Arnold Berleant
BEAUTY AND THE WAY OF MODERN LIFE i
ABSTRACT
As art has changed over the course of its history and societies have changed, so has our
understanding of beauty. This is further complicated by the fact that we live in a determinedly
unbeautiful world. What is meant by this – the unbeautiful – is yet another intriguing question.
This paper develops the idea that beauty is best understood to mean positive aesthetic value, and
that it can be found in modern life far more widely than when it was traditionally located in the
arts. What has to be made clear is how beauty is not a property of objects but a quality of
situations, which makes beauty contextual. The paper explores further how beauty may reside in
natural, historical, artistic, sensory, and social situations, and how an awareness of negative
aesthetic value recognizes both the importance of beauty and betrays its absence.
Beauty in modern life
“Beauty and the Way of Modern Life” is a challenging topic, for never has the idea of
beauty been more diverse and difficult to agree on. After a long period in the twentieth century
in which beauty was ignored, it has returned as a focus of theoretical interest in Western
aesthetics. Beginning some twenty years ago and with increasing frequency, one book after
another resurrected the idea of beauty. An abundance of new work has appeared in the past few
years and more is expected.ii
i
This paper was presented as the keynote address at the conference of the same name, “Beauty
and the Way of Modern Life,” in Wuhan, China on 14 May 2004. My thanks to Elena
Alexander for her helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
ii
Cf. M. Mothersill, Beauty Restored, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); N. Zangwill,,
The Metaphysics of Beauty. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Peg Brand (ed), Beauty
1
As might be expected, each author gives beauty a meaning that distinguishes it from
others and is intended to reveal its central character. And this character turns out to be
remarkably varied. Cultural commentaries display the varied concepts by which comparable
aesthetic value is identified: the Indian rasa, the Greek to kalon, the Japanese wabi-sabi, the
Navajo hozho. Sociological studies show how beauty is a culturally-constructed conceptiii and
feminist criticism demonstrates how standards of female beauty are used by the male-dominated
power structure to control and suppress women.iv Biologically-based analyses relate standards of
beauty to their function in promoting group identity and species survival.v
Philosophical views are equally varied. As the arts have changed over the course of
history, the early emphasis on beauty as perfection of form has been largely abandoned. Some
still search for an attribute of objects that makes them beautiful. Others locate beauty in the
pleasure or satisfaction we feel on contemplating an object. Today, moreover, a wide range of
qualities and features in perceptual experience may be called in some sense ‘beautiful.’ These
include the ugly, the grotesque, the comic or playful, the tragic, as well as the pleasing. The
concept of beauty needs to be enlarged from its original focus to accommodate the value of such
Matters, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000); G. Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); E. Scarry, On Beauty (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999); Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty (New York and London:
Routledge, forthcoming 2004); Alexander Nehemas, title? .
iii
Cf. Pierre Bourdieu.
iv
N. Wolf, Beauty Myth, London: (Chatto & Winds, 1990).
v
J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion: An Enquiry into the origins of Art and Religion, (New
York: Harper and Row, 1982); E. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus. (Where Art Comes from and
Why). (New York: The Free Press, 1992); What is Art For? (Seattle and London: University of
Washington Press, 1988).
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diverse forms of aesthetic satisfaction.
Yet there is an obverse side to this issue. We live in a determinedly unbeautiful world, a
world people have made that often deliberately turns its back on what the idea of beauty values.
There is the ruthless obsession with economic interests at the expense of aesthetic values. The
marketplace often dominates art news, from colossal prices that are bid for masterworks that
come on the market, to the success of price in judging new work. Attention often goes to the
design of the many new art museums and cultural centers, which is some of the outstanding
architecture of our time, while support for individual artists languishes.
Then there is the co-optation of aesthetic values by exploiting the easy satisfactions
offered by the arts of mass culture and their vulgarization in kitsch. Popular entertainers are
called ‘artists,’ and popular musical extravaganzas ‘concerts.’ Commercial success and “world
class” seem to be the selling points for art and artists, while local theater companies struggle to
survive and local performers go begging.
