What's True and Good about the Beautiful

Denis Donoghue. Speaking of Beauty New Haven: Yale University Press 2004. 209. US $15.00

Were he alive today, Edmund Burke would likely have much to grumble about, but he would gratefully acknowledge the precise value of Denis Donoghue's latest effort, Speaking of Beauty. Near the end of Burke's own Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he remarks that words 'affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them; therefore an enquiry into the manner by which they excite such emotions is far from being unnecessary.' Some two hundred and fifty years later, Donoghue reveals his own learned curiosity about language's particular ability to produce both an awareness of the beautiful and a longing for its effect upon us. But while Burke was principally concerned with determining the where and how of the sublime's and beautiful's effects according to a combination of eighteenth-century biology and cultural critique, Donoghue draws on a much larger storehouse of Western thought on the concept of beauty. The result, he gamely admits at the onset, is 'a recital of attitudes and values [that] may be exhausting, but is not exhaustive.'

There is much to be admired throughout Speaking of Beauty; many local moments attest to Donoghue's commanding position in contemporary cultural inquiry. His authority is best on display in his willingness to order criticism to ethical concerns; in his exacting estimations of the contemporary humanities; in his deep and varied reading; and in his formalist virtuosity. At the book's weakest moments, however, a reader can feel as if he's watching someone watch a series of tennis matches. For a relatively short work, Donoghue's rehearsals of arguments between writers, philosophers, and theologians over concepts of beauty can become overly internecine. Moreover, the book lacks a compelling architecture. Stand-alone chapters are rich in and of themselves, but Donoghue offers no culminating moment of insight or general evaluation. The final chapter, something of a ramble on Ruskin in Venice, ends the book rather abruptly, leaving the reader desirous of even a brief peroration. Those searching for a focused and sinewy study of the beautiful will have better luck with Burke or with many of the dozens, nay hundreds, of other writers that Donoghue gathers together, while those looking for an elegant and pithy tour of beauty's place in literature, criticism, philosophy, and theology will be amply satisfied by Speaking of Beauty.

Donoghue positions his apology for the beautiful against two contemporary phenomena: the slothful state of Western cultural knowledge in the era of late postmodernism and the calculated deformation of the beautiful into a consumable commodity in the era of late capitalism. Donoghue contends that the time is ripe for a retrenchment of the beautiful as an authentic category of value that can and ought to hold once more an ethical significance for general society. His subsequent collecting of multiple sources on the subject of beauty proves that centuries of discourse have failed to secure a consensus on what essentially constitutes the beautiful. But, Donoghue intimates, at least the theologians, philosophers, writers, artists, and critics of past eras recognized the importance of such a search.

Our present dilemma is that we no longer ask first-order questions regarding beauty's intrinsic value, or its relation to the religious, the social, or the authentically sexual. 'Beauty' has been entirely unhinged from its grand companions, the 'True' and the 'Good.' Increasingly, 'beauty' merely acts as a commercialized catch-all in the ever-voracious marketplace of consumer culture, or as a term of approbation dismissed by the high priests of materialist criticism because of its imputed regressive connotations. Recognizing...