The Treatment of Beauty & Sublimity in Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty
By Michael Nielson
After a focus on the more art-centric “philosophy of art” for most of his career, over the course of the last decade Arthur Danto changed his focus toward the field of aesthetic sensations. As of now, the exemplary source on this recent trend in Danto is The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, a book which reexamines the place these sensations hold in the art-world. Clearly influenced by G.W.F. Hegel, he ends the book by championing beauty as the sole aesthetic quality that transcends art and aesthetics to hold a place of value in any life a human being would want to lead. However, upon further examination, there are numerous difficulties that begin to emerge in the book.
These difficulties first became apparent to me due to the vagueness in both his conclusion and the examples he used from both philosophy and art to support this conclusion. Within a large number of these examples there is a longstanding Hegelian misconception manifesting itself in one of two ways: (1) an over-emphasization of beauty in his examples, namely creating a distinction between meaning-driven “internal beauty” and content-driven “external beauty”, resulting in his misconstrued interpretation of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 172 (with blood), a painting Danto presents as simply beautiful despite Motherwell’s insistence on the sublimity inherent within his paintings; (2) a deemphasizing of sublimity in his examples by disregarding what Kant distinguished as the dynamical kind of sublimity, instead presenting sublimity as one-dimensional and almost always related to what Kant distinguished as the mathematical sublime.
Danto’s tendency to over-inflate the dimensionality of beauty while deflating that of sublimity I feel has a common root in his preference for Hegel over all other foundational aesthetic thinkers. The central purpose of my paper is not to argue against Danto’s interpretation of beauty, because like him, I believe that this aesthetic quality plays a unique and powerful role in the complete human life. What I intend to argue, however, is that the sublime holds a comparable role, in that no human life would be complete without it. In reaching this conclusion, I focus on two key aspects of the sublime: (1) the sublime is exclusively associated with a feeling Motherwell identified as ‘the despair of the aesthetic,’ which occurs when the artist makes an choice in spite of the seemingly infinite possibilities they could have make; (2) Kant closely aligns the dynamical sublime with our reason, and this connection not only helps to unify his philosophical system as a whole, but more importantly, unlike mathematical sublimity, when this aesthetic quality provokes a feeling of grief, it and only it allows us to move past a tragedy and rediscover not just the beauty Danto was so fascinated with, but also a sense of normalcy within our lives. Based on these unique functions of the sublime which allow us to move past both the despair and tragedy every human being experiences in one form or another during the course of their life, I argue that the sublime also holds a place of value in any life worth living.
My examination into the sublime’s importance in our lives is divided into five concise sections. I begin by examining the distinction Danto draws between internal and external beauty, ultimately illustrating that while this distinction is not entirely off-base, he over-emphasizes the dimensionality of beauty. Secondly, I briefly discuss Kant’s conception of the sublime, detailing his distinction between the dynamical and mathematical kinds. I believe this distinction shows that Danto brushes aside the dynamical sublime for reasons I believe are tied with deemphasizing the sublime’s importance in our lives. Thirdly, I examine the roots of Danto’s deemphasization of the sublime, tracing them to the treatment of the sublime within Hegel’s system. Fourthly, I return the discussion toward sublimity, presenting Motherwell’s views on the role of the feeling in his paintings, ultimately illustrating that Danto disregards this important aspect of the Elegies series in his interpretation. Finally, I return to Kant in order to identify a crucial and unique role he saw sublimity having in our lives, a role that I believe elevates sublimity to the level of value Danto regards beauty.
1. Internal and External Beauty
Arthur Danto became intrigued by the idea of aesthetic beauty when in 1993 he heard David Hickey’s prediction that beauty “would be the defining problem of the decade”.[1] This initially resulted in his observation that beauty had been missing from the philosophical definitions of art presented since the 1960s.[2] Danto feels this absence was a response to an overly idealistic view of beauty that once dominated the field of aesthetics (Danto 2002, 39). In his view, for beauty’s role in art to be fully understood we must free ourselves from both the axioms which state “all good art is categorically beautiful” as well as the responses which completely ignored it (Danto, 2002, 42). His examination began in his 2002 article “The Abuse of Beauty,” in which he concluded that only after we had freed ourselves from these axioms can we begin to rediscover beauty as “one mode among many through which thoughts are presented in art to human sensibility −−− disgust, horror, sublimity, and sexuality are still others. These modes explain the relevance of art to human existence, and room for them all must be found in an adequate definition of art” (Danto 2002, 56).