And there is the failure to recognize negative aesthetics in the disregard or outright denial
of beauty or any aesthetic value. This takes two forms: One is the absence of positive aesthetic
values as in blandly anonymous suburban housing tracts and sterile blocks of low income
housing, in sitcoms that pander to the emptiness and crassness of ordinary life, and in pulp
novels that breed on people’s dissatisfactions by offering escape in fictional romance or
adventure.
Another, perhaps more virulent form of negative aesthetics, is the actual presence of
negative aesthetic value. This may be seen in the appropriation by advertising of people’s
clothes, cars, and food, turning people into the purveyors as well as consumers of advertising. It
is found in the commercialized landscapes of industrialism, from the shopping mall to the
commercial strip, the trailer park, and the slag heap. And it is endured in omnipresence of the
sound of music systems and television sets in virtually every public place (at least in the U.S.),
from supermarkets to doctors’ waiting rooms, airport lobbies, restaurants and bars, and even
public streets. When once cigarette smoke was unavoidable, now it is canned music and the
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television voice. Is this a commercial aesthetic based on fear, fear of silence, with the resultant
effect of overstimulation?
These are not only environmental offenses; they are aesthetic offenses. So insidious is
the negative that as generations of people become inured to it, they cease to be aware of the
presence of a negative aesthetic at the same time as we live in the embrace of urban trash,
telephone poles and power lines, omnipresent noise, and bad air and water. Evens the
countryside has been commercialized in being co-opted as the setting for enormous billboards.
Moreover, there is a further complication in the intersection of beauty and morality or shall I say
‘immorality,’ where beauty is fused with the morally repugnant, from polluted sunsets to abuse
and unrestrained violence in film and television. Examples of both forms of the negative
aesthetic can unfortunately be multiplied endlessly.
Let me proceed through this superabundance of usages and misuses of beauty by
suggesting that what beauty means is essentially stipulative. What beauty means is what a
society or an individual commentator decide on. This is also true of what we, in the tradition of
Western aesthetics, take as traditional meaning of beauty as the highest level of aesthetic value
found in the perfection of form. Even in this case, such ideal form is ultimately unattainable
because it is non-empirical and, in the emphatically empirical world we live in today, we need to
give the notion of beauty an naturalistic grounding. People are no longer willing to accept myths
of an ultimate reward, in this case, of heaven as a “life” of beauty. In its aesthetic sense,
moreover, beauty appears in a multitude of ways besides perfection of form: sensuous beauty,
social beauty, institutional beauty (Plato), erotic beauty, functional beauty (in machines, in
institutional processes), exquisite beauty (of details, small scale). Can these have anything in
common?
The locus of beauty
It is important, I think, to try and identify the locus of beauty. For our philosophical
purposes here, we must put aside questions of how beauty functions socially, politically, and
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economically. These are important questions but they have to do with the uses and functions of
beauty rather than with what its value consists in. There is nothing wrong, moreover, in
stipulating what beauty means. It allows one to call attention to important or neglected aspects
of beauty. More significantly, it recognizes that there is no ontology of beauty but rather only an
epistemology of beauty. And it leads us to think that such an epistemology is unavoidably
empirical.
Where, then, is beauty to be found? Is it a property of objects? Is it in the feeling of
pleasure? Is it some combination of these? Let me begin by listing some of the multitude of
regions where beauty may be located.
Beauty in nature is perhaps the most widely recognized: on a large scale in landscapes,
cloud formations, and waterfalls, and in miniature in a flower, a bird, the glint of a fish.
Commonly, beauty is associated with the arts: the fine arts, such as painting, sculpture, music,
and dance; architecture, both of structures and of landscapes; and crafts, such as quilting,
ceramics, fabric design, and haute cuisine. To these well-known loci of beauty we might add the
pure delight in sensory qualities, as in the delicate details of a flower, the feel of the well-worn
bowl of a briar pipe, the sensation of the spring sun on the skin. There are also the different
forms of human beauty, not only in the cast of a face or figure but the beauty inherent in
friendship, love, and the generally erotic. And we should not fail to add moral beauty to this
list: the beauty of character, of a noble action, of a life, the beauty of real virtue, as Plato put it.vi
These, except perhaps for the last, seem to refer to beauty of objects. But does beauty
reside in things? Surely the flower that blooms unseen is not beautiful but simply is what it is. It
vi
“ ‘Do you not reflect,’ said she [Diotima], ‘that there only it will be possible for him, when he
sees the beautiful with the mind, which alone can see it, to give birth not to likenesses of virtue,
since he touches no likeness, but to realities, since he touches reality; and when he has given
birth to real virtue and brought it up, will it not be granted him to be the friend of God, and
immortal if any man every is?’ ” Plato, Symposium, 212a, W.H.D. Rouse translation.
