Chapter 20 Further Reading: Beauty and Art

Primary Texts

Plato, Symposium (c. 385–370 BCE) The dialogue on love that contains Diotima's speech on the ladder of beauty (201d–212b) — one of the most beautiful and philosophically rich passages in all of ancient philosophy. Any reliable translation will serve; those by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 1989) and by Christopher Gill (Penguin, 1999) are both highly readable. Read the dialogue as a whole, not just the Diotima excerpt — the dramatic context gives it essential meaning. Socrates' account of his encounter with Diotima is itself an example of the kind of encounter with beauty (in this case, wisdom personified) that the text describes.

Plato, Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE) The dialogue on love, rhetoric, and beauty, containing Socrates' account of beauty as a Form that is uniquely visible to sense and that provokes the "divine madness" of philosophical eros. Particularly relevant are sections 249d–252b (beauty as the most perceptible of the Forms) and 265a–266b (the philosophical value of madness). The Nehamas-Woodruff translation (Hackett, 1995) is excellent.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790) The founding document of modern Western aesthetics. For this chapter, the most important sections are the "Analytic of the Beautiful" (§§1–22) and the "Analytic of the Sublime" (§§23–29). The most widely used English translation is Werner Pluhar's (Hackett, 1987); Paul Guyer's translation and introduction (Cambridge, 2000) is the best scholarly edition. This is demanding reading — but if you work through even the first fifteen sections carefully, you will have a better understanding of why aesthetic disagreement is both real and unresolvable than you could get from any secondary account.

John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) Chapter 1, "The Live Creature," is the essential starting point — arguably one of the best opening chapters in the history of aesthetics. Dewey connects art to biology, to the organism-environment relationship, and to the general theory of experience that underlies all his philosophy. Available from Penguin/Perigee editions and as a public-domain text. The full book is worth reading; if time is limited, Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 14 cover the essential arguments.

Bharata Muni, Natyashastra (selections) The foundational text of Indian aesthetic theory has not been translated in its entirety into readable modern English, but good selections are available. The most accessible approach is through secondary works (see below) and through translated poetry and drama — reading Kalidasa's Shakuntala alongside an account of rasa theory is a more powerful introduction than reading the Natyashastra directly.

Secondary Works

Umberto Eco, History of Beauty (2004) A lavishly illustrated survey of the history of Western aesthetic ideals, from ancient Greece to the present, by one of Europe's most influential humanists. Eco traces how standards of beauty have changed dramatically across history and cultures — a useful corrective to the assumption that any particular aesthetic standard is universal or natural. His companion volume, On Ugliness (2007), is equally illuminating and perhaps more philosophically interesting.

Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2011) A concise, conservative, and genuinely argued case for the philosophical seriousness of beauty — against both the view that beauty is merely subjective and the view that aesthetic judgment can be dissolved into sociological analysis. Scruton writes from a broadly Kantian perspective and is particularly good on architecture and music. Worth reading alongside bell hooks (below) for the political counterpoint.

bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995) A collection of essays by one of the most important African American cultural critics of the twentieth century, on the politics of visual representation, the aesthetics of Black culture, and what it means to make and value art from the margins of the dominant culture. An essential corrective to the tendency in Western aesthetics to present the aesthetic judgments of the dominant class as universal standards. hooks is both politically sharp and aesthetically sensitive — she is making philosophical arguments, not just political ones.

Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959) The most important single work on the relationship between Zen Buddhism and Japanese aesthetic culture — covering haiku, the tea ceremony, swordsmanship, ink painting, and gardens. The chapters on haiku, the tea ceremony, and the arts of Japanese daily life are directly relevant to this chapter's discussion of wabi-sabi, ma, and mono no aware. Suzuki writes with unusual clarity about concepts that resist direct translation.

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (1999) A brief, brilliant, and controversial argument that beauty and justice are connected — that the perception of beauty produces a characteristic response (wanting to copy, preserve, pass along, give to others) that is structurally similar to the recognition of justice. Scarry's argument is not universally accepted, but her close readings of Matisse, Odysseus, and Proust are beautifully done, and the central question — whether beauty has any connection to ethical life — is precisely the question that this chapter opens with and the course returns to throughout.

Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (2008) Shusterman develops a philosophy he calls "somaesthetics" — a systematic study of the body as a site of aesthetic experience and a medium of knowing. This extends Dewey's emphasis on embodied, participatory aesthetic experience and connects it to contemplative traditions (yoga, Zen body practice) in ways that are both philosophically rigorous and practically oriented. More demanding than Scarry but essential for anyone interested in the relationship between embodiment and aesthetic experience.

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997) The most accessible presentation of Danto's influential theory that art history has reached its end in the sense that no aesthetic style can any longer claim to be the way art "must" look. Danto writes as both a philosopher and an art critic; his analyses of specific contemporary works illuminate the abstract argument. The institutional theory of art, Warhol's significance, and the question of what aesthetic experience means in a world where anything can be art are all addressed with philosophical care.

A Note on Looking and Listening

The most important supplement to reading about aesthetics is attending to aesthetic objects themselves with increased care and intention. Consider choosing one work of art — a painting, a piece of music, a building, a poem — and spending time with it over the course of a week. Look at it or listen to it multiple times, with different frameworks in mind. Notice how your experience changes. This is not an academic exercise; it is what the aestheticians in this chapter are actually describing, and there is no substitute for doing it.