Day 214 MCAT Practice Question

Passage 6

Every introduction to the problems of aesthetics begins by acknowledging the

existence and claims of two methods of attack,—the general, philosophical,

deductive, which starts from a complete metaphysics and installs beauty in its

place among the other great concepts; and the empirical, or inductive, which seeks

to disengage a general principle of beauty from the objects of aesthetic experience

and the facts of aesthetic enjoyment: Fechner’s ‘aesthetics from above and from

below…’

Aesthetics, then, came into being as the philosophy of the Beautiful, and it may be

asked why this philosophical aesthetics does not suffice—why beauty should need

for its understanding also an aesthetics…

The answer is not that no system of philosophy is universally accepted, but that

the general aesthetic theories have not, as yet at least, succeeded in answering

the plain questions of ‘the plain man’ in regard to concrete beauty…No one of these

aesthetic systems, in spite of volumes of so-called application of their principles

to works of art, has been able to furnish a criterion of beauty…And so it was that

empirical aesthetics arose, which does not seek to answer those plain questions

as to the enjoyment of concrete beauty down to its simplest forms, to which

philosophical aesthetics had been inadequate.

But it is clear that neither has empirical aesthetics said the last word concerning

beauty. Criticism is still in a chaotic state that would be impossible if aesthetic

theory were firmly grounded. This situation appears to me to be due to the inherent

inadequacy and inconclusiveness of empirical aesthetics when it stands alone; the

grounds of this inadequacy I shall seek to establish in the following.

Granting that the aim of every aesthetics is to determine the Nature of Beauty, and

to explain our feelings about it, we may say that the empirical treatments propose

to do this either by describing the aesthetic object and extracting the essential

elements of Beauty, or by describing the aesthetic experience and extracting the

essential elements of aesthetic feeling, thereby indicating the elements of Beauty

as those which effect this feeling.

Now the bare description and analysis of beautiful objects cannot, logically, yield

any result; for the selection of cases would have to be arbitrary, and would be at

the mercy of any objection. To any one who should say, But this is not beautiful, and

should not be included in your inventory, answer could be made only by showing

that it had such and such qualities, the very, by hypothesis, unknown qualities

that were to be sought. Moreover, the field of beauty contains so many and so

heterogeneous objects, that the retreat to their only common ground, aesthetic

feeling, appears inevitable. A statue and a symphony can be reduced to a common

denominator most easily if the states of mind which they induce are compared.

Thus the analysis of objects passes naturally over to the analysis of mental states—

the point of view of psychology.

There is, however, a method subsidiary to the preceding, which seeks the elements

of Beauty in a study of the genesis and the development of art forms. But this

leaves the essential phenomenon absolutely untouched. The general types of

aesthetic expression may indeed have been shaped by social forces,— religious,

commercial, domestic,—but as social products, not as aesthetic phenomena. Such

studies reveal to us, as it were, the excuse for the fact of music, poetry, painting—

but they tell us nothing of the reason why beautiful rather than ugly forms were

chosen, as who should show that the bird sings to attract its mate, ignoring the

relation and sequence of the notes. The decorative art of most savage tribes, for

instance, is nearly all of totemic origin, and the decayed and degraded forms of

snake, bird, bear, fish, may be traced in the most apparently empty geometric

patterns;—but what does this discovery tell us of the essentially decorative quality

of such patterns or of the nature of beauty of form?…These researches, in short,

explain the reason for the existence, but not for the quality, of works of art.

Thus it is in psychology that empirical aesthetics finds its last resort. And indeed, our

plain man might say, the aesthetic experience itself is inescapable and undeniable.

You know that the sight or the hearing of this thing gives you a thrill of pleasure. You

may not be able to defend the beauty of the object, but the fact of the experience

you have. The psychologist, seeking to analyze the vivid and unmistakable Aesthetic

experience, would therefore proceed somewhat as follows. He would select the

salient characteristics of his mental state in presence of a given work of art. He would

then study, by experiment and introspection, how the particular sense-stimulations

of the work of art in question could become the psychological conditions of these

salient characteristics. Thus, supposing the aesthetic experience to have been

described as ‘the conscious happiness in which one is absorbed, and, as it were,

immersed in the sense-object,’ the further special aim, in connection with a picture,

for instance, would be to show how the sensations and associated ideas from

color, line, composition, and all the other elements of a picture may, on general

psychological principles, bring about this state of happy absorption…

Puffer, E. D. (2003). The psychology of beauty. Project Gutenberg. (Original work

published 1905)

The author refers to the “plain” or “common” man throughout the passage.

According to the claims made in the passage, the plain or common man is

likely to raise which of the following questions?

A) Which major theory of beauty is most concise?

B) Why do we think that landscapes or sunsets are obviously beautiful?

C) Why is it so difficult to achieve popular consensus about beauty?

D) Should the study of aesthetics begin with principles, or with beautiful

objects?