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is a thing that possesses whatever features it has, but it takes an appreciative observer for its
“thingness” to become beautiful. Likewise with the painting, the novel, and the landscape.
Human involvement is some fashion is necessary.
But what is that involvement? Does this mean that beauty is entirely a matter of personal
taste, de gustibus non disputandum est? Is it the pleasure we take in such objects, a matter purely
of feeling? Is it wholly subjective, to use that common but misleading word, as if there were a
self-sufficient interior self? If this were the case, how then to explain the generality of aesthetic
judgment, the fact that we tend mostly to agree in our valuing of art works? And even if
common agreement could be accounted for by our common biology or common sociology, other
explanations of general agreement can be given that are less indebted to such external factors.
Are object and perceiver somehow conjoined, as Santayana proposed, by regarding the
pleasure we feel as a quality of the object?vii Or is there some other way in which they come
together? This is not the place to engage in a full reconsideration of this important and longdebated question. One direction is promising, and pursuing a phenomenology of beauty can help
us understand this better and, at the same time, explore beauty, in the spirit of this conference, as
a way of modern life.
A phenomenology of beauty
What is involved in the experience of beauty? How can perceiver and object come
together to create aesthetic value? What would an epistemology of beauty be?
It would involve three conditions that are really one: a perceiver, a focus of perception,
and a situation in which perception takes place. The situation is all, for it encompasses both
perceiver and object or event that is the experience of beauty. When I look at a sculpture, say
one of Henry Moore’s enclosed forms, I not only use my eyes but I enter its aura, moving around
vii
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896), Part I, §11.
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it at different distances and from various directions. I am aware of my body in relation to its
mass, its height, its surfaces, responding somatically and kinesthetically to the deep amber wood
from which the sculpture was fashioned, its verticality, the hollowed outer form embracing the
more slender inner one, the human associations to which it gives rise, associations of protection
and comfort and, even though the piece is wholly abstract, of mother and child. This act of body
consciousness, this process of aesthetic engagement, can be strangely moving and I may stand in
wonder at the sculpture’s force and feel a strange, inarticulable exhilaration. These forms are not
perfect. One may detect chisel marks across its rough surface and the checks that have
developed in the wood, but perfection is not in question here. It is entirely irrelevant, for such is
beauty, not perfect, not ultimate, but rich and irreplaceable.
Now what does this tell us about the experience of beauty? Like other such valuable
occasions, it involves a multitude of factors, central to which are a receptive appreciator, an
object capable of evoking perceptual and associative responses, and conditions that encourage
such a strong encounter. These constitute a total situation and one can characterize such a
situational field as the experience of beauty, as beautiful. Since the same account holds for all
occasions when we recognize aesthetic value, we are led to understand beauty inclusively as
synonymous with aesthetic value. That is why we freely call aesthetically pleasing experiences
of the grotesque, the distorted, the comic “beautiful.”
Now the question is: Does this account describe the conditions that are present in all or
most of our experiences of beauty? If beauty, or aesthetic value, is an attribute of a situation,
then it would seem that any situation that involves an interplay between a perceiver and an object
or focus of perception can be beautiful. The situation may center on nature, art, purely sensory
qualities, or human relationships, including love, as Plato told us in the Symposium.viii
viii
Plato, Symposium, 212. See also Guy Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975).
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Beauty in the way of modern life
This great enlargement of beauty in the modern world is the result, I think, of two
developments in aesthetics that are having a major influence on the presence of beauty in the
modern world by promoting broader criteria for inclusion. While these developments are
certainly not universally accepted, they are becoming increasingly influential both theoretically
and experientially.
