THE BEAUTIFUL

The Beautiful in the History of Aesthetics

Admiring a beautiful woman, Boris Pasternak said that to fathom the

secret of her charm is tantamount to solving the riddle of life. The
secret of beauty is the secret of life.

In antiquity, man's approach to the world was still quite uncomplicated;

the aesthetic and the practical were not completely divorced, and
therefore every relationship of man with the world can be considered
aesthetic.

Classical Greek aesthetics was part of an undivided body of

knowledge. Individual sciences had not yet formed independent
branches of the single tree of human knowledge. Every characteristic
of the universe had grains of aesthetic appreciation. The very idea of
the world was essentially aesthetic. The first natural philosophers
considered the aesthetic and the cosmological as one: the beautiful was
a universal quality of beauty, the universal harmony and beauty of
cosmos (the word means the universe, the world, adornment, apparel,
beauty, order, harmony; it is no chance that the word cosmetics is
derived from the same root).
Natural philosophers maintained that the world and its beauty were
objective reality, and the idea has won many adherents among theorists
in later ages.

Harmony

Beauty is harmonious, and harmony appears where there is inequality,

the unity of diversity. In the presence of equality and absence of
contradiction, harmony is unnecessary, but where the opposites are
mixed in equal proportion, there is well-being and health. Beauty is the
measure of harmony and reality of existence, the measure of concord
with cosmos.

In the opinion of Heraclitus, harmony was not a static balance but

motion and dynamics. In his teaching, the central and most powerful
element is fire. He compared the life and destiny of all living beings to
the flame which consumes everything and turns it into ashes thus
making birth possible again, after which death will follow once more.
The beauty of life is the beauty of struggle, the beauty of perpetual
death and perpetual formation and resurrection from the ashes in a
multitude of new forms. Beauty is the nature of fire woven from
contradictions and straining into the future. Contradiction is the source
of harmony and the condition of the existence of beauty: that which
diverges comes together; the most perfect harmony emerges from
opposition. Straining apart, the two points of the drawn bow or a lyre
produce coordinated action. Heraclitus saw the
structure of the beautiful in the unity of conflicting opposites. The
image of the bow was a theoretical model of the dialectical structure of
harmony, historically very accurate: the bow was the forerunner and
the first source of musical sound; all stringed instruments can be traced
back to it.

Perception of beauty

For the first time in the history of aesthetics, Heraclitus discussed

perception of beauty which, in his opinion, can be understood not
through calculation or abstract thinking but through contemplation.
According to Heraclitus, to grasp the essence of beauty, the thinking
and contemplating individual has to possess a highly delicate
instrument – the ability to think dialectically. For Heraclitus, to
understand the essence of life and the nature of beauty means to reveal
the controversial character of existence, birth and death, struggle and
harmony.

Empedocles, another Greek materialist, believed that the world was

made up of four proto elements: fire, air, earth, and water. They are
united by love, which produces harmony and beauty, and divided by
animosity, which is the source of chaos and ugliness, the process of the
emergence of beauty and harmony.

Democritus advanced the theory of measure and developed the doctrine

of hedonism: life should be enjoyable; one should enjoy only that
which is beautiful, and in moderation. Not any pleasure should be
pursued but only that which has at least an element of the beautiful.

Plato's dialogues contain a comprehensive and profound analysis of the

beautiful. In the Greater Hippias, the question he poses is not What is
beautiful?' but 'What is beauty?' The interlocutors are Hippias and
Socrates; the latter tries to show the former how to reach the correct
solution to a problem. Socrates draws his attention to the relativity of
the beautiful: to determine the measure of the object's beauty, a
comparison with other objects is necessary. Socrates quotes Heraclitus,
who said, "...the most beautiful of apes is ugly compared with the
human race.... The wisest of men, when compared to a god, will appear
but an ape in wisdom and beauty and all else".

Finally, a definition is worked out: the beautiful is that which is

beneficial, useful and has power to produce something good. But
Socrates reminds his opponent, however, that there are things which
are quite useful for perpetrating an evil deed, and these are far removed
from the beautiful. Is not then the beautiful that which is useful for a
good deed, i.e. the useful itself? This supposition, introducing a
utilitarian element into the definition of beauty, is also rejected. A
new, sensualist approach to the beautiful emerges, which explains the
significance of the latter as a source of pleasure: "Beauty is the pleasant
which comes through the senses of hearing and sight", while the
designation "beautiful" is denied "to that which is pleasant according to
the other senses, that is, the senses which have to do with food, and
drink, and sexual intercourse, and all such things". Further on, Plato
draws a line between physical and spiritual beauty; Further still, he
tries to blend the utilitarian, the sensualist and the ethical definitions:
"beauty is that which is both useful and powerful for some good
purpose". But Plato makes a distinction between the good and the
beautiful. His Socrates says, "Then most certainly beauty is not good
nor the good beautiful". The final result of the dispute is summed up by
its last phrase: "All that is beautiful is difficult."

Plato looks for beauty in solids, in the quality of being proportionate.

In the final analysis, Plato's beauty is a specific aesthetic idea man can
grasp only in a state of obsession or inspiration. Noting the beauty of a
concrete object, Plato listens as it were to that which emerges in the
soul of man in the presence of beauty. He was the first to treat the
beautiful as the product of man's aesthetic and spiritual relation to the
object and not as an innate property of objects. This interpretation of
the beautiful points to its suprasensual nature.

However, Plato sees the source of this quality of the beautiful not in
social life or history but in the primacy of the spiritual. The most
valuable part of Plato's doctrine is its detailed characteristic of beauty
and the idea that aesthetic experience has features which are all its
own: contemplation of the beautiful is the source of a number of
unique "pleasures".

Hegel noted in his lectures on the history of philosophy that the very
trend of Plato's discussion concerning the beautiful and its qualities
shows that Plato gave a dialectical interpretation of the beautiful as the
product of man's spiritual, specifically human approach to the world.

As distinct from Plato, Aristotle regarded the beautiful not as an

objective idea but as an objective property of things, saying that
"beauty is a matter of size and order". "To be beautiful, a living
creature, and every whole made of parts, must not only present a
certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also to be of a certain
definite magnitude." Here, Aristotle gives a structural characteristic of
beauty stressing the size, proportions and order as the elements of the
beautiful. Aristotle maintained that these properties can be assessed
with the help of mathematics. Aristotle suggested the principle of
comparability of man and a beautiful object, saying that beauty is
"impossible either 1) in a very minute creature, since our perception
becomes indistinct as it approaches instantaneity; or 2) in a creature of
vast size ...as in that case, instead of the object being seen all at once,
the unity and wholeness of it is lost to the beholder". According to
Aristotle, the beautiful should be neither too small nor too large. This
seemingly naive idea is nevertheless that of a genius. Beauty becomes
a measure, and the measure of all things is man. It is in comparison
with man that the beautiful object should not be out of proportion.
Aristotle's doctrine of beauty theoretically corresponded to the
humanitarian character of the art of classical antiquity. As distinct from
a pyramid, the Parthenon is neither too small nor too large; it is small
enough not to overwhelm man but large enough to convey the
greatness of the Athenians who created it.

In the Middle Ages, the dominating doctrine was that of the divine
origin of beauty (Thomas Aquinas, Tertullian, Francis of Assisi):
animating the inert matter, god renders it aesthetic. Sensual beauty was
looked upon as sinful; enjoyment of it was prohibited. The humanists
of the Renaissance (Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare) glorified the
beauty of nature and the joy it gives man. They regarded art as a mirror
used by the artist to reflect nature. The aestheticians of classicism
(Boileau) reduced the beautiful to the refined; not all flowering and
luxuriant nature was considered beautiful but only the trimmed and
groomed part of it, like, for instance, Versailles. Classicists insisted
that the sublime object of art was beauty in social life seen as goodness
and state expediency.

French Enlighteners (Voltaire, Diderot et al) expanded the realm of the

beautiful, once more granting it to life in all its manifestations. For
them, beauty was an innate property of nature itself, like weight,
colour, size, etc.

The German classical aesthetics introduced a number of dialectical

ideas into the notion of the nature of the beautiful. Kant said that
beauty was an object of a disinterested relationship. Hegel's approach
was the historic one. He saw the beautiful as a stage in the evolution of
the Universal Spirit. In the course of it, the Spirit is harmoniously
united with the material form; the idea finds a complete and adequate
expression in the form, and that is beautiful. Such state was attained by
the Absolute Idea in the art of classical antiquity (Ancient Greece). For
Hegel, beauty lies in the realm of art.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the Russian aesthetician, maintained that

beauty is life as it should be. His doctrine treats beauty
materialistically. At the same time, it bears a stamp of anthropologism:
Chernyshevsky thought that beauty in nature anticipated man.

