What Does Leo Tostoy Say About the Elements of Art
Leo Tolstoy Annal
What is Art?
Chapter 3
Written: 1897
Source: Original Text from Gutenberg.org
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
I brainstorm with the founder of æsthetics, Baumgarten (1714-1762).
According to Baumgarten,[x] the object of logical knowledge is Truth, the object of æsthetic (i.east. sensuous) noesis is Beauty. Beauty is the Perfect (the Absolute), recognized through the senses; Truth is the Perfect perceived through reason; Goodness is the Perfect reached by moral volition.
Dazzler is defined by Baumgarten equally a correspondence, i.e. an club of the parts in their mutual relations to each other and in their relation to the whole. The aim of beauty itself is to please and excite a desire, "Wohlgefallen und Erregung eines Verlangens." (A position precisely the opposite of Kant's definition of the nature and sign of beauty.)
With reference to the manifestations of dazzler, Baumgarten considers that the highest apotheosis of beauty is seen by u.s. in nature, and he therefore thinks that the highest aim of art is to copy nature. (This position likewise is directly contradicted past the conclusions of the latest æstheticians.)
Passing over the unimportant followers of Baumgarten,—Maier, Eschenburg, and Eberhard,—who only slightly modified the doctrine of their teacher by dividing the pleasant from the beautiful, I will quote the definitions given by writers who came immediately subsequently Baumgarten, and defined dazzler quite in another manner. These writers 21were Sulzer, Mendelssohn, and Moritz. They, in contradiction to Baumgarten's principal position, recognize as the aim of art, not beauty, but goodness. Thus Sulzer (1720-1777) says that only that can be considered beautiful which contains goodness. Co-ordinate to his theory, the aim of the whole life of humanity is welfare in social life. This is attained past the pedagogy of the moral feelings, to which end art should be subservient. Beauty is that which evokes and educates this feeling.
Beauty is understood almost in the same way by Mendelssohn (1729-1786). According to him, art is the carrying forward of the beautiful, obscurely recognized by feeling, till information technology becomes the true and adept. The aim of art is moral perfection.[11]
For the æstheticians of this school, the ideal of dazzler is a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. So that these æstheticians completely wipe out Baumgarten's sectionalization of the Perfect (the Absolute), into the three forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; and Beauty is again united with the Skillful and the True.
But this conception is not simply not maintained past the later on æstheticians, just the æsthetic doctrine of Winckelmann arises, again in complete opposition. This divides the mission of art from the aim of goodness in the sharpest and most positive mode, makes external beauty the aim of art, and even limits it to visible dazzler.
According to the celebrated work of Winckelmann (1717-1767), the police force and aim of all art is beauty merely, beauty quite separated from and contained of goodness. There are three kinds of beauty:—(1) beauty of grade, (ii) beauty of thought, expressing itself in the position of the figure (in plastic art), (3) beauty of expression, accessible only when the 2 first conditions are present. This beauty of expression is the highest aim of art, and is attained in 22antique art; modern art should therefore aim at imitating aboriginal fine art.[12]
Art is similarly understood past Lessing, Herder, and afterwards by Goethe and by all the distinguished æstheticians of Germany till Kant, from whose day, again, a different formulation of fine art commences.
Native æsthetic theories arose during this period in England, France, Italy, and Holland, and they, though not taken from the German, were equally cloudy and contradictory. And all these writers, just like the High german æstheticians, founded their theories on a formulation of the Beautiful, understanding beauty in the sense of a something existing absolutely, and more or less intermingled with Goodness or having one and the same root. In England, most simultaneously with Baumgarten, fifty-fifty a fiddling before, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Shush, Hogarth, and others, wrote on art.
According to Shaftesbury (1670-1713), "That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable is truthful, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of result agreeable and expert."[13] Beauty, he taught, is recognized past the heed just. God is primal dazzler; beauty and goodness proceed from the same fount.
So that, although Shaftesbury regards beauty as beingness something dissever from goodness, they once again merge into something inseparable.
