Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
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Last annotated on March 14, 2017
pursued when we reason in favour of our aesthetic judgements. 5Read more at location 1237
Note: relativismo culturale: il bello nn esiste croce: Bellezza e bellezza l arte ha un contenuto (inseparabile dalla forma) e và capita rappresentare ed esprimersi: possedere un significayo farebbe penssre a una rappresentazione ma il significato dell opera è intraducibile. Croce: l arte è espressione intuitiva... poichè in essa l umano è imprescindibile. problemi: 1 l arte ha un significato e dire che l arte è un intuizione nulla ci dice del suo significato 2 l intentonally fallacy non sarebbe così evidente se l opera fosse davvero pura espressione esprimere come verbo intransitivo formalismo: si contraddice usando esso stesso un linguaggio metaforico nello spiegare l opera. capire l opera = capire la logica metaforica l arte si connette alla nostra esperienza emotiva + profonda (il qs senso è espressiva). la bellezza non è una proprietà dell oggetto ma una esperienza di connessione. l arte come ordine incipiente che ci predispone alla gratuita ricerca di senso arte e verità: ordine e ricrrca gratuita di significato... l arte ci conduce alle verità ultime arte x arte: l arte va giudicata solo con il criterio suo proprio... ma x quanto detto prima capiamo che l arte nn può essere moralmente neutrale... il tanto vituperato moralismo nell arte è innanzitutto un errore estetico Edit
5 Artistic BeautyRead more at location 1237
Only in the course of the nineteenth century, and in the wake of Hegel’s posthumously published lectures on aesthetics, did the topic of art come to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics.Read more at location 1238
Art picked up the torch of beauty, ran with it for a while, and then dropped it in the pissoirs of Paris.Read more at location 1242
Joking apart A century ago Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the name ‘R. Mutt’,Read more at location 1243
One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question ‘What is art?’Read more at location 1245
searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand,Read more at location 1249
The argument is eagerly embraced, because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that TV soaps are ‘as good as’ Shakespeare and Radiohead the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void. The argument therefore chimes with the fashionable forms of cultural relativism,Read more at location 1251
There is a useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artefact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that ‘falls flat’. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke ‘in bad taste’. But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad.Read more at location 1255
Art as a functional kind Works of art, like jokes, have a dominant function. They are objects of aesthetic interest.Read more at location 1262
They may fulfil this function in a rewarding way, offering food for thought and spiritual uplift, winning for themselves a loyal public that returns to them to be consoled or inspired.Read more at location 1263
it really matters which kind of art you adhere to, which you include in your treasury of symbols and allusions, which you carry around in your heart.Read more at location 1267
Good taste is as important in aesthetics as it is in humour, and indeed taste is what it is all about.Read more at location 1268
When it comes to art, aesthetic judgement concerns what you ought and ought not to like, and (I shall argue) the ‘ought’ here, even if it is not exactly a moral imperative, has a moral weight.Read more at location 1269
increasingly many teachers of the humanities agree with their incoming students, that there is no distinction between good and bad taste, but only between your taste and mine.Read more at location 1272
Mao Ze Dong burst into laughter: it was at the circus, when a tight-rope walker fell from the high wire to her death.Read more at location 1274
Imagine a world in which people laughed only at others’ misfortunes.Read more at location 1275
It would be a degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found its endorsementRead more at location 1277
Imagine now a world in which people showed an interest only in replica Brillo boxes, in signed urinals,Read more at location 1279
What would such a world have in common with that of Duccio, Giotto, Velazquez, or even Cézanne? Of course, there would be the fact of putting objects on display, and the fact of our looking at them through aesthetic spectacles. But it would be a world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the transcendent, and in which mounds of rubbish cover the sites of our ideals. Art and entertainmentRead more at location 1281
Benedetto Croce pointed to a radical distinction, as he saw it, between art properly so-called, and the pseudo-art designed to entertain, arouse or amuse.Read more at location 1286
When seeking entertainment, however, I am not interested in the cause but in the effect. Whatever has the right effect on me is right for me,Read more at location 1289
