D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• Art-makers are at home with mystery, scholars and pundits aspire to certainty. • The “science” of Aesthetics: a by-product of the Enlightenment • Greek word aesthetes, one who perceives. • The “unconscious” mind and insight. • Hegel: the separation of beauty in nature and beauty in art • Art and the spiritual: “aesthetic awe.” • The arts as “food for the soul.” What is feeding us? • 18th C England: standards of beauty and the rise of the Dilettanti. • Hume and the relativity of aesthetic judgement. Hogarth and the sinuous “line of Beauty.” • The Sublime in the landscape. • Beauty and the eye of the beholder. • Beauty as feminine, the Sublime as masculine. • The Avant-garde. • Strong, true beauty redeems our little lives. • Beauty and the commercialization of sex. • Plato on Beauty. • Paradox: true beauty as a logical incongruity fundamental to the universe.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and the giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of spirit. It is the recreation on another place of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

Sometimes I think I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter!

[Ansel Adams, in a letter quoted in wall texts, Portland Museum of Art, 3/10/00]

The testimony of art-makers of all kinds, as here from the great photographer Ansel Adams, is often quite different from that of scholars and pundits and other “experts” on the arts. For one thing, creative people are entirely at home saying metaphoric or unprovable things, or are obliged to say them by their experience—like Adams’s “God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”[1] They are aware that they can never fully identify the source of their inspiration, can never be sure that they can find their way to it again. People who see themselves as “experts,” on the other hand, must aspire to certainty and provability.

In Western culture since the Enlightenment, methodical study and analysis have over time come to be seen as the only sure roads to truth, incontrovertible proof being the goal. Inevitably, the arts were eventually included among the phenomena to be studied. The determination to find some kind of dependably scientific understanding of beauty and of the arts, as of everything else, led to the establishment of a field of study known as “Aesthetics.”

But what exactly is this “scientific” field of study? In a 1994 article in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Professor D. J. Diffey writes that at different times the word “aesthetic” has been variously identified with one of three main areas of human experience: the perceptual, the beautiful, and the artistic.

As noted in Part I of this chapter, the original Greek word aesthetes, one who perceives, refers only to the conscious experience of information gathered by the senses. This would of course have as much to do with a hunter's awareness of his prey as with whether or not you or I perceive something as beautiful. (Most of this sensory information is received and processed by the unconscious mind, and is the raw material of insight, as we will see later on.) In the ensuing centuries, when the word was used it was used in this sense until, in the 1750's, the minor German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten wrote a long unfinished treatise, “Aesthetica,” in which he proposed the word as the name for a new “science of the beautiful.” Baumgarten's near contemporary Emmanuel Kant was unconvinced, saying that the term “aesthetics” as a name for a “science” could correctly be applied only to a study of the laws of sensibility (as in the Greek root aesthetes); at the same time, he rejected the idea that a science of the beautiful was possible. Beauty, claimed Kant, is entirely a phenomenon of the senses, though it is of great spiritual importance, since beauty connects and reconciles that which the mind can understand with that which the senses experience.[2] This is a profound statement of our real psychological situation, in which an earthly sensory experience of beauty can mysteriously produce in us a sense of transcendent Meaning.

“Aesthetics” as a new science of the beautiful was also rejected at first by British thinkers, who agreed with Kant. Nevertheless, Baumgarten's usage prevailed, no doubt because the idea of a scientific analysis and definition allowing beauty to be categorized, measured, captured, has been irresistibly attractive. By 1859, a hundred years after Baumgarten’s proposal, the word was so used not only in Germany but throughout Europe.[3]

The next mutation of its meaning was proposed by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1773-1831), who claimed that the provinces of beauty and of the aesthetic cover the same territory, but that “specifically described, [the aesthetic’s] province is that of art.” This led in turn to a general understanding that “Aesthetics” has to do only with art and the philosophy of art. Increasingly, the word has even come to be used as a synonym for art.[4]

Until this point, a strong connection between beauty in nature and beauty in art had generally been taken for granted. But if “Aesthetics” does not concern itself with the beauty to be found in the “immensity and magnificence” of nature, art and nature are conceptually separated and beauty in art is whatever the experts currently say it is. Divide and conquer! This is the scientific method, and a crucial change in thinking.

We still look for beauty, of course, not only in nature and the arts but in upscale commercial environments: beautiful magazine layouts, photographs of natural and human-made beauties—clothes, human beings, animals and plants, landscapes, gardens, and interiors. Most advertisements for getaway travel offer an image of it. You could have sex on this pristine tropical beach! In all media, beauty is repeatedly used commercially—to lure us into believing that we want whatever is being sold, when it is beauty itself that we crave. [5]

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Aesthetics as an intellectual discipline—as the science of “the beautiful as found in the arts”—has been in existence for only about 150 years, but it has so triumphed that today it is defined as the science whose subject matter is “the description and explanation of the arts, artistic phenomena, and aesthetic experience, and includes the psychology, sociology, ethnology and history of the arts and essentially related aspects.”[6]

But this “science,” which is researched, written about and taught by People Who Know, is not grounded in any consensus as to what Art and Beauty are or may be. What is music? The Smithsonian Institution asked a group of experts from all over the world to answer the question for a documentary shown on PBS in 1989.[7] No one could answer it. In 1999, the New York Times invited thirteen members of the “New York Art World”— artists, dealers, critics and so on—to define what art is.[8] They were unable to do so, individually or collectively. A science of the undefinable is an odd science indeed.

