Aesthetics From Classical Greece to the Present by Monroe C Beardsley

Author:Monroe C Beardsley [Beardsley, Monroe C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817366230
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

To seek for a principle of taste which shall furnish, by means of definite concepts, a universal criterion of the beautiful, is fruitless trouble; because what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory [§ 17; p. 84; cf. §§ 33–34].

If aesthetic pleasure were merely empirical, the stimulation of an inner or outer sense, as the empiricists thought, this inquiry might be feasible, though the criterion found would only be probable, not necessary. Or if aesthetic pleasure were dependent upon a concept of some kind, as the rationalists thought, then such a criterion might be determined a priori, and applied by reason to mark out beautiful objects and demonstrate their beauty. However, aesthetic pleasure is neither sensuous nor intellectual, but something else (cf. § 58).

The fourth aspect of the judgment of taste is its modality: and that is necessity. “The beautiful we think as having a necessary reference to satisfaction” (§ 18; p. 91). This necessity is not apodictic, for no one who makes a judgment of taste can guarantee that all others will agree. Kant calls it “exemplary”—a particular judgment invites universal assent: it “claims that every one ought to give his approval to the object in question and also describe it as beautiful” (§ 19; p. 92). But it also promises agreement on the part of all those who correctly relate the object to their own cognitive faculties. The necessity, or obligatoriness, implicit in the judgment of taste presupposes a “common sense”—the state of mind “resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers” (p. 93)—in all men. Do we have any reason for presupposing such a common sense? Yes, because it is a necessary condition of the shareability (“communicability”) of knowledge itself, and this is assumed by all philosophical inquiry that is not skeptical (§ 21; cf. § 32). But this question really looks forward to the Deduction (see below).

The Second Book of the Analytic presents Kant’s “transcendental exposition” of the sublime. Beauty and sublimity have two things in common: they can both be predicates of aesthetic judgments that are singular in logical form and claim universal validity, and they afford in themselves a pleasure that does not depend on sense or on a definite concept of the understanding. But beauty and sublimity are contrasted in two respects: that the former is connected with the form, hence the boundedness, of an object, while the latter involves an experience of boundlessness; and that the former depends upon the purposiveness of an object, making it seem “as it were, pre-adapted to our judgment” (§ 23; p. 103), while the latter is aroused by objects that seem “as it were to do violence to the imagination.” The purposiveness we observe and call beautiful enriches our very concept of nature, by suggesting that it is not mere mechanism, but “something analogous to art” (p. 104); but it is wildness, chaos, disorder and desolation that excite sublimity, and therefore “the concept of the sublime is not nearly so important or rich in consequences as the concept of the beautiful.

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