According to Hutcheson (1694-1747—"Research into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue"), the aim of art is beauty, the essence of which consists in evoking in the states the perception of uniformity amid multifariousness. In the recognition of what is fine art we are guided past "an internal sense." This internal sense may exist in contradiction to the ethical 23one. So that, according to Hutcheson, beauty does not always correspond with goodness, but separates from it and is sometimes contrary to it.[xiv]
According to Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), beauty is that which is pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by gustatory modality alone. The standard of true gustation is that the maximum of richness, fullness, strength, and variety of impression should be contained in the narrowest limits. That is the platonic of a perfect piece of work of art.
According to Burke (1729-1797—"Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Cute"), the sublime and beautiful, which are the aim of fine art, take their origin in the promptings of self-preservation and of society. These feelings, examined in their source, are means for the maintenance of the race through the individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by nourishment, defense, and state of war; the second (society) past intercourse and propagation. Therefore self-defence force, and state of war, which is bound up with it, is the source of the sublime; sociability, and the sexual practice-instinct, which is bound up with it, is the source of beauty.[15]
Such were the main English definitions of art and beauty in the eighteenth century.
During that flow, in France, the writers on art were Père André and Batteux, with Diderot, D'Alembert, and, to some extent, Voltaire, post-obit afterward.
According to Père André ("Essai sur le Beau," 1741), there are three kinds of beauty—divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty.[16]
According to Batteux (1713-1780), art consists in imitating the beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.[17] Such is also Diderot'due south definition of fine art.
24The French writers, like the English, consider that it is gustatory modality that decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not merely not laid down, simply it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same view was held by D'Alembert and Voltaire.[eighteen]
According to the Italian æsthetician of that period, Pagano, fine art consists in uniting the beauties' dispersed in nature. The capacity to perceive these beauties is taste, the chapters to bring them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.[19]
According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori (1672-1750),—"Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e le arti,"—and especially Spaletti,[20]—"Saggio sopra la bellezza" (1765),—fine art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (equally with Shush) on the desire for self-preservation and social club.
Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720-1790), who had an influence on the German æstheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According to him, beauty is that which gives virtually pleasance, and that gives about pleasure which gives united states of america the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, considering it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man tin can attain.[21]
Such were the æsthetic theories outside Federal republic of germany during the last century. In Germany, afterwards Winckelmann, there again arose a completely new æsthetic theory, that of Kant (1724-1804), which more than than all others clears up what this formulation of beauty, and consequently of art, really amounts to.
The æsthetic educational activity of Kant is founded as follows:—Human has a noesis of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, exterior himself, he seeks for truth; in himself he seeks for goodness. The get-go is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (complimentary-will). Besides 25these two means of perception, at that place is yet the judging chapters (Urteilskraft), which forms judgments without reasonings and produces pleasure without desire (Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnügen ohne Begehren). This capacity is the basis of æsthetic feeling. Dazzler, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning information technology is the grade of a suitable object in so far as that object is perceived without whatever conception of its utility.[22]
Beauty is defined in the same way by the followers of Kant, among whom was Schiller (1759-1805). Co-ordinate to Schiller, who wrote much on æsthetics, the aim of art is, every bit with Kant, beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical advantage. So that fine art may exist chosen a game, not in the sense of an unimportant occupation, merely in the sense of a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than that of beauty.[23]
Besides Schiller, the nigh remarkable of Kant's followers in the sphere of æsthetics was Wilhelm Humboldt, who, though he added aught to the definition of beauty, explained various forms of it,—the drama, music, the comic, etc.[24]
After Kant, as well the second-rate philosophers, the writers on æsthetics were Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their followers. Fichte (1762-1814) says that perception of the beautiful proceeds from this: the earth—i.due east. nature—has ii sides: it is the sum of our limitations, and it is the sum of our costless idealistic activity. In the offset attribute the world is express, in the 2d attribute it is complimentary. In the kickoff aspect every object is limited, distorted, compressed, confined—and we meet deformity; in the second we perceive its inner abyss, vitality, regeneration—and we come across beauty. And then that the deformity or beauty of an object, according to 26Fichte, depends on the signal of view of the observer. Beauty therefore exists, non in the world, but in the cute soul (schöner Geist). Art is the manifestation of this beautiful soul, and its aim is the education, not but of the mind—that is the business of the savant; not only of the heart—that is the affair of the moral preacher; just of the whole homo. And then the characteristic of dazzler lies, not in annihilation external, but in the presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.[25]