Critics and artists often insist that art and beauty bear no relationship to one another. The French Ministry of Culture denied funding to the Paris choreographer and flamenco dancer Blanca Li in 1997; one critic explained that she “still had aesthetic tendencies.”[9] It is no wonder that the public is confused and alienated, and the world of the visual arts chaotic, commercially corrupted, and debased. A furniture catalogue refers, carefully, to the framed prints offered for sale as “wall décor,” in neat avoidance of the difficulty.[10]

However Professor Diffey senses that the word “aesthetic” is currently evolving yet again, and writes, toward the end of his article:

I suspect, however, that the term …is now taking on in general usage meanings and resonances which cannot be captured by restriction to that which pertains only to art and/or beauty…[it is becoming] a term that extends thought by pointing to new and as yet not entirely understood territory.

He provides two phrases from then-current literature as examples of this suspected power of the term to extend our thinking in new directions. The first example is: “the aesthetic, intuitive factor that is declared to be ultimately real…”; the other: “that innate respect for life as a thing of quite definite aesthetic values….” To me, each suggests an author’s need for a way in which to refer directly to experiences for which there is no satisfactory identifying word or symbol. And each brings us back to the everyday world of conscious sensing, in which there is, again and again, the potential for an experience of the transcendent. The aesthetic is seen to have to do with life itself, and with some kind of ultimate reality; the implication is that both life and ultimate reality are somehow connected to qualities found in art. Professor Diffey concludes by saying that in order to begin to understand this trend, “we might look profitably at the overlap of aesthetics and the philosophy of religion when the latter is not…tacitly identified with Christianity.” Yes.

Here is an excerpt from the New York Times, from the year 2000, in which a writer on architecture and an exhibition designer both have definite, if indirect, things to say about beauty, transcendence, and the aesthetic, and the problems associated with them today:

The new Rose Center for Earth and Space [designed by James Stewart Polshek], at the American Museum of Natural History in New York…[consists of] an enormous aluminum-clad sphere, eighty-seven feet in diameter, set within a cube of glass[[11]]…. [I]t sometimes seems as if the glass box were going to fold back and the sphere start to rise, silently floating up into the sky like a bubble.… [It] is a temple of serene geometries….

…[Ralph Appelbaum, the exhibition designer] also designed elements that use the sphere itself as a demonstration of scale. Objects are hung from the ceiling and affixed to railings, and each has a message: if the sphere is the sun, then this little nine-inch ball is the earth, and if the sphere is a rhinovirus, then this ten-inch ball is a hydrogen atom. All of the elements are beautiful, vivid, and clear. “There was a desire throughout this whole project to deal with how hard it is to create the experience of awe,” Appelbaum says. “We get it in great architecture, but now, at a time when the language is so perverted that a…sneaker or a perfume is described as ‘awesome,’ we need to think again about how we can create a sense of aesthetic awe.”

[Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker, 1/17/00 pp 72, 78]

One hears it said that in the past art was “co-opted” by religion as a means of persuasion —no doubt in the same way that it has now been “co-opted” by commerce. How different it would be to say what is well known, that virtually all cultures except the Islamic and the Hebrew have used art as a means of expression of religious experience and aspiration, and even those cultures embody spiritual significance in the abstract arts of architecture and calligraphy. If the word “aesthetic” does in fact begin to take on a meaning which is in some way connected with religious experience, it is not surprising at a time when institutional religion is fading as a consciously available resource in the lives of many people.

The grand contemporary museum of art is often called the cathedral of our time, and it is said that we go there to be restored, refreshed, renewed. [12] Some years ago, an advertisement in the New Yorker magazine featured a black and white photograph of a Cézanne still life. The caption reads, “Soul food is now being served at the Art Gallery of Ontario.” The assumption is that readers will understand what that means without being told—and we do, not in words but in experience and memory of experience.

But what is it about art that is feeding us, restoring and renewing us? Why is it that a concert or a performance of opera can make life seem worth living—can inspire, elevate, energize us? And is it the soul that is fed? An Islamic poem advises, “If you have two dinars, spend one on bread to feed your body, the other on hyacinths to feed your soul.” There is an underlying deep reality perceivable in nature and in the arts, of which we continue to be aware, and on which we continue to depend, in spite of all the authoritative talk about the science of aesthetics and the impossibility of the idea of God, and so on. I will explore something of the connection between the arts and the human aspiration toward the transcendent in a later chapter.

