumed therefore that it
was only temporarily that he let himself be captivated by a
hypothesis of the Chaldaean learning.
54. Giordano Bruno (born 1548, burned for heresy 1600). His
whole life might be expressed as a crusade on behalf of God and the
Copernican universe against a degenerated orthodoxy and an
Aristotelian world-idea long coagulated in death.—Tr.
55. F. Strunz, Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalter (1910), p. 90.
56. In the “Psammites,” or “Arenarius,” Archimedes framed a
numerical notation which was to be capable of expressing the
number of grains of sand in a sphere of the size of our universe.—Tr.
57. This, for which the ground had been prepared by Eudoxus,
was employed for calculating the volume of pyramids and cones:
“the means whereby the Greeks were able to evade the forbidden
notion of infinity” (Heiberg, Naturwiss. u. Math. i. Klass. Alter. [1912],
p. 27).
58. Dr. Anster’s translation.—Tr.
59. See Vol. II, Chapter III.
60. Oresme was, equally, prelate, church reformer, scholar,
scientist and economist—the very type of the philosopher-leader.—
Tr.
61. Oresme in his Latitudines Formarum used ordinate and
abscissa, not indeed to specify numerically, but certainly to describe,
change, i.e., fundamentally, to express functions.—Tr.
62. Alexandria ceased to be a world-city in the second century A.D.
and became a collection of houses left over from the Classical
civilization which harboured a primitive population of quite different
spiritual constitution. See Vol. II, pp. 122 et seq.
63. Born 1601, died 1665. See Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Fermat,
and references therein.—Tr.
64. Similarly, coinage and double-entry book-keeping play
analogous parts in the money-thinking of the Classical and the
Western Cultures respectively. See Vol. II, pp. 610 et seq.
65. The same may be said in the matter of Roman Law (see Vol.
II, pp. 96 et seq.) and of coinage (see Vol. II, pp. 616 et seq.).
66. That is, “it is impossible to part a cube into two cubes, a
biquadrate into two biquadrates, and generally any power above the
square into two powers having the same exponent.” Fermat claimed
to possess a proof of the proposition, but this has not been
preserved, and no general proof has hitherto been obtained.—Tr.
67. Thus Bishop Berkeley’s Discourse addressed to an infidel
mathematician (1735) shrewdly asked whether the mathematician
were in a position to criticize the divine for proceeding on the basis of
faith.—Tr.
68. From the savage conjuror with his naming-magic to the
modern scientist who subjects things by attaching technical labels to
them, the form has in no wise changed. See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq.,
322 et seq.
70. A beginning is now being made with the application of non-
Euclidean geometries to astronomy. The hypothesis of curved space,
closed but without limits, filled by the system of fixed stars on a
radius of about 470,000,000 earth-distances, would lead to the
hypothesis of a counter-image of the sun which to us appears as a
star of medium brilliancy. (See translator’s footnote, p. 332.)
71. That only one parallel to a given straight line is possible
through a given point—a proposition that is incapable of proof.
72. It is impossible to say, with certainty, how much of the Indian
mathematics that we possess is old, i.e., before Buddha.
73. The technical difference (in German usage) between Grenz
and Grenzwert is in most cases ignored in this translation as it is
only the underlying conception of “number” common to both that
concerns us. Grenz is the “limit” strictly speaking, i.e., the number a
to which the terms a1₁, a2₂, a₃ ... of a particular series approximate
more and more closely, till nearer to a than any assignable number
whatever. The Grenzwert of a function, on the other hand, is the
“limit” of the value which the function takes for a given value a of the
variable x. These methods of reasoning and their derivatives enable
solutions to be obtained for series such as (1⁄m¹,) (1⁄m²,)
(1⁄m³,) ... (1⁄mx) or functions such as
x(2x - 1)
y = —————
(x + 2)(x - 3)
where x is infinite or indefinite.—Tr.
74. “Function, rightly understood, is existence considered as an
activity” (Goethe). Cf. Vol. II, p. 618, for functional money.
75. Built for August II, in 1711, as barbican or fore-building for a
projected palace.—Tr.
76. From the standpoint of the theory of “aggregates” (or “sets of
points”), a well-ordered set of points, irrespective of the dimension
figure, is called a corpus; and thus an aggregate of n - 1 dimensions
is considered, relatively to one of n dimensions, as a surface. Thus
the limit (wall, edge) of an “aggregate” represents an aggregate of
lower “potentiality.”
77. See p. 55, also Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq.
78. “Anti-historical,” the expression which we apply to a decidedly
systematic valuation, is to be carefully distinguished from
“ahistorical.” The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopenhauer’s
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung affords a good illustration of the man
who thinks anti-historically, that is, deliberately for theoretical
reasons suppresses and rejects the historical in himself—something
that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the contrary,
neither possesses nor understands it.
79. “There are prime phenomena which in their godlike simplicity
we must not disturb or infringe.”
80. The date of Napoleon’s defeat, and the liberation of Germany,
on the field of Leipzig.—Tr.
81. See Vol. II, pp. 25 et seq., 327 et seq.
82.
“All we see before us passing