Following Fichte, and in the aforementioned direction, Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller also defined beauty. According to Schlegel (1772—1829), beauty in art is understood besides incompletely, i-sidedly, and disconnectedly. Beauty exists not just in fine art, but too in nature and in love; so that the truly beautiful is expressed by the spousal relationship of art, nature, and love. Therefore, as inseparably one with esthetic art, Schlegel acknowledges moral and philosophic art.[26]
According to Adam Muller (1779-1829), at that place are two kinds of beauty; the one, general beauty, which attracts people equally the sun attracts the planet—this is found chiefly in antique art—and the other, private dazzler, which results from the observer himself becoming a sun attracting dazzler,—this is the beauty of modern fine art. A world in which all contradictions are harmonized is the highest dazzler. Every work of art is a reproduction of this universal harmony.[27] The highest art is the art of life.[28]
Side by side later Fichte and his followers came a gimmicky of his, the philosopher Schelling (1775-1854), who has had a not bad influence on the æsthetic conceptions of our times. According to Schelling's philosophy, fine art is the production or upshot of that formulation of things by which the bailiwick becomes its own object, or the object its own subject field. Beauty is the perception of the infinite in the finite. And 27the primary characteristic of works of art is unconscious infinity. Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. Dazzler is the contemplation of things in themselves as they exist in the epitome (In den Urbildern). It is non the creative person who past his knowledge or skill produces the cute, but the idea of beauty in him itself produces it.[29]
Of Schelling'southward followers the most noticeable was Solger (1780-1819—Vorlesungen über Aesthetik). According to him, the idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world nosotros see simply distortions of the cardinal thought, merely fine art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.[30]
According to another follower of Schelling, Krause (1781-1832), truthful, positive beauty is the manifestation of the Thought in an individual class; art is the actualization of the dazzler existing in the sphere of human being's gratuitous spirit. The highest stage of art is the art of life, which directs its activity towards the beautification of life and then that information technology may be a cute abode for a cute human.[31]
After Schelling and his followers came the new æsthetic doctrine of Hegel, which is held to this day, consciously by many, but by the majority unconsciously. This teaching is non only no clearer or ameliorate defined than the preceding ones, only is, if possible, even more than cloudy and mystical.
According to Hegel (1770-1831), God manifests himself in nature and in art in the course of dazzler. God expresses himself in two ways: in the object and in the field of study, in nature and in spirit. Dazzler is the shining of the Idea through matter. Merely the soul, and what pertains to it, is truly beautiful; and therefore the beauty of nature is but the reflection of the natural dazzler of the spirit—the 28beautiful has only a spiritual content. Just the spiritual must appear in sensuous form. The sensuous manifestation of spirit is only appearance (schein), and this advent is the merely reality of the cute. Art is thus the production of this appearance of the Idea, and is a ways, together with religion and philosophy, of bringing to consciousness and of expressing the deepest problems of humanity and the highest truths of the spirit.
Truth and dazzler, co-ordinate to Hegel, are one and the aforementioned thing; the deviation being only that truth is the Idea itself as it exists in itself, and is thinkable. The Idea, manifested externally, becomes to the apprehension non simply true but beautiful. The beautiful is the manifestation of the Idea.[32]
Following Hegel came his many adherents, Weisse, Arnold Ruge, Rosenkrantz, Theodor Vischer and others.
According to Weisse (1801-1867), art is the introduction (Einbildung) of the absolute spiritual reality of beauty into external, dead, indifferent matter, the perception of which latter apart from the beauty brought into information technology presents the negation of all existence in itself (Negation alles Fürsichseins).
In the idea of truth, Weisse explains, lies a contradiction betwixt the subjective and the objective sides of knowledge, in that an private I discerns the Universal. This contradiction can be removed by a formulation that should unite into one the universal and the individual, which fall asunder in our conceptions of truth. Such a conception would be reconciled (aufgehoben) truth. Beauty is such a reconciled truth.[33]
According to Ruge (1802-1880), a strict follower of Hegel, beauty is the Thought expressing itself. The spirit, contemplating itself, either finds itself expressed completely, 29and then that total expression of itself is beauty; or incompletely, and and then it feels the need to alter this imperfect expression of itself, and becomes creative art.[34]
According to Vischer (1807-1887), beauty is the Idea in the form of a finite phenomenon. The Idea itself is not indivisible, but forms a system of ideas, which may be represented by ascending and descending lines. The higher the thought the more beauty it contains; only fifty-fifty the everyman contains dazzler, because it forms an essential link of the organisation. The highest form of the Idea is personality, and therefore the highest art is that which has for its subject-affair the highest personality.[35]
Such were the theories of the High german æstheticians in the Hegelian management, only they did not monopolize æsthetic dissertations. In Germany, side by side and simultaneously with the Hegelian theories, there appeared theories of dazzler not only independent of Hegel's position (that dazzler is the manifestation of the Idea), just directly contrary to this view, denying and ridiculing it. Such was the line taken past Herbart and, more particularly, by Schopenhauer.
