Quotes from philosophers on art and beauty: Baumgarten to Marcuse
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762): “...the object of logical knowledge is truth, the object of aesthetic (i.e. sensuous) knowledge is beauty. Beauty is the Perfect (the Absolute) recognized through the senses; Truth is the Perfect perceived through reason; Goodness is the Perfect reached by moral will. Beauty defined by Baumgarten is a correspondence, i.e., an order of the parts in their mutual relations to each other and in their relation to the whole. The aim of beauty itself is to please and excite and desire, (a position precisely the opposite of Kant’s definition of the nature and sign of beauty). (Tolstoy, 25)
Felix Mendelssohn (1729-1786): “....art is carrying forward of the beautiful, obscurely recognized by feeling, till it becomes the true and good. The aim of art is moral perfection” (Tolstoy, 26)
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1767): “...the law and aim of art is beauty only, beauty quite separated from independent goodness. There are three kinds of beauty: (1) beauty of form, (2) beauty of idea, expressing itself in the position of the figure (in plastic art), (3) beauty of expression, attainable only when the two first conditions are present. This beauty of expression is the highest aim of art, and is attained in antique art; modern art should therefore aim at imitating ancient art.” (Tolstoy, 26)
Shaftesbury (1671-1713): “That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence agreeable and good.’ Beauty, he taught, is recognizable by the mind only.” (Tolstoy, 27)
Père André (1675-1764): “...there are three kinds of beauty—divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty.” (Tolstoy, 28)
Charles Batteux (1713-1780): “...art consists in imitating the beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.” (Tolstoy, 28)
Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750): “...—art amounts to an egotistical sensation founded on the desire for self-preservation and society.” (Tolstoy, 28)
François Hemsterhuis (1720-1790): “...beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can attain.” (Tolstoy, 29)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): “Man has knowledge of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, outside himself, he seeks for truth; in himself, he seeks for goodness. The first is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (free will). Besides these two means of perception, there is yet the judging capacity (Urteilskraft), which forms judgements without reasonings and produces pleasure without desire (Urteil ohne Begriff, und Vergnügen ohne Begehren). This capacity is the basis of aesthetic feeling. Beauty according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object, in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.” (Tolstoy, 29)
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805): “...the aim of art is, as with Kant, beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical advantage. So that art may be called a game, not in the sense of unimportant occupation, but in the sense of manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than that of beauty.” (Tolstoy, 29)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814): “...perception of the beautiful proceeds from this: the world—i.e., nature—has two sides: it is the sum of our limitations and it is the sum of our free idealistic activity. In the first aspect the world is limited, in the second aspect it is free. In the first aspect every object is limited, distorted, compressed, confined—and we see deformity; in the second we perceive its inner completeness, vitality, regeneration—and we see beauty. So the deformity or beauty of an object, according to Fichte, depends on the point of view of the observer. Beauty therefore exists, not in the world, but in the beautiful soul (schöner Geist). Art is the manifestation of this beautiful soul, and its aim is the education, not only of the mind—that is the business of the savant, not only of the heart—that is the affair of the moral preacher, but of the whole man. And so the characteristic of beauty lies not in anything external, but in the presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.” (Tolstoy, 30)
Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829): “...beauty in art is understood too incompletely, one-sidedly, and disconnectedly. Beauty exists, not only in art, but also in nature and in love; so that the truly beautiful is expressed by the union of art, nature, and love.” (Tolstoy, 30)
Adam Müller (1779-1829): “...there are two kinds of beauty: the one, general beauty, which attracts people as the sun attracts the planet—this found chiefly in antique art; and the other, individual beauty, which results from the observer himself becoming a sun attracting beauty—this is the beauty of modern art. A world in which all contradictions are harmonized is the highest beauty. Every work of art is a reproduction of this universal harmony. The highest art is the art of life.”(Tolstoy, 31)
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880): “The only things that exist for me in the world, are splendid poetry, harmonious, well-turned, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlight, pictures, ancient sculpture, and strongly marked faces.”... “Art, the only true and good thing in life! Can you compare any earthly love to it? Can you prefer the adoration of some relative beauty to the cult of the True?'' (Atlas).
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): We may go on from here to consider the interesting case in which happiness in, life is predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty presents itself to our senses and our judgement — the beauty of human forms and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of artistic and even scientific creations. This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it. The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty, and, as usually happens, lack of success is concealed beneath a flood of resounding and empty words. (Freud, 28)
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979): “...art is not, or not supposed to be, a use value to be consumed in the course of the daily performances of men.” (Marcuse, 3)
“The utility of art is of a transcendent kind, utility for the soul, and/or [00:18:00] for the mind, which does not enter the normal behavior of men, and does not really change the normal behavior of men, except for precisely the short period of elevation, that cultural holiday: in church, in the museum, the concert hall, the theater, before the monuments and ruins of the great past. And after this short holiday, after the break with the routine of life, real life continues, business as usual. With these features, art becomes a force in the given society, but not of the given society.” (Marcuse, 3)
Art is also alienating, in its very essence. As part of the established culture, art is affirmative, sustaining this culture. As alienation from the established reality, art is a negative and negating force. The history of art can be understood as the attempt to harmonize this antagonism.” (Marcuse, 4).
Art is to have a reconciling, tranquillizing, and a cognitive function. It has to be beautiful and it has to be true. (Marcuse, 4).
Citations:
Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1977.
Atlas, James. “Art Is the Only True Thing in Life.” The New York Times, 1982.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Penguin Classics, 2002.
Marcuse, Herbert. “On the Future of Art: Art as a Form of Reality” Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection, 1969