## 1. Objectivity and Subjectivity



Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is
whether beauty is subjective--located 'in the eye of the
beholder'--or rather an objective feature of beautiful
things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible,
for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split
the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and
objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part
located beauty outside of anyone's particular experiences.
Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from
the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write
as follows, expressing one 'species of philosophy':



> 
> 
> Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the
> mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different
> beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is
> sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own
> sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757,
> 136)
> 
> 
> 



And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in *The Critique of
Judgment* (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:



> 
> 
> The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is
> consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that
> whose determining ground can be *no other than subjective*.
> Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be
> objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical
> representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure
> and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through
> which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the
> representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)
> 
> 
> 



However, if beauty is entirely subjective--that is, if anything
that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as
James Kirwan, for example, asserts)--then it seems that the word
has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call
something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In
addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular
judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a
remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny
that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is
possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is
beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or
learn from someone else why it is.



On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no
connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective.
That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no
perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be
detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would
seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue
about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one's
experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or
false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard
other people's taste, even when it differs from our own, as
provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in
cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts
of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response,
even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the
beholder.



Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty
treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful
object itself or in the qualities of that object. In *De Veritate
Religione*, Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful
because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they
are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247).
Plato's account in the *Symposium* and Plotinus's
in the *Enneads* connect beauty to a response of love and
desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the
beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form.
Indeed, Plotinus's account in one of its moments makes beauty a
matter of what we might term 'formedness': having the
definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.



> 
> 
> We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in
> Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form,
> as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that
> very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly:
> an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by
> pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and
> in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered,
> it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to
> become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has
> made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and
> what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may.
> (Plotinus, 22 [*Ennead* I, 6])
> 
> 
> 



In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept,
or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than
particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.



Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both
regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the
response of the beholder. The classical conception
 (see below)
 treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or
relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for
example the 'golden section.' The sculpture known as
'The Canon,' by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE),
was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by
students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by
reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is
conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to
the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as
in Plotinus: "This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce:
wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling
that is all delight" (Plotinus 23, [*Ennead* I, 3]).



At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the
British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat
different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin
of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke's
distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the
other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or
locus of beauty), for example, as a 'phantasm' of the
mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located
in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind.
Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One
argument for this was the variation in color experiences between
people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with
jaundice much of the world allegedly takes on a yellow cast. In
addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by
the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight,
for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty
as well.



Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant
perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated
merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that
controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such
as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies,
reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing.
They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual
experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable
as a value at all across persons or societies.



Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" and Kant's
*Critique Of Judgment* attempt to find ways through what has
been termed 'the antinomy of taste.' Taste is proverbially
subjective: *de gustibus non est disputandum* (about taste
there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute
about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of
good taste or of tastelessness. Some people's tastes appear
vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people's taste is too
exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or
non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and
objective: that is the antinomy.



Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste
or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally
subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the
*Canon* was held to be, that if people did not experience
certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge
that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than
others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither
precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we
might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural
aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to
validity.



Hume's account focuses on the history and condition of the
observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with
regard to assessing people's taste entail that judgments of
taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality
are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance
with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary
prejudices. Hume moves from considering what makes a thing beautiful
to what makes a critic credible. "Strong sense, united to
delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and
cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable
character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found,
is the true standard of taste and beauty" ("Of the
Standard of Taste" 1757, 144).



Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those
qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run,
which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works
of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts
of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective
standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective,
and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear
irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are
in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective
standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be
identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that
sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be
beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a
tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the
practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments
about beauty.



Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that
every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that
such judgments vary from person to person.



> 
> 
> By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of
> which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by
> means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is
> absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the
> representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no
> grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can
> reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They
> cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived]
> from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the
> subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790,
> section 34)
> 
> 
> 



But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than
that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons
entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience
before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture
of a house might remind me of where I grew up. "No one cares
about that," says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me
such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the
experiences of others.