According to Herbart (1776-1841), in that location is non, and cannot be, whatever such matter every bit beauty existing in itself. What does exist is but our opinion, and it is necessary to find the base of operations of this opinion (Ästhetisches Elementarurtheil). Such bases are connected with our impressions. At that place are certain relations which nosotros term beautiful; and art consists in finding these relations, which are simultaneous in painting, the plastic fine art, and architecture, successive and simultaneous in music, and purely successive in poetry. In contradiction to the former æstheticians, Herbart holds that objects are oftentimes beautiful which express zero at all, every bit, for example, the rainbow, which is beautiful for its lines and colors, and 30not for its mythological connection with Iris or Noah'south rainbow.[36]
Another opponent of Hegel was Schopenhauer, who denied Hegel'south whole organization, his æsthetics included.
According to Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Will objectivizes itself in the world on various planes; and although the higher the plane on which it is objectivized the more beautiful it is, however each plane has its own beauty. Renunciation of one's individuality and contemplation of 1 of these planes of manifestation of Will gives the states a perception of dazzler. All men, says Schopenhauer, possess the capacity to objectivize the Idea on different planes. The genius of the artist has this chapters in a higher degree, and therefore makes a college dazzler manifest.[37]
Afterward these more eminent writers there followed, in Federal republic of germany, less original and less influential ones, such as Hartmann, Kirkmann, Schnasse, and, to some extent, Helmholtz (equally an æsthetician), Bergmann, Jungmann, and an innumerable host of others.
According to Hartmann (1842), beauty lies, not in the external globe, nor in "the matter in itself," neither does information technology reside in the soul of man, but information technology lies in the "seeming" (Schein) produced by the artist. The thing in itself is non cute, only is transformed into beauty by the artist.[38]
According to Schnasse (1798-1875), there is no perfect beauty in the world. In nature there is only an arroyo towards information technology. Art gives what nature cannot give. In the energy of the gratuitous ego, conscious of harmony not found in nature, beauty is disclosed.[39]
Kirkmann wrote on experimental esthetics. All aspects of history in his system are joined past pure chance. Thus, according to Kirkmann (1802-1884), in that location are half-dozen realms of history:—The realm of Cognition, of Wealth, of 31Morality, of Faith, of Politics, and of Beauty; and activeness in the last-named realm is fine art.[40]
According to Helmholtz (1821), who wrote on beauty as it relates to music, dazzler in musical productions is attained simply by following unalterable laws. These laws are non known to the creative person; so that beauty is manifested by the artist unconsciously, and cannot be subjected to assay.[41]
According to Bergmann (1840) (Ueber das Schöne, 1887), to define beauty objectively is incommunicable. Beauty is simply perceived subjectively, and therefore the problem of æsthetics is to define what pleases whom.[42]
According to Jungmann (d. 1885), firstly, beauty is a suprasensible quality of things; secondly, beauty produces in united states of america pleasure by only being contemplated; and, thirdly, beauty is the foundation of love.[43]
The æsthetic theories of the chief representatives of France, England, and other nations in contempo times have been the post-obit:—
In France, during this period, the prominent writers on æsthetics were Cousin, Jouffroy, Pictet, Ravaisson, Lévêque.
