What is beauty? What
the beautiful ? Forget Kant and his famous Sachem
Iroquois, who enjoyed nothing to Paris
much as rotisseries. But we
also said: If, regardless of any
interest, you have the ability to judge
or enjoy a representation
pleasure or displeasure, you can call
"Taste" that faculty and "beautiful" this
representation. We can not prove
beauty, he concluded, only experience it.
Descartes confirmed that in its own way: The
beautiful is nothing but a report
our judgment to the object. So what
will appeal to the greatest number of people can
being named "the most beautiful", which nevertheless
can not be determined. Before Kant,
Baumgarten had hoped that be instituted
a discipline related to aesthetics,
a kind of science of sensitivity,
Beauty being in his eyes the sensible form
the truth. For Hegel, beauty
not due to the balance as a simple result,
but at the same time and always with the voltage
produced the same result. For Adorno,
the ugly is not a moment of art,
it is the dynamics of the beautiful, and it's good
This denial of a dynamic and
the other is born art. For Plato,
if the external beauty may sometimes we
upsetting to delirium is that it
provokes in us a reminder of the beauty
true, which is the inner beauty.
Without denying the emotional and power
the beautiful illumination, Plotinus, who was
the most famous of Neoplatonists us
warns: What we feel as beautiful,
this is not the sensible thing itself,
but invisible reality which appears in
it. His "soul", we would say today.
For Diderot, who was the first criticism
art, there is no good in itself. This one
necessarily implies the idea of ​​a
relationship capable of causing effects
us. The beautiful is not an absolute nor a
Ideally, notes a report us
for these effects. Petrie truths
and the principles of sensitivity, we
said Herbert Marcuse's aesthetics
objective perfection of cognition
sensitive, ie beauty. Representative
the order of sensitivity and defying the
Because of art objects, logic
repression, that of satisfaction.
In doing so, it relates to the principle of
pleasure. Three centuries ago, Montesquieu
spoke of pleasure before speaking of beauty,
in these terms: When we find fun
to do something we know it
will help us, we say it is
good; when we find pleasure in
see something we expect it
we will be of no use, we say
that she is beautiful. If there is a rule
the beautiful, Alain told us she gets stuck
in the work, so that it can not
never be used to make another. But
the true artist knows how to give his dreams
awake such force they can
lose their character and become too intimate
a source of enjoyment for others,
Freud wrote in somewhat different terms.
The force of desire is an irresistible robber
wrote his part Jacques Derrida. But
a thief that requires a witness and installs
one eye where it defies the law.
An artist is a man who sees the best
others, we said Henri Bergson, because it
looks naked reality without veils. However,
discovering the Sistine Chapel, Stendhal
will these terrible words: A work of art
is just a beautiful lie. But for the
very splenetic Schopenhauer, a work
Art is revealed to everyone in proportion
the value of his own mind, no
that of the artist; and it is precisely
why masterpieces of art are
actually intended to remain forever
letters closed to ordinary mortals. Of which
dear Arthur excluded, you'll understand.
You'll understand too,
Beauty is everywhere, and this is where you
the least expect it you will
The worst. The painting is on my right
sometimes called Ugly Duchess, sometimes
Old woman grotesque. I say this without
laugh, this oil on panel, which will be discussed
soon, is simply the best
painting by the Flemish painter Quentin Matsys.