By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is
a *disinterested* judgment. It does not respond to my
idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no
longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing
in question. Somewhat as in Hume--whose treatment Kant evidently
had in mind--one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine
judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate
interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal
range of human desires--economic and sexual desires, for
instance, which are examples of our 'interests' in this
sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings
because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for
auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence
them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings
at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the
object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as
the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty
of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure,
rather, in its sheer representation in one's experience:



> 
> 
> Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not
> want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence
> of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by
> mere observation (intuition or reflection). ... We easily see
> that, in saying it is *beautiful*, and in showing that I have
> taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the
> existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this
> representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about
> beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is
> not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)
> 
> 
> 



One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is
the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's dialogue *The Moralists*,
where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you
are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate
opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully
experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and
considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to
experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are
distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And
Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of
the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)



For Kant, some beauties are dependent--relative to the sort of
thing the object is--and others are free or absolute. A beautiful
ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example,
may be beautiful without a reference group or "concept,"
and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical
purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16).
The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from
practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the
actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or
free beauty is found in the *form* or *design* of the
object, or as Clive Bell (1914) put it, in the arrangement of lines
and colors (in the case of painting). By the time Bell writes in the
early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the
arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of
a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.



Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is
not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts
(1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly
situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume
that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person's
judgment from another's (though in fact there may be). Built
conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone
similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the
same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a
'universalization' somewhat analogous to the
universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In
ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the
judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought
to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of
aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but
necessarily contains the 'demand' that everyone should
reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to
inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very
often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are
different than our own defective.



The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics
has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such
figures as Schopenhauer (1818), Hanslick (1891), Bullough (1912), and
Croce (1928), for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly
subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as
'objectified pleasure.' The judgment of something that it
is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of
pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the
object itself were having subjective states.



> 
> 
> We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of
> our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value
> positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language,
> Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. ... Beauty
> is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of
> a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and
> appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give
> pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent
> is a contradiction in terms. ... Beauty is therefore a positive
> value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896,
> 50-51)
> 
> 
> 



It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or
device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an
agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its
causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of
beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this
account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes
subjective states (indeed, one's own) to a thing which in many
instances is not capable of having subjective states.



It is worth saying that Santayana's treatment of the topic in
*The Sense of Beauty* (1896) was the last major account offered
in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been
admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest
on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck
from Hume's and Kant's treatments was the subjectivity,
not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective
pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that
entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard
it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example.
And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal
of the arts, again in part because its trivialization in theory led
artists to believe that they ought to pursue more urgent and more
serious projects. More significantly, as we will see below, the
political and economic associations of beauty with power tended to
discredit the whole concept for much of the twentieth century. This
decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto's book *The
Abuse of Beauty* (2003).



However, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like
the classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy beginning
in the 1990s, to some extent centered on the work of art critic Dave
Hickey, who declared that "the issue of the 90s will be
beauty" (see Hickey 1993), as well as feminist-oriented
reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept (see Brand 2000,
Irigaray 1993). Several theorists made new attempts to address the
antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo
G.E. Moore's: "To say that a thing is beautiful is to say,
not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element
in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to
prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part,
is truly good" (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this
would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which
the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of
beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the
pleasures of the experiencer.



Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book *Six Names of Beauty*
(2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to
the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely
also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded.
He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for
instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of
pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are
celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no
perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no
beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and
object are juxtaposed and connected.



Alexander Nehamas, in *Only a Promise of Happiness* (2007),
characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way
that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The
beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also
requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as
an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like
Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an
irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or
something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are
particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of
beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but
connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in
communities of appreciation.



> 
> 
> Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and
> neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic
> community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or
> serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its
> members, each one is orthodox--orthodox, however, without
> thinking of all others as heresies. ... What is involved is less
> a matter of *understanding* and more a matter of hope, of
> *establishing* a community that centers around it--a
> community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and
> whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80-81)
> 
> 
> 


## 2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty



Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which
may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the
actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are
present. For example, Kant's treatment of beauty in terms of
disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the
ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the
object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration.
However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible
with one another many of these views are: for example, some
philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely
with uselessness.


