Amplitude

Aristotle's remarks on amplitude are fascinating (Poetics ch. 7, 1450b - 1451a).

He is obviously dealing with art and beauty. "It is not enough for beauty that a thing, whether an animal or anything else composed of parts, should have those parts well ordered; since beauty consists in amplitude as well as in order, the thing must also have amplitude".

And not just any amplitude, he goes on. Too small a creature cannot be beautiful, "since our view loses all distinctness". Neither is an enormously ample one beautiful, since our view of it is not simultaneous, so that we lose a sense of its unity and wholeness. The ideal seems to be 'the ampler the better, provided it remains clear as a whole.'

I am thinking of Michelangelo's David: it is huge, much larger than I had expected, and breadth-taking.

And Monet's Nympheas: you can't take it all in at one glance, simply because it is painted all over an oval shaped room; but it does have its own beauty!

Art and beauty

Lonergan, it seems, did not dwell on beauty and the sublime, but on art. Joe Flanagan says that his chapter on art in The Topics is the high point of his reflection on art: it comes between the 3 pages in Insight and the 2 pages in Method.

The 19th century debunked the link between beauty and art. So when Heidegger, for example, reflects, it is purely on the work of art, not on beauty.

Unless you take beauty as a transcendental in the scholastic sense - so you don't get stuck on prettiness, Glenn Chip Hughes said last night at the Workshop.

Beauty and art

The Aesthetics examination was very interesting: I actually learnt something new! And that was the distinction between beauty and art. Talking to the students, it became clear to me that there is such a distinction: not everything that is beautiful is art, and not everything that is art is conventionally beautiful.

The beauty of nature, for example, is not art. And Heidegger can speak at length about a work of art without once mentioning beauty. Could we call the Van Gogh painting of peasant shoes beautiful, in fact? Perhaps. But it lends itself better to a Heideggerean type of treatment in terms of the revelation of truth. And it became clear to me also how closely Heidegger follows Hegel: art is not so much beauty as revelation of the Idea / truth.

When asked what was the most important thing they had learned during the course, many students said they had learned to stop and appreciate beauty around them, where before they had perhaps either been 'blind' or else had had very global and undifferentiated experiences of beauty.