Cousin (1792-1867) was an eclectic, and a follower of the German language idealists. Co-ordinate to his theory, dazzler always has a moral foundation. He disputes the doctrine that art is imitation and that the beautiful is what pleases. He affirms that beauty may be divers considerately, and that it essentially consists in diverseness in unity.[44]
After Cousin came Jouffroy (1796-1842), who was a pupil of Cousin's and too a follower of the High german æstheticians. According to his definition, beauty is the expression of the invisible by those natural signs which manifest it. The visible world is the garment past ways of which we run into beauty.[45]
The Swiss author Pictet repeated Hegel and Plato, 32supposing beauty to exist in the straight and gratuitous manifestation of the divine Idea revealing itself in sense forms.[46]
Lévêque was a follower of Schelling and Hegel. He holds that dazzler is something invisible behind nature—a strength or spirit revealing itself in ordered energy.[47]
Similar vague opinions nearly the nature of dazzler were expressed by the French metaphysician Ravaisson, who considered beauty to exist the ultimate aim and purpose of the world. "La beauté la plus divine et principalement la plus parfaite contient le secret du monde."[48] And again:—"Le monde entier est fifty'œuvre d'une beauté absolue, qui northward'est la cause des choses que par l'amour qu'elle met en elles."
I purposely abstain from translating these metaphysical expressions, because, still cloudy the Germans may be, the French, in one case they absorb the theories of the Germans and take to imitating them, far surpass them in uniting heterogeneous conceptions into one expression, and putting forward one meaning or another indiscriminately. For instance, the French philosopher Renouvier, when discussing beauty, says:—"Ne craignons pas de dire qu'une vérité qui ne serait pas belle, ne serait qu'un jeu logique de noter camaraderie et que la seule vérité solide et digne de ce nom c'est la beauté."[49]
Besides the æsthetic idealists who wrote and still write under the influence of High german philosophy, the following recent writers take besides influenced the comprehension of art and dazzler in French republic: Taine, Guyau, Cherbuliez, Coster, and Véron.
Co-ordinate to Taine (1828-1893), beauty is the manifestation of the essential characteristic of any important thought more completely than it is expressed in reality.[50]
Guyau (1854-1888) taught that beauty is not something exterior to the object itself,—is non, as information technology were, a parasitic 33growth on information technology,—but is itself the very blossoming forth of that on which it appears. Art is the expression of reasonable and conscious life, evoking in us both the deepest consciousness of beingness and the highest feelings and loftiest thoughts. Art lifts human from his personal life into the universal life, by means, not only of participation in the same ideas and beliefs, just also past means of similarity in feeling.[51]
According to Cherbuliez, art is an activity, (i) satisfying our innate love of forms (apparences), (two) endowing these forms with ideas, (iii) affording pleasance alike to our senses, heart, and reason. Beauty is not inherent in objects, but is an human activity of our souls. Beauty is an illusion; there is no absolute dazzler. But what we consider characteristic and harmonious appears cute to us.
Coster held that the ideas of the beautiful, the proficient, and the true are innate. These ideas illuminate our minds and are identical with God, who is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. The thought of Beauty includes unity of essence, variety of constitutive elements, and order, which brings unity into the diverse manifestations of life.[52]
For the sake of completeness, I will further cite some of the very latest writings upon art.
La psychologie du Beau et de l'Art, par Mario Pilo (1895), says that beauty is a product of our physical feelings. The aim of fine art is pleasance, merely this pleasance (for some reason) he considers to exist necessarily highly moral.
The Essai sur l'art contemporain, par Fierens Gevaert (1897), says that art rests on its connection with the past, and on the religious ideal of the present which the creative person holds when giving to his work the grade of his individuality.
Then again, Sar Peladan's 50'art idéaliste et mystique (1894) says that beauty is one of the manifestations of God. "Il due north'y a pas d'autre Réalité que Dieu, north'y a pas d'autre Vérité que Dieu, il n'y a pas d'autre Beauté, que Dieu" (p. 33). 34This book is very fantastic and very illiterate, merely is characteristic in the positions information technology takes upwardly, and noticeable on account of a sure success it is having with the younger generation in France.
All the æsthetics diffused in France up to the present fourth dimension are like in kind, simply among them Véron'southward Fifty'esthétique (1878) forms an exception, being reasonable and clear. That work, though it does not give an verbal definition of fine art, at least rids æsthetics of the cloudy formulation of an accented dazzler.
According to Véron (1825-1889), fine art is the manifestation of emotion transmitted externally by a combination of lines, forms, colors, or by a succession of movements, sounds, or words subjected to certain rhythms.[53]
In England, during this menstruum, the writers on æsthetics define beauty more and more frequently, not by its own qualities, but by taste, and the discussion about beauty is superseded past a discussion on taste.