### 2.1 The Classical Conception



The art historian Heinrich Wolfflin gives a fundamental
description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in
Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:



> 
> 
> The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect
> proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove
> to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form
> developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated:
> nothing but independently living parts.... In the system of a
> classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be
> rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the
> anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and
> yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that
> presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a
> very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wolfflin
> 1932, 9-10, 15)
> 
> 
> 



The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of
integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion,
harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western
conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical
architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear.
Aristotle says in the *Poetics* that "to be beautiful, a
living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must ...
present a certain order in its arrangement of parts" (Aristotle,
volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the *Metaphysics*: "The
chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which
the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree"
(Aristotle, volume 2, 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies,
is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden
section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The
conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid's
*Elements* and such works of architecture as the Parthenon,
and, again, by the *Canon* of the sculptor Polykleitos (late
fifth/early fourth century BCE).



The *Canon* was not only a statue deigned to display perfect
proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen
characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of
"the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the
metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the
forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything.... For
having taught us in that treatise all the *symmetriae* of the
body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the
statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the
statue itself, like the treatise, the *Canon*" (quoted in
Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of
'symmetry' in classical texts is distinct from and richer
than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers
precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among
the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the
classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in
the *Sophist* (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as
symmetrical.



The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classical
conception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, both
in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying
unity:



> 
> 
> Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called
> *taxis*, and arrangement, which the Greeks name
> *diathesis*, and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and
> Distribution which in the Greeks is called *oeconomia*.
> 
> 
> 
> Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work
> separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion
> with a view to a symmetrical result.
> 
> 
> 
> Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of
> details in their context. This is attained when the details of the
> work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable
> to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical
> correspondence.
> 
> 
> 
> Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of
> the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form
> of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot,
> palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of
> eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26-27)
> 
> 
> 



Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that
"There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or
perfection--for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there
is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that
are brightly coloured are called beautiful" (*Summa
Theologica* I, 39, 8).



Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the
clearest expression of the view: "What we call Beautiful in
Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound
Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys
is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is
equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity" (Hutcheson 1725, 29).
Indeed, proponents of the view often speak "in the Mathematical
Style." Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and
specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects
(in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises
nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical
laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says,
"In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces,
from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir
Isaac Newton's Scheme" (Hutcheson 1725, 38).



A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the
idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between
parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke
in *A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Beautiful and the Sublime*:



> 
> 
> Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so
> beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and
> every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an
> infinite variety of forms. ... The rose is a large flower, yet it
> grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and
> it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are
> both beautiful. ... The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a
> neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is
> this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall
> we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a
> tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together?
> ... There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to
> hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved,
> that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn,
> that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is
> beautiful. ... For my part, I have at several times very
> carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold
> very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only
> very different from one another, but where one has been very
> beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. ... You may
> assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human
> body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and
> notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke
> 1757, 84-89)
> 
> 
> 


### 2.2 The Idealist Conception



There are many ways to interpret Plato's relation to classical
aesthetics. The political system sketched in the *Republic*
characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But
Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the
account of beauty that is expressed specifically in
the *Symposium*--perhaps the key Socratic text for
neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of
beauty--expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect
unity.



In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of
his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the
experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato,
558-59 [*Symposium* 206c-207e]). But the desire to
reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or
eternal: "And why all this longing for propagation? Because this
is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since
we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own
forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well
as for the good--which is to say that Love is a longing for
immortality" (Plato, 559, [*Symposium*
206e-207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate
classic:



> 
> 
> The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be
> rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the
> body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he
> will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his
> passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how
> nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any
> other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness
> of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every
> body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be
> the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into
> due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance.
> 
> 
> 
> Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the
> beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual
> loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it
> beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish--and beautiful
> enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends
> toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to
> contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers
> how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that
> the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment.
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried
> our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward
> sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. ...
> Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must
> find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to
> rung--that is, from one to two, and from two to *every*
> lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions,
> from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the
> special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful
> itself--until at last he comes to know what beauty is.
> 
> 
> 
> And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man's life is ever
> worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul
> of beauty. (Plato, 561-63 [*Symposium*
> 210a-211d])
> 
> 
> 



Beauty here is conceived--perhaps explicitly in contrast to the
classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole--as
perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.



Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with
formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things,
and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we
have called the classical conception of beauty:



> 
> 
> Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other
> and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour,
> constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things,
> as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially
> symmetrical, patterned.
> 
> 
> 
> But think what this means.
> 
> 
> 
> Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and
> only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves,
> but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an
> aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of
> ugliness; its law must run throughout.
> 
> 
> 
> All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being
> devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of
> the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And
> lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair?
> 
> 
> 
> In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole
> noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus,
> 21 [*Ennead* I,6])
> 
> 
> 



Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing,
"making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all
bodies, as very near to the unembodied. ... Hence the splendour
of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea" (Plotinus,
22 [*Ennead* I,3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be
immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience
lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.



This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God
that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic
asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that
finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century,
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as
yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God
as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29).
Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the
immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco
quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a
richly-appointed church:



> 
> 
> Thus, when--out of my delight in the beauty of the house of
> God--the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away
> from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect,
> transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on
> the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see
> myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe
> which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely
> in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be
> transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical
> manner. (Eco 1959, 14)
> 
> 
> 



This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including
in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom
the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge
(or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the
material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of
beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or
what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and
finally, the intelligence that makes even these artists (that is,
God). Shaftesbury's character Theocles describes "the
third order of beauty,"



> 
> 
> which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms
> which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can
> show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own
> hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in
> itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently
> the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. ... Whatever
> appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or
> produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and
> originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty.
> ... Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human
> invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738,
> 228-29)
> 
> 
> 



Schiller's expression of a similar series of thoughts was
fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed
within German Idealism:



> 
> 
> The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be
> drawn from no actual case--rather does itself correct and guide
> our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be
> sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply
> from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational;
> in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of
> humanity. Beauty ... makes of man a whole, complete in himself.
> (1795, 59-60, 86)
> 
> 
> 



For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather
cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of
integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or
the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are
we--who exist simultaneously on both these levels--free.
This is quite similar to Plato's 'ladder': beauty as
a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But
Schiller--though this is at times unclear--is more concerned
with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with
transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is
beauty and art that performs this integration.



In this and in other ways--including in the tripartite
dialectical structure of his account--Schiller strikingly
anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.



> 
> 
> The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true
> nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within
> itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the
> empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real
> particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)
> 
> 
> 



Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from
the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from
finitude to the infinite, formulations that--while they are
influenced by Schiller--strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus,
and Plato.



Hegel, who associates beauty and art with mind and spirit, holds with
Shaftesbury that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of
nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, "the beauty of
art is *born of the spirit and born again*" (Hegel 1835,
2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art
transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea
reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that
nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty
of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. "The real
meaning of 'natural beauty' is that certain persons,
things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one,
comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts"
(Croce 1928, 230).


### 2.3 Love and Longing



Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, "by
beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which
they cause love, or some passion similar to it" (Burke 1757,
83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the
most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in
which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are
emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or
*ataraxia*, as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already
seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe
the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the
human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and
destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is
proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the
Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the
world.



There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty
and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem
to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho's famous fragment
16: "Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others
call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I
say it's whatever you love best" (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at
*Phaedrus* 236c, Socrates appears to defer to "the fair
Sappho" as having had greater insight than himself on love
[Plato, 483].)



Plato's discussions of beauty in the *Symposium* and the
*Phaedrus* occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In
the former, love is portrayed as the 'child' of poverty
and plenty. "Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us
believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless" (Plato, 556
[Symposium 203b-d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that
seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an
infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of
desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of
infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path
to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example
by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love
through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the
infinite.



Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning
away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not
necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential
correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho's
fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as "the
object of longing" and characterizes longing as intense and
unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite
being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever
we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas
writes that "I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark
of an art that speaks to our desire. ... Beautiful things
don't stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to
everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and
possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and
direction" (Nehamas 2007, 77).