Sign and symbol is alone.”
From the final stanza of Faust II (Anster’s translation).—Tr.
83. This phrase, derived by analogy from the centre of gravity of
mechanics, is offered as a translation of “mithin in einim Zeitpunkte
ger nicht zusammengefasst werden können.”—Tr.
84. Cf. Vol. II, p. 33 et seq.
85. Not the dissecting morphology of the Darwinian’s pragmatic
zoology with its hunt for causal connexions, but the seeing and
overseeing morphology of Goethe.
88. See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq. What constitutes the downfall is
not, e.g., the catastrophe of the Great Migrations, which like the
annihilation of the Maya Culture by the Spaniards (see Vol. II, p. 51
et seq.) was a coincidence without any deep necessity, but the
inward undoing that began from the time of Hadrian, as in China
from the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220).
89. St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to 1022, and
himself architect and metal-worker. Three other churches besides
the cathedral survive in the city from his time or that of his immediate
successors, and Hildesheim of all North German cities is richest in
monuments of the Romanesque.—Tr.
90. By “Saxony,” a German historian means not the present-day
state of Saxony (which was a small and comparatively late
accretion), but the whole region of the Weser and the lower Elbe,
with Westphalia and Holstein.—Tr.
91. Vases from the cemetery adjoining the Dipylon Gate of Athens,
the most representative relics that we possess of the Doric or
primitive age of the Hellenic Culture (about 900 to 600 B.C.).—Tr.
93. In English the word “cast” will evidently satisfy the sense better
on occasion. The word “stil” will therefore not necessarily be always
rendered “style.”—Tr.
96. I will only mention here the distances apart of the three Punic
Wars, and the series—likewise comprehensible only as rhythmic—
Spanish Succession War, Silesian wars, Napoleonic Wars,
Bismarck’s wars, and the World War (cf. Vol. II, p. 488). Connected
with this is the spiritual relation of grandfather and grandson, a
relation which produces in the mind of primitive peoples the
conviction that the soul of the grandfather returns in the grandson,
and has originated the widespread custom of giving the grandson
the grandfather’s name, which by its mystic spell binds his soul
afresh to the corporeal world.
97. The word is used in the sense in which biology employs it, viz.,
to describe the process by which the embryo traverses all the
phases which its species has undergone.—Tr.
98. The first draft of Faust I, discovered only comparatively
recently.—Tr.
99. See Ency. Brit., XIth Ed., articles Owen, Sir Richard;
Morphology and Zoology (p. 1029).—Tr.
100. It is not superfluous to add that there is nothing of the causal
kind in these pure phenomena of “Living Nature.” Materialism, in
order to get a system for the pedestrian reasoner, has had to
adulterate the picture of them with fitness-causes. But Goethe—who
anticipated just about as much of Darwinism as there will be left of it
in fifty years from Darwin—absolutely excluded the causality-
principle. And the very fact that the Darwinians quite failed to notice
its absence is a clear indication that Goethe’s “Living Nature”
belongs to actual life, "cause"-less and "aim"-less; for the idea of the
prime-phenomenon does not involve causal assumptions of any sort
unless it has been misunderstood in advance in a mechanistic
sense.
101. Reigned 246-210 B.C. He styled himself “first universal
emperor” and intended a position for himself and his successors akin
to that of “Divus” in Rome. For a brief account of his energetic and
comprehensive work see Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article China, p. 194.—
Tr.
102. The sensuous life and the intellectual life too are Time; it is
only sensuous experience and intellectual experience, the “world,”
that is spatial nature. (As to the nearer affinity of the Feminine to
Time, see Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.)
103. The expression “space of time” (Zeitraum) which is common
to many languages, is evidence of our inability to represent direction
otherwise than by extension.
104. I.e., the translated Bible.—Tr.
106. See p. 80 of this volume, and Vol. II, pp. 166, 328.
107. See Vol. II, p. 137.
108. The nearest English equivalent is perhaps the word “fear.”
“Fearful” would correspond exactly but for the fact that in the second
sense the word is objective instead of subjective. The word “shy”
itself bears the second meaning in such trivial words as gun-shy,
work-shy.—Tr.
109. The Relativity theory, a working hypothesis which is on the
way to overthrowing Newton’s mechanics—which means at bottom
his view of the problem of motion—admits cases in which the words
“earlier” and “later” may be inverted. The mathematical foundation of
this theory by Minkowski uses imaginary time units for measurement.
110. The dimensions are x, y, z (in respect of space) and t (in
respect of time), and all four appear to be regarded as perfectly
equivalent in transformations. [The English reader may be referred to
A. Einstein, “Theory of Relativity,” Ch. XI and appendices I, II.—Tr.]
111. Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicari velim,
nescio. (Conf. XI, 14.)
112. Save in elementary mathematics. (It may be remarked that
most philosophers since Schopenhauer have approached these
questions with the prepossessions of elementary mathematics.)
113. The “inverse circular functions” of English text-books.—Tr.
