Chapter 2

Enlightenment or the This-Worldly Concept of the Beautiful

“Tout le monde raisonne du beau.”

—Diderot, Traité du beau (1772)1

The second act differs markedly from the first in the story of the concept of the beautiful. For example, new characters, such as the gentry, bourgeoisie, and wealthy men and women of the new age, appear on an unfamiliar stage. In addition, the love of life, elegance, poetry, nature, conversation, and passion marks the mood of the era. Even suicidal figures like Goethe’s hero, Werther, express a great love of life. Men and women of the Enlightenment ridicule the obsolete ideas of their forebears, smiling at their viewpoints and dismissing their infatuation with hierarchy and homogeneity. However, the reflective devaluation of hierarchical and traditional values that will eventually culminate in an experiential “death of god” has not yet cast its dark shadow.

The deconstruction of the metaphysical hierarchy of values allows for a new concept of the beautiful that shuns ranking and knows nothing of ascension. Still, since the upper region of the once hierarchically ordered spheres of beauty does not readily fit into the more contemporary framework, the Enlightenment thinkers doubled the old concept and forged two from one: the beautiful and the sublime. The distrust of homogeneity resulted in the pluralization, or rather dispersion of the concept of the beautiful in that a wide array of independent things that were never previously seen as beautiful were now identified as such. For example, the previously mundane task of gardening, one of the primary artistic practices in Oriental cultures, gained prominence in the post-metaphysical age, along with other activities relating to nature. Moreover, the love of life could be enhanced even by simple, yet beautiful objects, such as a piece of furniture, dress, or silver spoon. Intellectual property, like mannerisms, poetry, and other works of art, was construed as beautiful, too. Regardless of the entity, all beauties enhance life and just as the beauty of the Angelic mind goes unappreciated, no single grain of thánatos is left in the Enlightenment concept of the beautiful. Similarly, Erôs, the daimon, is also discharged, or at least transformed into a decorative motive depicted as a fat, winged, male child in sculpture and painting. Of the three kinds of Augustinian love—erôs, philia, and delectio—it is delectio that wins the day.

Not only is there an increase in the kinds of beauty individuals recognize, but the space in which one enjoys beauty widens as the discourse on beauty expands. A new public space is opened up, but it is a common space and not a “higher” one. Likewise, society differentiates between private, public, and intimate spaces, but does not rank them.2 Beauty is discussed in private salons, mansions, and gardens of the English gentry, but also in cafes, newspapers, and forests where groups gather for picnics. However, even though public space becomes a new hotbed of intellectual discourse, it may also be shunned, along with private space. As a result, the period of Enlightenment breeds the lonely, melancholic man who wanders alone in the woods and seeks solace in the nightingale’s beautiful song. The men and women of the time believed that beauty could be enjoyed in good company or in solitude, far from the maddening crowd.

While society no longer seeks the beauty of God, or the One, divine beauty remains a primary source of enjoyment. Of the old proofs of God’s existence, only the physics-teleological argument occupies any intellectual space. Individuals enjoy the purposefulness of nature not just for the sake of practicality, but also for the sake of its intrinsic beauty. The evaluative dichotomy of beautiful and ugly becomes blurred and theorists instead prefer to contrast beauty with deformity, which typically serves to identify what is ugly. For example, a manmade work is ugly if it is far from perfection or if the craftsman does not apply the proper form. Deformity may also imply natural beauty, however, and the beauty-deformity pair may be applied to virtually every concept or entity, from plants and animals to ethics and spiritual matters. When Kant exemplified the imperfections of human nature, which inclines toward evil, he employed the simile of crooked timber (krummes Holz).3 The choice of this metaphor suggests that for Kant’s contemporaries it was taken for granted that a piece of krummes Holz is deformed and assumed that a beautiful piece of wood must be straight. Our tastes have since changed, though, as we may now appreciate the krummes Holz more than the straight one.

What became a problem for the late moderns was not yet one for the early moderns. Since one may find Beauty in all things, there must be a relationship between beautiful behavior and “things of beauty.” One may presuppose that individuals who are surrounded by things of beauty tend to display beautiful manners or behavior. In this respect, there is a still a representational, pre-modern aspect in the Enlightenment concept of the Beautiful and its perception and practice in discourse and daily life. More specifically, there is a class distinction here in that wealthy individuals, especially in England, are expected to behave well and as we see from the novels of Jane Austen, “good breeding” without beautiful manners presents a social faux pas. Socially speaking, good judgment regarding beauty and deformity depended on good breeding, a phenomenon that alienated class outsiders and encouraged them to regard things of beauty with suspicion, both politically and ethically. For the Jacobins and, earlier, Rousseau, many beautiful things reek of privilege. Furthermore, both the church’s moral and religious censorship of art and Plato’s interpretation of beauty resulted in the politicization of the concept of the beautiful. Now, however, the yardstick of political assessment has changed as beauty and deformity have become a matter of taste. Taste, therefore, is the primary category of the concept of the beautiful during the Enlightenment, and the immanence and this-worldliness of beauty become manifest through the centrality of taste. Contrary to Plato’s notion that beauty transcends and is distinct from man, the Enlightenment presents a humanist interpretation of beauty in that man himself determines what is beautiful and, therefore, serves as the ultimate measure of beauty.

But what is taste? It is a kind of faculty, which is now reflected anthropologically. One may identify it as a kind of human faculty in which an individual exercises sensibility, especially in regards to judgment, imagination, and understanding. While not all human faculties can be wrongly employed, there are good and bad tastes and untutored and refined tastes. A popular topic during this age is the cultivation of taste, or the development of taste from its raw state to a more refined one. There are both ethical and cultural means by which taste is cultivated. For example, one may be ethically required to act only as an observer in some settings, so as not to damage an aesthetically important work. Nevertheless, one’s culture may insist that the learned individual is one who becomes proficient in evaluating beauty and comparing different objects of beauty. Therefore, while there is a universal-anthropological definition of taste, there is also an inner-worldly Doppelgänger for the ascent. The refinement and cultivation of taste replaces the ladder of ascension, or the flight into the upper regions. Only the refined taste can distinguish the truly beautiful from the apparently beautiful, and only the well-bred taste can legitimately utter the well-known expression, “This is not beautiful, something else is.” Here, we actually face a distinction rather than ascension. On the one hand is the universal faculty of taste and on the other is the connoisseur’s refined taste.

To understand the relevance of the Enlightenment concept of the beautiful to the everyday judgments of cultivated men, one must recognize that the focal points of judgment are often non-spectacular phenomena, such as flowers, glass, or carpet. However, a proper account of the matter also includes more uncommon phenomena, such as a beautiful boy, the paradigmatic case of ancient beauty. During the Enlightenment, the concept of the beautiful was closely related to the sensus communis of a broad social stratum since the possibility of everyone attaining a refined taste seemed possible. Everyone was thought to be able to distinguish true beauty and real deformity, as the concept of “potential equality,” or the idea that every man is born free, dominated the discourse, even before the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and the American “Declaration of Independence.” Hobbes and Locke created potential for an intellectual environment conducive to egalitarianism, although that possibility was not necessarily an actuality.

To reiterate, the Enlightenment marked the first instance in which the concept of the beautiful was so closely tied to everydayness. The discourse during this age negated the traditional hierarchical notions of beauty as the deconstruction of hierarchy comprised a general practice and eminent passion of the time. However, this negation was not initiated by philosophy and did not counter public perception. On the contrary, it was the shared pastime of a broad social stratum and an already existing sensus communis, including shared taste. Negating the rawness of this sensus communis from the perspective of refined taste was the weakest case of negation.

The Enlightenment concept of the beautiful diverges from the traditional concept in several notable ways. One may argue that beauty possessed entirely different meanings for Plato and Hume, but there are a few instances in which the early modern concept of the beautiful displays certain essential similarities to the concerns of the Platonic heritage. First, it is important that the Enlightenment thinkers reintroduced beauty into philosophy after some of the great metaphysicians and empiricists, like Locke, neglected to discuss aesthetics. During this age, intellectuals once again enthroned beauty as one of the queens of life, an experience that influences the good life just as much as the good and true. Beauty flourishes in a variety of ways and while difference enunciates the diversity of beauty, the same could not be said of truth, which at the time depended on the then nascent natural sciences.

