Beauty and the Beast
eBook - ePub

Beauty and the Beast

An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic

Share book
  1. 77 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Beauty and the Beast

An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

What do we mean when we call an object or experience "e;beautiful"e;? What are the mental, cognitive, psychological and spiritual processes that transpire when we encounter something with significant aesthetic value? These questions are at the heart of the insightful Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic, a long-form exploration of beauty and all of its beguiling facets.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Beauty and the Beast an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Beauty and the Beast by in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2014
ISBN
9781776529414
Topic
Art
Subtopic
Art General

Part I - The Theory

*

What is Beauty? Many have asked it, and could find no answer because they understood their question no more than jesting Pilate understood his 'What is Truth?' But many beside have asked it with at least a real desire to understand. It was already in the mind of the prehistoric artist who was the first to draw a pattern or to sketch the mammoth, though no doubt he did not put the question to himself. It has been there, expressed or unexpressed, wherever a man has had vision enough to find his spirit stirred by a flower or a cathedral; a fabric or the low October sun upon a sheet of gossamer; wherever a man has tried to reproduce nature on canvas or pour out his longing and triumph in sound or written words. He has cried out that beauty dwells only in his own spirit, for there have been moods and days when he could see no beauty in that which at other times moved him deeply. Yet the agreement of civilised mankind, at all events, that this or that particular is beautiful is so widely diffused that he cannot but admit that something in the object itself must suggest the idea of beauty. Taste may change, but the sunset and the rose are universally acclaimed by all who have any aesthetic perception at all. On the other hand, faced with the vagaries of artistic fashion a man finds no absolute beauty, and is driven to a subjective theory, for he cannot admire the protruding, distorted lip so persuasive to certain savages. But no sooner is this theory constructed than he is brought up once more against the difficulty that an object is required before the sense of beauty is aroused, and that men do agree in attributing beauty to many things.
Because the perception of beauty involves a judgment (which really belongs to the intellectual process, and not properly to the aesthetic), beauty itself seems too elusive for definition. It has been left, as we have said, for Croce to formulate the first satisfactory concept of beauty. He saw what no one else had seen—that man's first contact with the Real, the first movement of the spirit that stretched beyond a mere sensation, was a creative act, an intuition not a judgment, expressing the reality to himself. Beauty, says Croce, is expression. Afterwards the man might give his expression objective form through some technique. Hence derive pictures, sculpture, music, dancing, poetry, drama, architecture, language itself; all the arts. Or the expression of his intuition may remain simply as a formative agent of his spirit. There are many mute inglorious Miltons. But he has expressed his intuition to himself, and it has formed a new material for his conceptual activity, whether or no he brings it far into the domain of the practical, through technique, in order that it may subserve some economic or moral function for himself and other men. That he must bring it into the practical in some measure, whether he does or does not give it technical form, is clear to anyone who has grasped Croce's main thought. The aesthetic intuition is for the individual, but he is driven to universalise it by thought (i.e. logic). It is of practical value to himself (economic motive) and it is capable of being made of use to others (ethical motive). Theoretic and practical cannot be isolated from one another.
As aesthetic is to logic, so is economic to ethic, and so is theoretic to practical; it is the relation of the double degree.
A priori synthesis unites each of the theoretic and of the practical activities with the other, and the same a priori synthesis unites the theoretic and the practical themselves, of which neither exclusively precedes the other in the circle of Real Being. This is the life of the spirit.
Now in considering this theory of Croce's we notice at once that mind or spirit is for him a datum, and that he assumes further that spirit is active and is definable only by its activity. He gives no reason for this activity. The cause of this is not far to seek, for his whole system is confessedly anti-metaphysical, and so, of necessity, stops short of ultimate things. Life, spirit, is for him the true mystery, and this is immanent. There is no room for transcendence. All he can say is that no philosophical system is definite because Life itself is never definite[7] .
Truth is always surrounded with mystery, an ascending to ever higher heights, which are without a summit, as Life is without a summit[8] .