In the late 19th-early 20th century, aesthetics in Western Europe was

dominated by subjective idealism. It maintained that in the process of
aesthetic perception man spiritualises the aesthetically neutral world,
making it emanate beauty. Only man can introduce beauty into nature,
which, taken by itself, lies beyond the realm of the beautiful or the ugly
and is outside aesthetics, morals or logic. Nature is beautiful only if
aesthetic perception has made it so. From the aesthetic point of view, it
is rich only in that which has been lent to it by art.

Paradigms of Theoretical Perception of Beauty

Each of the numerous concepts of the beautiful advanced in the history

of aesthetics leans towards one of the theoretical models which have
been discussed above. In other words, they can all be reduced to five
paradigms.
Paradigm 1 (Plato, Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi,
Hegel): beauty is a manifestation of god (or the Absolute Idea) in
concrete objects and phenomena.

Paradigm 2: life is aesthetically neutral, the source of its beauty is in

the soul of man (Ch. Lalo, Theodor Lipps, E. Meumann), it emerges
when man lends or loans (Jean Paul), emotionally penetrates (B.
Croce), or projects (N. Hartmann) his inner wealth to life; beauty is a
result of the intentional (purposeful, active, conscious) perception of
the object by the subject (phenomenologists).

Paradigm 3 (Socrates, Aristotle, Chernyshevsky): beauty appears when

the various aspects of life are brought into correlation with man as the
measure of beauty or with his practical needs, ideals and ideas of life as
it should be.

Paradigm 4 (French materialists): beauty is the natural property of

objects and phenomena.

Paradigm 5 (Soviet aestheticians): beauty is a quality of objectively

existing phenomena with their natural properties which have been
involved by social production and human activity into the sphere of
man's interests and acquired a positive value for man as a race. They
have been spiritualised and humanised by labour becoming the realm
of freedom, i.e. the field where man is the master of life. Let us analyse
the principal theoretical ideas of this fundamentally new approach to
the problem of the beautiful.

We perceive the harmony and symmetry in the world around us as

beauty. They lie, as it were, in the very foundation of matter. Particles
and antiparticles in the microcosm form the basis of the structure of an
atom. Antiparticles are mirror reflections of particles. This essential
property of matter – the harmony and symmetry of its structure – is
repeated in a leaf of a tree, the build of various animals, and the human
face. This essential property of the world, its material nature, the
overall connection and interaction of its phenomena, comprises the
natural basis of the beautiful. With the infinite variety and multitude of
phenomena, they are correlated and linked with each other by millions
of ties, and are adjusted to each other.

Labour is older than art. Utilitarian views were the first to be acquired
by man, and it is only later that he came to form aesthetic views on the
basis of utilitarian ones. It is labour that bears the stamp of the
aesthetic. In contrast to the activities of animals, it is concerned with
creative transformation of life. Animals create unconsciously, by force
of biological necessity and according to the needs of the species they
belong to.

What is then the measure which is inherent in the object? It is not the
natural laws which govern the development of matter organised by the
presence of an inner purpose, for nature does not have a purpose.
Measure is the result of the discovery by man, in the course of his
exploration of the world, of the object's inner potential for serving man
and satisfying his needs.

The Beautiful as a Positive Universal Human Value

Only those natural properties of an object engender beauty which are

correlated in the process of social production to man's needs and are
determined by the level of social development. Beauty is objective, for
it depends not on its perception by an individual but on the actual
value of the object for man. This aesthetic quality is social, for it is
determined by production which involves the whole world into the
field of human activity and puts every object into a certain relation to
man. Thus beauty is the broadest positive social significance of a
phenomenon, its positive value for the human race.
Beauty is a product of history. Beauty in art is perfection of form,
depth of meaning, profound knowledge of the subject, and the
consequence of the artistic idea conveyed by the work. An accurate and
impassive copying of life does not produce beauty. The latter can be
attained in art only by a creative approach to life.