The deconstruction of the hierarchy of beauty, and therefore the motion of ascension, has eliminated the will from the list of essential secondary categories of the concept of the beautiful. Will was not necessarily a category in the Platonic concept as it was, after all, absent in Plato. However, since it became very apparent in Christian Platonism, the elimination of the will from questions regarding judgment, taste, or creation of beauty is still a prominent move. As has already been discussed, love has become less valued. It is still said that we love beauty and that it is beauty that we love, but since loving here means to like, that is, to take pleasure in or to take delight in the element of Erôs, something must be missing, namely, the thing we desire, lack, or need. This is the beauty of Poros without Penia and is the reason why beauty loses its redemptive power and is not considered the promise of happiness. Beauty is an essential aspect of man, who, after all, understands the good life and pursues happiness with no promise of attaining happiness. A century later, Hegel claimed that modern science is no longer philosophy, for it does not love wisdom, but possesses it and we do not love, at least with unquenchable desire, that which we already possess. During the Enlightenment, the experience of beauty is what man possesses and one possesses it because beauty is constituted by man’s judgments. Beauty dwells in one’s soul, yet one need not carve his soul in the form of idealized images. There are no ideal images and each of us must attune one’s soul to the music of the refined soul of his fellow creatures. Life is, above all, beautiful.

In the last decades of the late twentieth century, there still has been no common ground between the elitist egalitarianism of the enlightened concept of the beautiful and the banausic egalitarianism in matters of taste. The difference rests between the presence and absence of a standard of taste and there was indeed a standard, or better yet, idea of a common standard, in times of enlightenment. The idea of the standard comes with negation and it is not the barbarian underworld that is negated, as in Plato, but the crudeness of taste. Maintaining the standard of taste was difficult during the Enlightenment since there was no overarching, substantive criterion of beauty against which all beauties could be measured. In any event, it would have been near impossible to provide such a standard for all tastes given the immense diversity of things of beauty. However, serious philosophers were reluctant to dwell continuously in the no-man’s land between an absolute criterion of beauty and the absence of criteria. Ultimately, we celebrate all beauty, from the most vicious (de Sade) to the most virtuous (Clarissa), from the music of Mozart to the trotting horse. Beauty stands in its own territory, in the no-man’s land of an age that allegedly presents us with the rule of cold understanding (Verstand) alone. The concept of the beautiful, as we have seen, tells us a different story.

Part 1

The Standard of Taste and the Sense of Beauty: Fruits, Flowers, Sentiments, Grace, and the Apollo of Belvedere

The Enlightenment concept of the beautiful is post-metaphysical. As indicated in the introduction, it must be noted that the deconstruction of metaphysics was not accomplished in one stroke. Among the three majestic ideas, it was that of Beauty which had to leave the scene first, simply because the metaphysical idea of the beautiful was deconstructed before the ideas of the True and Good. If one casts a new eye on Kant’s three Critiques, then this notion becomes apparent. Whereas a priori understanding and reason both legislate and constitute their respective realms of nature and freedom and, thus, comprise a new kind of metaphysics, the a priori judgment of taste does not legislate. Rather, it reflects, possessing neither a realm nor a territory. Taste is entirely anti- or a-metaphysical.

The source of beauty is thus located in the human mind, Gemüt, as judgment. Since the hierarchy of spiritual beauty became a thing of the past, the beautiful has been beheaded. There was always a relationship between matters of beauty and virtue. But since the question of why it is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice could never be rationally answered, Plato placed the notion of the good at the top of the transcendent hierarchy in order to provide evidence as to the existence of the good in the metaphysical heaven. First, morality and knowledge are united, followed by beauty and goodness. The very existence of the idea of beauty reminds us that before birth, we take a glimpse toward this upper realm of goodness and truth and that we may vaguely recollect it through the glass of earthly beauties while ascending to the heavens.

In British empiricism, namely in the work of Hutcheson, Shaftsbury, Hume, and Smith, the general tendency to deconstruct both the idea of the beautiful and the idea of the good gathered momentum. The link, or perhaps parallel, between the reflections on beauty and goodness was retroactively restored. British empiricists began to deconstruct both of them simultaneously, but the deconstruction of the idea of the good, with the exception of Hume and Smith, did not happen easily. After all, God, in one or another form, was to be kept the moral center of the universe—God was not yet dead. No similar strings were attached to the deconstruction of the concept of the beautiful as it was not necessarily related to the upper region, from which beauty had already been expelled by the great rationalist (and some empiricist) metaphysicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hobbes. Still, old habits die hard and the parallel between beauty and God was reinforced. When Kant suggested that beauty is the symbol of morality, he remained true to tradition, but also conveyed a new idea.

Hutcheson was the greatest innovator here and he exerted the most influence on matters of both ethics and beauty. He was the first to draw a parallel between the two ideas he deconstructed, albeit to a different extent, for he deconstructed without eliminating the Center, God.4 His way of thinking proceeds as follows. First, all individuals distinguish good from bad and virtue from vice in order to identify a common motivation or sense that causes us to make such a distinction. This common sense is moral sense and it only explains that everybody desires to make this distinction, not how to make the distinction correctly. The proper distinction must identify the good, however, as individuals are virtuous in order to make others happy and themselves moral. Therefore, there must exist criteria by which people make others happy and one may discover these criteria only by calculating how to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers.

It is easy to comprehend the extent to which the homogeneity and the one-centeredness of the old metaphysics have been deconstructed. Contrary to the Platonic tradition, good motivation and deeds, which, taken together, comprise virtuosity, may be traced back to entirely different sources. Only coincidence determines whether virtuosity will be incorporated into decent actions and righteousness. To summarize, immanent, this-worldly actions of men and women homogenize the ingredients of morality, which are in part attributable to entirely unconnected faculties. Hutcheson applies the same framework to the concept of the beautiful.

One learns that there are no innate ideas, but only an innate sensus communis of the beautiful. This innate sense of beauty makes us seek beauty, yet one recognizes beauty through the senses and cannot do so without them.5 Senses neither lie nor judge—only internal sense judges, as it is its function to do so. However, to distinguish between true beauty and apparent beauty, one requires formal categories to make comparisons. Hutcheson’s use of such formal categories clearly indicates his ambiguous reaction to the Platonic tradition, which argues that beauty results from correct mathematical proportions between uniformity and variety. According to this tradition, the criteria of simplicity and homogeneity are dismissed, as they exclude variety, and one must attribute beauty to something like a proportionally sound geometrical figure. The Enlightenment era, on the other hand, does not relegate beauty in this manner and unites three sources of experience into a sound criterion for the judgment of beauty: the universal and internal sense of beauty (sensus communis), the outer sources that provide pleasure and displeasure, and the yardstick that privileges the good proportion of uniformity and variety. As in moral action, good judgment of taste homogenizes all three aspects of heterogeneous origin.

The primary difference between the universal moral sense and the similarly universal sense of beauty lies in the direction of the motivational force. Moral sense motivates action, whereas the sense of beauty induces contemplation. Once again, this difference introduces a great change after the long dominion of the Platonic tradition, which was characterized by the ultimate unity of the good and beautiful. The ascension from apparent beauty to true beauty is also a practical and moral endeavor, yet the ideas of both good and beauty are to be contemplated. However, Hutcheson tears the practical and contemplative attitudes apart insofar as he attributes to each a unique motivational source of their own. In matters of beauty, there is no practice or motion and one is situated as a spectator. While we learn that the world’s beauty and, thus, our internal sense of beauty, is by God’s design, individuals pass judgments without being cognizant of this design.

The men of the Enlightenment realized that the downfall of metaphysics rendered certain interpretations of beauty obsolete. They had a sense of transcendent homelessness as the beautiful of a debunked metaphysics provided no transcendent appeal. However, something of transcendent appeal had to be preserved so that the concept still encompassed objects of ekstasis, passion, and Erôs, the majestic and unrepeatable things of grandeur. A concept that relies heavily on common sense can accommodate exceptional experiences only with enormous difficulty. The thinkers of the age of lumieres coined the concept of the “sublime” in order to find a new home for the transcendentally homeless experiences and interpretations of the beautiful that did not fit into their concept of beauty.6 This concept was new, but short-lived and provided a transition between the deconstruction of the metaphysics of beauty and the experience of the death of God.7

While the uneasy relationship between the beautiful and the sublime will be discussed later, one must understand a few more ideas pertaining to the judgment of taste. The judgment of taste assesses beauty alone. Beauty is neither great nor violent and its experience does not require a great mind or soul. Beauty is simply the delight of the senses, of the mind, and soul. It is a kind of refined pleasure that is open to all.

Hume and Smith radicalize Hutcheson. They do not make an attempt at genealogy or seek to identify the heterogeneous sources of the judgment of taste. Instead, they begin immediately with taste and their sensus communis is not the “aesthetic sense” or the sense of beauty which dwells in every person’s soul (put there by God). It is the attunement of opinions of different individuals in a concrete social milieu or setting.