The point urged by Croce and Collingwood is exaggeratedRead more at location 1291
Amusement is not opposed to aesthetic interest, since it is already a form of it.Read more at location 1293
It is not surprising, therefore, if, from their exaggerated dismissal of entertainment art, Croce and Collingwood each derived aesthetic theories as implausible as any in the literature.Read more at location 1293
The photographic image has to some extent deadened us to the contrast here.Read more at location 1296
There have been few directors as conscious as Ingmar Bergman, of the temptation posed by the camera, and the need to resist it.Read more at location 1304
Bergman chose to make Wild Strawberries in black and white, even though colour had by then (1957) become the lingua franca.Read more at location 1308
Wild Strawberries is one of many examples of true cinematic art, in which the techniques of the cinema serve a dramatic purpose,Read more at location 1322
Wild Strawberries is one of many examples of true cinematic art,Read more at location 1322
illustrates the distinction between aesthetic interest and mere effect: the first creating a distance that the second destroys.Read more at location 1324
ability to turn a shared repertoire in a personal direction, so that a single character is revealed in each of them. That is what we mean by style,Read more at location 1361
Suppose you ask me what is the content of Van Gogh’s famous painting of the yellow chair.Read more at location 1381
I am likely to argue that this painting is saying something special about this particular chair, and also about the world as seen through the image of this chair.Read more at location 1384
But couldn’t he have written that message on the bottom of the canvas? Why does he need a chair to communicate a thought like that? I am likely to respond that my words are only a gesture; that the real meaning of the painting is bound up with, inseparable from, the image—Read more at location 1387
cannot be translated completely into another idiom.Read more at location 1390
We want to say that works of art are meaningful—they are not just interesting forms in which we take an unexplained delight. They are acts of communication, which present us with a meaning; and this meaning must be understood.Read more at location 1392
We listen to abstract music, like the quartets of Bartók and Schoenberg, and perhaps say that we do not understand them.Read more at location 1394
Some works have changed the way we see the world—Goethe’s Faust, for example, Beethoven’s late quartets, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Vergil’s Aeneid, Michelangelo’s Moses, the Psalms of David and the Book of Job.Read more at location 1397
Yet, when it comes to saying, of any particular work of art, just what its content might be, we find ourselves very soon reduced to silence.Read more at location 1400
Thus we arrive at what has become a critical commonplace, which is the thesis of the inseparability of form and content.Read more at location 1402
particular version of this thesis in the realm of literary criticism goes by the name of the ‘heresy of paraphrase’—an expression due to the critic Cleanth Brooks.Read more at location 1403
The heresy to which Brooks referred is that of thinking that the meaning of a poem can be contained in a paraphrase;Read more at location 1404
Brooks is pointing to several distinct features of poetry. First, there is the fact that a line of poetry can express several thoughts simultaneously, whereas a paraphrase will at best lay them out in succession. For instance, the line ‘bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’,Read more at location 1407
Secondly, there is the fact that poetry is ‘polysemous’, developing its meaning on several levels—the levels of image, of statement, of metaphor, of allegory and so on.Read more at location 1413
A paraphrase would have to spell out the levels of meaning separately;Read more at location 1416
Thirdly meaning is lost in any paraphrase. You could paraphrase the first line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy as ‘To live or to die: that’s the choice’; or ‘to exist or not to exist; there’s the problem’. But Shakespeare wanted the verb ‘to be’, with all its metaphysical resonance, as touching the very mystery of the universe:Read more at location 1417
It is not just the meaning and association of words that count towards their sense in poetry. The sound too is important—and not just sound: sound as organized by syntax, and shaped as language. So, finally, there is the sheer untranslateability of the semantic atmosphere in poetry.Read more at location 1422
For the most part you can say much about the meaning of a poem, a painting—even a work of music. But what you say will not explain the particular intensity of meaningRead more at location 1429
The distinction goes back to Croce and Collingwood, though it corresponds to thoughts that have been around for far longer.Read more at location 1433
Representation can be judged to be more or less realistic—in other words, more or less in conformity with the generality of the things and situations described. It admits of translation and paraphrase;Read more at location 1437