### 2.4 Hedonist Conceptions



Thinkers of the 18th century--many of them oriented
toward empiricism--accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The
Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a
typical formulation, says that "By *beautiful* we
generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood,
delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable
sensations" (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear
whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical
formal elements or in terms of the viewer's pleasurable
response. He begins the *Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of
Beauty and Virtue* with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears
to assert that objects which instantiate his 'compound ratio of
uniformity and variety' are peculiarly or necessarily capable of
producing pleasure:



> 
> 
> The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider,
> is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are
> vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which
> obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one
> acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture,
> than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as
> possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among
> settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a
> fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a
> smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify'd by Woods,
> Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are
> not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is
> incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or
> swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)
> 
> 
> 



When Hutcheson then goes on to describe 'original or absolute
beauty,' he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities
of the beautiful thing (a "compound ratio" of uniformity and variety),
and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human
experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come
apart from Hutcheson's particular aesthetic preferences, which
are poised precisely opposite Plotinus's, for example. That we
find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building
(if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure
appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure
which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as
its objects.



Hume writes in a similar vein in the *Treatise of Human
Nature*:



> 
> 
> Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the
> primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is
> fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. ...
> Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of
> beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740,
> 299)
> 
> 
> 



Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the
pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon
talking about the 'sentiment of beauty,' where sentiment
is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or
ideas, though the experience of beauty is a matter of cultivated or
delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant's Third Critique
and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of
beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where
thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of
pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still
gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes
pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of
pleasure.



One result of this approach to beauty--or perhaps an extreme
expression of this orientation--is the assertion of the
positivists that words such as 'beauty' are meaningless or
without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective
approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter
of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were
trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical
consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus
seems contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to
certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no
*reasons* to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus
assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:



> 
> 
> Such aesthetic words as 'beautiful' and
> 'hideous' are employed ... not to make statements of
> fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain
> response. It follows...that there is no sense attributing
> objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of
> arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)
> 
> 
> 



All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are
empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations
could confirm or disconfirm them. 'That song is beautiful'
has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content.
It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is
an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of
beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or
alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.


### 2.5 Use and Uselessness



Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of
beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like,
and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. "*Taste*
is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an
*entirely disinterested* satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The
object of such satisfaction is called *beautiful*" (Kant
1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely
agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from
practical concerns: "Distance is produced in the first instance
by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our
practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of
our personal needs and ends" (Bullough 1912, 244).



On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite
direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use.
'Beauty' is perhaps one of the few terms that could
plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.



According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of
Cyrene took a rather direct approach.



> 
> 
> Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is
> beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty?
> Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly
> in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be
> embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he
> should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in
> employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes
> Laertius, 94)
> 
> 
> 



In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst
of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the
idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of
thinkers. Xenophon's *Memorabilia* puts the view in the
mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:



> 
> 
> *Socrates*: In short everything which we use is considered both
> good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use.
> 
> 
> 
> *Aristippus*: Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing?
> 
> 
> 
> *Socrates*: Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if
> the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill.
> (Xenophon, Book III, viii)
> 
> 
> 



Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue *Alciphron*,
though he begins with the hedonist conception: "Every one knows
that beauty is what pleases" (Berkeley 1732, 174; see Carritt
1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon
suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the
uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly
applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of
object it is and, again, a beautiful car might make an ugly tractor.
"The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related,
and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and
operation of the whole" (Berkeley 1732, 174-75; see
Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains
tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It
essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to
know the use of a thing and assess its suitedness to that use.



This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the
distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer
philistinism by enriching the concept of 'use,' so that it
might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing
it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda
Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European
medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as
well as serves its purpose.



> 
> 
> A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, ... a
> hymn than a mathematical equation. ... A well-made sword is not
> less beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay,
> the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or
> ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and
> truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their
> purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)
> 
> 
> 



Roger Scruton, in his book *Beauty* (2009) returns to a
modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched
by many and varied examples. "We call something
beautiful," writes Scruton, "when we gain pleasure from
contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its
*presented form*" (Scruton 2009, 26). Despite the
Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the
subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares
experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one
loves is not merely to place one body part on another, "but to
touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is
compromising - it is a move from one self toward another, and a
*summoning* of the other into the surface of his being"
(Scruton 2009, 48). This, Scruton says, is a profound pleasure.