There are a few among the thinkers of the new generation who, like Burke, entertained the ambition to find the universal anthropological foundations of taste. He ponders: vinegar is sour, honey is sweet, and everyone except the sick prefers the sweet. In matters of combinations of sensations, he writes: “So far then as Taste belongs to the imagination, its principle is the same in all men; there is no difference in their manner of being affected, nor in the causes of the affection; but in the degree there is a difference. . . .”8 However, while Burke elaborates on these remarks, he follows the common thinking patterns of his age and identifies bad judgment as the sole cause of bad taste. Good judgment, enhanced by proper learning, results from social approbation.9 People are not loners; they live gregariously and their judgments influence others and are influenced by others. Judgments of taste are always concrete and are valid only in the social setting in which they are uttered. Therefore, taste is just as contextual as ethics, and if one thinks otherwise, he or she is misled by language—words such as virtue, elegance, etc. Yet, if one asks the questions, “what is virtuous?” or “what is elegant?” the answers received are varied and sometimes contradictory. What seems to be an agreement in language becomes a disagreement in the context in which the language is used. Agreement in language comes close to real agreement only if one takes the concrete context as the starting point and avoids the danger of coining universal maxims, that is, to speak of eternal virtues and beauties and the like.

Hume’s starting point is a statement that confirms historical relativity. One cannot avoid the issue, and self-conscious modern thinkers have abandoned the certitude that only the contents they consider to be good or beautiful are truly good or beautiful. Still, Kant and Hegel remain true to the claim of universality. Kant speaks of forms void of contents, and not just in the case of the categorical imperative, but also in the case of the pure judgment of taste. On the level of pure form one can indeed make a good case for universality. Hegel, for his part, thinks of form and content together and this relationship causes him to reject the negative interpretation of historicity. History is not the confusing factor because it is in history that all concepts or determinations of the good, true, and beautiful have been worked out, or rather, have worked themselves out.

Returning to Hume, the constant fluctuation, or the transience of the concrete concepts of the beautiful, suggests that there are no universal measurements and searching for such measurements is like looking for a ghost. He believes, furthermore, that we do not need such measurements. However, this cautious and skeptical approach does not force him to accept the position of a banal aesthetic or ethical relativism. After all, our age, our world requires a standard of taste, not in order to universalize the standard, but in order to judge according to the norms of the standard. If, as social beings, humans attune themselves to their fellow creatures and vice versa, then they can share more than they currently do without mutual attunement—more noble pleasures, more decency, and more fun.

However, if one wants to establish a standard, one cannot attach the judgment of taste to sentiments. As Hume says, “no sentiment represents what is really in the object. It only marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind. . . . Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”10 Hume believes that this analysis is a fair, common-sense conception of taste, but there is another opposing, yet no less persuasive, common-sense conception as well. “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addision, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Tenerife, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.”11 Here is the paradox of taste, which we confront if both of the above mentioned good common-sense statements are upheld simultaneously. The paradox appears, however, only in the generalized statement. In terms of concrete judgments, men will agree as to the character of certain things that are normally believed to have or not to have satisfied the criteria of certain rules. Still, this expectation is not a universal “catholic” one.

Hume explains that certain works and artists, like Homer, have remained highly esteemed while tastes and common sense have changed multiple times. Since they were approved by so many different and diverging judgments, they have an “authority over the minds of men.”12 If those works do not please, then one can truly blame the sick palate or bad taste. There is such a thing as the delicacy of taste.

From this point forward, the two opposing common-sense sentences will occupy asymmetrical positions and this discussion will distinguish between taste in general and delicate taste in particular. Everyone has taste, and equally so. In this respect, judgments of taste are relative. Still, not everyone has a delicate taste. Since taste is located in the person’s mind (judgment) alone, the basis for delicate taste can be sought in both the object and mind, or in the relationship between object and mind. One must assume that there is something more or less beautiful in the objects themselves. This statement is political in that all are born equally endowed with the faculty of taste, but do not remain equal as not everybody can identify beauty equally well. The delicacy of taste depends on more than just practice and attunement. The identification of beauty depends on other aspects as well, and if such were not the case, then there would not be so many bad critics, as Hume wittily remarks.

Still, taste must be acquired through practice and repeated exposure to the same object. To that end, one must rid himself of prejudices and liberate himself from specific sentiments and convictions attached to those biases. This process of abolishing charm and self-interest, as Kant later expresses himself, depends on the general concepts of enlightenment. Through this practice, one places himself into the situation of the “universal man” and the better one can assume this role, the more refined are his judgments. Therefore, “ . . . 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.”13 One cannot miss the sound of the old music: “This is not true beauty; something else is.” “This is just taste of sorts, but something else is true taste.” The concept of the beautiful is restored through the motion of negation.

Everyone has taste, but only men who have worked themselves through all of the strenuous practices of the refinement of taste can become good critics. The standard of taste is the judgment of good critics, or the cultural elite. This cultural elite is not commensurate to the social elite, for we are all born with the same capacity to judge. The individual distinguishes himself and becomes an authority capable of separating beauty from deformity or greater from lesser beauty without relying on sentiments or established rules. He does so by refining sentiments and freeing himself from prejudices while injecting elasticity into the rules themselves. If individuals outside of the cultural elite wish to approximate good judgments of taste, they must accept the guidance of good critics who know the standard of taste. The general public will be able to distinguish the fraud from the true critic and the mediocre critic from the master critic. If a critic’s judgment does not correspond to one’s common sense, then that judgment does not represent the standard of taste. However, the elite is in need of recognition: “It is sufficient for our present purpose, if we have proved, that the taste of all individuals is not upon equal footing, and that some men in general, however difficult to be particularly pitched upon with be acknowledged by universal sentiment to have a preference above others.”14 Translated into political language, this means that everyone has a capacity to judge, but the political elite are best at passing judgment. Nevertheless, the people’s sentiment will serve as a check on the politician’s capacity to judge. If people can become attuned to an individual’s judgments, then that individual is a legitimate elite.

Hume’s conception of the standard of taste signaled the absolute rejection of traditional metaphysics. According to his own standard of taste, old works of metaphysics have no part in the contemporary discourse while old poetic works, for which society still has a taste, may remain poignant. Hume appeals to his colleagues, who are certain to share his sentiment:

Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: in a successive period these have been universally exploded; their absurdity has been detected . . . . The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry . . . Aristotle and Plato, and Epicurus, and Descartes, may successively yield to each other; but Terence and Virgil maintain a universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men. The abstract philosophy of Cicero has lost its credit: the vehemence of his oratory is still the object of our admiration.15

This humorous judgment does not discredit Hume. Rather, it shows that as a member of the elite of his country, he said things that the learned public readily accepted, and not just in his time. From then until the present, Great Britain has remained Humean in this sense. As a result, it has been a matter of pride not to understand Hegel. A Continental Hume would have passed another kind of judgment, as Kant certainly did.

If one speaks of taste in general and compares aesthetic taste with moral approbation and disapprobation, one would expect that author to deal not just with beauty in art. Hume never admits that he is speaking of artistic beauty, but he actually does so from the moment he decides that the paradox of taste is not really a paradox, since taste and delicate taste stand in an asymmetric relationship. One may have believed that, with the exception of artistic beauty, the paradox is maintained, for there is hardly an elite to provide the standard even for judging a bush, and antiquity does not normally play a role in judgment. However, it seems as if the cultural elite would provide the standard of taste in all matters. They do not only decide the worth of Don Quixote and the Latin poets, but also of the beauty and perfection of behavior, manners, and dress.

It is Hume’s greatness to say decisive things by keeping to a rule of thumb. He opened a conversation which has continued ever since.

One can still detect a dominant concept of the beautiful in Hume since the move of negation—that is, “This is not beautiful, but . . . ”—occupies a central space in his reflections on the distinction between taste and delicate taste. However, in Adam Smith’s philosophic ruminations, no such concept appears to be preserved or discussed. Smith seems adamant that there is no common measurement by which to compare beauty in different things. His primary thesis holds that all kinds of beautiful things are beautiful in and of themselves, by their own intrinsic measure. In other words, the means by which one measures beauty in something like furniture naturally differs from the means by which one measures beauty in nature.16 Ultimately, within the same realm, the standard of beauty differs from genre to genre and from piece to piece as there are different “species” of beauty.

Sometimes, albeit rarely, Smith makes generalized statements about the common sources of beauty. These discussions comprise the least interesting aspects of his work, however. For example, in his criticism of the theory of Father Buffier, who says that “the whole charm [of the nature of beauty] would thus seem to arise from its falling in with the habits which custom had impressed upon imagination . . .”17 Smith cannot be induced to believe “that our sense of beauty is founded altogether on custom. The utility of any form, its fitness for the useful purposes . . . renders it agreeable to us, independent of custom.”18 His criticism is meant to defend the pluralization as the still homogeneous concept, but to replace one factor with two is still a rigid version of the concept of the beautiful.