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How did we arrive at such intellectual disarray in relation to the Aesthetic? A partial answer can be imagined. Early in the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the term beauty was “displaced in favor of the concepts of art and creativity.” [13] At more or less the same time, the most important meaning of “symmetry” and the very word “concinnity” appear to have been lost to the general use and understanding. Art and the philosophy of art gradually came to be regarded as the province of the new science, or philosophy, of Aesthetics. Beauty was still a matter of fundamental interest—although, as it turned out, it cannot be convincingly measured or analyzed and is therefore resistant to science. In art as in the natural world, relationships among parts are too complex to be fully expressed in mathematical formulae, or even to be clearly conceptualized. If only those things which can be scientifically investigated are worthwhile, the arts are of interest only to the extent to which they can thus be investigated, named and tamed, and eventually, analyzed by experts. And what extent is that?

We know that “Aesthetics” as a science of the beautiful took a hundred years or so to become widely accepted throughout Europe. In England by that time an enthusiastic amateur had appeared: the virtuoso in matters aesthetic, the more-than-usually-sensitive and educated soul who knew beauty when he saw it, who had “taste.” A liberal politics was on the rise, and the enthusiastic Third Earl of Shaftesbury saw a “happy Balance of Power between our Prince and People.”[14] In his opinion, Britain’s own “Liberty and happy Constitution” would soon make her “the Principal Seat of the Arts.…[and] When the free Spirit of a Nation turns itself this way, Judgements are formed, Critics arise; the publick eye and ear improve; a right Taste prevails….” The nation was ready to experience a great flowering of the arts, although “she has her Models yet to seek, her Scale and Standard to form, with deliberation and good choice.”[15] “Scale and Standard” were needed for measurement, comparison and evaluation, as much in matters of taste and aesthetic judgement as in the study of liquids and gases.

Young English aristocrats and the sons of newly-rich manufacturers and gentleman farmers took the Grand Tour of Europe (perhaps emboldened by the invention of the carriage spring in 1702) and returned home inspired by what they had seen. All sorts of theories of “the beautiful” were bandied about, often in relation to hopes of its achievement in the scientifically managed landscapes of the great new estates made possible by the enclosure of land formerly held in common. For the Enlightenment, the simplicity and unity of Nature were central ideals. The Greeks and Romans were believed to have expressed the very essence of Nature in their poetry and art. Therefore to imitate them—their buildings, sculpture, and poetry, and as much as possible their landscapes—was to follow the standards of beauty found in nature.

Ever since the early Renaissance individual travelers had made drawings and taken measurements of the ruined monuments of Greece and Rome in order to study them. In 1734 an association called The Society of Dilettanti was formed in London for the connoisseurship, the considered appreciation, of the antique. It was one of the many such “clubs”—literary, artistic and social associations—which, along with political groups, were characteristic of the period.[16] The Society, a gathering of amateur art collectors, was described by Horace Walpole as “a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been to Italy, and the real one, being drunk,” but it nevertheless sponsored the publication of Antiquities of Athens, the first accurate survey of Greek architecture.[17]

At more or less the same time, and among many of the same people, there arose a movement counter to the enthusiasm for the classical; its devotees saw themselves, instead, as connoisseurs of the eccentric, the malformed, the ruined, the awe-inspiring, the uncanny. They deemed such things “picturesque.”

A prominent member of the Society of Dilettanti was Richard Payne Knight, the grandson of an ironmonger, who inherited 10,000 acres in Herefordshire when he came of age in 1771. Knight’s first book was an exploration of a generally less celebrated aspect of classical life. It was an illustrated account of phallus worship, published and privately distributed by the Society, “an idiosyncratic and daring study” entitled: Remains of the Worship of Priapus, lately existing in Isernia, to which is added a Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients. Not surprisingly, the book was controversial. Knight’s later work, An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) was more widely read, and the author, “with his original, not to say perverse, mind” was an important influence on the development of eighteenth century ideas about beauty.[18]

Another voice in the discussion was the philosopher David Hume, who—in opposition to the general Enlightenment aspiration toward objective standards of beauty—insisted upon the relativity of aesthetic judgement, and thus the subjectivity of the experience of beauty. The formidable Richard Payne Knight, carrying this further, opined that beauty was a way of looking, not a quality inherent in particular objects.[19] This sharp shift in emphasis—from the object itself to the educated and sensitive connoisseur, to beauty as existing "in the eye of the beholder”—has had major and regrettable consequences in later times, as we will see.

