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Beauty and Aesthetic Value Author(s): Monroe C. Beardsley Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 59, No. 21, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division: Symposium Papers to be presented at the Fifty-ninth Annual Meeting, New York City, December 27-29, 1962 (Oct. 11, 1962), pp. 617-628 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2023283 . Accessed: 26/02/2013 18:36
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is not metaphysical; it is a metaphysically contingent condition of spiritual absoluteness. In this aesthetic situation the dualities and transitivities that characterize the life of practice and science have been surmounted. Nothing happens for the sake of anything-which is the same as to say, perhaps, that everything happens for the sake of everything. Nothing is examined for its testimony regarding something else that is absent. One exists validly in perceiving the valid form, and one perceives the valid form in existing validly. It is the same condition in both. Here, at this stage, a human being solves the basic problem of force and right in perfecting the activity of perception itself. The limitation of art to its medium makes possible the relative isolation in which the artist can solve the problem of valid being through valid form. Despite the fact that words have meanings and that through their meanings the poet can bring within the compass of his work all things mentionable, it remains the case that the poet's solution of the problem is restricted to his creation of a valid form in words. All the meanings are also stuff, and the validity of a poem lies not in its truth to life or its truth to philosophy, not in the profundity of what it says, but in its truth to being, the profundity of what it is, that is, in its rightful power and powerful rightness as language, which reveals the union of power and right in the spirit whose language it is. Seen in this light, no art is higher or lower than another. The validity possible in music or architecture is no less and no greater-and in the end no different-than that possible in painting or poetry. Unless the artist's task was restricted to his medium, he would never solve it.
ALBERT HOFSTADTER
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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VALUE

R. Hofstadter's rich and trenchant paper t is a firm challenge to present tendencies in aesthetics and a stern call to return to the high road from which he believes its current practitioners have strayed. Since I do not agree either that present tendencies are mainly in the wrong direction, or that this direction differs sharply from that of much classic aesthetics, it can be seen that
* To be presented in a symposium on "Validity versus Value in Aesthetic Phlenomenology" at the fifty-niinth annual meeting of the Amerie:'In Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, December 29, 1962. t First paper of this symposium, this JOURNAL, 59: 607.

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there is something of a gap between us. I look across it, however, with great respect, and with the hope that it can be narrowed if not closed. First, let us draw together those sentences in which Hofstadter presents his primary themes. "Genuinely aesthetic judgment, however-which is not to be identified with the judgment of the critic-is not a judgment of appraisal" (614)-that is, it is not a value judgment. Hofstadter does not deny that various value judgments can be made about works of art or that various grounds may be had for them (610), but he regards it as "not so much false as it is absurd . . . to say that works of art have aesthetic value" (608). Judgments of beauty are genuine aesthetic judgments; these, however, are not judgments of value, but judgments of "validity." "Only beauty constitutes a fundamental philosophical subject matter calling for a special branch of philosophy" (610). I, on the other hand, think that there is a particular class of value judgments involved in art criticism (whether or not by the professional critic) and plenty of justification for the existence of a branch of philosophy to examine their meaning and ground and, if possible, to clarify and improve our reasoning about them. This is, I think, the most fundamental difference in our positions.
I. VALUE

The normative remarks that people make about works of art characteristically (and perhaps largely) consist of statements in which the word 'good' (together with its derivatives and negatives) is used in an attributive way: there is superb music, good music, poor music, better and worse music. Since these statements purport to tell how good a work of art is, let us agree to call them "judgments of artistic goodness." That such judgments occur, that they have the function of appraising or (in a rough way) rating particular works of art, and that they possess a logic that can be inquired into by metacritical theory-these points, I believe, are not disputed by Hofstadter. But he does deny that such judgments are the genuinely or centrally aesthetic judgments and that the study of their meaning and grounds is the proper task of aesthetics. Questions about genuineness and about proper tasks are notoriously difficult to raise in a non-question-begging manner. I think it not irrelevant to observe, on the first point of disagreement, that to utter a judgment of artistic goodness is the niatural and usual way to point out the worth of a work of art-and not its