One consists in recognizing the aesthetics of function, that is, the aesthetic attraction of
functional success. This leads to the display of machines in art museums, from the internal
combustion engine to Tinguely’s mechnical contrivances, from the Bugati to the functional
beauty of hand tools. During the past century the design arts have especially flourished by
incorporating an industrial aesthetic of flawless precision, simplicity, and clarity. And we must
not forget the classic examples of the functional beauty of the sailing ship and the
skyscraper.ixPaul Valéry, "Eupalinos, or the Architect," in Dialogues (New York: Pantheon,
1956), Vol.4 of Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Bollingen Series XLV, pp. 129-130.
Functional beauty takes a bizarre turn in the aesthetic celebration of war.x
ix
Horatio Greenough’s appreciation of the functional beauty of the sailing ship is classic. See
his Form and Function (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 60-61. Paul Valéry
expressed the modernist credo of such beauty:
"It sometimes used to seem to me that an impression of beauty was born of exactitude; and that a
sort of delight was engendered by the almost miraculous conformity of an object with the
function that it must fulfill. And so the perfection of this aptitude excites in our souls the feeling
of a relationship between the beautiful/and the necessary; and the final case or simplicity of the
result, compared with the intricacy of the problem, fills us with an indescribable enthusiasm."
x
Walter Benjamin quotes the Italian Futurist Marinetti’s glorification of the Ethiopian colonial
war: “For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as
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A second change in aesthetic thinking is the greater readiness to include the perception of
all the senses, not just the traditional ones of sight and hearing. By including touch, smell, taste,
and the kinesthetic sense of body movement through muscle and tendon awareness, full bodily
engagement enters the aesthetic realm. This leads to a further expansion of our modern
awareness of beauty, incorporating the complete range of somatic receptivity. A flowering of the
dance arts has taken place in the West, and sensual and erotic experience has found artistic
expression and produced aesthetic delight. Non-aesthetic constraints have thus been cast aside,
which does not mean that they are necessarily irrelevant but that they are now recognized as
external barriers.
These developments in aesthetic thinking have vastly enlarged the range of beauty in the
modern way of life. To these we must add the growing awareness of the aesthetic ideas of
different cultures. And the range of cultures has enlarged to include not only the developed
aesthetic values of Western and Eastern cultures but the aesthetic of other regions and of
indigenous peoples in all parts of the world. The range here is enormous and it is rightly
inclusive.
antiaesthetic....Accordingly we state:...War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion
over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers,
and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human
body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of
machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire,
the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates
new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals
from burning villages, and many others....Poets and artists of Futurism!...remember these
principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic
art...may be illumined by them!” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 241-242.
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To this enlargement of beauty comes another question: If beauty is a property of a
situation or field and any situation can be beautiful, and if external moral, religious, or cultural
standards no longer hold, how can we find or create the conditions of beauty? That is the great
human challenge of modern life. I suggest that applying the aesthetic brush so broadly makes all
the more apparent how and where the ways of modern life fail. For if the stock of possible
beautiful occasions increases with the openness of the arts, the expansion of aesthetic perception,
and our increasing sensitivity to natural and built environments, we are at the same time blinded
by the betrayal of beauty in the exclusive worship of economic values. The pervasiveness of a
negative aesthetic in most building and home design, in urban surroundings, and in the
commercially-inspired vulgarization of the countryside makes us seek harder for the beauties that
we may enjoy.
We have, then, particular occasions rather than overall conditions, small-scale beauties
rather than Beauty writ large: a color-suffused sky at sunset, the rise of a full moon, an early
spring flower, the first song of a warbler during spring migration, the smile of a child, the touch
of a friend, the rush of sound in a musical performance. In place of the substantive ‘Beauty,’ we
have the adjectival ‘beautiful.’ To see the world as new is to see it as beautiful, and it gives us
an incentive to encourage beauty as much as possible in daily life. This may induce us to
cultivate such beautiful occasions, even though they be modest, for monumental beauty has
largely disappeared from our prosaic world. For this reason, the beautiful may become a source
of ideals. For many it is the only way that is left.
Beauty and the way of modern life is a challenging topic. I look forward to learning
more about this from what other contributors have to say.
25 IV 04
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NOTES
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