After Reid (1704-1796), who acknowledged beauty as being entirely dependent on the spectator, Alison, in his Essay on the Nature and Principles of Gustatory modality (1790), proved the same thing. From another side this was too asserted past Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the granddaddy of the celebrated Charles Darwin.
He says that nosotros consider cute that which is connected in our conception with what we dearest. Richard Knight's work, An Analytical Research into the Principles of Gustation, as well tends in the same management.
About of the English theories of æsthetics are on the aforementioned lines. The prominent writers on æsthetics in England during the present century have been Charles Darwin, (to some extent), Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Ker, and Knight.
According to Charles Darwin (1809-1882—Descent of Man, 1871), beauty is a feeling natural not only to human being 35but likewise to animals, and consequently to the ancestors of homo. Birds adorn their nests and esteem beauty in their mates. Beauty has an influence on marriages. Beauty includes a variety of diverse conceptions. The origin of the art of music is the call of the males to the females.[54]
According to Herbert Spencer (b. 1820), the origin of art is play, a thought previously expressed by Schiller. In the lower animals all the free energy of life is expended in life-maintenance and race-maintenance; in man, even so, at that place remains, subsequently these needs are satisfied, some superfluous force. This excess is used in play, which passes over into art. Play is an fake of real activity, so is art. The sources of æsthetic pleasure are threefold:—(1) That "which exercises the faculties afflicted in the most complete ways, with the fewest drawbacks from excess of exercise," (2) "the divergence of a stimulus in big amount, which awakens a glow of amusing feeling," (3) the partial revival of the same, with special combinations.[55]
In Todhunter's Theory of the Beautiful (1872), beauty is infinite loveliness, which we apprehend both past reason and by the enthusiasm of love. The recognition of beauty as being such depends on taste; in that location can exist no criterion for it. The merely approach to a definition is found in culture. (What culture is, is not divers.) Intrinsically, art—that which affects us through lines, colors, sounds, or words—is not the product of bullheaded forces, but of reasonable ones, working, with mutual helpfulness, towards a reasonable aim. Dazzler is the reconciliation of contradictions.[56]
Grant Allen is a follower of Spencer, and in his Physiological Æsthetics (1877) he says that beauty has a physical origin. Æsthetic pleasures come up from the contemplation of the beautiful, merely the conception of beauty is obtained by a physiological procedure. The origin of art is 36play; when there is a superfluity of concrete strength human gives himself to play; when there is a superfluity of receptive power human gives himself to art. The cute is that which affords the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of waste product. Differences in the estimation of beauty continue from gustatory modality. Taste tin be educated. We must take faith in the judgments "of the finest-nurtured and nigh discriminative" men. These people form the taste of the next generation.[57]
Co-ordinate to Ker's Essay on the Philosophy of Art (1883), dazzler enables us to brand part of the objective world intelligible to ourselves without being troubled past reference to other parts of it, as is inevitable for science. So that art destroys the opposition betwixt the one and the many, between the law and its manifestation, between the subject area and its object, by uniting them. Art is the revelation and vindication of freedom, because it is free from the darkness and incomprehensibility of finite things.[58]
According to Knight's Philosophy of the Beautiful, Part II. (1893), beauty is (as with Schelling) the matrimony of object and subject, the cartoon along from nature of that which is cognate to human being, and the recognition in oneself of that which is common to all nature.
The opinions on beauty and on Art here mentioned are far from exhausting what has been written on the subject. And every day fresh writers on æsthetics ascend, in whose disquisitions announced the same enchanted confusion and contradictoriness in defining beauty. Some, by inertia, continue the mystical æsthetics of Baumgarten and Hegel with sundry variations; others transfer the question to the region of subjectivity, and seek for the foundation of the beautiful in questions of taste; others—the æstheticians of the very latest formation—seek the origin of beauty in the laws of physiology; and finally, others again investigate the question quite independently of the conception of beauty. Thus, 37Sully in his Awareness and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Æsthetics (1874), dismisses the conception of beauty altogether, fine art, by his definition, being the product of some permanent object or passing action fitted to supply active enjoyment to the producer, and a pleasurable impression to a number of spectators or listeners, quite autonomously from any personal reward derived from it.[59]
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1897/what-is-art/chapter-3.html
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