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worth as propaganda or anything else, but its worth (or its success) as art. To call something "good music" must be to judge it by essentially musical criteria; for when we say it is good music we are saying that it is good qua music, good music-wise, or in the manner of music. Thus there must be a manner in which music is good, considered simply as music, if there is such a thing as good music. And surely judgments of artistic goodness are aesthetic judgments. I don't quite know how this proposition is to be supported, when challenged-except that I do not see how any other form of statement could have a better claim to be an aesthetic judgment than the sort of statement that judges a work of art as a work of art. To say that music is good music is certainly not to make any other kind of judgment, moral, political, financial, medical, or whatever. As regards the other disputed point, about the proper task of aesthetics, Hofstadter apparently thinks the subject has been perverted from its true tradition. Perhaps so-though I think it is a little odd to imply that Aristotle was not writing aesthetics in his Poetics, which he sums up in his last sentence in a way that plainly acknowledges the importance of judgments of artistic goodness and the need to examine their meaning and grounds.' But since Hofstadter concedes that there is work available for aesthetics in my sense (metacriticism), though he does not regard it very highly, the question at issue (apart from the appropriation or misappropriation of labels) is whether there is another job to be done by aesthetics in his sense. If it be granted that there are judgments of artistic goodness, whether or not they are genuinely aesthetic judgments, the next question is what sort of judgment they are; and I say that they are judgments of aesthetic value. Here again I collide with Hofstadter 's position. It seems to me that to call a sequence of sounds "good music" is to attribute to it a comparatively high degree of a special sort of value, which might be called "musical value. " And I take the general term 'aesthetic value ' to be related to the specific term 'musical value' in this logical fashion: anything that has musical value has aesthetic value. Musical value, poetic value, dramatic value, painting value, sculptural
1 " So much for tragic and epic poetry, their characteristics, . . . and the causes of their being well [done, made] or not" (in terms of their special artistic function, which is to produce their "proper pleasure," oikeia hedone). Butcher translates: " the causes that make a poem good or bad "; Fyfe: "the causes of success and failure '; G. F. Else: "the causes of artistic excellelnce and the opposite. "

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value, etc., are thus species of aesthetic value, just as aesthetic value is a species of value in general. If there is something inherently faulty in the concept of aesthetic value, I want to know what it is. We commonly discriminate among various roughly defined species of value by terms like 'medical (or therapeutic) value', 'nutritional value', 'economic value', and with the help of slightly awkward expressions, coined for certain purposes, I believe we can make sensible references to innumerable other species of value: can-opening value, hair-parting value, oyster-opening value, etc. Aesthetic value seems to me an equally legitimate (and much more important) concept, namely, the capacity to provide valuable experiences of a certain sort (this definition does not, of course, show how to eliminate the term 'value', and so is not strictly a naturalistic definition, but a contextualistic one). That is what we value works of art for, and why we are justified in valuing them. That is the end in view when we evaluate them or declare their value, and the critic's plainest, most comprehensive, and incisive formula of evaluation is precisely the judgment of artistic goodness. As far as I can see, Hofstadter's objection to the term 'aesthetic value' is that its use involves a "confusion category" (608). And, if I make out his argument correctly, the confusion consists in treating something as aesthetically valuable "because it conduces to values that are themselves nonaesthetic" (609). I don't see any category confusion in this, any more than in ascribing medical value to a drug because it is capable of restoring health, though health itself is not properly said to have medical value. True, my definition of aesthetic value makes it derivative or instrumental, and this may be a mistake, but it appears to me reasonable, and even fairly innocuous, to say that works of art are, and should be, highly prized on account of the experiences they afford. Indeed, I do not see how Hofstadter himself can escape it: whatever reasons he could give for his own normative statements about works of art would certainly have to refer to what they can do to and for those who have commerce with them. 2' II. " VALIDITY The term "aesthetic validity" at first sounds a little strange to those of us who are accustomed to the word 'valid' primarily in logical and legal contexts ("a valid syllogism" or "a valid passport"). Mr. Hofstadter explicates it ihf a way close to Webster's "now rare"l sense: validity is a combination of force and fittingness: "a rightful power or a powerful right" (608 n). This property is something that works of art may possess in varying