On the speculative level, one nears the complete senescence of this concept. The rejection or negation of a common concept actually serves to preserve the concept. If instead of completing the negation consistently one is tempted to enumerate the common features that make certain things beautiful, such as fashion and utility, philosophical metaphysics will be replaced with an everyday common-sense metaphysics. Furthermore, one will find rigidity and poverty instead of a variety of richness.19 Smith, however, avoids the trap. Despite the aforementioned remarks, along with a few others, Smith wants to do justice to the richness and variety of beautiful things and he succeeds in doing so more than anyone else among his predecessors and contemporaries. To build upon the previous quotation, when discussing the beauty of the imitative arts, Smith acknowledged the beauty of artworks which do not fall into the habits, for their beauty lies in their disquieting and surprising novelty.20

One must pay attention to Smith’s language as he often uses the terms beauty, charm, and agreeableness almost synonymously. When he speaks of dramatic poetry, he does not call beautiful things agreeable and charming. When he speaks of a face, horse, or furniture, however, he does. There exists a gradation of beauty and while beauty is important to all things, there are both more exciting kinds of beauty, and less exciting ones. Regardless, each kind of beauty exists in its proper place and there is no absolute dividing line between what is agreeable and what is purely beautiful. Rather, there is a continuous spectrum and one cannot point at a concrete species of beauty and determine whether it belongs to another side of the dividing line.

To summarize, each and every species of beauty has its own particular measurement. There are standards of taste, but there is no all-encompassing standard of taste. For example, one may have good taste in gardening, but bad taste in horse racing. More specifically, in certain species of beauty, one speaks of either having taste or not having taste, while in other species, one can speak about bad and good taste without hesitation. Still, no taste is an absence of taste as even bad taste is a presence, albeit one subjected to false social opinions and prejudices.

That each species of beauty has its own measurement by which to judge beauty does not mean that there is but a single type of measurement for each kind. Even if one speaks about one species, he needs to consider the diversity of measurements. Take human beauty, for instance. This type of beauty is intersubjectively constituted and, therefore, social:

Our first ideas of personal beauty and deformity are drawn from the shape and appearance of others, not from our own. We soon become sensible . . . that others exercise the same criticism upon us . . . We are pleased if they approve of our figure . . . We examine our person’s limb by limb, and by placing ourselves before a looking-glass . . . endeavor . . . to view ourselves at the distance and with the eyes of other persons.21

This idea, however, does not imply that there are no external criteria for certain social habits or common opinions. Consider the beauty of the human form in which the standard of beauty lies in the middle, or average.22 Still, Smith questions, why do people view a chair that is placed in the middle of the room as ugly? Here, the aspect of competency comes into play. However, in the case of a beautiful toy, aptness, and not utility is relevant to beauty.23 There are more permanent and more transient things of beauty. A poem’s beauty lasts for a long time, while a dress is beautiful as long as it does not unravel or fade. Finally, there is also a category of “propagated fashion” that lasts through generations. Once again, the dividing lines are not rigid.

It is this heterogeneity of the species of beauty as addressed by Smith that makes Smith’s concept(s) of the beautiful so interesting regarding the details and less attractive in regard to the general message. One could perhaps detect some similarity between Smith’s fluid concept of the Beautiful and the now current insistence that the distinction between high and low art ought to be blurred. As a matter of fact, contemporary museums do collect the things that Smith described as worthy of judgments of taste in his ruminations on beauty and taste. Smith’s ingenuity in matters of distinction and in discovering standards for each of the previously discussed species is best exemplified by his study, “Of the Nature of that Imitation Which Takes Place in What are Called the Imitative Arts.”24 The issue at stake is whether imitation is beautiful or ugly.

If a carpet is an exact imitation of another one, then it does not make any difference in regard to beauty which of them was made first and which was made second. However, “to build another St. Peter’s, or St. Paul’s church, of exactly the same dimensions, proportions, and ornaments with the present building . . . would be supposed to argue such a miserable barrenness of genius and invention as would disgrace the most expensive magnificence.”25 On the other hand, look at the correspondence between two flower beds, or chairs and tables—if they resemble one another they are beautiful. However, we are “displeased if resemblance was carried beyond the general outline,” such as when one puts exactly the same pictures on corresponding walls. In a grand hall, the pedestals of statues may resemble one another, but the statues themselves must be different. Ultimately, in nature, two seemingly identical objects do not disturb each other’s beauty, but if man-made work is duplicated, only the original, and not the copy, has any merit.

Resemblance of a different kind, such as the cloth on a Dutch painting, warrants attention and is considered beautiful. As a matter of fact, the painted cloth is more beautiful than the original. A beautiful painting may imitate displeasing objects, as well, but sculpture does not enjoy this freedom. Artificial fruits and flowers imitate natural objects, but we soon grow weary of them. Artistic imitation is unlike a mirror. The mirror reflects objects in the same way, “but every good statue and picture is a fresh wonder, which carries . . . its own explication around with it.”26 Smith accepts the idea that painting and sculpture are imitations of nature, but he does not allow all forms of art, such as music, to occupy this niche.

One thing may capture the reader’s attention here. Although Smith speaks frequently about beautiful things of nature, he is far more interested in the things of beauty created by man. He does not favor “naturalness” and, thus, speaks of English gardeners with suspicion. They believe that the French garden is unnatural and, therefore, less beautiful. However, “the figure of a pyramid or obelisk . . . is no more unnatural to a yew-tree than to a block of porphyry or marble.”27 This argument serves as a polemic against Rousseau’s emphasis on naturalness. Things of beauty that Hume and Smith valued so much were devalued in Rousseau’s aesthetic theory, which approved of simplicity. Rousseau disdainfully held magnificent buildings, in which he liked to lodge, as artificial luxuries, yet he did not elaborate a more general concept of the Beautiful. Still, his name was associated with the notion that only the simple is beautiful.

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime can easily be traced in the works of Rousseau. The identification of beauty with simplicity has merit unless one is a writer who designs human characters. When it comes to the presentation of human characters, as in Julie or the New Heloise, Rousseau depicts the characters as noble, but certainly not simple.28 In addition, the characters may be sublime, but they are not beautiful. The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime—goodness is beautiful, yet virtue is sublime—had, at first, far more to do with the understanding and appreciation of human character than with the appreciation of the ocean, mountain, or tempest.

Part 2

The Beautiful and the Sublime

Burke’s book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful29 became the prominent work on the topic, not because Burke employed the two concepts first, but because of the systematic approach he took to addressing a problem that was normally treated in essay form.30 In Burke, the concept of the sublime appears before the concept of the beautiful. Such is the case because the philosophies of the sublime and beautiful are intimately related to the philosophies of feelings, or passions. According to Burke, since all pains and pleasures may be reduced to two concepts, namely self-preservation and societal passion, self-preservation, which is based on the sublime, takes a quasi-historical precedence over the beautiful, which allegedly owes its power to the drive of “being societal.”

The move from the ancient, Platonic to the modern, British concept of the beautiful represents a radical reversal. The notion that the origin of both the beautiful and the sublime is feeling, or, even more so, abstract and deeply universal drives such as self-preservation, portrays this reversal of metaphysics in the nineteenth century at the hands of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Sentiments, emotions, drives, and passions, such as self-preservation, had already become central themes in the seventeenth century rationalism of Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and others. Hutcheson was impressed by Malebranche, and Spinoza’s doctrine of countervailing passions made headway among the thinkers of the eighteenth century, who frequently remained unaware of the sources of these ideas. These thinkers differed from their dignified forefathers because of a representative absence and representative presence. The representative absence was the absence of God, with which Burke disagreed, while the representative presence, with which Burke agreed, was the concept of the beautiful and the sublime. The theory of emotions and passions had always been linked to the issue of ethics, morals, politics, and so on, and in this respect, both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions were preserved. Now, however, the beautiful and the sublime are directly linked to the original passions and, therefore, the ethico-political must also be connected to the experience of the beautiful and the sublime.

The idea that the increasing appreciation of tragic poetry, both Greek and Shakespearean, played a monumental role in legitimizing the concept of the sublime is not farfetched. The Aristotelian origin of the discourse on the sublime is easily discernable as well. After all, in Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy is related to the emotions of fear and pity and to the purification of the soul regarding those emotions. Fear and pity are strong emotions and according to contemporary thinkers, their origin is related to the so-called drive for self-preservation.

While the discussion has seemingly digressed from Burke, such is not actually the case. Burke writes, “The passions which concern self-preservation turn mostly on pain or danger. The ideas of pain, sickness, and death fill the mind with strong emotions of horror.”31 He continues to argue that it isthe terrible that excites ideas of pain, etc., and, thus, serves as the origin of the Sublime: “That is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”32 According to this idea, the impact of torment and suffering is far more intensive than any kind of pleasure. For Plato, such a truth would have spelled the final verdict in that any kind of pleasure that can be accompanied by torment is the worst kind of pleasure. However, the thinkers of the Enlightenment did not ascribe to this. In fact, they did not decry torment and suffering because both are a productive kind of grandeur.