Mantegna’s and Grünewald’s Crucifixions both represent the crucifixion of JesusRead more at location 1439
An accurate representation may also be meaningless as a work of art—Read more at location 1440
All those features caused Croce to dismiss representation as inessential to the aesthetic enterprise.Read more at location 1441
According to Croce, therefore, the burden of artistic meaning lies not with representation but with expression.Read more at location 1448
works of art express emotion, and that this is of value to us because it acquaints us with the human condition, and arouses our sympathies for experiences that we do not otherwise undergo.Read more at location 1451
Even when artists refer to the emotion that is allegedly conveyed by their work, we may not believe that their description is the correct one.Read more at location 1454
Beethoven prefaced the slow movement of Op. 132 with the description ‘Hymn of thanksgiving from the convalescent to the Godhead in the Lydian mode’. Suppose you respond by saying ‘To me it is just a serene expression of contentment,Read more at location 1455
Why is Beethoven any better placed than you, to put words to the feeling conveyed by his music? Maybe you, as critic, are better able to describe the emotional content of a piece of music than the composer. There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot’s response to Helen Gardner’s book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.Read more at location 1458
attempts to describe the emotional content of works of art seem to fall short of their target. The feeling does not have an independent life: it is there in the notes,Read more at location 1461
Expression does not deal in concepts but in intuitions—particular experiences, that are conveyed by communicating their uniqueness. Two works of art can represent the same thing; but they cannot express the same thing—for a work expresses an intuition only by presenting its individual character, the character that requires just these words, or just these images, if it is to be put across.Read more at location 1468
it presents us with the unconceptualized uniqueness of its subject-matter.Read more at location 1472
to say that a work of art expresses an intuition is like saying that it is identical with itself.Read more at location 1476
There have been many attempts in recent years to revisit and reanimate the distinction between representation and expression,Read more at location 1478
We have witnessed semantic, semiotic, cognitive and similar theories,Read more at location 1480
None of these theories, in my view, has advanced the subject very far.Read more at location 1482
Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.Read more at location 1485
Consider Samuel Barber’s solemn Adagio for Strings—surely one of the most expressive pieces in the instrumental repertoire. How do we understand its expressive power? It is not telling a storyRead more at location 1486
there are not two qualities here, the beauty and the expression, but one quality.Read more at location 1489
what is the difference between the one who understands the expression, and the one who does not?Read more at location 1490
there are two uses of the term ‘expression’: a transitive use, which invites the question ‘expression of what?’, and an intransitive use, which forbids that question.Read more at location 1491
Espressivo in a musical score is always understood intransitively.Read more at location 1493
The question: ‘how can I play this expressively if you don’t tell me what it means?’Read more at location 1493
Performers show their understanding of an expressive work of music not by identifying some state of mind which it is ‘about’, but by playing with understanding.Read more at location 1494
They must fit themselves into the groove of the work. This process of ‘fitting’ is mirrored too in the audience,Read more at location 1495
Hence although Croce’s theory of art as intuition is far too stringent, it is pointing to a puzzle about beauty in art. Why are we so often tempted to speak of expression in this intransitive way? And why is expression a part of beauty?Read more at location 1497
Hanslick’s essay On the Musically Beautiful of 1854 was to become a pivotal document in the dispute between the followers of Brahms, for whom the art of music was essentially architectural, consisting in the elaboration of tonal structures, and the followers of Wagner, who had defended the view that music is a dramatic art, giving form and coherence to our states of mind.Read more at location 1501
music is an abstract art, incapable of presenting definite thoughts. Hence the assertion that a piece of music is expressive of some emotion becomes empty: nothing can be said in answer to the question ‘expressive of what?’Read more at location 1505
Hanslick argued instead that music is understood as ‘forms moved through sound’.Read more at location 1507
emotional associations are no more than that—associations, which have no claim to be the meaning of what we hear.Read more at location 1508
Musical understanding is not a matter of lapsing into a self-centred reverie, prompted by the music, perhaps, but in no way controlled by it. Understanding consists in appreciating the various movements contained in the musical surface,Read more at location 1509
The pleasure that this causes is not unlike the pleasure of pattern in architecture,Read more at location 1511
Hanslick’s theory is not really distinguished from that of the romantics whom he attacks. They agree that music moves, but add that, granted that metaphor, why not help yourself to another—namely, that music moves as the heart moves, when it is moved by feeling? In other words, beauty in music is not just a matter of form: it involves an emotional content.Read more at location 1518
there is a tradition in architectural thinking going back to Alberti’s Ten Books of Architecture (De re aedificatoria, 1452) which sees architectural beauty (concinnitas) as the appropriate fitting of part to part. This parallels the formalist approach advocated by Hanslick and is just as incomplete and just as unsustainable in architectural criticism as in the discussion of music.Read more at location 1523
Ruskin saw in the forms and aspect of this church the theatrical insincerity of the Counter-ReformationRead more at location 1530
Geoffrey Scott, in his great work of criticism, The Architecture of Humanism (1914), responded with what he took to be a purely formal account of the church’s beauty and perfection:Read more at location 1531
Scott says nothing—or nothing clear—about the content of the church, not mentioning its ostensible invocation of the Virgin queen of the sea,Read more at location 1539
On the other hand, when we look at the detail of Scott’s description, we see that it is a sequence of metaphors and similes: ‘their heaped and rolling form (two metaphors) is like that of a heavy substance (simile) … the great statues and pedestals … seem to arrest the outward movement (simile) … the essential simplicity and dignity of the baroque (metaphors) …’. This purely ‘formal’ description, in other words, is logically on a par with the most adventurous attempt to describe the meaning of the church, and could easily be pushed in that direction.Read more at location 1541
To point to these analogies and symbolic connections is as legitimate in the criticism of architecture as it is in the expressionist criticism of music. Browning produced a celebrated instance of such expressionist criticism,Read more at location 1550
It seems odd to make a radical distinction between form and content, when the attempt to describe either involves the same recourse to metaphor,Read more at location 1557
It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion.Read more at location 1561
If we are to understand the nature of artistic meaning, therefore, we must first understand the logic of figurative language. Figurative uses of language aim not to describe things but to connect them, and the connection is forged in the feeling of the perceiver.Read more at location 1563
The connection may be made in many ways: through metaphor, metonymy, simile, personification or a transferred name.Read more at location 1565
The connection between music and emotion is not established by conventions or a ‘theory of musical meaning’. It is established in the experience of playing and hearing.Read more at location 1574
We understand expressive music by fitting it to other elements in our experience, drawing connections with human life, ‘matching’ the musicRead more at location 1575
Thus we praise the Barber Adagio for Strings for its noble solemnity. The metaphor is not arbitrary, since it makes a connection with the moral life which explains why we feel at home with the piece, and elevated by it.Read more at location 1576
If this is a true indication of what the piece means, then it must be anchored in the structure and argument of the music.Read more at location 1578
This suggests a different model of expression from the one presented by Croce and his followers. The Crocean model is of an inarticulate inner state (an ‘intuition’) becoming articulate and conscious through its artistic expression. The rival model is of an artist fitting things together so as to create links which resonate in the audience’s feelings.Read more at location 1588
Note: DIFFERENZA CON CROCE:NN INTUIZIONE VS LINKS (CONNESSIONI)... TRA LA RABBIA DELL ARTISTA E LA MIA NN C È DIFFERENZA. MA TRA L OPERA ARTISTICA E LA MIA RABBIA C È UNA CONNESSIONE ANALOGICA. L ASTRAZIONE CHE HANNO IN COMUNE È IL SIGNIFICATO DELL OPERA Edit
The question what is being expressed ceases to be relevant. What matters is whether this belongs (emotionally speaking) with that.Read more at location 1591
This does not mean that dissonance and conflict have no part in the artistic enterprise: of course they do.Read more at location 1594
Although beauty and meaning are connected in art, some of the most meaningful works of recent times have been downright ugly and even offensiveRead more at location 1600
think of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Gunther Grass’s Tin Drum, Picasso’s Guernica. To call such works beautiful is in a way to diminish and even to trivialize what they are trying to say.Read more at location 1601
Some insight is provided by the connection made by Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, between art and play.Read more at location 1604
In play, elevated by art to the level of free contemplation, reason and sense are reconciled, and we are granted a vision of human life in its wholeness.Read more at location 1610
In appreciating art we are playing; the artist too is playing in creating it.Read more at location 1611
this ludic attitude is fulfilled by beauty, and by the kind of orderliness which retains our interest and prompts us to search for the deeper significance of the sensory world.Read more at location 1612
order and meaning on human life, through the experience of something delightful, is the underlying motive of art in all its forms. Art answers the riddle of existence: it tells us why we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of fittingness.Read more at location 1616
logic which connects the end of things with their beginning, as they are connected in Paradise Lost, in Phèdre and in Der Ring des Nibelungen.Read more at location 1618
Keats’s vision of the Grecian urn, with its message that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all | Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’,Read more at location 1622
Our favourite works of art seem to guide us to the truth of the human conditionRead more at location 1624
We know what it is to love and be rejected, and thereafter to wander in the world infected by a bleak passivity. This experience, in all its messiness and arbitrariness, is one that most of us must undergo. But when Schubert, in Die Winterreise, explores it in song, finding exquisite melodies to illuminate one after another the many secret corners of a desolated heart, we are granted an insight of another order.Read more at location 1626
Beauty reaches to the underlying truth of a human experience, by showing it under the aspect of necessity. I find this point difficult to express.Read more at location 1632
To refer to a truth contained in a work of art is always to risk the corrosive effect of the question: what truth?Read more at location 1634
The insight that art provides is available only in the form in which it is presented: it resides in an immediate experience whose consoling power is that it removes the arbitrariness from the human condition—as the arbitrariness of suffering is overcome in tragedy, and the arbitrariness of rejection in Schubert’s song-cycle.Read more at location 1635
we can make comparative judgements. And these help to flesh out the idea of a truth beyond the work, to which the work is pointing.Read more at location 1639
For example we can ask whether that which is captured by Schubert is captured also by Mahler in his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. And the answer is surely ‘no’:Read more at location 1640
During the nineteenth century there arose the movement of ‘art for art’s sake’: l’art pour l’art. The words are those of Théophile Gautier, who believed that if art is to be valued for its own sakeRead more at location 1646
It is certainly a failing in a work of art that it should be more concerned to convey a message than to delight its audience. Works of propaganda, such as the socialist realist sculptures of the Soviet period or (their equivalent in prose) Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, sacrifice aestheticRead more at location 1650
On the other hand, part of what we object to in such works is their untruthful quality.Read more at location 1653
Art is not morally neutral, but has its own way of making and justifying moral claims.Read more at location 1666
By eliciting sympathy where the world withholds it an artist may, like Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, oppose the bonds of a too constrictive moral order.Read more at location 1667
Many of the aesthetic faults incurred by art are moral faults—sentimentality, insincerity, self-righteousness, moralizing itself.Read more at location 1669
In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbour.Read more at location 1672
You like Bach, she likes U2; you like Leonardo, he likes Mucha; she likes Jane Austen, you like Danielle Steele. Each of you exists in his own enclosed aesthetic world,Read more at location 1674
If it is so offensive to look down on another’s taste, it is, as the democrat recognizes, because taste is intimately bound up with our personal life and moral identity.Read more at location 1677
This we discover as soon as we take into account the public impact of private tastes. Your neighbour fills her garden with kitsch mermaids and Disneyland gnomes, polluting the view from your window; she designs her house in a ludicrous Costa Brava style, in loud primary colours that utterly ruin the tranquil atmosphere of the street, and so on. Now her taste has ceased to be a private matterRead more at location 1680
Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community—of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile. That is one of the reasons why we have planning laws—which, in the great days of Western civilization, have been extremely strict,Read more at location 1689
Think of clothes, interior décor, and bodily ornaments: here too we can be put on edge, excluded or included, made to feel inside or outside the implied community,Read more at location 1694
Many of the clothes we wear have the character of uniforms, designed to express and confirm our inoffensive membershipRead more at location 1696
We begin to see why concepts like decorum and propriety are integral to the sense of beauty: but they are concepts that range equally across the aesthetic and the moral spheres.Read more at location 1701
However, there are also private arts like music and literature. Why are we so concerned that our children should learn to like the things that we regard as beautiful?Read more at location 1702
Why do we worry when children are drawn to literature that is, in our eyes, ugly, stupefying, sentimental or obscene?Read more at location 1703
Plato believed that the various modes of music are connected with specific moral characteristicsRead more at location 1704
You like Brahms, say, and I detest him. So you invite me to listen to your favourite pieces, and after a while they ‘work on me’. Maybe I am influenced by my friendship for you, and make a special effort on your behalf.Read more at location 1710
A change of taste is not a ‘change of mind’, in the way that a change of belief or even of moral posture is a change of mind.Read more at location 1714
justify the child’s graduation from burgers to broccoli. Greens are far more healthy, maybe part of a superior lifestyle, maybe even a spiritual improvement, as the Vegans argue.Read more at location 1716
As our discussion proceeds, unfolding the two rival interpretations of the painting, as pure impression and as social comment, the aspect of the picture will perhaps shift from one to the other—so that the painting seems to contain a lesson, reminding us that we can to some extent choose how the new world of industry should be seen.Read more at location 1738
We can find simpler, and logically more transparent, cases of this kind of change in aspect—like the celebrated duck-rabbit discussed by Wittgenstein.Read more at location 1742
On the contrary, in every perspective picture there are choices to make, concerning what size to attribute to which figure, and what distance to see between the various grounds.Read more at location 1745
The poetry is not a means to its meaning, as though a translation would do just as well. I want you to experience the poem differently, and my critical argument is aimed precisely at a change in your perception.Read more at location 1753
In every case we recognize that there is such a thing as reasoning, which has a changed perception as its goal.Read more at location 1755
is the Grand Canyon breathtaking or corny? Is Bambi moving or kitsch? Is Madame Bovary tragic or cruel? Is The Magic Flute childish or sublime? These are real questions, and hotly disputed too. But to argue them is to present an experience and to present it as appropriate or right.Read more at location 1758
there is a kind of reasoning that has aesthetic judgement as its goal, and that this judgement is bound up with the experience of the one who makes it.Read more at location 1762
You might still question whether this kind of reasoning is objective,Read more at location 1763
Indeed, there are important considerations to the contrary. First, taste is rooted in a broader cultural context,Read more at location 1764
significant differences between the forms of human life, and the satisfactions that people take in them.Read more at location 1766
Consider the ragas of Indian classical music: these belong to a longstanding tradition of listening and performance, and this tradition is dependent on the discipline associated with religious rituals and a devout way of life.Read more at location 1767
Secondly, as noted in Chapter 1, there is no deductive relation between premises and conclusion when the conclusion is a judgement of taste.Read more at location 1771
Finally, we must recognize that any attempt to lay down objective standards threatens the very enterprise that it purports to judge.Read more at location 1773
How might we respond to such arguments? First, it is important to recognize that cultural variation does not imply the absence of cross-cultural universals.Read more at location 1777
Symmetry and order; proportion; closure; convention; harmony, and also novelty and excitement: all these seem to have a permanent hold on the human psyche.Read more at location 1779
The early medievals regarded the fourth as harmonious, the third as dissonant: for us, if anything, it is the other way round.Read more at location 1781
Harmonia for the Greeks consisted in the relation between successive sounds in a melody, and not the consonance of simultaneous notes.Read more at location 1782
in the matter of aesthetic judgement, objectivity and universality come apart.Read more at location 1785
In science and morality, the search for objectivity is the search for universally valid results—results that must be accepted by every rational being. In the judgement of beauty the search for objectivity is for valid and heightened forms of human experience—Read more at location 1785
forms in which human life can flower according to its inner needRead more at location 1787