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degrees, and to ascribe this property to them is to judge them in the bessentiallyaesthetic way. Hofstadter's theory of aesthetic validity has two aspects, one phenomenological, the other epistemological and semantic. They are closely connected, but distinguishable, and call, I think, for different estimates of success. Taken as a phenomenological description of aesthetic experience, Hofstadter's theory has much to commend it. The rightfulness aspect of aesthetic validity lies in the relations between the parts of the work, in their "fitness" for each other, so that the experience evoked is an experience that they are, in some sense, the way they ought to be (612-614). Thus, to be aesthetically valid is to be "valid in and for intuitive feeling" (612). Certainly it is true that in a good work of art there is this sort of rightness (though I think we should say, not that it is felt or intuited, but that it is perceived-heard or seen). The power aspect of validity has, for Hofstadter, two phases: there is the power of spirit in the work itself, finding or creating its rightful form, and the power of the work itself to move the beholder-it "grips" us by its "cogency" (611). If we ask, then, in phenomenological terms, whether there is such a thing as aesthetic validity, in this sense, the answer must be Yes: we experience it, and Hofstadter has called our attention, in fresh ways, to some of its important features. But the theory goes beyond phenomenological description. For Hofstadter says that the aesthetically valid work of art has a "valid form" that "shows itself as the form of a content which is a living spiritual power that exists in a condition of spiritual validity itself; the validity of the form thus constitutes the outward relevation of an inner validity of spiritual being" (610). Again, "What we discover through the revelation of aesthetically valid form is the union of power and right in spiritually valid being" (616). Here a revelation theory of art is imported into the concept of aesthetic validity: the work becomes a manifestation, a symbol (615 n), of one ideal human condition-that in which man experiences the absoluteness of spiritually valid existence. Whether there is such a human condition is a question that goes beyond the present context; Hofstadter clearly has in mind a fully developed philosophy of human life. But some questions must be raised about the connection between art and reality. The objections that can be brought against revelation theories in general do not seem to have been taken into account in this version, though some of them are quite serious. Two are particularly pertinent here:

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I believe that this revelation theory is both too abstract and too general. The theory is too abstract in this way: what all beautiful works of art reveal is, in the end, the same thing, namely spiritual validity. But it will not be enough to say this unless we then go on to explain the difference between works of art. What is it that King Lear reveals and Macbeth does not? How does one work become greater, or more beautiful, than another-by being more powerful, more rightful, more revelatory, or revelatory of different things? And, finally, are there not many forms of life revealed in works of literature-in different plays and poems, even in the same play, and not only through the characters and events, but in the very meter and diction and structure? Some forms of life are less valid, presumably, than others, even among the great works: Dante's, Homer's, Lucretius's. What distinctions can the theory provide? The theory is also too general. I don't see how every work of art can be a revelation. I will grant that a tragic drama makes a direct allusion to the human condition, but can the same be said for a string quartet? It is always possible to achieve generality of revelatory content by ascending to higher levels of abstraction: the string quartet exhibits order, and so reveals the order of the universe, etc. But if 'spiritual validity' has a more concrete and substantial meaning, then it does not seem extendable to every beautiful work of art. Of course it may be said that the string quartet does not contain references to reality, but is itself, as a whole, a reference-or a kind of symbol. But this view raises difficult problems. For how does it come about that the work of art reflects "existential validity" -how do we know that beauty is "truth regarding validity of (spiritual) being " (615 n) ? A work cannot become a symbol without some symbol-making or symbol-forming process. It will not do, I think, to try to sink the epistemological or semiotic question into the phenomenological one, with the help of an ambiguous word like 'show'. The fullest phenomenological description of the aesthetic experience will give us only what is in the experience; it will not justify our attributing to the work a reference beyond itself to human life (which is implied in 'showing'), and still less will it justify our deriving from the work a truth about human life (which may be implied in 'revealing'). Taken in its fullest and richest sense, Hofstadter's account of spiritual life working itself out in valid form is a fine description of what we may hear in music or see in painting, but it remains metaphorical. Music has a life of its own, it moves and grows, it finds