In 1753 the painter and cartoonist William Hogarth published The Analysis of Beauty, in which he proposed that Beauty is the product of a sinuous and three-dimensional “Line of Beauty.”[20] Hogarth’s views on beauty, like Knight’s, were widely influential, as for example on statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke, who wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful in 1757. Burke’s “aesthetic of sentiment” proposed that the characteristics necessary to beauty were “Smallness, Smoothness, Gradual Variation and Delicacy of form.” Smoothness, he claimed, is “A quality so essential to Beauty that I do not now recollect any thing beautiful that is not smooth….”[21]

Burke was no doubt also influenced by Kant, who by this time had proposed the division of that which had thus far been called “beauty” into two categories—the “beautiful,” seen as feminine, and the “sublime,” seen as masculine.[22] In English thinking about the rural landscape, the aesthetically desirable came gradually to be divided in a similarly curious way into two distinct parts, the first being the beauty of “smoothness,” “delicacy of form,” the sinuous line, and so on. The second was the “picturesque,” which originally meant that which would make a good picture (tell a good story?), but eventually came to refer to those elements which are rough, wild, ruined, eccentric, historically interesting, and so on—things which could be categorized as belonging to the realm of the “sublime.” Elaine Scarry writes, in her 1999 book On Beauty and Being Just:

Kant’s early work, the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, gives so straightforward a list that it can be recited, nearly verbatim, as a shorthand…. the sublime is male and the beautiful is female. The sublime is English, Spanish, and German; the beautiful is French and Italian. The sublime resides in mountains, Milton’s Hell, and tall oaks in a sacred grove; the beautiful resides in flowers and Elysian meadows. The sublime is night, the beautiful day. “The sublime moves” (one becomes “earnest…rigid…astonished”). “Beauty charms.” The sublime is dusk, “disdain for the world…eternity”; the beautiful is lively gaiety and cheer. The sublime is great; the beautiful “can also be small.” …The sublime is principled, noble, righteous; the beautiful is compassionate and good-hearted.

[Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p 83]

A new understanding of beauty was thus established:

Formerly capable of charming or astonishing, now beauty was the not-astonishing; as it was also the not-male, the not-mountainous, the not-righteous, the not-night. Each attribute of the beautiful became one member of an oppositional pair, and because it was almost always the diminutive member, it was also the dismissible member.

[Ibid. p 84]

However, Professor Scarry is confident that Kant and Burke and later writers did not intend to inflict this blow on beauty; rather it was the idea of the “sublime” that did the harm:

The sublime occasioned the demotion of beauty because it ensured that the meadow flowers, rather than their being perceived in their continuity with the august silence of the ancient groves (as they had when the two co-habited the inclusive realm of beauty) were now seen instead as a counterpoint to that grove.

[Ibid. p 84]

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It very often appears that the Greeks—with their fresh, free, intelligent eyes on reality, their minds unimpeded by all the theory, theology and dogma of the succeeding centuries—got things exactly right. A Greek treatise from the first century CE, called On the Sublime, attempted to answer a question left unanswered by Aristotle: What makes great literature great? The treatise, of which about a third has been lost, is one of the foundations of literary criticism. It is attributed to someone known as “Pseudo-Longinus,” there being no conclusive evidence as to who wrote it. It claims that sublimity (Greek hypsos) in literature is the “echo of greatness of spirit.” This has been taken to mean that the imaginative and moral power of the writer pervades the work, that greatness is the product of qualities innate in the writer, rather than in the work.[23]

But if Longinus’s observation is combined with the phenomenon so frequently reported by musicians and artists as well as writers, that the work “comes from somewhere and flows through” them—we have something seemingly more mysterious, and certainly more interesting. [24] The work flows through the writer or painter or musician, into his or her brain and hand and out onto the page, coming from who-knows-where? Life? The Universe? God? The Great Source? [25] More recently we find it referred to as the vast sea of energy known as “the Zero Point Field” in contemporary physics, or in a text exploring the parallels between quantum mechanics and Buddhism as “the non-local Self,” or “the conscious intelligence field.”[26] Does it matter what it’s named, when it is so clearly and commonly experienced? A British actress reported that she once found Sir Lawrence Olivier in tears in his dressing room after a brilliant production of “Othello.” When she protested that his performance had been overwhelming in its power and authority, the great actor lamented, “But I don’t know how I did it!” Longinus wrote of “possession by a spirit not one’s own.” Sublimity strikes both the artist and the reader/viewer/hearer: “For, as if instinctively our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard.”[italics mine] I am confident that by the “true sublime,” Longinus meant that which I am calling < >´. It is ultimate beauty, in all its breadth and power.

The cult of the Picturesque (and of the Sublime: the two got rather muddled together) led to some remarkable goings-on in the English landscape, and eventually in landscapes on the Continent in imitation: newly-built ornamental “ruins,” a fashion for wind-blasted trees and rocky chasms, new tumbledown hermitages with hired hermits in residence. Lord Shaftesbury wrote admiringly of “the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s and broken Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself.” Oh my.