114. The Newtonian form of the differential calculus was distinct
from the Leibnizian, which is now in general use. Without going into
unnecessary detail, the characteristic of Newton’s method was that it
was meant not for the calculation of quadratures and tangents
(which had occupied his predecessors), nor as an organ of functional
theory as such (as the differential calculus became much later), but
quite definitely as a method of dealing with rate of change in pure
mechanics, with the “flowing” or “fluxion” of a dependent variable
under the influence of a variable which for Newton was the “fluent,”
and which we call the argument of a function.—Tr.
115. See Vol. II, pp. 13, 19.
116. See Vol. II, p. 16.
117. The original reads: “(So ist jede Art von Verstehen ... nur
dadurch möglich ...) dass ein Begriffspaar von innerem Gegensatz
gewissermassen durch Auseinandertreten erst Wirklichkeit erhält.”—
Tr.
118. At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in
this edition begins at “But inquiry” (p. 121) and ends at the close of
section I (p. 121).—Tr.
119. See Vol. II, pp. 137, 159.
120. Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary
acceptation of the word.—Tr.
121. Œd. Rex., 642. κακῶς εἴληφα τοὐμὸν σῶμα σὺν τέχνῃ κακῇ.
(Cf. Rudolf Hirsch, Die Person (1914), p. 9.)
122. Œd. Col., 355. μαντεῖα ... ἃ τοῦδ’ ἐχρήσθη σώματος.
123. Choëphoræ, 710. ἐπὶ ναυάρχῳ σώματι ... τῷ βασιλείῳ.
124. Phidias, and through him his patron Pericles, were attacked
for alleged introduction of portraits upon the shield of Athene
Parthenos. In Western religious art, on the contrary, portraiture was,
as everyone knows, a habitual practice. Every Madonna, for
instance, is more or less of a portrait.
With this may be compared again the growing resistance of
Byzantine art, as it matured, to portraiture in sacred surroundings,
evidenced for instance in the history of the nimbus or halo—which
was removed from the insignia of the Prince to become the badge of
the Saint—in the legend of the miraculous effacement of Justinian’s
pompous inscription on Hagia Sophia, and in the banishment of the
human patron from the celestial part of the church to the earthly.—Tr.
125. Who was criticized as “no god-maker but a man-maker” and
as one who spoilt the beauty of his work by aiming at likeness.
Cresilas, the sculptor from whom the only existing portrait of
Pericles is derived, was a little earlier; in him, however, the “ideal”
was still the supreme aim.—Tr.
126. The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes.—Tr.
128. Diels, Antike Technik (1920), p. 159.
129. About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in
Africa and Ionia, and from Plato’s time still more primitive clepsydræ
came into use; but in both forms, the Greek clock was a mere
imitation of the far superior models of the older East, and it had not
the slightest connexion with the Greek life-feeling. See Diels, op. cit.,
pp. 160 et seq.
130. Horace’s monumentum ære perennius (Odes III, 30) may
seem to conflict with this: but let the reader reconsider the whole of
that ode in the light of the present argument, and turn also to
Leuconoe and her “Babylonian” impieties (Odes I, 11) inter alia, and
he will probably agree that so far as Horace is concerned, the
argument is supported rather than impugned.—Tr.
131. Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancient-
mediæval-modern scheme. It was on those foundations that, from
early Gothic times, the images of religion and of art have been built
up in which a large part of Western humanity continues to live. To
predicate the same of Plato or Phidias is quite impossible, whereas
the Renaissance artists could and did project a classical past, which
indeed they permitted to dominate their judgments completely.
132. See pp. 9. et seq.
133. The Indian history of our books is a Western reconstruction
from texts and monuments. See the chapter on epigraphy in the
“Indian Gazetteer,” Vol. II.—Tr.
134. See Vol. II, pp. 482, 521 et seq.
135. There is one famous episode in Greek history that may be
thought to contradict this—the race against time of the galley sent to
Mitylene to countermand the order of massacre (Thucydides, III, 49).
But we observe that Thucydides gives twenty times the space to the
debates at Athens that he gives to the drama of the galley-rowers
pulling night and day to save life. And we are told that it was the
Mitylenean ambassadors who spared no expense to make it worth
the rowers’ while to win, whereupon “there arose such a zeal of
rowing that....” The final comment is, strictly construing Thucydides’s
own words: “Such was the magnitude of the danger that Mitylene
passed by” (παρὰ τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ Μυτιλήνη ἦλθε κινδύνου), a
phrase which recalls forcibly what has just been said regarding the
“situation-drama.”—Tr.
136. Besides the clock, the bell itself is a Western “symbol.” The
passing-bell tolled for St. Hilda of Whitby in 680, and a century
before that time bells had come into general use in Gaul both for
monasteries and for parish churches. On the contrary, it was not till
865 that Constantinople possessed bells, and these were presented
in that year by Venice. The presence of a belfry in a Byzantine
church is accounted a proof of “Western influence”: the East used
and still largely uses mere gongs and rattles for religious purposes.
(British Museum “Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”.—Tr.
137. May we be permitted to guess that the Babylonian sun-dial