In order to support this important place he saw aesthetic qualities holding in art, Danto draws a distinction between internal beauty and external beauty. ”External beauty” he defines as “external to the thought” and often connected with a more formal beauty (Danto 2002, 55). Exemplary of this was Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, one in a series of pop culture replications which stood out from all the others to Danto because of the beauty inherent in artist James Harvey’s original design (Danto 2003, 5). “Internal beauty” is juxtaposed against this and crucial to Danto’s overall schema because it allowed him to redefine beauty as internally related to the meaning of a particular work. A painting Danto saw as exemplary of this kind of beauty was No. 172 because he considers its beauty as connected with its meaning as an elegy[3] (Danto 2002, 110-111). Like Danto, I feel that beauty can be deeply connected with the meaning of a work, as he observes it is within the Vietnam War Memorial. In the case of the Elegies, however, I feel the paintings are misrepresented when classified as beautiful, and this classification I feel occurs in order to support his largely Hegelian schema.
This misclassification of The Elegies becomes more evident as Danto develops his thesis in the subsequent book of the same title. Here this misconception directly leads to an over-inflation of the importance of beauty by concluding that alone among all the aesthetic qualities initially considered, only beauty holds a place of value in life as we would want to lead it. (Danto 2003, 160). While I will not argue against Danto’s assertion that beauty holds a place of value in a life, I will argue against beauty alone holding a place of value in our lives. I will progress toward this conclusion in the following section when I introduce the aesthetic quality known as sublimity and its presentation in Kant’s third critique as well as Danto’s Abuse of Beauty.
2. Mathematical and Dynamical Sublimity
Of all the foundational aesthetic thinkers, one of the most referenced and argued over is Immanuel Kant, and Danto’s own writing is no exception to this. Of the contrasts Kant makes between the beautiful and the sublime, one of the most striking is that unlike beauty, which can be found in an object, sublimity “must always have reference to our way of thinking.” [4] He identifies the feeling associated with the sublime as a mental agitation. Through this agitation the imagination dualistically refers “either to the cognitive power or to the power of desire, but in both cases the purposiveness of the given presentation is judged only with regard to these powers (without any purpose or interest). The first kind of agitation is a mathematical, the second a dynamical, attunement of the mind. And so we attribute both these kinds of agitation to the object, and hence present the object as sublime in these two ways” (Kant 1987, 101). The mathematical sublime is connected with our cognition as presented in the Critique on Pure Reason, and thus serves our understanding. In contrast, the dynamical sublime is connected with our desire and serves our reason as presented in the Critique on Practical Reason, and its importance begins to emerge through its “foundation in human nature: in something that, along with common sense, we may require and demand of everyone” (Kant 1987, 125). Like beauty, Kant felt sublimity aided in coherently unifying his entire philosophy, and thus an account for each kind is crucial to his philosophical system as a whole (Kant 1987, 17). However, as opposed to the mathematical sublime, which despite its close connection with our understanding Kant rarely lifts out of the realm of aesthetics, the dynamical sublime has a unique function which transcends aesthetics due to its close connection with our powers of desire and reason This transcendence allows us to “consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us” and arouses fear within us (Kant 1987, 119).