It is interesting to note the evolving Romantic ideal of the poet, painter, or composer, in the late 18th and the 19th century, as a passionate and eccentric outsider, while in the arts of the time the sinuous line of beauty is everywhere evident. The work is beautiful, the artist sublime. This is beauty divided and undone in a great flood of sentimentality: a fiercely individual and self-congratulatory (and sublimely masculine) originality on one side, unctuous smoothness and sweetness on the other. Yet in the great works of the period, as in the greatest works of every period, a reassuring order is enlivened by the unpredictable and contingent to somehow achieve < >´, an intense condition of being to which subtlety and nuance are essential.

Professor Scarry tells us that in classical times Beauty was considered so potent as to be a danger to the beholder, but by now the balance has shifted such that it is the beholder who is powerful; beauty is fragile and dependent.[27] The beholder decides what is beautiful, and the more expert he or she is perceived as being, the more the decision is likely to be accepted as final.

I think it likely that one impetus for a “science” of the visual originated in a need among people newly enriched by the industrial revolution for an easy road to appreciation of the “fine” arts. Before the days of multiple reproduction, the pleasures of such connoisseurship outside the churches had generally been reserved for those who could afford to own paintings, buy books, and employ musicians—or who could make art themselves. But features such as Hogarth’s “Line of beauty” could be discerned by anyone. Hume’s statement that “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them”—an idea proposed in Greece as early as the third century BC—is encountered now in its 19th century form as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,”[28] and is a comfort to many.[29] Such easy connoisseurship has necessarily been like a devaluation of currency, in which the means of exchange is more widely dispersed, but loses value and quality.

The confusion generated by effete 18th century pundits on beauty and on its position in the object/viewer relationship has been long-lasting. In the Funk and Wagnall dictionary published in New York and London in 1913, we find, among the entries under “beauty” and “beautiful”:

[beauty:] Five principal kinds of beauty may be distinguished: that of the sublime, of the proportional, of the graceful, of the wild or luxurious, and of the pretty or handsome. These are distinguished by the physiological and psychological elements and accompaniments which compose the complex states of consciousness with which different kinds of objects are appreciated as beautiful. . .

[beautiful:] Synonyms : attractive, beauteous, bewitching, charming, comely, delightful, elegant, exquisite, fair, fine, good-looking, graceful, handsome, lovely, picturesque, pretty. . . There must also be harmony and unity, and in human beings spiritual loveliness, to constitute an object or a person really beautiful. Thus we speak of a beautiful landscape, a beautiful poem. But beautiful implies also, in concrete objects, softness of outline and delicacy of mold: it is opposed to all that is hard and rugged: hence we may say a beautiful woman, but not a beautiful man. . . Handsome is a term far inferior to beautiful; we may even say a handsome villain.

[Funk and Wagnalls, New Standard English Dictionary of the English Language]

We can hear in this the struggle of a lexicographer trying valiantly to pin down a hopelessly intangible concept with some kind of precision. Today, two hundred and fifty years after Hogarth, Kant, Burke, and Knight, the concepts of beauty, the aesthetic, art itself, nature itself, and the psychology of our appreciation, still roil around in a sort of clouded pool, connected to one another or dependent upon one another, and all more or less compromised.

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The anarchistic ideas of the European avant-garde of the late 19th and early 20th century (vital still) were and are in part a reaction to the long reign of a limited and feminized idea of beauty. Art has in fact virtually no connection to, and is entirely different from, that which is “bewitching, charming, elegant, exquisite, pretty.” The Desmoiselles d’Avignon is art, and so are Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and so many other “difficult” works that have followed them in the ever-forward march of the avant-garde.[30].

In contemporary scholarly discourse, however, Beauty, so long dismissed as irrelevant, begins to re-appear as a potentially serious subject. Harvard magazine ran a cover story on recent academic thinking about beauty, and on Professor Scarry’s new book, in 1999:

In American universities, beauty has been in exile. Despite its centrality in human experience, the concept of beauty has virtually disappeared from scholarly discourse. Oddly enough, the banishment has been most complete in the humanities, home of literature, music, and art. Criticized as an elitist concept, an ethnocentric creation of white European males, beauty has been stigmatized as sexist, racist…. Attention to beauty, some say, may distract us from the world’s injustices…. Current analytic approaches such as semiotics, deconstruction, and cultural studies have eclipsed the study of beauty, and not only at elite institutions such as Harvard…. Harvard president [and professor of English and American Literature and Language] Neil Rudenstine [says]: “Marx, Freud, anthropological studies, various forms of cultural studies, new theories of gender-related or ethnicity-related analysis: all of these stress very different aspects of works of art. Aesthetics isn’t high on the list.”

[Harvard Magazine September -October 1999, pp 46, 48]

The cover image of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s 1999 book, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime consists of a collage of fragments of photographs and paintings of women’s red and smiling lips. The author, who is a painter as well as a theorist, writes that “beauty is entirely feminine,” in contrast to “the contemporary sublime”—that is, technology—seen as masculine. Technology, he says, is the means of operation of the corporate world, which exploits beauty to advertise its wares without ever delivering on its promises. Instead, it delivers our contemporary landscape of shopping malls, fast food joints and sprawling housing developments.[31] Beautiful manufactured goods—cars, furniture, textiles—are as expensive as hand-made luxuries once were. They are advertised and promoted only in the glossiest magazines, and mainly to stimulate dreams of beauty in the magazine’s readers: the actual market for these goods is necessarily small.

