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1 BeautyâExisting Views
Since the history of reflection about beauty is generally known, we will limit ourselves to recalling its most important stages.
Ancient Greeks were the first to attempt to offer a definition of beauty. In the 5th century, Pythagoreans launched the so-called Great Theory of Beauty, according to which beauty resides in the selection of proportions and proper arrangement of parts; that is, it is based on size, quality, quantity and their interrelationship (Vitruvius 1807). That theory prevailed until the 17th century, and no other theory in the history of aesthetics has had such long-lasting power. Its proponents included Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, DĂźrer, Poussin and also Leibniz, who wrote: âMusic charms us, although its beauty consists only in the agreement of numbersâ and âThe pleasures which sight finds in proportions are of the same nature; and those caused by the other senses amount to almost the same thingâ (Leibniz 1714). Meanwhile, other notions were also being articulated. The Great Theory was criticized for the first time by Plotinus as antiquity was drawing to a close. He claimed that âthe beauty of proportions comes not so much from the proportions themselves, but rather from the soul which shines through these proportionsâ (Plotinus 1991). Doubts emerged regarding the objectivity of beauty (first among the Sophists). Epicharm argued that a dog considers a dog most beautiful and similarly an ox an ox, etc. Socrates set forth the thesis that beauty does not lie in the proportion but in the appropriateness or the correspondence of an object to its purpose and nature. According to this view, even a dung basket may be beautiful because it is good for its purpose and a gold shield ugly because gold is inappropriate for it and makes the shield too heavy. It followed that beauty was relative. In the 4th century Basil the Great conceived the idea that beauty resides in relationship, not only among the parts of the object but between the object and the human sight. This was one of the first attempts to take into account the relationship between the object and the subject. In the 13th century that idea was also mentioned by Thomas Aquinas. Spinoza wrote in 1674 that if our constitution was different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The subjective nature of beauty was also noted by D. Hume (Hume 1896), who wrote: âbeauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beautyâ. For Hegel (just as for Plotinus), beauty was âthe sensual manifestation of the ideaâ. A momentous event in the 18th-century aesthetic theory was Kantâs statement (Kant 1952) that âall judgments about beauty are individual judgements. Beauty is asserted for each object separately and is not derived from general propositionsâ.
In the grand philosophical systems of the first half of the 19th century, beauty remained the principal notion of aesthetics. However, already in the second half of that century, experience (or its synonyms such as affection or emotion) came to the forefront of aesthetics (Tatarkiewicz 1980). Aesthetics turned (largely) into a field of psychology; consequently, it became empirical knowledge, and from the 1860s onwards, i.e. beginning with the works of G. Th. Fechner, experimental in nature. What caused the change whereby beauty as a subject was eliminated from aesthetics and aesthetic experience came to be the chief concern of that discipline? In the first place, it was the realization that beautiful objects have no common features, that they are too diverse; hence, there can be no general theory of beauty, a science of beauty. On the other hand, we can identify common characteristics of what we experience vis-Ă -vis beautiful objects or, to put it differently, the common features of the aesthetic experience. The psychological approach provided aesthetics with a lot of detailed, factual material, and it has been the ambition of 19th- and 20th-century scholars to subsume that material under a general theory. Yet, while that detailed material was largely indisputable, the same could not be said about the theories that generalized beyond the factual material.
New events in art of the early 20th century caused the interest in beauty and its analysis to significantly weaken. WĹadysĹaw Tatarkiewiczwrites
During the 20th century both theorists and artists concluded that beauty is a defective concept and it is not possible to construct its theory. Neither is this property so valuable as believed for centuries. The ability of an artwork to shock the observer is more important than that it delights with its beauty. This shock is achieved not only by beauty, but even through ugliness. Nowadays we like ugliness as much as beauty, wrote Apollinaire. H. Read believed that art should not be coupled with beauty. The word âbeautifulâ is very rarely found in 20th century texts. Its place has been taken up by the term âaestheticâ, which carries less historical baggage.