Before reaching his conclusion in The Abuse of Beauty, Danto uses much of the concluding chapter to discredit the sublime; however, he almost entirely disregards dynamical sublimity in his investigation. This is best reflected in his direct reference to Kant’s definition for mathematical sublimity when defining sublimity in general, stating that in the sublime feeling “the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (Danto 2003, 147; Kant 1987, 106). While Danto does recognize the sublime as entailing “something more than great size” and would introduce both terror and wonder to the concept, his examples of the sublime’s place in art still centers on its being “internally related to size, indeed to vastness” as opposed to its dynamical power (Danto 2003, 154-155). This exclusive focus on the mathematical sublime I believe led Danto to consider aspects of the Elegies series as internally beautiful, when in fact these aspects are closely aligned with dynamical sublimity. However, it is first necessary to further examine how Danto’s own preference for Hegel had caused him to deemphasize the sublime before these sublime aspects of the Elegies can be better illuminated
3. Hegel and the Sublime
The conflict on how to treat aesthetic qualities dates back to ancient philosophy, but it was not until the emergence of Kant and Hegel that many of these differences became concrete. The most striking of these differences are rooted in Hegel’s reaction to Kant’s cognitive approach, and are best represented in his account of the historical progression of art through three stages of history.[5] The first stage is symbolic. This stage is exemplified in architecture and the conflict the viewer feels “between content and form” (Knox 1958, 85; 88). Hegel saw the symbolic as the means through which we experienced the sublime, though much like Kant, it is never fully rendered in the object itself and the feeling exists only within us subjectively (Knox 1958, 85; 182). After the symbolic stage, art progresses onto the classical stage, exemplified by Greek sculpture. Viewing these artworks allows us to appreciate beauty in the human form as “ideally depicted, as a representation of the universal human mind, as the visible vesture of mind, as individually and concretely determinate spirituality” (Knox 1958, 87). The concluding stage is the romantic, through which classically beauty progresses and the conflict of symbolic art between the content and form returns, “but on a spiritually higher level” connected with our reason (Knox 1958, 88-89).
After the resolution of this conflict is the death of art, an idea that had a profound effect on not just Danto’s thesis in “The End of Art,” but is also foundational to his system (Danto 1986). This death or end is a point at which “the [aesthetic] activity. . .became a mode of apprehending the Absolute, of solving the great philosophical problem” (Knox 1958, 93). However, when considering the place of reason in the realization of this end, a far-reaching failure to acknowledge a connection with sublimity is found. Reason’s place in connection with the feeling of sublimity first came to me reading Iris Murdoch’s observation that for both Hegel and Kant, reason “is the faculty which seeks systematic wholeness and abhors incompleteness and juxtaposition.”[6] Despite these similarities, there are also striking differences in how each philosopher dealt with the role of the sublime. While Hegel relegated it exclusively to the early stages of artistic development, leading him to a deeper appreciation of beauty, in Kant’s more cognitive approach, the sublime is tied closely together with our reason, and because of this, just as crucial as beauty in the context of the three critiques as a whole. The following section will examine Robert Motherwell’s views of sublimity, views that stands more closely aligned with Kant’s than Danto’s. Examining Motherwell’s view will illustrate not just the misconceptions in Danto’s interpretation of No 172, but also a connection between the sublime and our reason that results in a unique healing power crucial to a functioning human life.
4. Motherwell and the Sublime
Despite Motherwell taking graduate level courses in philosophy at prestigious schools, Danto viewed him as having “no sense of…ever having a philosophical background or any great interest in the subject” (Danto 2002, 13). However, in reading Motherwell’s writing, one quickly finds he did have a philosophical background, but his interests were in the same vein as those who Danto brings to task for an abuse of beauty. Based on this, it is not surprising that in spite of their friendship, their interpretations of the Elegies conflicted. I believe Motherwell intended the paintings to be sublime metaphors, while Danto had classified these sublime aspects as internally beautiful. Before examining why Motherwell intended these paintings to be sublime, I first direct my examination toward his views on both the school of painting he was a part of, Abstract Expressionism, as well as aspects of his own artistic process.
Despite being the youngest of the group, Motherwell’s writings are one of the definitive primary sources on Abstract Expressionism because his education allowed him to articulate many commonalities among the group. To him, here was a style of art that attempts to project the experiences of the artist through a process of emphasis termed as abstraction.[7] Unlike the name suggests, however, abstract is not meant to be an adjective describing a painting, but instead, an action verb describing a process[8] (Motherwell 2007, 270). Motherwell viewed his own art as deeply rooted in any aesthetic decisions he made regarding selections of form and color “on the basis of the most concrete personal feeling” (Motherwell 2007, 196). These aesthetic decisions are closely linked with ethics, as he considered painting to be “a series of moral decisions about the aesthetic” (Motherwell 2007, 196; 206). These decisions are akin to an idea he first discovered within Søren Kierkegaard identified as ‘the despair of the aesthetic’ (Motherwell 2007, 172). This despair occurs when one is allowed to use any color, any shape, any series of relations, to the point that the possibilities are so innumerable and “the ultimate decision so arbitrary and tedious, that a kind of anguish overcomes you that, say, the medieval painter, who had to paint the Virgin’s mantle blue, did not dream of” (Motherwell 2007, 172). These ethical decisions by the painter are “the absolute, and in all eternity the highest value,” because without them “a painter is only a decorator” and his audience relegated to, as his contemporary Barrnett Newman suggested in the film Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, “mere aesthetes” (Motherwell 2007, 178).[9]
Based on the close connection Kant had drawn between sublimity and reason, it is not surprising that for Motherwell himself these ethical choices involved in his painting are also connected with the feeling of sublimity (Motherwell 2007, 178). As Dore Ashton observes in “Robert Motherwell: The Painter and His Poets,” Motherwell viewed his paintings as “oblique metaphors, [that] hold fast to the Mallarméan rule that things must be suggested or evoked, and not described”.[10] Aston observed these subtle sublime themes are often placed in juxtaposition with themes Motherwell considered to be tragic (Ashton 1983, 9), and in the case of the Elegies in particular, these sublime themes are connected with the despair he felt while painting.