The spirit, which is infinite possibility passing into infinite actuality, has drawn and draws at every moment the cosmos from chaos, has collected diffused life into the concentrated life of the organ, has achieved the passage from animal to human life, has created and creates modes of life ever more lofty. The work of the spirit is not finished and never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher is not vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof of the infinity of that process. The plant dreams of the animal, the animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, is a reality, if it be reality that with every historical movement man surpasses himself. The time will come when the great deeds and the great works now our memory and our boast will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works and the deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme genius who created what we call human life and seem to us now to have been savages of the lowest grade, almost men-monkeys. They will be forgotten for the document of progress is in forgetting; that is, in the fact being entirely absorbed in the new fact, in which, and not in itself, it has value. But we cannot know what the future states of Reality will be, in their determined physiognomy and succession, owing to the 'dignity' established in the Philosophy of the Practical, by which the knowledge of the action and of the deed follows and does not precede the action and the deed. Mystery is just the infinity of evolution; were this not so, that concept would not arise in the mind of man, nor would it be possible to abuse it, as it has been abused by being transported out of its place, that is to say, into the consciousness of itself, which the spiritual activity should have and has to the fullest degree, that is, the consciousness of its eternal categories.
The neglect of the moment of mystery is the true reason of the error known as the Philosophy of History, which undertakes to portray the plan of Providence and to determine the formula of progress. In this attempt (when it does not affirm mere philosophemes, as has very often happened), it makes the effort to enclose the infinite in the finite and capriciously to decree concluded that evolution which the universal spirit itself cannot conclude, for it would thus come to deny itself. In logic that error has been gnoseologically defined as the pretension of treating the individual as though it were the universal, making the universal individual; here it is to be defined in other words as the pretension of treating the finite as though it were the infinite, of making the infinite finite.
But the unjustified transportation of the concept of mystery from history, where it indicates the future that the past prepares and does not know, into philosophy, causes to be pointed as mysteries which give rise to probabilities and conjectures, problems that consist of philosophical terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved. But if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibility of man is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete forms that progress and perfectibility will assume (not knowing them, because now it imports not to know, but to do them), then there is no meaning in positing as a mystery the immortality of the individual soul, or the existence of God; for these are not facts that may or may not happen sooner or later, but concepts that must be proved to be in themselves thinkable and not contradictory. Their thinkability will indeed be a mystery, but of the kind that it is a duty to make clear, because synonymous with obscurity or mental confusion. What has so far been demonstrated has been their unthinkability in the traditional form. Nor is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the human soul. Man does not seek a god external to himself and almost a despot, who commands and benefits him capriciously, nor does he aspire to an immortality of insipid ease; but he seeks for that God which he has in himself, and aspires to that activity which is both Life and Death[9] .
Thus Croce affirms that evolution, development, is demanded by the very nature of spirit. In spirit the problem of the one and the many is solved. The yearnings of man towards something higher, and towards a unity that shall lie behind and stabilise all thought, are but expressions of the nature of Life. The dissatisfaction of such a thought is due to psychological illusion, comparable to a "dream of an art so sublime that every work of art really existing would by comparison appear contemptible." There is no intuition that cannot be clearly expressed; vague dreams of the Madonna of the Future end inevitably in an empty canvas. So too, according to Croce, is a dream of transcendence empty of content, because inexpressible; based on no clear intuition, but on a confusion between the historical judgment and some vague conception of the transcendental. And thus the life of the spirit is left a mystery.