and the Egyptian water-clock came into being “simultaneously,” that
is, on the threshold of the third millennium before Christ? The history
of clocks is inwardly inseparable from that of the calendar; it is
therefore to be assumed that the Chinese and the Mexican Cultures
also, with their deep sense of history, very early devised and used
methods of time-measurement.
(The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known
systems of indicating year and day. See British Museum “Handbook
of May on Antiquities.”—Tr.)
138. Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when
suddenly made acquainted with this custom of ours.
139. The Chinese ancestor-worship honoured genealogical order
with strict ceremonies. And whereas here ancestor-worship by
degrees came to be the centre of all piety, in the Classical world it
was driven entirely into the background by the cults of present gods;
in Roman times it hardly existed at all.
(Note the elaborate precautions taken in the Athenian
“Anthesteria” to keep the anonymous mass of ghosts at bay. This
feast was anything but an All Souls’ Day of re-communion with the
departed spirits.—Tr.)
140. With obvious reference to the resurrection of the flesh (ἐκ
νεκρῶν). But the meaning of the term “resurrection” has undergone,
from about 1000 A.D., a profound—though hardly noticed—change.
More and more it has tended to become identified with “immortality.”
But in the resurrection from the dead, the implication is that time
begins again to repeat in space, whereas in “immortality” it is time
that overcomes space.
141. For English readers, the most conspicuous case of historic
doubt is the Shakespeare-Bacon matter. But even here, it is only the
work of Shakespeare that is in question, not his existence and
personality, for which we have perfectly definite evidence.—Tr.
142. Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture-temple
founded in honour of Aristotle, and later the great University of
Alexandria, bore the title Μουσεῖον. Both Aristotle and the University
amassed collections but they were collections of (a) books, (b)
natural history specimens, living or taken from life. In the West, the
collection of memorials of the past as such dates from the earliest
days of the Renaissance.—Tr.
143. The connotation of “care” is almost the same as that of
“Sorge,” but the German word includes also a certain specific, ad
hoc apprehension, that in English is expressed by “concern” or
“fear.”—Tr.
144. The Lingayats are one of the chief sects of the Saivas (that
is, of the branch of Hinduism which devotes itself to Shiva) and
Paewati worshippers belong to another branch, having the generic
name of Saktas, who worship the “active female principle” in the
persons of Shiva’s consorts, of whom Paewati is one. Vaishnavism—
the Vishnu branch of Indian religion—also contains an erotic element
in that form which conceives Vishnu as Krishna. But in Krishna
worship the erotic is rather less precise and more amorous in
character.
See “Imperial Gazetteer of India,” Vol. I, pp. 421 et seq., and Ency.
Brit., XI Edition, article Hinduism.—Tr.
145. British Museum.—Tr.
146. Dresden.—Tr.
147. See Vol. II, p. 316.
148. In connexion with this very important link in the Author’s
argument, attention may be drawn to a famous wall-painting of very
early date in the Catacomb of St. Priscilla. In this, Mary is definitely
and unmistakably the Stillende Mutter. But she is, equally
unmistakably, different in soul and style from her “Early-Christian-
Byzantine” successor the Theotokos. Now, it is well known that the
art of the catacombs, at any rate in its beginnings, is simply the art of
contemporary Rome, and that this “Roman” art had its home in
Alexandria. See Woermann’s Geschichte der Kunst, III, 14-15, and
British Museum “Guide to Early Christian Art,” 72-74, 86. Woermann
speaks of this Madonna as the prototype of our grave, tenderly-
solicitous Mother-Madonnas. Dr. Spengler would probably prefer to
regard her as the last Isis. In any case it is significant that the symbol
disappears: in the very same catacomb is a Theotokos of perhaps a
century later date.—Tr.
149. Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.
150. See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (Der Staat and
Wirtschaftsleben).—Tr.
151. Sesenheim is the home of Friederike, and a student’s holiday
took him thither: Weimar, of course, is the centre from which all the
activity of his long life was to radiate.—Tr.
152. Vermeintlich. The allusion is presumably to the fact that
Copernicus, adhering to the hypothesis of circular orbits, was obliged
to retain some elements of Ptolemy’s geocentric machinery of
epicycles, so that Copernicus’s sun was not placed at the true centre
of any planetary orbit.—Tr.
153. Sprüche in Reimen.
155. The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English
philosophy.
156. This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-
theory. The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”;
the Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the
convergent function that it is. The one is, the other becomes. And
thus all Classical tragedy assumes the constancy of the personality,
and all Western its variability, which essentially constitutes a
“character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in
continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of
relationships. In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering,
in Shakespeare the grand idea (Gesinnung) ennobles the doing. As
our æsthetic took its examples from both Cultures, it was bound to
go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.
157. “The older one becomes, the more one is persuaded that His
Sacred Majesty Chance does three-quarters of the work of this
miserable Universe.” (Frederick the Great to Voltaire.) So,
necessarily, must the genuine rationalist conceive it.
159. The incident which is said to have precipitated the French
war on Algiers (1827).—Tr.
160. Act. II, Scene VII.—Tr.
161. In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national
parliament was assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic
colour, and it chose Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary
emperor. Frederick William, however, refused to “pick up a crown out
of the gutter.” For the history of this momentous episode, the English
reader may be referred to the Cambridge Modern History or to the
article Germany (History) in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition.—Tr.
162. It is the fact that a whole group of these Cultures is available
for our study that makes possible the “comparative” method used in
the present work. See Vol. II, pp. 42 et seq.
163. Derived from μείρομαι, to receive as one’s portion, to have
allotted to one, or, colloquially, to “come in for” or “step into.”—Tr.
164. The expedition of the Ten Thousand into Persia is no
exception. The Ten Thousand indeed formed an ambulatory Polis,
and its adventures are truly Classical. It was confronted with a series
of “situations.”—Tr.
165. Helios is only a poetical figure; he had neither temples nor
cult. Even less was Selene a moon-goddess.
166. The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die
Wahrscheinlichkeit für sich hat, ist bereits eine Frage des
historischen—und also des tragischen—Stils."—Tr.
167. The words of Canning at the beginning of the XIXth century
may be recalled. “South America free! and if possible English!” The
expansion idea has never been expressed in greater purity than this.
168. The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a
French outgrowth of the Spanish, beginning with Louis XIV. But even
by Louis XVI’s time the English park had defeated the French,
sensibility had ousted wit, London costume and manners had
overcome Versailles, and Hogarth, Chippendale and Wedgwood had
prevailed over Watteau, Boulle and Sèvres.
169. The allusion is to the voyage of Linois’s small squadron to
Pondichéry in 1803, its confrontation by another small British
squadron there, and the counter-order which led Linois to retire to
Mauritius.—Tr.
170. Hardenberg’s reorganization of Prussia was thoroughly
English in spirit, and as such incurred the severe censure of the old
Prussian Von der Marwitz. Scharnhorst’s army reforms too, as a
breakaway from the professional army system of the eighteenth-
century cabinet-wars, are a sort of “return to nature” in the
Rousseau-Revolutionary sense.
171. Where in 295 B.C. the Romans decisively defeated the last
great Samnite effort to resist their hegemony over Italy.—Tr.
172. Which, inasmuch as it has been detached from time, is able
to employ mathematical symbols. These rigid figures signify for us a
destiny of yore. But their meaning is other than mathematical. Past is
not a cause, nor Fate a formula, and to anyone who handles them,
as the historical materialist handles them, mathematically, the past
event as such, as an actuality that has lived once and only once, is
invisible.
173. That is, not merely conclusions of peaces or deathdays of
persons, but the Renaissance style, the Polis, the Mexican Culture
and so forth—are dates or data, facts that have been, even when we
possess no representation of them.
175. The formation of hypotheses in Chemistry is much more
thoughtless, owing to the less close relation of that science to
mathematics. A house of cards such as is presented to us in the
researches of the moment on atom-structure (see, for example, M.
Born, Der Aufbau der Materie, 1920) would be impossible in the near
neighbourhood of the electro-magnetic theory of light, whose authors
never for a moment lost sight of the frontier between mathematical
vision and its representation by a picture, or of the fact that this was
only a picture.
176. There is no difference essentially between these
representations and the switchboard wiring-diagram.
177. Goethe’s theory of colour openly controverted Newton’s
theory of light. A long account of the controversy will be found in
Chapter IX of G. H. Lewes’s Life of Goethe—a work that, taken all in
all, is one of the wisest biographies ever written. In reading his
critique of Goethe’s theory, of course, it has to be borne in mind that
he wrote before the modern development of the electro-magnetic
theory, which has substituted a merely mathematical existence for
the Newtonian physical existence of colour-rays as such in white
light. Now, this physical existence was just what, in substance,
Goethe denied. What he affirmed, in the simpler language of his day,
was that white light was something simple and colourless that
becomes coloured through diminutions or modifications imposed
upon it by “darkness.” The modern physicist, using a subtler
hypothesis than Newton’s and a more refined “balance” than that
which Lewes reproaches Goethe for “flinging away,” has found in
white light, not the Newtonian mixture of colour-rays, but a surge of
irregular wave-trains which are only regularized into colour-vibrations