Some of the difficulties arising from the limitation of the idea of beauty to qualities such as “smallness, smoothness, gradual variation and delicacy of form,” that is, from considering it to be “entirely feminine,” can be seen in the following paragraphs from Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe’s book:

[I]f beauty is now (when, in fact, was it not) inextricably entwined with glamour… and if the place where one finds beauty as glamour is in certain photographs, then only that painting which seeks to make the idea of painting itself converge with the condition of the photograph could articulate the language of glamour, i.e., be beautiful.…

Painting that doesn’t seek such a convergence is, in its commitment to denial, consigned eternally to the sublime as a poetics of the negative: not beautiful, eruptive, rough, sincerely nonaesthetical, lumpy, scabrous, always threatening to lapse into the merely human in its attempt to get beyond just that, i.e., to preserve pathos (meaning) in the course of invoking terror (meaninglessness).[[32]]

The beautiful…is indifferent to the pathetic and the terrifying, leaving them in the eyes of the beholder, who recognizing beauty’s refusal to be interested, may indeed feel terrified and pathetic: powerless in the face of an attractiveness which is also an indifference (the beautiful an object which mutely raises the question of what the right way to look at it might be…).

[Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime p 97]

In this view, painting that makes no attempt either to be “beautiful” in the current, debased sense of the word, or to converge with the mechanical perfection and transparency of the photographic image, must limit itself to that which is “rough, eruptive, lumpy, sincerely nonaesthetical” (in 18th century terms, “picturesque” and perhaps “sublime”) in its “attempt to preserve pathos (meaning).” I spoke earlier of the poignancy of beauty’s evanescence, but that is only one aspect of its pathos. As Mr. Gilbert-Roth says, pathos is fundamental to the experience of art, which can include the powerful, the monumentally simple, the rough and lumpy and scabrous—as Rodin demonstrated in The Burghers of Calais—or perhaps anything else whatever. A Rembrandt landscape rendered in mud or smeared feces instead of in sepia ink would still be beautiful.

Presented with strong, true beauty, our little individual life in this vast universe feels meaningful, somehow redeemed, and when we come across it we experience that.

Certainly [Vermeer’s] work is beautiful, but in unsettling ways that sheer away from the subjects of the pictures. The mighty red of the hat in “Girl with a Red Hat” confounds like a shocking comment made in polite company, which only you appear to have heard. The play of sunlight on the collar and cowl of the girl in “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” also jolts—it could be the secret of life—and when you try to call attention to it you stammer.

…Vermeer beggars analysis. There is a discomfort—a prickling itch—in my experience of him. Looking and looking, I feel I have only begun to look.

…the sonorous yellow of the prostitute’s dress sets off an eruption of beauty. (Isn’t Vermeer the painter of yellow…?) [Most of] Vermeer’s major work…is at once spiritual and erotic.[[33]]

… As we ponder all this, the work melts us with a subtle, plangent triad of the primary colors; yellow book, bluish leaves on the canvas, the painter’s red stockings. Vermeer is in the details.

…[Proust’s] passage [in which a character, deathly ill, imagines his whole life in balance with “a little patch of yellow wall” in a Vermeer] sets a sacramental seal on the art of Vermeer as a shrine of artistic devotion. You would think that veneration so exquisite, verging on the epicene, indicates an object of, well, recherché taste. But anyone with eyes can go goofy over this or that little patch of something in Vermeer.

…I think that Vermeer’s ideal was a classless, timeless truth that is returning to the fore in contemporary culture: the essential role that aesthetic pleasure must play in any seriously lived life. Each of us is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision. Ultimately, Vermeer’s appeal is about nothing other than the realization of that gift. Looking at his pictures, we experience the farthest frontiers of a necessary joy.[[34]]

[Peter Schjeldhal, The New Yorker 4/16/01, p 78]

This is the writing of a critic overcome—by real, undefinable, transcendent beauty in art—and thereby set free of everyday constraints. When I read it, I feel love for him. In order to relay his experience he is compelled to speak of the ineffable, to “go goofy,” to refer to such direly unfashionable concepts as “timeless truth” and inborn “gifts.”[35] As he says, each of us is born to see and feel (or to use all of the five senses, physically and in imagination) intensely and with precision. But we arrive at the farthest frontiers of joy in an experience of the existence of < >´ in the painting, or the cello sonata, in something in the natural physical world, or in a dream generated by our own mind/body.