(Tatarkiewicz 1980)
Contemporary aesthetics significantly gave up searching for the essence of beauty and art, also as a result of Wittgensteinâs philosophy and the efforts of 20th-century anti-essentialism. At present, philosophical aesthetic investigations are focused mainly on issues peripheral to art, such as aesthetic judgement (Sircello 1968), art criticism (Beardsley 1958), sociological and cultural context (Danto 1964; Welsch 1990) or institutional context (Dickie 1974). Contemporary approaches that are more directly concerned with art, such as Formalism (Zangwill 2001; Scruton 1983; Bell 1958) and Anti-Formalism (Walton 1970; Danto 1981; Curie 1989; Carlson 2000), offer more precise language but contribute little to the traditional investigations focusing on the form-content relationship.
In the end of the 20th and in the 21th century the study of aesthetic preferences continues to be pursued mostly in experimental psychology. Such research however has no coherent character and focuses primarily on the individual factors that affect aesthetic preferences, e.g. colour, brightness, saturation, symmetry, contrast, clarity, style, familiarity, emotional state, knowledge, and understanding (Leder et al. 2004).
Another discipline that studies aesthetic preferences is neuroaesthetics. This is a new field with strong links to experimental psychology, which seeks to explain aesthetic experiences at the neurological level. Semir Zeki is considered to be the founder of this discipline (Zeki 2001). These studies, however, like the other in experimental psychology, do not analyze the complex interactions between perceived objects, which are essential for understanding aesthetic experiences. Neuroaesthetics also erroneously assumes that neurological research is primary to analyses of states of mind. The fact that the material elements of the brain have a longer history does not mean that their (mental) analysis is also primary in relation to the (mental) analysis of beauty. If this were the case then neurological research would appear before any reflections on the subject of beauty. In fact, neurological research, e.g. looking for centres that cause a sense of pleasure, is also based on mental assumptions (e.g. that locating these centres will contribute to solving the mystery of beauty). Studying the material elements of the brain as primary in relation to complex mental structures can also be compared to the analysis of a simple computer program that generates complex structures (simple computer programs are able to generate structures of any complexity). In both cases, such an analysis makes no sense. Without neglecting the significance of neurological research in general, it is difficult to understand how this type of research could explain complex relationships at the level of mental structures.
It is difficult to find in the existing literature a position related to the concept of contrast, which could be treated as a reference to these considerations. Weâve only found two positions: Alfred North Whiteheadâs cosmology Process and Reality (Whitehead 1978) and the theory of Stephen David Ross, based on it: The Theory of Art: Inexhaustibility by Contrast (Ross 1982), to which we will refer in the chapter âInterpretations of Existing Viewsâ. If we were to indicate existing positions that are closest to this in terms of the nature of the analyses, they would be those that primarily analyze the objects of perception, i.e. works of art and visual structures, as opposed to those analyzing the subject of perception. These are the following positions:
- Arnheim, R., Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Arnheim 1954).
- Gombrich, E., The Story of Art (Gombrich 1950).
- Kandinsky, W., Point and Line to Plane (Kandinsky 1947).
- Kepes, G., Language of Vision (Kepes 1995).
- Klee, P., Pedagogical Sketchbook (Klee 1973).
- StrzemiĹski, W., Theory of Vision (StrzemiĹski 1974).
These works address many important issues that have to do with visual perception. Nevertheless, they do not provide an answer to the question of what the main cause behind our aesthetic preferences is. The most important and interesting of them is R. Arnheimâs work entitled Art and Visual Perception. This is a study that combines the disciplines of psychology and art theory to present comprehensive knowledge about perceptual experiences, primarily based on Gestalt psychology. The analyses of factors affecting our perceptions, contained in this work, continue to underpin studies of visual perception today. However, they lack a coherent unifying framework to organize and make sense of perceptions. Likewise, the Gestalt theory of visual perception (which will be discussed later) has ultimately failed to propose an integrated model of perceptual processes (Bruce et al. 2003), forming a field of separate visual phenomena.
References
- Arnheim, R. 1954/1974. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Beardsley, M.C. 1958. Aesthetics: Probl...