through being acted upon by analysers of one sort and another, from
prisms to particulate matter. This necessity of a counter-agent for the
production of colour seems—to a critical outsider at any rate—very
like the necessity of an efficient negative principle or “opaque” that
Goethe’s intuitive interpretation of his experiments led him to
postulate. It is this that is the heart of the theory, and not the
“simplicity” of light per se.
So much it seems desirable to add to the text and the reference, in
order to expand the author’s statement that “both were right.” For
Lewes, with all his sympathetic penetration of the man and real
appreciation of his scientific achievement, feels obliged to regard his
methods and his theory as such as “erroneous.” And it is perhaps
not out of place in this book to adduce an instance of the peculiar
nature and power of intuitive vision (which entirely escapes direct
description) in which Vision frankly challenges Reason on its own
ground, meets with refutation (or contempt) from the Reason of its
day, and yet may come to be upheld in its specific rightness (its
rightness as vision, that is, apart from its technical enunciation by the
seer) by the Reason of a later day.—Tr.
178. See p. 123.
179. See page 123.
180. The word dimension ought only to be used in the singular. It
means extension but not extensions. The idea of the three directions
is an out-and-out abstraction and is not contained in the immediate
extension-feeling of the body (the “soul”). Direction as such, the
direction-essence, gives rise to the mysterious animal sense of right
and left and also the vegetable characteristic of below-to-above,
earth to heaven. The latter is a fact felt dream-wise, the former a
truth of waking existence to be learned and therefore capable of
being transmuted. Both find expression in architecture, to wit, in the
symmetry of the plan and the energy of the elevation, and it is only
because of this that we specially distinguish in the “architecture” of
the space around us the angle of 90° in preference, for example, to
that of 60°. Had not this been so, the conventional number of our
“dimensions” would have been quite different.
181. The want of perspective in children’s drawings is emphatically
not perceptible to the children themselves.
182. His idea that the a priori-ness of space was proved by and
through the unconditional validity of simple geometrical facts rests,
as we have already remarked, on the all-too-popular notion that
mathematics are either geometry or arithmetic. Now, even in Kant’s
time the mathematic of the West had got far beyond this naïve
scheme, which was a mere imitation of the Classical. Modern
geometry bases itself not on space but on multiply-infinite number-
manifolds—amongst which the three-dimensional is simply the
undistinguished special case—and within these groups investigates
functional formations with reference to their structure; that is, there is
no longer any contact or even possibility of contact between any
possible kind of sense-perception and mathematical facts in the
domain of such extensions as these, and yet the demonstrability of
the latter is in no wise impaired thereby. Mathematics, then, are
independent of the perceived, and the question now is, how much of
this famous demonstrability of the forms of perception is left when
the artificiality of juxtaposing both in a supposedly single process of
experience has been recognized.
183. It is true that a geometrical theorem may be proved, or rather
demonstrated, by means of a drawing. But the theorem is differently
constituted in every kind of geometry, and that being so, the drawing
ceases to be a proof of anything whatever.
184. So much so that Gauss said nothing about his discovery until
almost the end of his life for tear of “the clamour of the Bœotians.”
185. The distinction of right and left (see p. 169) is only
conceivable as the outcome of this directedness in the dispositions
of the body. “In front” has no meaning whatever for the body of a
plant.
186. It may not be out of place here to refer to the enormous
importance attached in savage society to initiation-rites at
adolescence.—Tr.
187. Either in Greek or in Latin, τόπος (= locus) means spot,
locality, and also social position; χώρα (= spatium) means space-
between, distance, rank, and also ground and soil (e.g., τὰ ἐκ τῆς
χώρας, produce); τὸ κένον (vacuum) means quite unequivocally a
hollow body, and the stress is emphatically on the envelope. The
literature of the Roman Imperial Age, which attempted to render the
Magian world-feeling through Classical words, was reduced to such
clumsy versions as ὁρατὸς τόπος (sensible world) or spatium inane
(“endless space,” but also “wide surface”—the root of the word
“spatium” means to swell or grow fat). In the true Classical literature,
the idea not being there, there was no necessity for a word to
describe it.
188. It has not hitherto been seen that this fact is implicit in
Euclid’s famous parallel axiom (“through a point only one parallel to
a straight line is possible”).
This was the only one of the Classical theorems which remained
unproved, and as we know now, it is incapable of proof. But it was
just that which made it into a dogma (as opposed to any experience)
and therefore the metaphysical centre and main girder of that
geometrical system. Everything else, axiom or postulate, is merely
introductory or corollary to this. This one proposition is necessary
and universally-valid for the Classical intellect, and yet not deducible.