Based on this, it is not at all surprising that for Motherwell the sublime was not a concrete, static thing, but instead, a possibility of an aesthetic experience (Motherwell 2007, 63). Sublimity, in his view, occurs when “the artist transcends his personal anguish” by ultimately making an aesthetic choice despite the seemingly infinite number of other aesthetic possibilities (Motherwell 2007, 63). The sublimity in this vast number of possibilities is at least part of what I feel he was attempting to express in both the Elegies and Open series, because the original form abstracted from in each series, other than slight variations, was essentially the same throughout, however, no two were ever identical either. This function the sublime has in our lives becomes amplified when considering a healing power connected with grief that Kant identified solely with the dynamical sublime.
5. The Healing Sublime
This idea of a healing grief connected with sublimity is something Kant only identifies in the later sections of the Analytic of the Sublime. “This comment is intended only as a reminder that even grief (but not a dejected kind of sadness) may be included among the vigorous affects, if it has the basis in moral ideas. If, on the other hand, it is based on sympathy, then it may indeed be lovable, but belongs merely to the languid affects. My point is to draw attention to the fact that only in the first case is the mental attunement sublime” (Kant 1987, 137). The connection Kant saw between the sublime and moral ideas only manifests itself in this particular kind of healing grief, a grief exclusively connected with dynamical sublimity. Thus it is in this kind of sublimity that we can recognize the very important value the sublime has in regards to our lives.
I believe this dynamically sublime grief Kant identified is akin the despair Motherwell transcended in the repetitious series like the Elegies and Open. Danto’s Hegelian tendencies in his project to defend beauty cause him to shut himself off from not just these aspects, but also the importance of the sublime in a functioning life. I believe this dynamically sublime grief allows us not only to come to terms with events outside our understanding, which for Motherwell was the infinitely possible number of choices we could make, or for another could be an event like death that escapes our understanding, but ultimately to move past them and not just find beauty in art and the world around us once again, but to continue on living our lives. Because of this unique, yet essential, function of the sublime, I feel that alongside beauty and numerous other aesthetic qualities, it holds a place of value in a life as we would want to live it.
6. Conclusion
In The Abuse of Beauty Arthur Danto had viewed beauty as the sole aesthetic quality crucial to a desirable life; however, I believe that sublimity serves an equally unique and important role as that of beauty. This role can be seen in connection with a healing key aspect of the sublime I have identified in the preceding paper, namely a healing quality identified by both the aesthetician Kant and the artist Motherwell. This failure to account for sublimities role in the full human life I believe led Danto to not just misclassify paintings like the Elegies, and the cause for it can be seen in an implicit preference for the philosophy of Hegel throughout his career.
[2] Arthur Danto, “The Abuse of Beauty,” American Academy of Arts & Sciences 131.4 (2002): 37.
[3] An elegy is an art-form which he defined as possessing a beauty that “works as a catalyst,
transforming raw grief into a tranquil sadness, helping the tears to flow and, at the same time,
one might say, putting the loss into a certain philosophical perspective” (Danto 2002, 110-111).
[4] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans: Pluhar. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987): 137.
[5] Josef Chytry. The Aesthetic State. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
Kai Hammermeister. The German Aesthetic Tradition. (Cambridge: University Press, 2002).
Israel Knox. The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. (New York: Humanities Press, 1958).
[6] Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review. 13.3 (1959): 45
[7] Motherwell, Robert. The Writings of Robert Motherwell. Ed: Dore Ashton. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 200/7): 159.