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its way, overcomes obstacles, resounds in exultant joy, comes to anl end 'that suits its nature well, and so on. But these apt and vital metaphors do not warrant our taking the music as a manifestation of something else. I sympathize very much with Hofstadter's aim to show how art contributes in a fundamental way to all our life. I am drawn toward those passages in his paper that indirectly remind me of Dewey-for example, of Dewey's idea that in aesthetic experience the incorporation of means into ends gives us a sort of model of what life at its best can be. I would like to believe one very pregnant statement. After asserting that "one exists validly in perceiving the valid form, and one perceives the valid form in existing validly. It is the same condition in both," Hofstadter says, "Here, at this stage, a human being solves the basic problem of force and right in perfecting the activity of perception itself " (617). Granted that many of our social problems can be summed up as the problem of "rightful power" -how to make force subservient to justice-and that the subtle problems of the creative artist can also be summed up as the problem of "rightful power" -how to harmonize the elements of an intense experience-I do not see how these problems can really be called one. And it may be dangerous in the extreme to think that one of them can be "solved' or even partially solved, by solving the other. III.
BEAUTY

What, finally, are we to make of the judgment of beauty? Is beauty a "form of validity," or is it not'? I have had my moments of impatience with such questions-utterances about beauty must be among the least rule-governed of all verbal behavior. Anyone with enterprise and strength of mind can adopt the word and adapt it to his own purposes. So: what is beauty? It is pleasure objectified, or unity in variety, or the ideal in sensuous form, or successful expression, or the rightful power to make the inner validity of spiritual life also valid for intuitive perception-or something else. And if one should say, No, beauty is not any of those things, and not anything like them, how would one make one's case any more convincing than these-give it any less the appearance of being a verbal fiat? For it is easy enough to show that people often apply the word 'beauty' very loosely and capriciously, in a hit-or-miss fashion, according to momentary whim, and quite inconsistently with one another. I think the explanation for this confusing usage is a simple one. Suppose a person who is looking at the sea early one morning, under special weather conditions, observes upon it a certain

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peculiar quality-it has that sort of look, then and there-and gives it a name or description. Let us say that it pervades the scene, but only for a short time; it returns, but often less intense; it appears unexpectedly and often very briefly; it must be looked at with some attention to be seen, and perhaps few persons are present when it appears or have the inclination to attend or can recall it very distinctly afterward or describe it with great accuracy. One can imagine a particular adjective coming, but gradually and insecurely, to designate that quality among those who are acquainted with it, but we can be sure that such an adjective will have all the vagaries of 'beautiful': it will often be misapplied by those who think they are talking about the same quality when they are not; there will be frustrating disputes between those who have eyes to see its evanescent presence on a particular morning and those who are less perceptive, or between those whose mood on that occasion opens them to a response and those who are in a contrary or unsuitable mood. More importantly, the adjective may commonly be applied to a range of similar though distinct qualities; and efforts to agree upon a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its application will be frustrated. It will no doubt even be argued with some cogency, once it is realized that those who claim to have seen this quality have found it precious, and cherish their recollection, that there was no quality at all, but that in talking about it, they have merely been expressing their emotionsanother way of carolling "Oh, what a beautiful morning !" If beauty is such a perceptual quality, similarly variable in intensity and sometimes difficult or impossible for some people to perceive, then judgments of beauty can be expected to have all the peculiarities they do in fact have. This explanation seems to me the best one available; moreover, I believe it can be supported independently. To set out more points of disagreement for discussion, I shall state some propositions about beauty and defend them briefly. Except for the last one, it is not so much their truth as their importance (or interest) that Hofstadter would question; but if they are true they have a bearing on the nature of aesthetic judgment. To sum them up, I shall argue that beauty is a simple regional perceptual quality, which is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of aesthetic value. 1. Beauty is a perceivable quality. We use the adjective 'beautiful' most normally in response to questions like "How does it look?" "How does it sound?" The beauty of the sculpture is seen in it; of music, is heard. (I do not think that it can be smelt or tasted.) We may be able in an indirect way to persuade

