Notes on Tolstoy, What is Art? Chapter 3 (B)

(Originally Written Feb. 29, 2008 in the Journal).

Lachelier states that beauty is the only truth that is solid and worthy of the name 'truth'.

Taine held that beauty is the manifestation of the essential characteristic of any important idea more completely than it is expressed in reality.

Goyau taught that beauty is not a thing in the object itself, but is the blossoming of the thing onto that which it appears. Art, according to Goyau evokes the deepest consciousness of existence in us and the highest feelings and loftiest thoughts. "Art lifts men from his personal life into the universal life" (Maude, 105).

Cherbuliez held that art is an activity that:
1. Satisfies our innate love of forms
2. Endows form with ideas
3. Afords pleasure to our senses, heart and reason

He held that beauty exists in our souls, not in objects. He rejected absolute beauty.

Coster held that the ideas of the beautiful, the true and the good were innate to us. Those innate ideas illuminate our mind and are identical to God who is Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Mario Pilo held that beauty is a product of our physical feelings. He held that the aim of art is pleasure, but this pleasure is necessarily highly moral.

Gevaert held art is the connection between the past and the religious ideal of the present.

Sam Pedlan stated that beauty is a manifestation of God. "There is no reality than God, there is no truth than God, there is no beauty than God" (Maude, 106).

Véron rids aesthetics of the idea of absolute beauty. He states art is a manifestation of emotions transmitted by a combination of forms, lines, colors, etc.

The English aesthetic theories state beauty is entirely dependent on the spectator.

Charles Darwin states beauty is not only a feeling of man, but to animals and the ancestors of man. Darwin held that the origin of music lies in the call of males to females for sex.

Herbert Spencer claimed the origin of art is play. Play is animation of real activity; so is art. He claimed that there are three sources of aesthetic pleasure:
1. That which exercises the faculties in the most complete way
2. The difference of stimuli which awakens a glow of agreeable feeling
3. THe practical revival of the same with special combinations

Todhunter claims beauty to be infinite loveliness which we perceive by reason and by enthusiasm of love. He claims that therefore, beauty depends on taste and there is no criterion for taste. He puts forth a cultural definition of beauty.

Grant Allen claims that there is a physical origin of beauty. He held that aesthetic pleasure comes from the contemplation of the beautiful, but the conception of beauty is a physiological process. He claimed that taste can be educated and that the educated men form the the taste of the next generation.

Ker claimed that beauty enables man to make part of the objective world intelligible to us. Art destroys the opposition between the one and the many between the law and its manifestation between the subject and the object.

Sully dismisses the concept of beauty altogether. He defines art as the production of some permanent object or passing action that supplies active enjoyment to the producer and passive pleasure to the spectator.