What does this signify?
It signifies that the statement is a symbol of the first rank. It
contains the structure of Classical corporeality. It is just this
proposition, theoretically the weakest link in the Classical geometry
(objections began to be raised to it as early as Hellenistic times), that
reveals its soul, and it was just this proposition, self-evident within
the limits of routine experience, that the Faustian number-thinking,
derived from incorporeal spatial distances, fastened upon as the
centre of doubt. It is one of the deepest symbols of our being that we
have opposed to the Euclidean geometry not one but several other
geometries all of which for us are equally true and self-consistent.
The specific tendency of the anti-Euclidean group of geometries—in
which there may be no parallel or two parallels or several parallels to
a line through a point—lies in the fact that by their very plurality the
corporeal sense of extension, which Euclid canonized by his
principle, is entirely got rid of; for what they reject is that which all
corporeal postulates but all spatial denies. The question of which of
the three Non-Euclidean geometries is the “correct” one (i.e., that
which underlies actuality)—although Gauss himself gave it earnest
consideration—is in respect of world-feeling entirely Classical and
therefore it should not have been asked by a thinker of our sphere.
Indeed it prevents us from seeing the true and deep meaning implicit
in the plurality of these geometries. The specifically Western symbol
resides not in the reality of one or of another, but in the true plurality
of equally possible geometries. It is the group of space-structures—
in the abundance of which the classical system is a mere particular
case—that has dissolved the last residuum of the corporeal into the
pure space-feeling.
189. This zero, which probably contains a suggestion of the Indian
idea of extension—of that spatiality of the world that is treated in the
Upanishads and is entirely alien to our space-consciousness—was
of course wholly absent in the Classical. By way of the Arabian
mathematics (which completely transformed its meaning) it reached
the West, where it was only introduced in 1554 by Stipel, with its
sense, moreover, again fundamentally changed, for it became the
mean of +1 and -1 as a cut in a linear continuum, i.e., it was
assimilated to the Western number-world in a wholly un-Indian sense
of relation.
190. The word Höhlengefühl is Leo Frobenius’s (Paideuma, p. 92).
(The Early-Christian Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem [A.D. 327] is
built over a natural cave.—Tr.)
191. Strzygowski’s Ursprung der Christlichen Kirchenkunst (1920),
p. 80.
192. See Vol. II, p. 101 et seq.
194. Müller-Decker, Die Etrusker (1877), II, pp. 128 et seq.
Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (1912), p. 527. The oldest
plan of Roma Quadrata was a “templum” whose limits had nothing to
do with the building-up of the city but were connected with sacral
rules, as the significance of this precinct (the “Pomœrium”) in later
times shows. A “templum,” too, was the Roman camp whose
rectangular outline is visible to-day in many a Roman-founded town;
it was the consecrated area within which the army felt itself under the
protection of its gods, and originally had nothing whatever to do with
fortification, which is a product of Hellenistic times. (It may be added
that Roman camps retained their rigidity of outline even where
obvious “military considerations” of ground, etc., must have
suggested its modification.—Tr.) Most Roman stone-temples
("ædes") were not “templa” at all. On the other hand, the early Greek
τέμενος of Homeric times must have had a similar significance.
195. The student may consult the articles “Church History,”
“Monasticism,” “Eucharist” and other articles therein referred to in the
Encyclopædia Britannica, XI Edition.—Tr.
196. English readers may remember that Cobbett (“Rural Rides,”
passim) was so impressed with the spaciousness of English country
churches as to formulate a theory that mediæval England must have
been more populous than modern England is.—Tr.
197. Cf. my introduction to Ernst Droem’s Gesänge, p. ix.
198. The oldest and most mystical of the poems of the “Elder
Edda.”—Tr.
199. See Vol. II, p. 358 et seq.
201. See Vol. II, p. 354.
202. This refers to the diaphonic chant of Church music in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. The form of this chant is supposed to
have been an accompaniment of the “plain chant” by voices moving
parallel to it at a fourth, fifth, or octave.—Tr.
203. Hölscher, Grabdenkmal des Königs Chephren; Borchardt,
Grabdenkmal des Sahurê; Curtius, Die Antike Kunst, p. 45.
204. See Vol. II, p. 342; Borchardt, Re-Heiligtum des Newoserri;
Ed. Mayer, Geschichte des Altertums, I, 251.
205. “Relief en creux”; compare H. Schäfer, Von ägyptischer Kunst
(1919), I, p. 41.
207. O. Fischer, Chinesische Landmalerei (1921), p. 24. What
makes Chinese—as also Indian—art so difficult a study for us is the
fact that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the
Hwangho region from 1300 to 800 B.C. and of pre-Buddhist India)
have vanished without a trace. But that which we now call “Chinese
art” corresponds, say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty
onward, and the great schools of painting find their parallel in the
sculpture schools of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an
antiquarian preciosity takes the place of the living inward