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someone by argument that a sculpture contains a beauty he cannot see (by adducing the testimony of others, for example), but we regard this as somewhat futile unless we can point it out to him, make him see it for himself. It follows that any property of art (including "validity"?) that cannot be perceived-but must be felt or inferred-is something quite different from beauty. 2. Beauty is a regional (or emergent) quality, that is, a quality of a complex: of a melody or visual design. A single sound cannot strictly be beautiful, I think, though it can be pleasing. I say this despite the famous passage in which Plotinus 2 argues that symmetry cannot be the essential perceptual condition of beauty because in that case simple qualities, like a color, a star, or gold, could not be beautiful. Perhaps Plotinus was right-then at least I would claim that beauty cannot appear in a very intense degree except when it is a regional quality. (I don't see, by the way, how there would be beauty in, say, a single tone on Hofstadter's view, either; a single tone could not have "rightness," since it has neither parts nor context.) 3. Though it is a quality of a complex, beauty is itself a simple quality. I don't know how to prove this convincingly, but certainly beauty can be present in various degrees, and on occasion we can observe its increase. Take an amateur pianist practicing the slow movement of a Mozart sonata. At first he is inaccurate, then accurate but mechanical, then freer and more expressive in phrasing. As we listen, his successive performances become more and more beautiful-and if we were given tape recordings of them all, jumbled up, we could rearrange them in order of beauty. This suggests to me that we are going by a single quality to establish a single dimension. Plotinus, in the passage mentioned above, was replying to a theory that was in his time principally maintained by the Stoics. I think it noteworthy that these classical philosophers, in discussing the question of the relation between beauty and symmetry,s were usually clear about the sort of question they were asking. Plotinus does not ask, for example, "What is beauty?" or "Is beauty simple or complex'?" He asks, "What is it that gives comeliness to material forms?" He answers that an object becomes unified by participation in the Ideal (Platonic) Forms, and "on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum. . . ." He means, I take it, not that
2 The Enneads, trans. MacKenna and Page, 2d ed. rev. (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), I, vi, 1 (p. 56). 3 Plato in the Philebus; Aristotle in the Poetics (briefly); Plotinus in Ennead I, Tractate vi.

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beauty can be defined as unity or as participation in the Forms, but that unity (whether of the homogeneous or the heterogeneous) is the perceptual condition of supervenient beauty. 4. A fairly high degree of beauty is a sufficient condition of a fairly high degree of aesthetic value. Anyone who can say that this is a beautiful piece of music can also say that it is a good piece of music. I admit that a comparatively uncomplicated poem may be quite beautiful, without ranking among the best poems, but if it is quite beautiful then it is quite good. Note that, with certain assumptions, this point and the previous one might be used to support point 2 above. The argument would be this: The conditions of being a good poem are multiple-it must have not only a pervasive quality (like beauty), but also coherence and completeness, in some measure, and a degree of complexity, in the form of subtlety and richness of meaning. But beauty is simple. Therefore, if beauty in a poem is sufficient to make it good, that must be because beauty has itself complex conditions that are also conditions of poetic goodness. But the conclusion does not necessarily follow, because some degree of complexity is necessary, not only for being a good poem, but for being a poem-and similarly for other aesthetic objects. If a single note on a flute or French horn can be beautiful, it nevertheless cannot be beautiful music, for it is not music. 5. Beauty is not a necessary condition of aesthetic value. This proposition is strongly objected to by Hofstadter, whose charitable impulses are aroused when he observes "how homeless an orphan beauty has become in contemporary aesthetic terminology" (609). I thought that I had provided adequate shelter for beauty when I said that it was one ground of aesthetic value, but evidently it craves to be an only child. (In any case, I believe I treat beauty no more harshly or slightingly than the British aestheticians of the eighteenth century). In my view, other qualities besides beauty are grounds of aesthetic value. For example, there is the sublime, which is something different. Expressiveness-that is, the possession of intense regional qualities-I take to be broader than beauty. I realize that Hofstadter may reply that what many people call expressiveness is really part of what he means by 'beauty'. How much of the issue here is verbal is a subtle question. But for my part I believe that the gradual recognition of expressiveness (not expression-a different thing) in the past few centuries has involved not a mere narrowing of the term 'beauty' but a widehing of the scope of the aesthetic.