## 3. The Politics of Beauty



Kissing sounds nice, but some kisses are coerced, some pleasures
obtained at a cost to other people. The political associations of
beauty over the last few centuries have been remarkably various and
remarkably problematic, particularly in connection with race and
gender, but in other aspects as well. This perhaps helps account for
the neglect of the issue in early-to-mid twentieth-century philosophy
as well as its growth late in the century as an issue in social
justice movements, and subsequently in social-justice oriented
philosophy.


### 3.1 Aristocracy and Capital



The French revolutionaries of 1789 associated beauty with the French
aristocracy and with the Rococo style of the French royal family, as in
the paintings of Fragonard: hedonist expressions of wealth and
decadence, every inch filled with decorative motifs. Beauty itself
became subject to a moral and political critique, or even to direct
destruction, with political motivations (see Levey 1985). And by the early
20th century, beauty was particularly associated with capitalism
(ironically enough, considering the ugliness of the poverty and
environmental destruction it often induced). At times even great art
appeared to be dedicated mainly to furnishing the homes of rich
people, with the effect of concealing the suffering they were
inflicting. In response, many anti-capitalists, including many
Marxists, appeared to repudiate beauty entirely. And in the aesthetic
politics of Nazism, reflected for example in the films of Leni
Riefenstahl, the association of beauty and right wing politics was
sealed to devastating effect (see Spotts 2003).



Early on in his authorship, Karl Marx could hint that the experience
of beauty distinguishes human beings from all other animals. An animal
"produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need,
whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only
truly produces in freedom therefrom. Man therefore also forms objects
in accordance with the laws of beauty" (Marx 1844, 76). But later
Marx appeared to conceive beauty as "superstructure" or
"ideology" disguising the material conditions of
production. Perhaps, however, he also anticipated the emergence of new
beauties, available to all both as makers and appreciators, in
socialism.



Capitalism, of course, uses beauty - at times with complete
self-consciousness - to manipulate people into buying things.
Many Marxists believed that the arts must be turned from providing
fripperies to the privileged or advertising that helps make them
wealthier to showing the dark realities of capitalism (as in the
American Ashcan school, for example), and articulating an inspiring
Communist future. Stalinist socialist realism consciously repudiates
the aestheticized beauties of post-impressionist and abstract
painting, for example. It has urgent social tasks to perform (see Bown
and Lanfranconi 2012). But the critique tended at times to generalize to
all sorts of beauty: as luxury, as seduction, as disguise and
oppression. The artist Max Ernst (1891-1976), having survived
the First World War, wrote this about the radical artists of the early
century: "To us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage
aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five
years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule
and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and
beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to
make people scream" (quoted in Danto 2003, 49).



Theodor Adorno, in his book *Aesthetic Theory*, wrote that one
symptom of oppression is that oppressed groups and cultures are
regarded as uncouth, dirty, ragged; in short, that poverty is ugly. It
is art's obligation, he wrote, to show this ugliness, imposed on
people by an unjust system, clearly and without flinching, rather to
distract people by beauty from the brutal realities of
capitalism. "Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as
ugly, though no longer to integrate or mitigate it or reconcile it
with its own existence," Adorno wrote. "Rather, in the
ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly
in its own image" (Adorno 1970, 48-9).



The political entanglements of beauty tend to throw into question
various of the traditional theories. For example, the purity and
transcendence associated with the essence of beauty in the realm of
the Forms seems irrelevant, as beauty shows its centrality to politics
and commerce, to concrete dimensions of oppression. The austere
formalism of the classical conception, for example, seems neither here
nor there when the building process is brutally exploitative.