Still, one learns from Burke that there is another cluster of passions related to human intercourse which entails two sub-clusters. The first encompasses the passions of the sensual pleasure of sex—strong, yet hardly noticed in their absence. The other is humanity’s long-time acquaintance, amatory madness. Notwithstanding this brief mention, the discussion does not pertain to desire and lust as Burke does not take these concepts seriously. The concept of the beautiful becomes important when one inquires about mixed passions, namely sex and social passion. Burke insists that men are attached to “particulars” in the case of personal or human beauty. Ultimately, the sole kind of beauty Burke allocates to the authority of erôs appears only when erôs is mixed with social impulses, in which case the result is female beauty. No other kind of beauty is connected to this passion and it is hardly necessary to emphasize yet again that in the Platonic tradition, Erôs is a great God, the idea of which has played a central role in taming erotic impulses. According to Burke, however, erôs is relegated to one, small corner of life and every other phenomenon occurs independently from erôs.

In addition to the passions of self-preservation are the passions of society. One learns immediately that the greatest pain is solitude and may even recall that solitude and self-sufficiency, autarchia, are god-like constituents in the mind of Plato. Burke argues that it is precisely the need for others and their “good company” and “lively conversation” that carries, or begets the promise of happiness.33 The three “principal links” among people are sympathy, imitation, and ambition. Sympathy explains, among others things, our relation to the tragic heroes as the pleasure we take in others’ pain mirrors the spectators of a tragic theatrical. Imitation explains the emotional background of beauties, such as that of painting. Finally, ambition simply crouches in the same corner where one finds the other human brute.

From the discussion thus far, one has already learned that all arts are related to the passion of self-preservation and society, or at least it is from them that arts have their origin. Burke goes even further on this topic. He embraces the whole extension of the concept of the beautiful, with all of its different kinds and forms, and relates that extension to the two primordial passions of its origin. He thus homogenizes heterogeneity with means similar to that of the Platonists. The second part of his book on the beautiful and the sublime is dedicated to this task as Burke begins his story by examining the sublime in nature. The primary passion from which the sublime originates is fear. However, he immediately turns to the representation of this primordial fear by art, and in particular poetry. Burke believes that poetry influences us the most because it affects us emotionally to a great extent. There is also sublimation in Burke’s scenario—the portrayal of fear itself. This portrayal does not inflict fear, either of primordial terror or death. Passions provide the energy for poetry, just as Erôs provided the energy for the Platonic ascent.

Interestingly, Burke makes a distinction between warm and cold poetry. The great passions absorbed by the sublime make sublime poetry “warm.” Hence, sublime poetry, namely tragedy, is warm. On the other hand, the portrayal of the beautiful, in which the energies of fear and terror are not employed, is “cold,” as this poetry relies on a kind of imitation that uses no words.34 The obscure idea, Burke ruminates, affects us more than the clear one does.35 After having discussed obscurity, darkness, and all the similar sources of terror, it turns out that power, such as that which is found in nature, and privation, such as solitude and silence, are also sublime.

Burke says less about reflection on the beautiful. He traces its origin back to our social nature or instinct. There are two kinds of society: one is the society of the sexes, the sexual relation, and the other is the society of “men and other animals.”36 What follows from above is that the fundamental form and kind of beauty is female beauty. Some commentators have remarked that that Burke borrowed all the features of his description of beauty, such as smallness, elegance, smoothness, and delicacy, from the model of his fiancé. However, the second kind of society, with its own beauty, still remains important. For example, Burke makes the interesting point that animals may be construed as beautiful because they belong to the same community as humans. Love, attraction, familiarity, need, reciprocity, and the like bind us together with animals and plants. Certain kinds of love attach us to both the other sex and to the community of all living things. Loving the familiar is beauty as beauty is that which does not threaten. Beauty is intimate, internal, and somehow belongs to us. The sublime, however, is threatening, empowering, and remains outside of us, for it is unfamiliar.

At this stage of his discourse, Burke introduces two rather new elements into the concept of the beautiful. The creatures of nature will also be embraced by love. They need to be preserved since one cares for all that one loves. On the one hand, the love of nature is expressed in the act of preservation. On the other hand, the love of nature is expressed by taking an observatory position, as Kant would later agree. Burke also explains that if animals and plants belong to the community of living which humans share, then the position of observation must be turned into the act of taking responsibility. Man is responsible for the beauty of the “great society.” In this sense, he is the shepherd of all beautiful things that might be threatened by civilization. As a matter of fact, the idea that living beings will be threatened by civilization first emerged in the eighteenth century concomitant to an ambiguous attitude towards nature. In the Platonic tradition, nature is the barbarian within us. According to Burke, however, the nature within us needs to be protected from the barbarianism of civilization. Still, this theme is familiar to attentive readers of Plato, but only insofar as one understands that civilization does not necessarily make humans “good.” Plato would never have considered unadulterated nature to be highly attractive and worthy of protection. In the Christian spirit, all humans are God’s children. In the Judeo-Christian spirit, animals and plants are given to man’s protection by God because man is stronger and wiser than plants and animals. Burke secularizes this idea and claims that the community of living things is one of the sources of Beauty. Everyone bears the responsibility of caring for all living beings, as all living things share something in common, namely life.

Kant had not yet read Burke’s book when he published his work of youth, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime.”37 Later, in his Critique of Judgment, he regards Burke’s work with respect, even though he critiques it as well. He criticizes Burke’s approach for being psychological and empirical, an approach Kant defines as one beginning with the analysis of the empirical human universals instead of a priori principles. According to this definition, Kant’s early work was psychological in nature, too, and he relied in his early discourse on common observations, reflection, narrative poetry, jokes, and common-sense philosophizing. He did not want to systematize like Burke and he did not speak of the common origins of all that is beautiful. Ultimately, Kant’s early work was an essay in the modern sense and as the personality of a man is normally continuous, it is no surprise that the pre-critical Kant is passionately interested in the same things that interested the older Kant, namely the relationship between morality, the beautiful, and the sublime.

Kant refers to both the feeling of the beautiful and sublime as “refined feeling,” and it is because of that reference that we begin to return to the spirit of the narrative of beauty, the Geist der Erzählung. This term stems from Thomas Mann, who regards this narrative as an archetype that will be told again and again in many variations from generation to generation. Even if one can hardly recognize the original narrative, the idea will still define the fundamental theme on which imagination thrives, expands, and plays.

The Platonic concept of the beautiful is the archetype here. In the works of some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hume and Smith, the narrative has been abandoned permanently. In Kant, the spirit of the old narrative is resurrected after having absorbed the great innovations of French- and English-Enlightenment thought. As a matter of fact, Kant was inspired by French and English ideas and superficially he employs those ideas, such as taste and the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. In Kant’s critical period, the introduction of a priori-ism reconnected contemporary thought with the almost forgotten contrast between purity and impurity. The young Kant did not address this issue, but the feeling of the sublime and beautiful were introduced as the harbinger of humanity’s overcoming of barbarism and what is at stake is freedom and happiness.

The essay begins with the distinction between kinds of enjoyment, and with Kant’s fundamental statement about happiness, that will never change: “ . . . a person finds himself happy only so far as he gratifies an inclination.”38 The ancient objective concept of happiness, practicing virtues throughout our life, vanishes and one can no longer tell anyone else that he is mistaken when he believes himself to be happy because he is in fact unhappy, as was possible among the Greeks.39 Kant drastically denies the possibility of an objective concept of happiness. Men feel happy if they fulfill their desires and satisfy their needs. Still, men and women can be evaluated and ranked according to the refinement of their desires and needs. The more refined one’s desires, the more refined things can make one happy and the higher one stands on the ladder of human character. There certainly exists such a ladder and one can certainly climb the rungs of this ladder, from the barbaric bottom to the refined top, but such a movement does not necessarily imply a movement from unhappiness to happiness. Kant emphatically denies this hypothesis and the message he conveys is that happiness does not depend on the witnessing of sublime things. Refined and decent individuals can become happy without the sublime, although beauty and the sublime may provide this possibility or at least have something to do with it.

Here, Kant’s distinction between the sublime and beautiful is rather banal. He falls almost unthinkingly into the footsteps of the distinction made by the popular understanding that friendship has more to do with the sublime and sexual love with beauty. Experiences of infinity and notions of immortality trigger feelings of sublimity, whereas harmony triggers the feeling of Beauty; “Understanding is sublime, wit is beautiful.”40 However, in the same section of the essay, a few innovative ideas surface as well. Kant begins to speak about the sublime and beautiful virtues only to return immediately to the discussion of the sublime and beautiful character.

