Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics

2. Beauty and the Transcendence of the Ideal

Chapter 2  Beauty and the Transcendence of the Ideal T he character of art in the modernist period, when considered in the context of the prior tradition, ought to raise serious questions regarding the nature of art itself. Does art in general need to be beautiful? Do the visual arts need to be representational ? Do music and architecture, lacking a clear representational content, have other similar, expressive requirements? And if beauty be necessary to the aim of art, what would be the definition of beauty? Similarly, if significant subject matter is necessary to the purpose of art, of what should it consist? But if the answers to the questions about the necessity of beauty and the significance of content in art are negative, then what is the significance of art at all? The questions posed by the modernist enterprise are, therefore, of the utmost seriousness for the future of art itself. The originators of the modernist avant-garde rejected the concept of beauty in its traditional conception as a quality of visual (or in music, aural) appeal as part of their denial of traditional content in the arts. That is, they developed a concept of abstraction which necessarily entailed a loss of one or more of the components of beauty: intelligible harmony and charm. Wassily Kandinsky justifies the abstract forms of his expressionist art as a necessary loss of external harmony in order to procure a new kind of “internal harmony.”1 The notion of visible beauty in the sense of coherent form, then, became a 37 restriction of the essence of art; the “canceling of conventional and obtrusive beauty” was the requirement of the new art.2 But the exterior harmony of which he complained was that which resulted from the representation of recognizable elements of the real world, and especially the narrative content of traditional painting. Similarly, in the case of music, Arnold Schoenberg proclaims “the emancipation of the dissonance” on the ground that musical harmony did not really matter; only the motivic and thematic material was important to the coherence of what he called the “idea” of a piece of music.3 But the overruling of harmonic coherence grounded in consonance and tonality seriously undermines the ability of the listener to discern the motivic unity Schoenberg sought, so that the new music is apt to sound as chaotic as abstract painting looks. For both Kandinsky and Schoenberg, the motive was the expression of their “inner need,” a heightened emotional content that surpassed the traditional limits of their arts. Thus they maintained a kind of content, but at the cost of the restraint imposed by the criterion of beauty in both the sense of intelligible harmony and charm. The other arts have also been affected by the modernist hostility to charm. Le Corbusier, one of the founders of the International Style in architecture, likewise rejected the nineteenth-century aesthetic of elaborate ornamentation and decoration of the interior of homes; the home was to be a “machine” for dwelling, in which simplicity and austerity of the furnishings and surroundings would be more comfortable and peaceful. In both the interior and the exterior , visual detail was banished in the name of an unarticulated harmony , and in explicit rejection of visual charm.4 In the case of poetry, a similar hostility to the charm of meter and rhyme became the defining condition of the modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Thus, although modernist poets often retained a commitment to poetic content, the traditional character of poetic form largely disappeared. What these examples show is that the conventional concept of beauty was rejected as an inhibition of the artist’s selfexpression or truthfulness. But although painting, music, and poetry maintained a concept of artistic content, however foreign its expression might seem in comparison to the prior tradition of intelligible representation, many of the new styles still raise the question of the significance of that content. For it is not immediately clear that we should care for the self-expression of shattering emotional pain in Schoenberg’s music, or in Kandinsky’s paintings, or the 38 Between Transcendence and Historicism solipsism of Pound’s self-absorption. The nonsense of Dada, the provocations of Duchamp, the surrealist psychology of Breton all raise the question of both the significance of content and the significance of art in the absence of beauty even more forcefully. Modernism is a dogmatic refusal to see...