### 3.2 The Feminist Critique



As we have seen, the association of beauty with the erotic is
proverbial from Sappho and is emphasized relentlessly by figures such
as Burke and Nehamas. But the erotic is not a neutral or universal
site, and we need to ask whose sexuality is in play in the history of
beauty, with what effects. This history, particularly in the West and
as many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized, is
associated with the objectification and exploitation of women.
Feminists beginning in the 19th century gave fundamental critiques of
the use of beauty as a set of norms to control women's bodies or
to constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in
profound and disabling ways (see Wollstonecraft 1792, Grimke
1837).



In patriarchal society, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it, the content of
sexuality "is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male
pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content," she
continues, describing her treatment of the subject, "for the
gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the
there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the
animal. *That* is the content of sexuality that defines gender
female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method"
(MacKinnon 1987, 53-4). Laura Mulvey, in "Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema," reaches one variety of radical critique
and conclusion: "It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty,
destroys it. That is the intention of this article" (Mulvey
1975, 60).



Mulvey's psychoanalytic treatment was focused on the scopophilia
(a Freudian term denoting neurotic sexual pleasure configured around
looking) of Hollywood films, in which men appeared as protagonists,
and women as decorative or sexual objects for the pleasure of the male
characters and male audience-members. She locates beauty "at the
heart of our oppression." And she appears to have a hedonist
conception of it: beauty engenders pleasure. But some pleasures, like
some kisses, are sadistic or exploitative at the individual and at the
societal level. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin (1988) and
Griselda Pollock (1987) brought such insights to bear on the history
of painting, for example, where the scopophilia is all too evident in
famous nudes such as Titian's *Venus of Urbino* or
Velazquez's *Rokeby Venus*, which a feminist slashed with
knife in 1914 because "she didn't like the way men gawked
at it".



Feminists such as Naomi Wolf in her book *The Beauty Myth*,
generalized such insights into a critique of the ways women are
represented throughout Western popular culture: in advertising, for
example, or music videos. Such practices have the effect of
constraining women to certain acceptable ways of presenting themselves
publicly, which in turn greatly constrains how seriously they are
taken, or how much of themselves they can express in public space. As
have many other commentators, Wolf connects the representation of the
"beautiful" female body, in Western high art but
especially in popular culture, to eating disorders and many other
self-destructive behaviors, and indicates that a real overturning of
gender hierarchy will require deeply re-construing the concept of
beauty.



The demand on women to create a beautiful self-presentation by male
standards, Wolf argues, fundamentally compromises women's action
and self-understanding, and makes fully human relationships between
men and women difficult or impossible. In this Wolf follows, among
others, the French thinker Luce Irigaray, who wrote that "Female
beauty is always considered as finery ultimately designed to attract
the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a
manifestation of, an appearance of, a phenomenon expressive of
interiority - whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at
ourselves in the mirror to *please someone*, rarely to
interrogate the state of our body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves
and in search of our becoming" (quoted in Robinson 2000,
230).



"Sex is held hostage by beauty," Wolf remarks, "and
its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply
with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or
pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and
film" (Wolf 1991f, 157).


### 3.3 Colonialism and Race



Early in the 20th century, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey
(1887-1940) described European or white standards of beauty as a
deep dimension of oppression, quite similarly to the way Naomi Wolf
describes beauty standards for women. These standards are relentlessly
reinforced in authoritative images, but they are incompatible with
black skin, black bodies, and also traditional African ways of
understanding human beauty. White standards of beauty, Garvey argued,
devalue black bodies. The truly oppressive aspects of such norms can
be seen in the way they induce self-alienation, as Wolf argues with
regard to sexualized images of women. "Some of us in America,
the West Indies, and Africa believe that the nearer we approach the
white man in color, the greater our social standing and
privilege," he wrote (Garvey 1925 [1986], 56). He condemns skin
bleaching and hair straightening as ways that black people are taught
to devalue themselves by white standards of beauty. And he connects
such standards to 'colorism' or prejudice in the
African-American community toward darker-skinned black people.



Such observations suggest some of the strengths of cultural relativism
as opposed to subjectivism or universalism: standards of beauty appear
in this picture not to be idiosyncratic to individuals, nor to be
universal among all people, but to be tied to group identities and to
oppression and resistance.