Human virtues are related either to the dignity of human nature or to the feeling of beauty. The first kind of virtue Kant calls original (echte) whereas the second kind is “adopted” virtue. Kant, who at the time had not yet elaborated on the idea of transcendental freedom, is hardly able to make a strong case for his hierarchical organization as both the dignity of human nature and the feeling of beauty are inherent to human nature. Granted, the former is also based on a principle, but why is the latter merely “adopted”? After all, human nature is not adopted. Adoption implies that if a good-hearted man has to accept virtues that had been developed by the man of dignity. This idea is Kant’s position in his critical work. The man of dignity is autonomous, has principles, does not turn to the other for need alone, and does not react to the other, whereas a good person in the adopted sense reacts to his needs and those of others. In this respect, the beautiful virtue is social, while the dignified virtue is not, as it does not depend on others and relationships to others. The dignified sublime person does not depend on others’ opinions and this independence is one of the chief sources of his autonomy. If one relies on other people’s needs, he is also exposed to their opinions since the other persons’ claims may result from prejudices. The difficulty is better spelled out here than in Kant’s great Critiques precisely because of the absence of philosophical sophistication. Kant’s beautiful individual resembles a good individual in Levinas’s philosophy, namely that the other outside me lays the claim upon me.41 Whereas in the second case in which human dignity becomes the sole source and principle for man, the other is always within a person and lays claim upon that person from within. The first character is beautiful and the second sublime. This distinction makes Kant depreciate the feeling of sympathy, a sentiment or judgmental pattern that has played a significant and unproblematic role in both the ethics and aesthetics of the British Enlightenment.42

Sublime character is obviously not happy: “It even approaches melancholy, a gentle and noble feeling so far as it is grounded upon the awe that a hard-pressed soul feels when, full of some great purpose, he sees the danger he will have to overcome, and has before his eyes the difficult but great victory of self-conquest.”43 The echte Tugend is then in a sense melancholic. On the contrary, the beautiful character is close to the sanguinary type.44 Rather, it becomes likely that happiness, if it exists, can be found in the beautiful character.

The deepest discussion of the two character types follows in the third section when Kant begins to associate the sublime character with men and the beautiful character with women: “The fair sex,” writes Kant, “has just as much understanding as the male, only it is a beautiful understanding, while ours should be a deeper understanding, which is an expression that means the same thing as the sublime.”45 After having repeated this commonplace expression, Kant begins to do something interesting with it, namely he identifies the nature of beautiful virtue. Kant writes:

The virtue of the woman is a beautiful virtue. That of the male sex ought to be a noble virtue. Women will avoid evil not because it is unjust but because it is ugly, and for them virtuous actions mean those that are ethically beautiful. Nothing of ought, nothing of must, nothing of obligation. To a woman anything by way of orders and sullen compulsion is insufferable. They do something only because they love to, and the art lies in making sure that they love only what is good.46

Surprisingly, this is the character Kant considers less valuable!

The sublime man follows the call of dignity. He acts under the yoke of ought whereas the beautiful soul is harmonious, just like the beautiful souls in Plato. In addition, the beautiful soul is autonomous, for autonomy may mean something different from self-sufficiency. One can say, rather, that autonomy comprise not subjecting oneself to the commands of an authority and still doing what is right, doing it well, and doing it with pleasure. Certainly, this beautiful character, the non-self-sufficient, yet still autonomous character, exists only if it becomes, for nothing is simply a gift of nature. The beautiful character develops itself through the refinement of her feelings, yet without narrowing her soul. The self-education that paideia is to achieve is the good that will be loved. Plato said that we love the beautiful and Kant said that he who loves the good is beautiful. Kant designs a character type that is well-suited to the ethics of personality, even though a modern ethics of personality, which was ready to accommodate the harmonious character type alone, and not also its sublime, melancholic counterpart, would be as one-sided as Kant’s early attempt at the opposite. The sublime and beautiful characters do not need to be arranged in a hierarchical order. They are both variants of the refined character47 and can be equally reinterpreted by and reintroduced into the moral aesthetics of modernity.

There is, however, one aspect that makes the distinction essential. The discussion returns again to the spirit of the narrative. Whatever way in which one interprets self-sufficiency, whether as the absence of need or the absence of constraint, it is always the other constituent of freedom that makes happiness possible. Beautiful people are, or at least can be, happy. Kant has defined happiness as the satisfaction of desires. The decent, beautiful woman’s greatest desire is to become what she already is, namely, a decent, beautiful person. Therefore, she does what she enjoys doing, namely, the right thing, and by doing the right thing she is at peace with herself and enjoys her life. She is a happy character.

The later Kant shed this shadow of his early work. The man of sublimity, of dignity, and original virtues cannot be happy as his soul is narrow and his task strenuous. Beauty, however, as defined in the narrative archetype, is the promise of happiness. The beautiful person is beautiful because she is the promise of happiness, but why is she only a promise? If one assumes that a beautiful soul can be happy, he still does not necessarily claim that all souls are indeed happy. There are, after all, many needs and even if those beautifully souled women were happy, the sublime person would still stand for the promise of happiness. The sublime person sees in the beautiful person something that he deserves but never achieves: the unity of freedom and happiness. This notion returns the reader to the spirit of the narrative, that the beautiful soul is the promise of fulfillment. However, this time, fulfillment does not resemble death in any sense of the concept. It is, rather, a form of life.48 Still, the more the idea of the beautiful form of life is embraced, the more its paradoxes and contradictions come into light.

Part 3

Redeeming and Healing Beauty

In Goethe’s dramatic poetry, and especially in his novels, the sublime and beautiful characters are not always distinguished by gender lines. True, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, Lotte is the beautiful and Werther the sublime character, but in Willhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels or Elective Affinities, for example, this distinction does not hold as there are men of beautiful character and women of sublime character. What interests Goethe, among other things, is whether those two character types are well suited to each other. The myth of the archetypal man or woman, as once told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, returns in a new variation and in a hetErôsexual setting. There is somehow a fatal pre-ordained character match, a kind of primordial unity that men and women seek on Earth. If one finds this match, or unity, then life becomes beautiful beyond imagination. If not, then the person suffers and meets a tragic fate. The self-destructiveness of decent characters, particularly of the sublime ones, may pull beautiful characters into the abyss of night and darkness or sin and death. In comparison to Kant, Goethe metaphorically enlarges the soul of the sublime character. Unless they are sublime or evil, all great characters—those of overwhelming passions and unquenchable desire—thirst for something meaningful and significant, be it knowledge, felicity, liberty, or love. Thus, Goethe appreciates Hamlet for his sublime and melancholic nature even though Hamlet hardly would have fit the Kantian notion of the melancholic, sublime man.

As a thinker, Goethe considers all the themes of the concept of the beautiful and composes many variations of them. As a poet, on the other hand, he never provides smooth answers, clear categorizations, or final decisions. Every point has a counterpoint and every hope can turn into despair, just as every despair can turn into hope. Fulfillment means realizing one’s true self, yet according to the Greeks and Christians, ascension serves as a path to fulfillment as well. While there is happiness in sensual gratification, there is also redemption through purification.

In Goethe, the spirit of the narrative radically meets the spirit of the time. This meeting is not random, as Goethe purposefully and constantly creates the scenario for such meetings. The best examples of this literary device are Iphigenia in Tauris and Faust. Most obviously, the appearance of Helena, the Greek beauty, her marriage to Faust, the modern man, and the terrible fate of their sublime child portrays this situation. The reader witnesses the mismatch between the beautiful and the sublime as a repetition of the first mismatch between Gretchen and Faust, during which the mother kills her child, but on a higher level. The death of the child symbolizes the mismatch in Elective Affinities.

The first and most significant appearance of the concept of the beautiful takes place during the wager between Faust and Mephistopheles and unfolds in vicissitudes and ambiguities of this wager.49 The object of the wager is the beautiful moment, fulfillment, happiness, and salvation. Faust offers his soul to the devil in case he ever wishes the moment to last. Fulfillment—the angelic state of the soul, the unification with supreme beauty, autarchia—would cause Faust to lose his soul. The life of modern man, so the reader learns, is constant striving and freedom yields only dissatisfaction. Satisfaction is the admission of defeat, for the satisfied man is untrue to the spirit of his time. However, to resign fulfillment—the moment of beauty, felicity, wholeness—is also defeat, to the fullest extent as a matter of fact, at least in the spirit of the original narrative, and this is the fullest absolute defeat.

Although Faust, as a modern man, is committed to remaining true to the spirit of his time, he conveys an unmistakable nostalgia for the spirit of the old narrative. It is uncertain whether Faust proudly refuses happiness, as the sublime person does, or feels inept and unable to experience happiness. The happy moment at stake here is not a moment in the everyday sense of the word, but rather nunc stans. It occurs the minute Phaedrus and his young friends let their wings grow and turn their faces upwards, infatuated with the notion of eternity. Faust resigns the happiness he gets from the moment of fulfillment in the wager. The reader is told, as the spirit of the narrative constantly repeats, that beauty is what elicits the happy moment of eternity. But is it true that Faust resigns eternal happiness in the moment? What about transient happiness? Perhaps what he resigns is transient fulfillment. Is coveting transient fulfillment the sin of the moderns that makes them lose their souls? Or, rather, is the resignation of transient happiness a kind of sacrifice offered by modern men on the altar of modernity?