In the experience of those of us living in consumer economies, the idea of beauty seems at present to be almost entirely entangled in what the English critic, poet, and novelist John Berger calls "the aestheticism of sex," which he says has "helped to keep a consumer society stimulated, competitive, and dissatisfied."[36] The connection between sex and beauty is obviously strong. Beauty is the great aphrodisiac: we desire to grasp and hold all beauty, mentally if not physically, wherever we come upon it. An understanding of beauty as a concinnitous order, potentially available anywhere, a relationship among parts such that they form a harmonious whole, is both ancient and regularly recurring. In contemporary culture we have lost our awareness of the underlying quality—both harmonious and full of life—which is necessary to beauty, whether in nature or in the arts, or in a moment of inspired coherence between two people. Unaware of it, most of us neither demand it nor pursue it; in fact we may now consciously and perversely pursue its opposite.

Plato wrote (in the Symposium) that love creates beauty, such love being inspired especially by the beauty of a human being and by a yearning for immortality; the lover desires to “engender in the beautiful.” It is often stated that the Greeks did not include works of art, in our sense of that term, among the works and deeds inspired by love’s creative power.[37] However, the Symposium’s host does in fact speak of the connection between love and art:

In the first place, [Love] is a poet…and he is also the source of poesy in others…And at the touch of him every one becomes a poet even though he had no music in him before…. Love is a good poet and accomplished in all the fine arts; for no man can give to another that which he has not himself, or teach that of which he has no knowledge…. And as to the artists, do we not know that he only whom love inspires has the light of fame?… In the days of old…dreadful deeds were done among the gods, for they were ruled by Necessity; but now since the birth of Love, and from the love of the beautiful, has sprung every good in heaven and earth.

[Plato, The Symposium, from Dialogues of Plato, page 198]

A “symposium” was a drinking party, and Plato’s account, to which scholars so frequently and reverently refer, tells of efforts by participants in the second and necessarily more sober of two such parties, on consecutive nights, to praise the god of Love in eloquent speech, each reveler in turn. A lot of the theorizing focuses on homosexual love, but some of it is more widely applicable, and in every case beauty is essential to the discussion, since, as the first speaker says, “We all know that Love is inseparable from Aphrodite.” When at last Socrates takes his turn, he quotes the teachings of the wise woman Diotima, his early instructress in the arts of love; she is of course not present, but her observations and questions about the subject gradually raise the discussion to a higher level:[38]

“These [physical beauties and noble works] are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates may enter: to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain.… For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first…to love one such form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish he would be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same!…; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form…until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them is all of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after the laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences…drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty…and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.

He who has…learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty… which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others…or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all things.…he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

…[T]hither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine…in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.”

[The Symposium, from Dialogues of Plato, pp 165-218]

The desire to possess—to catch and hold—the beautiful, whether manifest in a person, a landscape, or a work of art, has driven human beings to various kinds of extreme behavior through the ages. Rollo May proposed that Helen of Troy served as a symbol for Beauty itself, and that The Iliad is in part an allegory of its fundamental importance and desirability.[39] The young Louis XIV’s envy and resentment of the extent and beauty of the gardens of his finance minister Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte, designed by the great Le Notre, are believed to have provoked Louis to send Fouquet to prison for life. The King then commissioned Le Notre to design his new, even more magnificent gardens at Versailles. Louis conferred daily with Le Notre until both men were old, and it is said that on their last progress round the vast gardens together the king pushed the wheelchair of his landscape architect and friend. Many favorite Japanese dramas concern the loss and recovery of a masterpiece; in one, Lord Hosokawa rushes into his burning castle to rescue a celebrated painting, and when he realizes that he cannot escape, opens his body with his sword and stows the painting in the open wound. His body is fatally burned, but the painting is undamaged, and its savior has died a hero.[40]

The greatest Beauty is < >´; it is found again and again in Nature, but at our scale of time it appears and disappears more or less unpredictably. In the arts, it can be intuitively achieved by human beings and retained, or re-achieved in different form.

I long for beauty of this fundamental kind—a nobility and justice and rightness among parts, the whole much greater than the sum of its parts, something extraordinary within the ordinary, bringing us to life—and I feel an irritated impatience with “beauty” in the current sense of that which is necessarily and only pleasant and elegant and conventionally attractive—or even more fatuously, soft, small, and sinuous.

Beauty is order, clarity, right proportion, enlivened or not. It can be found not only in nature and in every variety of art, but in mental structures like mathematics and logic, in human justice and in human interaction. It is either < >, or < >´. When Francis Bacon spoke of that “excellent beauty that hath…some strangeness in the proportion,” he described an enlivened beauty, a dynamic equilibrium, what I am here calling < >´ : the harmonious serenity of beauty brought to life to greater or lesser degree by an intrinsic—something else. And this is indeed an “excellent” beauty, beauty as it is most intensely experienced. It provides a poignancy and power which a static beauty lacks, having undergone a “sea-change, into something rich and strange.”

This may be a manifestation of paradox as a universal and intrinsic reality, that is, of a logical incongruity as fundamental to all that is. If so, it is far outside our vaunted Western system of logic, inherited from the ancient Greeks and essential to classical science. Within that logic, paradox is intolerable; it allows no provable conclusion.

