Theme
Art and beauty
17 philosophers, 4 traditions
Is beauty in things or in the eye of the beholder, and what are the arts for? Chinese thinkers argued over music; Greek and modern European philosophers over beauty and art.
In early China the argument was about music. Confucius was remembered for his mastery of ritual and music, and his followers held that performing them trains the emotions and transforms character. Mozi condemned the lavish musical entertainments of the rich as a waste of what could feed and clothe the poor. Xunzi replied that the sages had left music to give human feelings an orderly outlet, and that it brings harmony to the people.
In Greece, Plato and later Plotinus placed beauty in the realm of the Forms: things are beautiful by sharing in Beauty itself, and beauty calls out love. In the eighteenth century Hume and Kant began from the opposite side, accepting that taste is subjective, yet both looked for a standard. Hume found it in the joint verdict of qualified critics, Kant in a disinterested pleasure that claims everyone’s agreement.
Schopenhauer thought art gives us a clearer view of the essences of things, and some relief from the striving of the will. Nietzsche praised art for the illusions we need in order to live, and Dewey brought art back into everyday experience. Philosophers still debate whether beauty is objective, subjective or something between the two.
Through time
6th century BCE
Confucius
Confucius was famed for his mastery of ritual and music, and sought to preserve the Zhou ritual system. The tradition credits him with a theory of how performing ritual and music trains the emotions, limits desires, teaches people their social roles and transforms their character.
5th century BCE
Mozi
The benevolent person opposes the lavish musical entertainments of rulers and officials, because they waste resources that could feed and clothe the common people. Taxing people to buy costly instruments goes against the sage-kings, who taxed only for useful things, such as boats and carts, that benefit everyone.
Argued against Confucius
3rd century BCE
Xunzi
Against the Mohist charge that music is wasteful, Xunzi held that it is a vital means of moral persuasion. Music, like ritual, is human artifice: the sages left compositions to give our emotions orderly expression, and well-balanced music makes the people harmonious and united.
About 500 years later
3rd century CE
Plotinus
The sensible world is a beautiful, harmonious whole, imitating as far as it can the intelligible beauty of its model. The soul’s pursuit is moved by Beauty, though things with a mere semblance of beauty and goodness can lead it astray.
About 1300 years later
16th century
Sen no Rikyū
Beauty lies in austere simplicity (wabi), not in costly display. The tea ceremony in a small, plain room can turn away from the rich host’s rare utensils towards an aesthetic that treats its guests as equals.
17th century
Madame de Sévigné
Beauty lies in harmony, proportion and balance, in art as in the order of the cosmos itself.
18th century
David Hume
Beauty is not a quality in things but exists in the mind that contemplates them. Yet there is a standard of taste: the joint verdict of critics with strong sense and delicate sentiment, improved by practice and comparison and free of prejudice, whose verdicts tend to agree over time, as Homer’s lasting fame shows.
Immanuel Kant
A judgment of beauty rests on feeling, not on concepts, yet it is more than a report of personal pleasure. It is disinterested, made apart from our desires, and it claims that anyone similarly placed ought to judge the same way, so it carries a demand for everyone’s agreement.
Drew on and argued against David Hume
Motoori Norinaga
Literature should be read for its feeling, not its moral lesson. The Tale of Genji moves its readers by the pathos of things (mono no aware), inviting them to share its characters’ emotions without judging them by Confucian or Buddhist standards.
19th century
Arthur Schopenhauer
Art’s highest aim is to convey the Platonic Ideas, the essences of things. The artistic genius can remain in pure perception of these Ideas and present them in works clearer and more accessible than the everyday world, so that others too can rise above it.
Drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant
Friedrich Nietzsche
We need illusion to live well, and art is irreplaceable because it gives it: “we possess art lest we perish of the truth”. Artists also show us how to make things beautiful and desirable when they are not, and we should become the poets of our own lives.
Drew on and argued against Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer
John Dewey
Art is “the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity”, and aesthetics is central to philosophy’s task of making everyday experience fuller and more meaningful. Experience at its most integrated, “consummatory”, can arise in daily life as well as in concert halls and museums.
20th century
W. E. B. Du Bois
“All art is propaganda and ever must be.” Artists use beauty to convey truth and goodness, winning understanding and sympathy, so the artist of beauty becomes, by compulsion, an apostle of truth and right, free but bounded by truth and justice.
Edith Landmann-Kalischer
Beauty is a real property of things, perceived by an aesthetic faculty much as colours are by sight; and art is true when it faithfully mirrors the life of the mind.
Alain Locke
Art should not be propaganda. Earlier Black art had been trapped in stereotypes and counter-stereotypes, presenting the Negro as a “formula” to be defended. The artist’s responsibility is to express their own individuality, and so communicate something of universal human appeal.
Argued against W. E. B. Du Bois
Kuki Shūzō
Some aesthetic ideals are bound to a culture’s lived experience; iki joins allure, composure and resignation in a style no foreign word can capture.
Susanne Langer
Art is a symbol of feeling. Its forms are not statements but presentations that create virtual space, time and movement, articulating feeling as language articulates thought.
Terms on this page
- wabi
- Simple, austere beauty. Sen no Rikyū built his tea ceremony, wabicha, on it, against the display of wealth in aristocratic tea.
- mono no aware
- The pathos of things: the feeling that things stir in us because they pass away. Motoori Norinaga made it the key to reading The Tale of Genji and Japanese poetry.
- iki
- A refined, alluring style from the pleasure quarters of Edo-period cities. Kuki Shūzō analysed it as seductiveness joined with brave composure and Buddhist resignation.
Sources
- Crispin Sartwell, Beauty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy