introduction 11
and should not be separated from the concrete practices of making,
studying, and enjoying particular works of art.
A premise of the book is that the questions about beauty raised in
late-eighteenth-century Germany, and discussed in Chapter 1, remain
vital and urgent throughout subsequent debates, up to and including
the present. However, it should be stressed that the book does not
amount to a comprehensive history of the dissemination of German
aesthetics; that remains a project for the future, and for a much longer
book. A number of important thinkers on aesthetics, such as the
German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) or the
American pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952), are mentioned only in
passing; similarly, many artistic practices that explored aesthetic ques-
tions in distinctive ways, such as Surrealism or Conceptual Art, are
omitted. These and many other omissions, in one way regrettable, may
in another reinforce a crucial argument of the book: what is distinctive
about beauty, in the philosophical tradition explored here, is its capac-
ity to stimulate fresh thinking and fresh debate. Thus a book about
beauty can never claim to have exhausted its enquiry or to have reached
a point of closure. Even if its primary focus is historical, as in the case
of this book, it succeeds precisely to the extent that it opens possibili-
ties for future exploration.
The following chapters will address, in more detail, the reasons why
beauty has been configured, in the philosophical tradition, as a ques-
tion that is open-ended rather than closural. However, the idea may
seem surprising in the light of recent attempts to relegate beauty to the
past, to declare it a dead issue. It is hoped that readers will find many
such surprises in the following chapters. Indeed, it may be worth
calling attention at the outset to a few of the limitations that have been
most often, and most unwarrantably, imposed on the aesthetic in
recent years. Baudelaire directed particular scorn at what he called ‘the
heresy of The Didactic’, the tendency of his own contemporaries to
limit art by imposing moral or educational strictures on it.
3
For many
artists of today, who wish to rebel against the perceived need to preach
a narrow political lesson, this heresy remains a live issue. However, we
may also note some other ‘heresies’ of our own day, which may impede
our enquiries unless they are dispelled from the start.
First, there is what might be called the heresy of hierarchy. It is
often assumed that a commitment to the aesthetic, or to the beautiful,
entails making relative judgements of quality or value, to privilege
some objects above others. It is true that we may take delight in the
superb technical quality of something like a fine Iznik pot [1], and that
our perception of its superiority in this respect may be important to a
decision to describe it as ‘beautiful’. But as we shall see countless times
in the following chapters, estimates of relative quality, or hierarchical
rankings, are irrelevant to the judgement of beauty on the pot. That we