[1] Reality, all of it, is in a state of flux—forming, dissolving, re-forming. As to the condition of < >´: sculptors attempt to form it from clay and stone, musicians from sound. Photographers make it by setting up a promising situation in the studio, or by catching it when it occurs—and developing it in the darkroom. Some are like hawks: a continuous discriminating gaze, fully aware, then suddenly seeing, moving in the instant. Some take multiple pictures, hoping that one can be developed into “it.” Others wait, all their knowledge and intuition available in the conscious moment, then the move. And later the sorting, the modification of the negative, the various options for printing, the manipulation of the print, all of which Adams said was at least half the process. [Vanity Fair, July 2001] Today, of course, digital images are manipulated by computer, but the process is the same. Finally—occasionally— < >´, and the deep joy of both artist and viewer.

[2] Encyclopedia Britannica Vol. 1, p 228

[3] D.J. Diffey, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1994

[4] Ibid.

[5] This, as perhaps might have been foreseen, has in turn brought about an aestheticization of the banal in aesthetic criticism, as pointed out by Donald Cuspit in The Dialectic of Decadence, note 20, p. 67. “…[K]itsch has come to offer new reflective possibilities, because we no longer know what to make of it, or rather, because it has become pervasive we have to make something of it—seriously reflect on it, as though what it is about is not self-evident—to preserve our sanity.” Robert Venturi’s celebration of strip mall “architecture,” and the current elevation of comic books to “graphic literature” are obvious examples of this phenomenon.

[6] Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

[7] WGBH TV, Boston, 1989

[8] The New York Times, 1999.

[9] The New Yorker, 4/28/97, p 187

[10] Ethan Allen Co. catalogue, January 2000.

[11] A beautiful photograph of this “serene geometry,” accompanying the article, showed the building’s giant sphere illuminated and enclosed in its cube of glass—at night, in the rain, its multi-lateral symmetries interrupted by bare branches, the dark form of a living tree silhouetted between the viewer and the building. Geometric perfection is brought into the real world, in company that both harmoniously complements and enlivens it. A friend who went to see the building in daylight found it disappointing, “compared to the photograph in the Times.”

[12] For example: by the eminent Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell in a lecture at the De Cordova museum in Lincoln, MA, March 1995.

[13] Diffey, op.cit. p 38.

[14] Shaftesbury, in “Letter…Concerning Design,” quoted in Rudolph Wittkower, Palladio and Palladianism, p 180.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Encyclopedia Britannica Vol 2, p 252a.

[17] David Watkin, The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Garden Design, p 78

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Encyclopedia Britannica Vol. 11, p 579

[21] Edmund Burke, quoted by David Watkin, Op. cit. p 68.

[22] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p 83

[23] Encyclopedia Britannica On-line; Literature: Critical Theories, Longinus. (3/25/04) This moral power is of course not necessarily connected in any obvious way to the mores of a given society. ≈

[24] In one example among hundreds, Henri Matisse testified: “I have been no more than a medium, as it were.”

[25] As in Deepak Chopra, in The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Consciousness.

[26] Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, p 25 & etc.

[27] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p 73-86

[28] David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political, 1742.

[29] This is true to the extent that personal preferences and prejudices are an element in our judgement.

[30] They were found shocking when they first appeared; the ability to shock is now often taken as an indication of a new work’s probable importance

[31] The tract house is often built to last only as long as the mortgage—when that has been paid off, no more interest on investment is generated for the mortgage-giver. Planned obsolescence is now characterized as an aspect of “marketing,” as I learned when browsing in the library of the Harvard Business School. Anything we buy will later have to be thrown away and replaced. To fix it costs more than the purchase price; it will either break or be rendered obsolete. We must be conditioned to want it very much and then it must self-destruct as soon as possible, short of consumer outrage. A delicate balance.

[32] Here one might think of the work of painters like Lucien Freud, Alice Neel, and Francis Bacon.

[33] Remember Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, and the “still and restful, but…intensely sensual, almost erotic” moments to be experienced in a Japanese gardens (p. 26)

[34] Note also the similarity between this and Longinus’s “…as if instinctively our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard.” Both Takemitsu and Schjeldhal refer to < >´, and to the sublime.

[35] I would contend that only a critic able and willing to “go goofy” occasionally in this way is worthy of our attention.

[36] John Berger, The Sense of Sight, p 90]

[37] For example, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 1, p 224.

[38] I give this quotation at length, since the Symposium is so often identified as a source for Western thinking about beauty. However in my experience its clear message is as often slighted and over-simplified—trivialized, in a limiting focus on the idea of engendering in the beautiful, as in the Encyclopedia Britannica entry quoted earlier. Elaine Scarry, in Beauty and Being Just, appears to be burdened by this same convention, and goes to some trouble to incorporate it into her theory.

[39] Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty.

[40] Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea.