Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty The Substance of the Experience of Beauty The Service of Art Art As Release The Theories of Beauty Theories of Mental Attitude Theories of Organic State Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	THEORIES OF MENTAL ATTITUDE Intrinsicality. We begin with the theory of intrinsicality for no other reason than that we must begin somewhere. Any other theory would be just as effective for the crucial purpose here intended. This theory holds that in beauty experience is valued for itself, is its own justification, in contrast with practical experiences, like the good, the true, or the useful, where experience is esteemed for its fruits, and hence is not sufficient in itself, but is justified by its results. In other words, whenever experience becomes significance as experience, whenever its value is immediate rather than derived, whenever value is placed upon experience as experience, it is termed an experience of beauty, and its object is labeled an object of beauty. Beauty is thus a matter of emphasis. When an activity or an interest is considered as a means towards some end, and directed by a consciousness of the end to be accomplished, the experience is utilitarian, practical. When the emphasis is on the activity itself, when the activity or interest is its own end, the experience is beautiful. A common illustration is "a beautiful walk," namely, when the activity of walking is engaged in for its own sake, in contrast with walking to reach a certain destination, when the activity becomes laborious. In beauty, value is intrinsic, the activity is the value and the value is the activity. In practical experience the value is outside of the activity, extrinsic to it, namely, in some conscious end that the activity is to promote. Disinterestedness. The theory of disinterestedness holds that in the experience of beauty interest is attached to the immediate event rather than to some felt need that is promoted by the event. The experience is in this sense impersonal, that is, detached from conscious personal motives. For instance, walking for one's health is an interested, motive-full, intentional activity, since the activity may be unpleasant in itself, but is persisted in because of the desirability of the end to be accomplished. The difference is brought out in such remarks as that the laborer works for his hire, and the artist for the sake of the work. Both laborer and artist work, of course, toward an end, but while the laborer is interested only in the end, works only because of the fruits of the labor, the artist finds satisfaction in the work itself, at the end of which he may even feel grief instead of satisfaction. Again, this theory also deals with emphasis. In disinterestedness the emphasis, the concentration, is on the immediate activity; in interestedness it is on the culmination of the activity. Thus disinterestedness is object-centered, while interestedness is self-centered. Platonic friendship is an instance of disinterestedness, and hence labeled beautiful, while friendship based upon some ulterior motive, upon some conscious gain to be obtained from the association, is given an opprobrius name. Cemal Tollu Now it is obvious that this theory is in substance but a restatement of the theory of intrinsicality. In the interested attitude attention is centered on considerations outside the event itself, that is, on extrinsicalities. I work because I want the money or the fame, or because I must, in order to satisfy some external pressure. The work is not its own justification, intrinsic, but finds its justification in something outside of itself, something extrinsic to itself. In disinterestedness, on the other hand, emphasis is on the thing itself, hence attention is intrinsic, the activity is its own justification, interest in it being for itself. Hence intrinsicality and disinterestedness describe the same attitude. Significant Form. This theory is advanced by Clive Bell in his book, Art. His statement of it is as follows: All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recognizably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects. For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of "works of art" we gibber. Everyone speaks of "art", making a mental classification by which he distinguishes the class "works of art" from all other classes. What is the justification of this classification? What is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? Whatever it be, no doubt it is often found in company with other qualities; but they are adventitious--it is essential. There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worth. less. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible--significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. Their relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant Form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art. A simple illustration will bring out the substance of this theory. Two men are observing a column of smoke emanating from a smoke-stack of a steel mill. One of them comments "What a shame that this be tolerated to pollute the atmosphere, befog the landscape, soil linen," etc., etc. The second exclaims "How beautiful." Now what is it that is beautiful in the smoke? Apparently not that which pollutes the atmosphere, etc., but the phenomenon as such, namely, the form that is directly present before us. The form is the essence of the phenomenon, for if that disappeared the phenomenon would disappear, while its effects, the befogging of the atmosphere, etc., are its consequences or attributes. The theory states, then, that whenever form becomes significant, meaningful, as form, the experience is termed beautiful. This illustration serves also to point out the identity of this theory with that of intrinsicality and of disinterestedness The first observer is concerned with the consequences, results, effects of the phenomenon, in other words, with those aspects of it that are extrinsic to the phenomenon, per se. His attitude is calculating, subjective, namely, interested. The second observer's interest is in the phenomenon as a phenomenon, in its essential intrinsic phase, hence he is unaware of the consequences of anything that the phenomenon gives rise to, and his attitude is thus disinterested. We can then state any one of these three theories in terms of the other two. Thus, in the disinterested attitude attention is centered on the essential, intrinsic aspect of an event, and this aspect is, necessarily, its form. Or, when attention is focussed on the intrinsic aspect of an event, that is, on its form as form, the attitude is disinterested, in that any considerations of the effects of the event are out of mind. Or, when attention is centered on the form of a phenomenon rather than on its consequences, the experience is necessarily intrinsic and disinterested. Psychical Distance. Dr. E. Bullough gives the following excellent account of his theory: A short illustration will explain what is meant by "Psychical Distance." Imagine a fog at sea: for most people it is an experience of acute unpleasantness. Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter forms of discomfort such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and listening for distant and unlocalized signals. The listless movements of the ship and her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the passengers; and that special, expectant, tacit anxiety and nervousness, always associated with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea (all the more terrifying because of its very silence and gentleness) for the expert seafarer no less than for the ignorant landsman. Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness, just as every one in the enjoyment of a mountain-climb disregards its physical labor and its danger (though, it is not denied, that these may incidentally enter into the enjoyment and enhance it); direct the attention to the features "objectively" constituting the phenomenon--the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying-power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from the world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops; and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, flavor of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects. This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like a momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary and familiar object--an impression which we experience sometimes in instants of direst extremity, when our practical interest snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some impending catastrophe with the marveling unconcern of a mere spectator. Psychical distance then means distance from one's self, one's personal, practical interests in the event. In any experience, the closer that one is to one's own self, the more that one is concerned with one's interests, the farther one is removed, psychically, from the object, in that he relates it to himself, stands over it, appraising and evaluating it, consciously seeking through it the satisfaction of some need, and aware of a separation between himself and the object, namely, that the object is a means towards some conscious personal end that is to be attained. Conversely, the farther that one is removed from one's self, from personal considerations, the closer he gets to the object, in that the self-interests do not intervene and separate subject and object, hence there is a mergence, the subject being in the object, instead of the object being consciously used to further some need of the subject. In the former attitude there is psychical distance, in the latter psychical closeness. In psychical distance, therefore, experience becomes significant as such, valued as experience, while the fruit of experience, namely, the extrinsicalities that arise in the interested attitude, are absent. This theory is, then, but another restatement of those of disinterestedness, intrinsicality, and significant form. Objectification. George Santayana defines beauty as pleasure objectified. His formulation of it is as follows: Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the perception of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from perception; by the objectification of the elements and their appearance as qualities rather of things than of consciousness. The passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use one phrase; if I am impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear; and the union of two pleasures often makes one beauty. In Shakespeare's LIVth sonnet are these words: O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem By that sweet ornament which truth doth give! The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odor which doth in it live. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye As the perfumed tincture of the roses, Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly When summer's breath their masked buds discloses. But, for their beauty only is their show, They live unwooed and unrespected fade; Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so: Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made. One added ornament, we see turns the deep dye, which was but show and mere sensation before, into an element of beauty and reality; and as truth is here the co-operation of perceptions, so beauty is the co-operation of pleasures. If colour, form, and motion are hardly beautiful without the sweetness of the odour, how much more necessary would they be for the sweetness itself to become a beauty! If we had the perfume in a flask, no one would think of calling it beautiful: it would give us too detached and controllable a sensation. There would be no object in which it could be easily incorporated. But let it float from the garden, and it will add another sensuous charm to objects simultaneously recognized, and help to make them beautiful. Thus beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified. In ordinary feeling we find two traits. I see you are sad, and I know that the sadness is in you and not in me. Or I am sad and I refer the sadness to myself and not to the thing or situation that made me sad. Or if your sadness makes me sad, I make a distinction between the two and say that your sadness made me sad. But in beauty we have the unique fact that the feeling which is in me is referred to the object which created the feeling in me. The feeling is objectified, expressed, which means that it receives a form, it becomes the thing that has aroused it, and is contemplated or observed as the thing. Thus in an aesthetic attitude I contemplate my own feelings, objectify them, consider the self in relation to the feelings instead of the feelings in relation to the self. The feelings, therefore, are not mine, but I am the feelings. I become identified with them. I am therefore disinterested, detached from the self, in other words, objectified. What is the nature of "the thing," the object, that is observed in this attitude? It cannot be the thing of ordinary experience any more than the feeling is that of ordinary experience. Just as in ordinary experience we do not observe the feeling for itself but in its meaning, so an object in ordinary experience is seen not as it is in itself but in its relationship to other things or to the observer. The