Kaleidoscopes, or Two Kinds of Beauty:The Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty Revival Movements

This doctoral thesis identifies and provides original descriptive accounts of two schools of thought in the philosophy of beauty: (i) the 20th-century ‘Anti-Aesthetic’ movement and (ii) the 21st-century ‘Beauty-Revival’ movement. I argue that the Anti-Aesthetic movement is devoted to a decisive negation of beauty—denying its importance as a philosophical notion and its significance as a lived experience. The Beauty-Revival movement affirms the value of beauty as a philosophical notion and as a lived aesthetic experience. Corresponding to these commitments, the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty-Revival movements engage largely incompatible philosophical notions of beauty, which this dissertation constructs and places in parallel with one another. The Anti-Aesthetic movement suggests that beauty is a merely sensual experience, which can be used, at best, as a distraction from justice and, at worst, as an instrument of evil. Beauty-Revivalism advances arguments for beauty as an experience that extends primarily to sensual experience, but which also calls forth mental products and cognitive and affective states evoked by that experience. Ultimately, I argue that there are two contrasting modern views of the concept of beauty, only one of which gives way to an account of the experience of beauty. Therefore, this dissertation also includes (iii) a defence of the notion of beauty as a lived experience, or scene of encounter, extrapolated from Beauty-Revival descriptions of three key ‘moments’ which occur in the process of our experiencing beautiful objects. These moments are (a) the conditions that constitute an experience of beauty, (b) the attitudinal features most likely to lead to the experience of beauty, and (c) the results of the experience of beauty. Given the current sparse adumbration of (i) the Anti-Aesthetic movement, (ii) the Beauty-Revival movement and (iii) contemporary accounts of the experience of beauty, this doctoral thesis offers an original contribution to scholarship in the field of philosophical aesthetics