Book: The Secret Power of Beauty
Author: John Armstrong
Price: Allen Lane, ?12.99
Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm. But beauty as an overriding goal of the arts began to decline more than 100 years ago. Several factors explain its fall from grace: clich?, associations with a ruling taste and the way it dominated other concerns. In the past few years, however, it has begun to make a comeback. Not only have there been large exhibitions on the subject in Avignon and Washington DC, but important investigations have been published, such as Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just (1999) and Wendy Steiner's critique of modernism, The Trouble with Beauty (2001). A recent issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Fall 2002), has essays by Susan Sontag and Arthur Danto that reclaim aesthetics as the central problem of art. John Armstrong's The Secret Power of Beauty is in this line of contemporary thought. A Glaswegian who worked on aesthetics in London, Armstrong is now a director at the centre for public philosophy at Monash University in Australia. Given his public role, it is no surprise to find he commands a limpid style of some subtlety. His earlier books, Conditions of Love and The Intimate Philosophy of Art, suggest he might be aiming at the "body and soul" sector of the self-help market. The subtitle of his new book, "Why Happiness is in the Eye of the Beholder," and the lack of notes or bibliography also support this supposition. Such a supposition would, however, be wrong.
Armstrong starts off his exploration with great confidence and wit, surveying first the old explanations of beauty - fine proportions, fitness to function, harmonies of various kinds, and Hogarth's serpentine line of beauty. He might have made more of the latter's self-parody (women's use of corsets to get the perfect shape), but he does score a telling point in recounting David Garrick's objections to his 18th-century friend and guide. Why, if it's all in the continuously changing curve, Garrick rightly asks, isn't my stomach, which grows more and more serpentine with the years, more continuously beautiful? Well, among other reasons, Armstrong answers, because the experience of this aesthetic state comes in wholes, not parts - or "the law of the whole" as he puts it, paraphrasing Ruskin. This is surely right, and enough of a defence against all those who have found the secret of beauty, whether it is in perfect proportions or some local canons of prettiness that presently engage evolutionary psychologists. Yet Armstrong's book itself suggests the same premise of singular explanation in its very title, The Secret Power of... Has he not read his own first five chapters, especially the lines about "making what is called a 'Procrustean' mistake," that is, forcing whole, complex experiences into single, crushing explanations? Well, yes and no.
His treatise touches the many causes and types of beauty, and at one point quotes Stendahl approvingly: "There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness." Since it is Armstrong's basic aim to connect happiness, even modest everyday pleasure, with beauty, the plurality of viewpoints can be assumed. Elsewhere, however, he affirms the more singular views of Keats, Plotinus and Schiller. Here, beauty is the attraction of the soul or psyche for perfection: "So in the beautiful object we see what we should be." In this sense, beauty is active and transformative, something in which we see our better, even ideal, selves. Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - a palpable falsehood - is true in the poem because it refers to the ideal world of the Grecian urn as a work of art.
It is for such impossible worlds that we yearn; and it is the dissatisfaction with our present inadequacies, that drives at least one impulse towards beauty. According to this view, beauty might be better understood as an intransitive verb than a noun. It concerns the action of, or hope for, self-transcendence when confronted by an object that elicits this response. "I beauty myself," an absurd phrase outside the world of cosmetics, would then refer to the way we project ourselves into a beautiful work in order to change. Such objects, I have argued in this magazine, are symbols of perfection where truth, beauty and goodness meet in a psychological convergence of values. This is a perspectival meeting at infinity, as it were, rather than a real encounter. In reality, truth isn't beauty, nor goodness either.
Put another way, Schiller uses the term "aesthetic necessity" to refer to the process by which a beautiful work of art has parts that seem inevitably connected, and that must exist for the work to feel complete. As Armstrong comments, "In the aesthetic necessity that we find in a really successful work of art or in a beautiful object we are presented with an image of how we would like life to be... Thus beauty can give rise to a mixed emotion. On the one hand we are delighted by this happy apprehension of how life should be; on the other hand we are pained by the acute sense we have that life is not like that." He rightly stresses the gap between work and life as setting up a tension that we experience as beauty.
Unfortunately, such interesting insights are not pulled together and any overall argument, except a weak one concerning happiness, is dissipated with endless examples. Furthermore, and depressingly for a book on beauty, the illustrations are small and lacking colour.
The main problem with this investigation, however, is that it fails to address the last hundred years, as well as the current arguments on the subject. Modernists rejected the b-word, as Wendy Steiner points out, because they were enamoured of the Kantian sublime. There was, in addition, a positive, masculine "aesthetic of ugliness." Contrary to much 19th-century thought, and the aesthetic movement, beauty does not have to be a goal of art. As Arthur Danto has argued, Dadaists rejected it in order to rage against a society for whom beauty was a cherished value, the society that took Europe to the first world war.
Armstrong hardly mentions the 20th century, as if he found anything except Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion too distasteful to contemplate. This is a pity. Given his lucidity, he should have taken on this gathering debate. His own lines of reasoning might illuminate why, for instance, Brancusi was so obsessed by beauty and Damien Hirst is so intermittently engaged, or why Norman Foster's "gherkin" is beautiful while Will Alsop's Fourth Grace for Liverpool doesn't even try. We are at a point when beauty is coming back into architecture and the arts as a minority concern. It is not the dominant drive, as it was so often in the 19th century, nor is it a swear word, as it was in the 20th. But the return is helped by its becoming just one of many artistic concerns, on a par with positive expressions of logic, invention and sexuality, and negative ones of violence, entropy and ugliness. Why not give beauty a place in the arts as one among equals? As often with portrayals of other positive qualities, beauty seems most convincing when it arrives as a by-product of the whole art work and is not sought as an end in itself.