reality of an object to me, ordinarily, resides in its significance to me, what it does to me, how it affects me, what is its meaning to me. Consequently, when feeling becomes detached from me it becomes attached not to the meaning of the object as chair or table, that is, to its extrinsic aspect, but to the object itself, namely, its intrinsicality, that which it is in itself, as a form. Thus meaning and form become identical: the form being the meaning, and the meaning the form. And for the same reason, percipient and perceived become identified, for, when the meaning, which is I, is referred to the object, I also reside in the object. Object and subject thus fuse into pure being. Now what does this theory offer us that is new, that is not contained in the theories already discussed? All that it does is add the affective element to the theories of intrinsicality, disinterestedness, etc. These theories describe the mental attitude in the experience of beauty. The theory of objectification describes the feeling attitude. What it tells us is this: that since what is present to mind in the intrinsic, disinterested, psychically distanced attitude is not subjective meaning, but objective meaning, the feeling-counterpart of the experience is also objective. Beauty is really not so much pleasure objectified, but rather the pleasure is objectified because beauty is an objective experience, and hence the pleasure-aspect of the experience is also objective. Intuition. This is a theory advocated by the Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce. Croce identifies the aesthetic experience with intuition, and intuition with expression. Intuition is, for Croce, a midway station between sensation and perception, in the psychological connotation of these terms. To Croce sensation and matter are identical. Sensation is formless matter, chaotic, unformulated confusion. In the words of Croce, "it is what the spirit of man suffers, but does not produce. Without it no human knowledge or activity is possible; but mere matter produces animality, whatever is brutal and impulsive in man, not the spiritual dominion, which is humanity." 1 Perception, as used in psychology, is the process of interpretation of sensation in terms of behavior, that is, meaning. But before chaotic sensation can become perception, it must become individualized, systematized, ordered, in a word, formulated. This process of form-giving, individualizing, Croce calls intuition. Intuition is contrasted with intellect. Through intuition we obtain knowledge of individual things, and through intellect knowledge of relations between them. Examples of intuitive knowledge are, an impression of a moonlight scene by a painter, a musical theme, the words of a singing lyric. These are complete, self-contained, formed impressions, "intuitive facts without a shadow of intellectual relation," that is, not dependent on anything outside of themselves for their meaning. The meaning is intrinsic. Intuition is also expression, for this form-giving process is an activity of the mind, spiritual activity, as Croce calls it, a mental creation, an imaginative act. "Every true intuition or representation is also expression. That which does not objectify itself in expression is not intuition or representation, but sensation and mere natural fact. The spirit only intuits in making, forming, expressing." 2 Ordinarily the intuitive process is superseded by interpretation, that is, by perception. Then it loses its purity, form is submerged in meaning, resulting in a practical attitude. Interest is no longer in form, but in relations, meanings, and consequences. The attitude becomes interested, selfish, utilitarian. Thus the aesthetic attitude liberates us from the practical, from perception, and leads us back to pure experience, to intuition. "In our intuitions," says Croce, "we do not oppose ourselves as empirical beings to external reality, but we simply objectify our impressions, whatever they may be." In this theory, then, we have a restatement of the doctrine of intrinsicality, and therefore by implication, also of the other theories, with the addition of the idea of expression. What this theory states, in substance, is, that our ordinary experience becomes intuitive experience, aesthetic experience, when stripped of everything but what is directly, immediately experienced, namely, form. In this state the attitude is necessarily disinterested, depersonalized or objectified, distanced, intrinsic. Empathy. The theory of empathy or Einfuhlung (feelinginto), advanced by the German, Theodor Lipps, holds that the aesthetic experience is one in which we project our own state of being into things, attribute to them our own feelings whether of activity or passivity. The forces, tendencies, and strivings that we feel in inanimate objects like columns are our own muscular activities projected into them. Thus when I feel a column "striving" upwards, it is my "striving" that I "feel into" the column. I project my own inner state into the perceived object, so that I and the object become one. In the wording of Lipps "The meaning of the object to me as object, is in reality what I am within myself, but through the object, and hence also in the object." In other words, my own state was induced in me by the object, and therefore the object is within me and I am in the object. Empathy is not specifically an aesthetic theory, but the psychological principle of the source of all meaning, applied to aesthetic experience. All significant experience is an instance of empathy. Without inner participation of some sort and to some degree, experience is meaningless. Inner strains and stresses, incipient movements, are phases of all perception, and in no manner limited to aesthetic perception. There is probably more objectification of these strains and stresses of perception in aesthetic experience, but this in itself does not make of empathy an aesthetic theory per se. Since in beauty all subjective occurrences become objectified, the incipient movements are necessarily also referred to the object and not to the subject. It is also probable that these movements are more balanced in aesthetic experience because of the unity of the art product, and it is also probable that they are more intense because of the state of complete absorption and mergence with the object of experience. Yet this is also true of listening to an effective speaker, of intense interest in reading a book on science, in which experiences there may be nothing aesthetic. Hence, all that may be said of empathy is that its rôle in beauty is that of its rôle in experience in general and it therefore tells us nothing that is uniquely aesthetic.