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But I am afraid that this is not enough to let me escape from the trouble into which I am plunged by Hofstadter's attack-and by his charge that I confuse "the stuff of the work and the work itself ' (609). When I try to give examples of excellent (or, if Hofstadter prefers, highly successful) works of art that are nevertheless not properly called "beautiful," his answreris that, though the "stuff" (or subject) may not be beautiful, the work itself nevertheless is. At the risk of some unorthodoxy, I would like to say whv I do not wholly accept this criticism. There are three types of case to consider. First, consider nonrepresentational works of visual or auditory art. In these, we cannot confuse the subject with the work itself, since there is no subject. Yet I would say, for example, that Beethoven's Great Fugue (Op. 133) should not be called "beautiful, though it is a tremendous piece of music, a great and excellent work. Parts of it have beauty, but as a whole it glories in its power, its dramatic intensity, its drive and pent-up energy. As to visual art, let me invoke the support of Henry Moore, in a passage quoted by Harold Osborne:
For me a work must first have vitality of its own. I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of life, of movement, physical action, frisking, dancing figures and so on, but that a work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the object it may represent. When a work has this powerful vitality we do not connect the word Beauty with it. Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim of my sculpture.4

Second, consider literary works of art. In these, I cannot be conffusing the subject with the work itself, since what is true of the subject is true of the work. How can we distinguish between the drama Oedipus Rex and the fate of (Sophocles') Oedipus ?5 For that fate is what the play is about, and thus it is what the play (in part) is. "Oedipus discovers his crimes and blinds himself" describes what is going on in the play; it is the play's tragic substance. If the events that make up a play are tragic, or comic, or farcical, how can the play fail to be tragedy, comedy, or farce?
4Theory of Beauty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 14. This fassage illustrates one of the two senses of 'beauty' distinguished by Osborne. which I hold to be the usual and useful one. One example from a critic: Bernard Berenson (Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Oxford: Clarendcon Press, 1930) uses the word 'beauty' nine times in his two pages praising Simone Martini (pp. 162-163), but in his six pages praising Giotto much more highly (pp. 64-65, 69-73) he does not once attribute beauty to Giotto 's paintings. ,"We can of course distinguish between Euripides's story of Medea and the traditional one, since he invented Medea 's murder of her children, but the murder is then part of the subject of the play.

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And it seems to me peculiar to say that Oedipus Rex is a beautiful play, even thougyhit is a great play. Third, consider representational paintings. Certainly we may distinguish between the subject and the painting, or at any rate between what is depicted and the design that depicts it.6 And there are some nice questions about the connection between them. A visual design can depict certain things without actually having the properties depicted: for example, a picture of a 100-foot tower need not itself be 100 feet high. But a picture of a red dress has to be red. And in the example given by Henry Moore, it seems to me that a work could not go far toward representing a physical action that has vitality unless it presented vitality as a quality, though of course it could be vital as a design without representing anything at all. Now, what is the logical connection between "X is a beautiful picture" and "X is a picture of a beautiful object" ? To show the object as beautiful, the depicter must assemble lines and areas that will look to some extent beautiful, as the object itself would presumably look (because of its lines and shapes) if we were to see it; and the lines and shapes that depict an ugly object can do so only by being themselves ugly. Suppose, then, that in offering the Griunewald example I had made this inference: "Since the Crucifixion as depicted by Grunewald is not beautiful, the painting is not beautiful." Would such an inference really be fallacious? I don't say that one cannot paint a beautiful picture of the Crucifixion-other painters have depicted that event as far less terrible than Griunewald-but only that, to do so, one will either have to depict a beautiful Crucifixion or else bring into the picture other areas than those that depict the Crucifixion. However, I did not mean to legitimize this example by an inference, fallacious or not, from subject to painting, but rather to appeal to the careful observer's reflective judgment. Do we not wish to praise this painting in some way other than by saying that it is beautiful? I do. Possibly that is because my narrower use of the term tempts me to miss something in the painting that is more easily seen by one who uses Hofstadter's terms. Possibly it is because the narrower use makes room for the recognition that there is no one character that stamps all great works of art, but an unlimited variety of aesthetically valuable qualities. MONROE C. BEARDSLEY
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
6 I use the term 'depict' in the slightly technical sense (distinguished from that of 'portray') assigned to it in Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), ch. 6.

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