In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1925-1965), whose parents were
activists in the Garvey movement, describes 'conking' or
straightening his hair with lye products as a young man. "This
was my first really big step toward self-degradation," he
writes, "when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my
flesh to have it look like a white man's hair. I had joined that
multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into
believing that black people are 'inferior' - and
white people 'superior' - that they will even
violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look
'pretty' by white standards" (X 1964,
56-7). For both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, a key moment in the
transformation of racial oppression would be the affirmation of
standards of black beauty that are not parasitic on white standards,
and hence not directly involved in racial oppression. This was
systematically developed after Malcolm's death in the
"natural" hairstyles and African fabrics in the Black
Power movement. Certainly, people have many motivations for
straightening or coloring their hair, for example. But the critical
examination of the racial content of beauty norms was a key moment in
black liberation movements, many of which, around 1970, coalesced
around the slogan *Black is beautiful*. These are critiques of
specific standards of beauty; they are also tributes to beauty's
power.



Imposing standards of beauty on non-Western cultures, and, in
particular, misappropriating standards of beauty and beautiful objects
from them, formed one of the most complex strategies of colonialism.
Edward Said famously termed this dynamic "orientalism."
Novelists such as Nerval and Kipling and painters such as Delacroix
and Picasso, he argued, used motifs drawn from Asian and African
cultures, treating them as "exotic" insertions into
Western arts. Such writers and artists might even have understood
themselves to be celebrating the cultures they depicted in pictures of
Arabian warriors or African masks. But they used this imagery
precisely in relation to Western art history. They distorted what they
appropriated.



"Being a White Man, in short," writes Said, "was a
very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of
reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style
possible" (Said 1978, 227). This style might be encapsulated in
the outfits of colonial governors, and their mansions. But it was also
typified by an appropriative "appreciation" of
"savage" arts and "exotic" beauties, which
were of course not savage or exotic in their own context. Even in
cases where the beauty of such objects was celebrated, the
appreciation was mixed with condescension and misapprehension, and
also associated with stripping colonial possessions of their most
beautiful objects (as Europeans understood beauty)--shipping them
back to the British Museum, for example. Now some beautiful objects,
looted in colonialism, are being returned to their points of origin
(see Matthes 2017), but many others remain in dispute.


### 3.4 Beauty and Resistance



However, if beauty has been an element in various forms of oppression,
it has also been an element in various forms of resistance, as the
slogan "Black is beautiful" suggests. The most compelling
responses to oppressive standards and uses of beauty have given rise
to what might be termed *counter-beauties*. When fighting
discrimination against people with disabilities, for example, one may
decry the oppressive norms that regard disabled bodies as ugly and
leave it at that. Or one might try to discover what new standards of
beauty and subversive pleasures might arise in the attempt to regard
disabled bodies as beautiful (Siebers 2005). For that matter, one
might uncover the ways that non-normative bodies and subversive
pleasures actually do fulfill various traditional criteria of
beauty. Indeed, for some decades there has been a disability arts
movement, often associated with artists such as Christine Sun Kim and
Riva Lehrer, which tries to do just that (see Siebers 2005).


 
The exploration of beauty, in some ways flipping it over into an
instrument of feminist resistance, or showing directly how
women's beauty could be experienced outside of patriarchy, has
been a theme of much art by women of the 20th and 21st
centuries. Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers and Judy
Chicago's "Dinner Party" place settings undertake to
absorb and reverse the objectifying gaze. The exploration of the
meaning of the female body in the work of performance artists such as
Hannah Wilke, Karen Finley, and Orlan, tries both to explore the
objectification of the female body and to affirm women's
experience in its concrete realities from the inside: to make of it
emphatically a subject rather than an object (see Striff 1997).



"Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that
can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving," wrote
philosopher Peg Zeglin Brand in 2000. "Confident young women
today pack their closets with mini-skirts and sensible suits. Young
female artists toy with feminine stereotypes in ways that make their
feminist elders uncomfortable. They recognize that ... beauty can
be a double-edged sword - as capable of destabilizing rigid
conventions and restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing
them" (Brand 2000, xv). Indeed, vernacular norms of beauty as
expressed in media and advertising have shifted in virtue of the
feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms, as the
concept's long journey continues.