[8] Motherwell even went as far as classifying it as a form of mysticism. Much like mysticism, a
process found in all cultures that views its processes both “as part of a larger undertaking aimed
at human transformation” (Gellman 2010), Motherwell viewed abstraction as making a parallel
effort “to close the void that modern men feel” (Motherwell 2007, 159)
[9] Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970. Dir: Emile de Antonio. Perf: Wiliam de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman. (Mystic Fire Video, 1973), 116 min. VHS.
[10] Ashton, Dore. Introduction. Robert Motherwell. By H.H. Amason. (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, Inc, 1983), 8.
Works Cited
Amason, H. Harvard. Robert Motherwell. (New York: Harry N.Abrahms, Inc, 1983).
Ashton, Dore. Introduction. Robert Motherwell. By H.H. Amason. (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, Inc, 1983): 8-16.
Chytry, Josef. The Aesthetic State. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
Danto, Arthur. “The Abuse of Beauty,” American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 131.4 (2002).
−−−. The Abuse of Beauty. (Chicago: Open Court, 2003).
−−−. Beyond the Brillo Box. (Las Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
−−−. The Madonna of the Future. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
−−−. “The End of Art,” The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 81-115.
−−−. “The Art-World,”
−−−. “The ‘Original Creative Principle’: Motherwell and Psychic Autmatism,” Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
Fenves, Peter. “Taking Stock of the Kantian Sublime,” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 28.1 (1994): 65-82.
Gellman, Jerome. "Mysticism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed: Edward N. Zalta, Febuary 9, 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/mysticism.
Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. (Cambridge: University Press, 2002).
Hobbes, Robert C. “Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic,” Reading Abstract Expressionism Ed. Ellen G. Landau. (Yale University Press, 2005).
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment, Trans: Werner Pluhar. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
Knox, Israel. The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. (New York: Humanities Press, 1958).
Motherwell, Robert. The Writings of Robert Motherwell. Ed: Dore Ashton. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 200/7).
Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review. 13.3 (1959).
Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970. Dir: Emile de Antonio. Perf: Wiliam de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman. (Mystic Fire Video, 1973), 116 min. VHS.
Works Referenced
Alberro, Alexander. “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Art Journal. 63.2 (2004): 36-43.
Budd, Macolm. “The Sublime in Nature,” Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Ed: Paul Guyer. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2003).
Burnham, Douglas. An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. (Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
Crowther, Paul. “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Oxford Art Journal. 7.2 (1984): 52-59.
Engström, Timothy H. “The Postmodern Sublime?: Philosophical Rehabilitations and Pragmatic Evasions,” Boundary. 20.2 (1993): 190-204.
Gasché, Rodolphe. “The Sublime, Ontologically Speaking,” Yale French Studies. 99 (2001): 117-128.
Harries, Karsten. “Hegel on the Future of Art,” The Review of Metaphysics. 27.4 (1974): 677-696.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillip and David Kuchta. “Sublime Truth (Part 1),” Cultural Critique. 18 (1991): 5-31.
−−−. “Sublime Truth (Part 2),” Cultural Critique. 20 (1991-1992): 207-229.
Loesberg, Jonathan. “Dickensian Deformed Children and the Hegelian Sublime,” Victorian Studies. 40.4 (1997): 625-654.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. Lessons on ‘the Analytic of the Sublime’. Trans: Elizabeth Rottenberg. (Stanford: University Press, 1991).
Makkreel, Rudolf A. Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermenuetical Import of the Critique of Judgment. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1990.
McCloskey, Mary A. Kant’s Aesthetics. (New York: State University of New York Press), 1987.
Robert Motherwell and the New York School: Storming the Citidal. Dir: Catherine Tatge. Perf: Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Cavander. (Phaidon Press, 1990), 55 min. VHS.
Sardá, Elisabet Goula. “’Someone Who Did Not Forget’: The Reception of Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic in Spain,” Revisa Forma. 0 (2009): 77-91.
Shapiro, Gary. “From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical Notes,” New Literary History. 16.2 (1985): 213-235.
Swann, Karen. “The Sublime and the Vulgar,” College English. 52.1 (1990): 7-20.
Wicks, Robert. “Reviving the Remains of Hege’s Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic Education. 36.1 (2002): 100-110.
