A Flight Through Aestheic Space-Time

Abstract

The wish has been expressed that there should be a world-conference to end world-conferences. An equally deep if unuttered prayer of humanity must be that speculation regarding the essence of beauty or art should-at least temporarily-cease, that an aesthetic “holiday” should be declared. For no department of research seems to be so hopelessly bogged. Since the beginning of this century some of the world's most brilliant minds have devoted their energies to this elusive quest; yet what common denominator can be found for Croce's “Expressionism,” Babbitt's “Humanism;” Clive Bell's “Significant Form,” and Richards's neurological theory, to mention only a few of the more salient solutions that have been offered us? It has been calculated that at least sixteen different definitions of “art” have been given by serious and influential thinkers in the course of the last century. The worst of it is that, far from abdicating in favour of the Relative, our old friend the Absolute takes advantage of chaos to increase his tyranny; he multiplies himself. Every school turns out to be an incarnation of the Absolute; among conservatives he is called Tradition, among radicals the New Truth. The former believe that the “truth” about art was discovered long ago, the latter that it was discovered this morning. But both are equally in the grip of a “finality complex” which obscures from them the possibility that beauty, instead of being a mysterious and unique essence waiting to be discovered, may be simply a convenient linguistic symbol used by men of different lands and different ages to cover an intricate nexus of disturbances produced in their nervous systems by such objects as statues, paintings, buildings, poems, etc. It may be that much of the trouble comes from the fact that the single word “beauty” has to do service for extremely disparate nervous disturbances.