Abstract
An intorduction to an English translation of Bernad Bolzano´s On the Concept of the Beautiful. A neglected gem in the history of aesthetics, Bolzano’s essay on beauty is best understood when read alongside his other writings and philosophical sources. This introduction is designed to contribute to such a reading. In Part I, I identify and discuss three salient ways in which Bolzano’s account can be misunderstood. As a lack of familiarity with Bolzano’s background assumptions is one source of these misunderstandings, in Part II, I elucidate some of his ideas about the psychological processes involved in the contemplation and enjoyment of beauty. In Part III, I situate Bolzano’s discussion of beauty within the more general framework of his ideas about the nature of philosophy, the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, and the place of the concept of beauty within the latter. Part IV is devoted to Bolzano’s discussion of some of his philosophical antecedents, including Kant. In Part V, I raise some objections to Bolzano’s account and indicate how his advocates might respond to them.
Highlights
A neglected gem in the history of aesthetics, Bolzano’s essay on beauty is best understood when read alongside his other writings and philosophical sources.1 This introduction is designed to contribute to such a reading
It is the absence of attention to these psychological springs of our contemplative pleasure, conjoined with the salience in our minds of the object’s qualities, that motivates Bolzano to refer to a transference of our feelings to the object, and in this regard his view differs from the error theoretic position expressed by Santayana’s famous statement about beauty
When we have reached the point where we believe we have found a definition that corresponds with our understanding of this concept, let us not follow the same path as those who amend their definitions with a second and a third, claiming that it is possible to come up with the same concept by combining certain other attributes which differ from those that the definition originally contained
Summary
Bolzano’s central thesis is that beauty is what rewards a certain kind of contemplation with pleasure. It is easy to misunderstand this thesis if we fail to grasp various concepts and distinctions on which Bolzano relies in his discussion of contemplation and pleasure, such as notions of clarity and distinctness, which he analyses at length in his Theory of Science. For example, one may find Bolzano’s mention of ‘confused’ and ‘obscure’ thoughts hopelessly vague or puzzling and uninformative: why would our perception and enjoyment of beauty have to be ‘dark’ or ‘confused’? I return to this topic in Part II. It becomes clear that Bolzano maintains that there is a strong epistemic constraint on the appreciation of beauty He refers explicitly to the ‘appropriate’ (gehörig) contemplation of a beautiful object. The object has the relational quality of being able to give rise to pleasure when contemplated appropriately, and this is true because its attributes are such that they can occasion the successful exercise of the sort of cognitive proficiency Bolzano identifies. It is the absence of attention to these psychological springs of our contemplative pleasure, conjoined with the salience in our minds of the object’s qualities, that motivates Bolzano to refer to a transference of our feelings to the object, and in this regard his view differs from the error theoretic position expressed by Santayana’s famous statement about beauty. As is obvious from the text, Bolzano proposes that this cognition has special characteristics that he sought to identify by reworking notions of clarity and obscurity, distinctness and confusedness, which I shall briefly elucidate
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