Faust meets beauty three times. First he meets the beauty of Margaret, second the beauty of Helena, and third the beauty of transcendence, the beauty toward which his soul finally ascends. The final stage displays the Christian mystery of ascension. The possibility of ascension is, however, encapsulated in the judgment that had been passed on the wager itself.

Faust actually detains the moment and asks it to remain, but Mephisto does not receive his soul. The spirit of the narrative would suggest that he does not receive it because Faust’s willingness to keep the beautiful moment hints that he is ready for the ascent. At this very moment, his wings grow and he ceases to concern himself with what the reader may identify as hope. On the contrary, however, the spirit of the modern age suggests that Faust was redeemed not because of his desire to capture the beautiful moment, but because both the spirit of the narrative and the spirit of modernity stake a claim on Faust and redeem him.

The particular wording of the wager is significant. When Faust speaks about the beautiful moment, he does not evoke ascension, but rather descent into hell. He also says, “Ich würde gern zugrunde gehn.” This statement is highly ambiguous and seems to imply a great challenge taken up by a sublime man who declares himself ready to go to hell in exchange for a great deed. However, the happiness of the moment is not a great deed and one may interpret the sentence as either, “I will go happily to hell for one single moment of unmitigated happiness” or “I am ready to suffer eternal damnation if I am redeemed.” This ambiguity is maintained until the last word, as the reader does not know if Faust was redeemed for remaining true to the spirit of his time or for denying that spirit. Was it for the unification of the ancient, Christian, and modern “spirit”? Faust’s ascension is not Platonic, but rather it is an ascension in the sense of Plotinus or Christian Platonism. Love is that which redeems and comes from above. Here, the spirit of the archetype emerges once again: Love guides only the lover!50

The angels carry the immortality of Faust. At the top of the hierarchy of the upper heaven there are only women—mater gloriosa, Maria Aegyptiana, Muliere Samaritana, and Gretchen, the beautiful sinner. They redeem in love and in spite of its majestic outlines, the transcendent scenes of Faust refrain from providing a solution to the wager. The Chorus mysticus sings the Platonic-Augustinian song. In the closing mysterium, it ultimately makes no difference whether the reader grasps the happy moment or strives without end, whether one is beautiful or sublime. Ultimately, the spirit of the narrative—the promise of happiness, of felicity, of redemption—motivates individuals and not the mystical realm of the angels.

Part 4

In 1777, Diderot wrote, “Tout le monde raisonne du beau.” And truly everyone did. In the German-speaking world, Winckelmann discovered Greece and the unattainable beauty of Greek sculpture. However, since the intellectual atmosphere of the time was already pluralistic,51 clashing opinions were immediately voiced. It seemed as if beauty would have had its finest hours in times during which modern life was in gestation. After the rebirth of its concept in new forms,52 the demise of beauty was already placed on the agenda. Goethe’s work was seen as “die Ende der Kunstperiode” and Hegel, as will be discussed, entertained doubts as to whether beauty as such would survive at all. The modern world was prosaic, devoid of beauty and the potential to develop beauty, and the sense of beauty was threatened by the division of labor. This situation marked the first part of the crisis of the concept of the beautiful, but it did not mark the moment of its demise since the spirit of the narrative was strong enough to secure a role for beauty in the modern world. Moreover, this role was one beauty could occupy even after losing its metaphysical habitat. One may define beauty’s new place in society as paideia, Bildung, or education and these themes were still inherent in the archetypal story. After all, meaningful thoughts are part of the paideia in Plato’s early works, and not just in his “warm” concept of the beautiful.

There appeared, however, a new expression, which also manifested a new content and which made modern philosophers (Kant and Hegel, among others) ill at ease. I mean the term “aesthetic” and the apparent fusion of the philosophy of beauty with aesthetics. For example, Schiller termed education through beauty “aesthetic education.” As the origin of the word suggests, the fusion of philosophy of beauty with aesthetics, and education through beauty with “aesthetic education” takes place not just because aisthêsis (sensation or sense perception) finally became acknowledged after so many decades of the devaluation of the senses, but also because of the Copernican turn in the concept of the beautiful. When the experience of beauty is attributed to the faculty of judgment or taste instead of an absolute object such as God or the Idea of Beauty, the Kantian Copernican turn has taken place. The judgment of taste does not approximate, but at best constitutes; otherwise, it becomes historically contingent.

The Copernican turn contributes to the wide acceptance of terms such as “aesthetic” in reflections on beauty and also in thinkers who prefer spiritual beauty to sensually affected beauty. True, there is no author, perhaps with the exception of Condillac, who would have neglected the participation of the faculties of understanding and reason, language, norms, and habits in the judgment of taste. Simple perception and sensual immediacy alone are never regarded as the sole sources of beauty.

Still, although beauty does not originate solely in the senses, delicate taste was believed to depend on the proper education of the senses, and in this manner on aesthetic education. When Kant discussed the two refined senses and Hume and Smith approved of a society that contributed to the refinement of sense, the emphasis was not put on education and development in general, but on cultivating the senses in particular. In this respect, the senses gained an independent status and were endowed with a far greater dignity than granted them in the Platonic tradition. Senses need not be controlled, subjected to reason, or suppressed. A person of refined sense, as Kant suggested, can live a good life without appealing to the notions of “ought” and “must.” Here, one can detect certain similarities with Aristotle’s good character, hexis, but these similarities are superficial. Aristotle, in his theory of the mean, spoke about the proper proportion of different feelings and emotions that one achieves by practicing intellectual virtue, phronesis, and even more so, moral virtue.53 Yet, in the Enlightenment period, there were no predetermined virtues to cultivate. Furthermore, according to Aristotle, moral practice, and not beauty, educates the senses. The educational mission of beauty appears with the consciousness of contingency. Those who rely on aesthetic education are men and women who are contingent, who are thrown by birth into a place they perceive as accidental, who have not received virtuous ideas or fixed tasks to fulfill, who have to choose their tasks and virtues themselves as much as they choose their own life. Aesthetic education renders one morally fit not just for one kind of life, but for different kinds of lives. This conviction is addressed in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

Thus, let the senses have what is due to them and allow us greater freedom. Let us think ethics and freedom of the person as a whole. But the liberation of the senses from formal control of norms and virtues also places the onus of responsibility on the senses.

Aisthêsis is not meant here to concern seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, although all of these senses need to be refined. In addition to an aesthetic refinement of the senses, aisthêsis notably includes all kinds of feelings and emotions. Since both situation and cognition are constituent features of emotions, the refinement of the emotional life is the whole person’s refinement.

To cut a long story short, contingent men and women of modernity do not construct fixed Form, which they then approximate. This is why the original Platonic model of the Republic (and even the Aristotelian model of ethics) does not fit them at all. Something must educate their senses and emotional life, including their sentiments. But, to repeat, this something cannot be duty specific; it must be unspecified. It must educate their character to be fit for both decency and happiness. Aesthetic education is the education of man-as-a-whole. It is education to the conduct of life as a character, which is not identical with the actual, everyday form of life of an individual in a particular profession. It is here, at least potentially, that form of life and conduct of life part ways.

If the refinement of feelings and senses is the best way in which to educate a modern ethical person, then the task of refinement is a duty and the successful refinement will be considered meritorious.54 Still, the question remains, how is this duty best performed and how may someone achieve merit? In On Grace and Dignity, Schiller presents the following alternatives:

Either man enforces silence upon the exigencies of his sensuous nature, to govern himself conformably with the superior exigencies of his reasonable nature; or else, on the contrary, he subjects the reasonable portion of his being to the sensuous part, reducing himself thus to obey only the impulses which the necessity of nature imprints upon him, as well as upon other phenomena; or lastly, harmony is established between the impulsions of the one and the laws of the other, and man is in perfect accord with himself.55

One could regard this idea as a straightforward repetition of the Platonic archetype since the discussion once again considers the harmony of the soul as presented in The Republic. However, there is a difference. In Plato, the harmony was always strictly hierarchical. Plato stipulated the parts of the soul that needed to control other areas and which of the lesser parts required greater repression, as the metaphor of the two horses and charioteer enunciates. In Schiller, on the other hand, there is no such hierarchy, or at least there is no reason to maintain a hierarchy if harmony with the law is achieved. This formulation attributes activity to the senses, in that they adjust themselves, through refinement, to accord with the law.