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Beauty and Sublimity A Cognitive

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p a t r i c k c o l m h o g a n is a professor in the Department of English,

Patrick Colm Hogan

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

Acknowledgments page viii

Introduction: why beauty? 1

Works cited 257

An earlier version of part of Chapter 1 appeared as “Literary Aesthetics:

McDermott, Georgina Paiella, Evan Reardon, and David Smith. My

science; second, works of art.2 In this respect, it continues the project

Aesthetics and Politics

of tension with one another. When I discuss beauty in public talks, I

3 Gell-Mann defines beauty by reference to mathematical simplicity. In terms of the anal-

ultimately cruel to women.4 Jeffreys’s analyses are important and conse-

blanching and hair straightening.8 These are commonly seen as a matter

8 I am grateful to Bhakti Shringarpure for reminding me of the relevance of these practices.

in Chapter 1, there are differences in male and female facial luminance

Beauty and Art

corner – aesthetics. As Wales notes, “aesthetic describes the percep-

of restriction should hold for aesthetic response (i.e., the experience of

number and intensity of components, the stronger the aesthetic

13 Here and throughout, I am using “aesthetic experience” merely to refer to an experi-

apply cross-culturally and trans-historically. However, by their nature,

of just what constitutes such response, seeking to explain its components

principles governing that response, as isolated in earlier chapters. For

“All we see before us passing

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