Sanctifying Art. Deborah Sokolove
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such well-trodden territory. As I am neither an historian nor a philosopher, any summary that I might make would be certain to be incomplete. More to the point, such a digression would be much too long and distract from the central themes of this volume.
However, it is not possible to write about either art or beauty without any reference to the historical background that informs the current state of the discussion. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that up until relatively recently philosophers and theologians have generally assumed that art and beauty were inextricably bound up in one another. As philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto puts it in his influential work, The Abuse of Beauty,
The philosophical conception of aesthetics is almost entirely dominated by the idea of beauty, and this was particularly the case in the eighteenth century—the great age of aesthetics—when apart from the sublime, the beautiful was the only aesthetic quality actively considered by artists and thinkers.36
In these discussions, it has often been assumed that beauty (or the lack thereof) was a property of an object, something that anyone with the proper perceptual equipment could recognize as easily as they could its shape or size or acoustical properties. For centuries, philosophical theories about art tended to rest on the twin notions that the purpose of art was to be beautiful, and that the merit of any artwork, as measured by its beauty, would universally be recognized and acknowledged. By the eighteenth century, however, this presumed universality was in endangered by a move towards subjective relativism in which beauty existed only in the eye of the beholder.
In Voicing Creation’s Praise, theologian Jeremy Begbie surveys philosophical notions about art and aesthetics in the early modern period. Placing Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) at the apex of the Enlightenment, he points out that in Kant’s writings the universality of beauty is one of its hallmarks. For Kant, although the experience of beauty was subjective, it was not idiosyncratic. Everyone, he asserted, should agree that this or that thing was objectively beautiful. Begbie notes that Kant, as well as other philosophers, realizes that beauty is not something that can be known intellectually or objectively, but must be sensed subjectively. He writes,
. . . it is clearly hard for Kant to provide a convincing account of the universal validity of aesthetic judgements [sic], despite his intention to avoid relativism. The universality of judgements of taste is grounded only in the universality of the subjective conditions for judging objects, and it is not evident that we can ever ascertain whether the subjective conditions necessary for an authentic experience of beauty are actually operative. Not surprisingly, Kant says little about aesthetic disputes and how they might be resolved.37
Theological aesthetic theories tend to follow Kant, and like him, give little help towards resolving aesthetic disputes. It is this difficulty that opens the way toward relativism. For David Hume (1711–1776), the nature of aesthetic judgment is entirely subjective, arising from our sense experiences, memories, imagination, and dreams. Begbie asserts that for Hume, beauty is not an a priori concept, but an idea arising from a series of impressions, a matter of pleasure and satisfaction rather than some kind of absolute, external reality. For Hume, it is not only beauty, but also “tastes and colours, and all other sensible qualities” which exist not in the object, but merely in the senses.38
In these philosophical discussions about beauty, little effort was made to distinguish between theories relating to the beauty of the natural world and those relating to art. Both philosophers and artists seemed to simply assume that beauty was an integral property of art, and that the beauty found in art was no different than the beauty found in the natural world. This began to change with the Aesthetics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a work based on his lectures throughout the 1820s and published in 1830. Danto notes his own excitement on reading Hegel:
There were two thoughts on the very first page of his work . . . One was the rather radical distinction he drew between natural and artistic beauty . . . And the other was his gloss on why artistic beauty seemed “superior” to natural beauty. It was because it was “born of the Spirit and born again.” That was a grand, ringing phrase: Aus den Geistens geborene und wiedergeborene. It meant, as I saw it, that artistic beauty was in some sense an intellectual rather than a natural product.39
Danto goes on to say that the mimetic theory of art, which held that a picture of a field of daffodils is beautiful in the same way that the field itself is beautiful, does not really account for what we value in art. For Hegel, and for Danto, the painting has an importance, a meaning, lacking in the natural phenomenon.
By the early twentieth century, the very concept of beauty as applied to artworks was seriously challenged. In his seminal work, simply titled Art, published in 1913, Clive Bell (1881–1964) made a careful distinction between what he called significant form, which could be a property only of works of art, and beauty, which could only properly be said to apply to things in the natural world. Since what he termed the aesthetic emotion could only be aroused in the presence of significant form, this sensation was different than that which was evoked by the beauty of a flaming sunset or a perfect rose. For Bell, the concept of beauty simply did not apply to artworks at all.
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