A person can be beautiful only if this kind of harmony occurs. Man is not moral because he performs a meritorious act, but because he is a moral being. Schiller indicates that if one is a moral being, that is, a person who never stands in conflict with himself, he is also a beautiful being: “A noble soul has no other merit than to be a noble soul . . . . It is then in a noble soul that is found the true harmony between reason and sense, between inclination and duty, and grace is the expression of this harmony in the sensuous world.”56 The concept of grace, Grazie, in Schiller adds something important to the old story of beautiful souls. The beautiful soul of the ancient was beautiful because it was virtuous. In Schiller’s Grazie, however, beauty is the manifestation of the virtuous soul in the world of appearances. In other words, the sensual aspect of beauty is preserved in the discourse on the soul. The beauty of the soul manifests itself not only in deeds, but also in the way that one behaves, or the way in which one performs those deeds, which ought to be unique to each individual. Grace is the fundamental aspect of moral beauty in a world where men and women are contingent, where traditional forms do not provide the ceremonial framework in which our actions and behavioral patterns are set. Grace can be serious, but it can also be playful. Either way, it must inhere in the act. Finally, Grace does not embellish the moral beauty of the soul because it belongs to the soul. There is no moral beauty of a harmonious individual without this almost imperceptible and somewhat incomprehensible notion of grace. In this sense one could also speak about the “aura” of personality.

One must note that the second character type, dignity, is, unlike in Kant, not starkly contrasted to grace. Hierarchy plays a role as the highest human type is characterized by the unification, or fusion of beauty and dignity. He continues, “If nature has furnished the architectonic beauty, the soul in its turn determines the beauty of the play, and now also we know what we must understand by charm and grace.”57 The unity of grace and dignity is the supreme human beauty, for appearance and essence enter into a perfect synthesis. However, if this unity occurs, then beauty is eminently earthly and transient. The most beautiful person and, thus, Beauty itself, is mortal. The young Kant believed that the promise of beauty was embodied in the beautiful person, for by casting a glance upon a beautiful person, the dignified, sublime person realizes that it is not impossible to be moral and happy simultaneously. In Schiller, however, the most beautiful is the transient in the moral context as well. No further perfection is needed here, not even through the refinement of taste. The refinement of the senses and sentiments, to the extent that they are attuned to moral law, suffices. In addition, the most valuable is also defined as the fusion not of the mortal and immortal, but of two mortal possibilities, namely dignity and grace. Through this unity, love is not reduced to mere desire and respect is not reduced to fear. The possibility of the two noble character types and their synthesis provides hope for the aesthetic education of humanity.

This theme, while based on the old Platonic notion of the “barbarian within us,” has clearly been reformulated. Wild activity and barbarism are not identical and what has traditionally been identified as “barbarian” is better understood as “wild” or “raw.” The wild man’s senses are raw, and this rawness must be refined. Therefore, a barbarian can be refined and it is through aesthetic education that the barbarian is transformed into a harmonious person who expresses the synthesis of grace and dignity (Anmut and Würde).

The aforementioned kind of anthropological naturalism goes hand in hand with a kind of naïve ethical optimism. One decisive sign of this optimism is easily identifiable. Beauty in terms of autarchia, death or social death, is so strongly present in the Platonic narrative, but it is left out of Schiller’s framework. What appears, then, is a telos of the beautiful, harmonious person and the optimistic notion that that beauty can be cultivated in the barbarian, both from the rawness of instincts and from calculative unfeeling rationality. In other words, beauty is the panacea for barbarism.

Above all, this refining beauty is play. While nothing could be more remote from the traditional concept of the beautiful, the spirit of the old narrative can be traced to the notion of play. Play is related to happiness not in the understanding of felicity, but in the experience of negative freedom, or living well without obligation. If one fulfills all of his or her desires, then he or she achieves a kind of happiness that can result in the highest exultation, but also in sheer banality.58 In spite of its naiveté and at times triteness, there is an important message, namely the sense of urgency, in Schiller’s concept of the Beautiful and its role in humanity’s aesthetic education. The most important aspect of Schiller’s work is neither his commendation nor criticism of Kant. Instead, it is that he was the first to ponder one of the ultimate nightmares: a world without beauty. Furthermore, not only does Schiller consider this idea, but he fears its coming to fruition, a fear all humans share.59

Notes

1. Denis Diderot, Traité du beau (1772) (Kessinger Publishing, LLC , 2009).

2. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (MIT Press, 1991).

3. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allen Wood (Modern Library, 2001).

4. In Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725. For Hutcheson’s conception of the origin of virtue in detail, see Heller, Beyond Justice, Blackwell 1989.

5. Here, senses play the same role as happiness does in Hutcheson’s moral theory.

6. The concept of the sublime was taken from Longinus’s treatise on rhetoric, Peri Hypsous, where hypsous, the great-souled, was translated as “the sublime.” The Enlightenment concept of the sublime also encompasses “great-souled” men, but it became broader and took on many more meanings.

7. I have to mention in advance my disagreement with Lyotard. What he understands by sublime has nothing to do with the tradition of the concept of the sublime. The concept of the sublime became problematic even before the disintegration of the concept of the beautiful. The beautiful became banal, but the sublime became ridiculous. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford Univeristy Press, 1994).

8. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 20–21.

9. Burke, “Introduction on Taste,” Ibid.

10. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. 6.

11. Ibid., p. 7.

12. Ibid., p. 9.

13. Ibid., p. 17.

14. Ibid., p. 18.

15. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

16. Many examples discussed by Smith were taken over by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, yet discussed in an entirely different philosophy of taste.

17. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. Robert Baird and Stuart Rosenbaum (Prometheus Books, 2000), p. 288.

18. Ibid.

19. Hegel continuously criticized these kinds of Verstandsbegriffe (concepts of understanding) where the enumeration of common features produce only abstractions but no universality. His most telling example is the comparison between the Verstandsbegriff “man” and the concept “man” in the first part of his Encyclopedia.

20. Ibid., Part V, Chapter 1.

21. Ibid., p. 163.

22. This is also Kant’s position in his discussion on the “normal idea” of beauty in humans and animals in his Critique of Judgment.

23. Ibid., Part IV, Chapter 1.

24. Adam Smith, “Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called The Imitative Arts/Of the Affinity Between Music, Dancing, and Poetry” in Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol. 3 Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795), ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce, vol. 3 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982).

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie or the New Heloise, trans. Philipe Stewart and Jean Vache (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997).

29. György Markus criticized this sub-chapter because of my disregard of Burke’s political philosophy. All the aesthetic categories of Burke, he said, the concept of the sublime first and foremost, are intimately connected to his political conceptions. Markus is right and I have no excuse. After all, in Kant’s case, I pointed out the connection between the judgment of taste and Kant’s political philosophy. Unfortunately, I was unable to expand on the Burke sub-chapter, so I left it in its original form with its obvious imperfections and lacunae.

30. When writing his early work on the beautiful and the sublime, Kant was not yet familiar with Burke’s then-recently published book. However, he plays his tribute—albeit critical—to Burke in the Critique of Judgment.

31. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 36.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., p. 40.

34. This does not mean that the poetry leaves the recipient cold. On the contrary, as a matter of fact.

35. Part 2, IV, p. 60. This is said in defense of Shakespeare against tragedie classique.

36. Op. cit., p. 51

37. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John Goldthwait (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960).

38. Ibid., p. 45.

39. See also the famous story of Policrates and Solon.

40. Ibid., p. 51.

41. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).

42. “Allein da diese moralische Sympathie gleichwohl noch nicht genug ist, die trage menschliche Natur zu gemeinnützigen Handlungen anzutreiben.” Op. cit., 838.

43. Ibid., p. 63.

44. Kant also speaks about the phlegmatic and choleric character, but these descriptions have no relevance to the distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and this irrelevance is the reason why I will not discuss them.

45. Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime” in Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, eds. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 36.

46. Ibid., p. 39.

47. I distinguish between the same character types and place them beside each other, not in a hierarchical order in part III of my book, Ethics of Personality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

48. There are a few important observations in the later section of the book, for example, on the intimate relation and opposition between beauty and disgust on the one hand, and sublime and ridiculous on the other. In the primary section of the book, the text follows the commonsensical judgment of Kant’s times and does not give us any more food for thought, least of all when Kant begins to ponder the so-called “national character.”

49. Goethe, Faust, trans. Bayard Taylor (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 58.Scene IV, “The Study (The Compact).”

50. Goethe, ibid., Scene II “Before the City-Gate.”

51. Hegel says in the introduction to the Phenomenology of the Spirit that the concept of a new world appeared during the French Revolution. The “child,” as Hegel said, was born, but the child was not yet a man.

52. Here, I employ the term “concept” in the Hegelian sense.

53. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics” in Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).

54. This idea of duty is borrowed from Kant, but employed in an un-Kantian manner. There is no possibility of discussing Kant in this section, but he will be discussed in the next.

55. Friedrich Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde,” in Sämtliche Werke, 9th Band, Ros. 1 (Munich and Leipzig, 1923). Translation online: www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20750, accessed 7/26/11.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Kant’s conception of the free play of understanding and imagination that inspired Schiller never intimates the idea that beauty is just a kind of play. The two conceptions do not overlap.

59. This conception will reappear more seriously in Kierkegaard.