We will not attempt any discussion of Croce's fundamental pantheism, neither will we as yet criticise his definition of Beauty. Instead, we will begin our constructive work by considering the psychological accompaniment of a perception of beauty and from that starting-point try to reach a conception and a definition that will carry us beyond Croce's into a region less empty of love, a region that shines with a light of its own. Dead moons are lovely, but they owe their loveliness to living light. Cold philosophies too are only beautiful when a beautiful spirit makes them seem to live.
Let us, then, turn to the psychological effects of that which appeals as beautiful to some individual mind, leaving on one side, for the time, all consideration of the reason why a particular object should rouse a sense of beauty in a particular mind.
Now unquestionably the beauty we perceive is never satisfying, or if it satisfies at all it does so but for a moment. Almost at once dissatisfaction follows, or rather unsatisfaction.
There is a yearning for something, a sense of something lacking. It is vague—so vague that the only representation of it that has ever adequately expressed at once its aspirations, its lack and its indeterminateness, is Blake's drawing "I want—I want." Of these three things it is compounded, of lack, of aspiration, and of self-ignorance that knows neither what it lacks nor what it desires; and these three determine its salient character—that of an impulse. That it is really an impulse becomes clear directly we examine its effects. It produces a desire to create. In the young, the uncontrolled, the illiterate, the creative impulse may be definitely sexual. Passion is undoubtedly stimulated in simple natures by the beautiful, and we shall see when we come to discuss the evolution of aesthetic sensibility that this fact is of the profoundest spiritual import. For the moment we need only note that this sex-impulse is creative. In natures artistically more developed yet not truly originative, the creative impulse is a desire to repeat the thing that has given this sense of beauty—to paint the sunset, to play the sonata, to declaim the poem. Yet even here we must note the germ of originality. The repetition is no mere reproduction. Elimination and emphasis make it in some measure a new creation. This is obvious in the less rigid arts, painting and music; but it is present even where the form is definite. Hear two different people, or the same person in two different moods, read the same poem, and see how different a thing it can be! In more artistic natures still, truly original, the desire to create is conscious, the desire to reproduce less. The thing created need not, probably will not, be of the same kind. The moon-glade on the sea enriching by contrast the blackness of the rocky headland, will inspire the musician to write, not a moonlight sonata, for true music is free from sensuous symbolism, but a pure rhythm of sound. To suggest visual symbols in sound is to prostitute music, to drive it back into the sensationalism from which it has freed itself. It is, further, to confuse the mind by attempting to combine two incompatible media of technical expression. As animal passion is to love, so is Carrier's "La Chasse" to a Bach prelude[10] .
We see, then, that the psychological effect of the beautiful is to produce a creative impulse, based on the lack and the aspiration which give rise to a sense of yearning desire. We see that it is indeterminate, for it attempts to satisfy itself in very various ways. We see that in so far as it creates successfully, it finds some satisfaction.
Now all this fits admirably with Croce's theory of beauty. Beauty is for us the expression of that of which we have intuition. In realising the beauty of a symphony or picture we have ourselves re-created the intuition of the artist. In realising the beauty of a natural scene we have expressed an intuition of the reality that lies behind that scene; a creative act. We shall later go beyond Croce in this matter, referring our creative act to a re-creation of the intuition of God, and this will lead us to consider the aesthetic meaning of God's creation; but for the time we need not pursue this thought.
Our next business is, clearly, to analyse the yearning which precedes the creative act. We have said that this originates in dissatisfaction. What is this dissatisfaction? One other thing produces a feeling that is not merely analogous, but absolutely identical. When you love a person intensely and are uncertain if it is reciprocated, because no sign, or no sufficient sign, is given, you experience the same dissatisfaction, the same yearning and the same creative impulse. In primitive natures the impulse may fulfil itself in sexual excitement; in higher ones it is expressed in art. It is a commonplace to say that some of the world's greatest creative work is done under the stimulus of love. The poems of lovers furnish the most prominent example, not only their love poems, but the poems inspired by their love, like the Divina Commedia; but we need not seek far for examples in the other arts. Beethoven's Fourth Symphony was inspired by his love for the Countess Theresa von Brunswick. Tchaikovsky found inspiration in his Platonic love for Nadejda von Meck, whom he had never seen. His sad, abnormal friendships were an inspiration to Michael Angelo.
Now in both cases, paradoxical as it may seem, the dissatisfaction is due to receiving without...

Table of contents