Criticism is not aiming to show that you must like Hamlet, for example: it is aiming to expose the vision of human life which the play contains, and the forms of belonging which it endorses, and to persuade you of their value.Read more at location 1788
It is not claiming that this vision of human life is universally available.Read more at location 1790
This does not mean that no cross-cultural comparisons can be made: it is certainly possible to compare a play like Hamlet with a puppet play by Chikamatsu,Read more at location 1791
There may be rules of taste, but they do not guarantee beauty, and the beauty of a work of art may reside precisely in the act of transgressing them.Read more at location 1798
Bach’s Forty-Eight illustrate all the rules of fugal composition: but they do so by obeying them creatively, by showing how they can be used as a platform from which to rise to a higher realm of freedom.Read more at location 1799
Eighteenth-century thinkers, who wished to take natural beauty as their paradigm of the object of taste, were therefore quick to adopt Burke’s contrast between the sublime and the beautiful.Read more at location 1808
So too in art, we might usefully distinguish those works that please us on account of the order, harmony, and rule-governed perfection which they display, like the fugues of Bach, the Holy Virgins of Bellini, or the lyrics of Verlaine, and those which, on the contrary, please us by challenging and disturbing our routines,Read more at location 1809
But as soon as we make this distinction we realize that, even in the most orderly and rule-governed work, there is no way of fixing a ‘standard of taste’ by appeal to the rules. It is not the rules, but the use of them, that appeals in a Bach fugue or a Bellini Virgin.Read more at location 1813
pointed out that obedience to the rules is neither necessary nor sufficient for beauty.Read more at location 1815
Hume tried to shift the focus of the discussion, arguing roughly as follows: taste is a form of preference, and this preference is the premise, not the conclusion of the judgement of beauty.Read more at location 1819
To fix the standard, therefore, we must discover the reliable judge, the one whose taste and discriminations are the best guideRead more at location 1820
There is a potential circle here: beauty is what the reliable critic discerns, and the reliable critic is the one who discerns beauty.Read more at location 1821
The standard, if it exists, does not lie in the qualities of the object but in the sentiments of the judge. So, Hume suggests, let us get away from the fruitless discussion of beauty, and simply concentrate on the qualities we admire,Read more at location 1824
However, this opens us to another kind of scepticism: why should it be those qualities that we admire?Read more at location 1826
it seemed natural, in the Scotland of Hume’s day, to admire delicacy and discernment, it seems less natural today, when facetiousness and ignorance, so unfairly left out by the austere sages of the Enlightenment, are demanding, and receiving, their share of attention.Read more at location 1827
For Hume’s argument suggests that the judgement of taste reflects the character of the one who makes it, and character matters. The characteristics of the good critic, as Hume envisaged them, point to virtues which, in Hume’s thinking, are vital to the good conduct of life, and not just to the discrimination of aestheticRead more at location 1829
In the last analysis there is as much objectivity in our judgements of beauty as there is in our judgements of virtue and vice.Read more at location 1832
Beauty is therefore as firmly rooted in the scheme of things as goodness.Read more at location 1833
And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us. 9Read more at location 2352
Note: cos è la bellezza? non una proprietà ben definita ma un' esprienza di ricerca. di ricerca di significato, in particolare. un esperienza dove la ragione gioca un ruolo decisivo. il significato da ricercare ha una natura spirituale Edit
The reader will have noticed that I have not said what beauty is. I have implicitly rejected the neo-Platonist view of beauty,Read more at location 2353
I have not discussed the tradition of thinking, which again goes back to Plotinus and the neo-Platonists, which sees beauty as a kind of organic wholeness, as in the definition given by Alberti:Read more at location 2356
I have likewise said nothing about the view, popularized in the eighteenth century by Francis Hutcheson, that beauty ‘consists in’ unity in variety.Read more at location 2359
Any attempt to prove the point as a generalization inevitably makes the terms ‘unity’ and ‘variety’ so vague as to cover everything from my garden (a mess, but bounded) to the most hideous communicationsRead more at location 2363
In my view all such definitions start from the wrong end of the subject, which is not about ‘things in the world’ but about a particular experience of them, and about the pursuit of meaningRead more at location 2367
everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded.Read more at location 2370
The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it
