The Beautiful and the Sublime

A discussion of the historical division between the two fundamentally different sides of the aesthetic experience

When working with aesthetics and the aesthetic experience, there are two fundamental and important terms to consider: the beautiful and the sublime. These two terms, which in manyways represent two fundamentally different sides of the aesthetic experience, have been made subject to numerous philosophical theses and art historical discussions.

The historical division between the beautiful and the sublime indicates that an aesthetic experience is not necessarily linked to beauty, but can also be induced by the unpleasant, unbalanced, distorted, or even hideous. This could include a dilapidated old house or a frightening demonic figure in a gothic church.

The most significant differences between the beautiful and the sublime can outlined like this:

BEAUTIFUL: Symmetrical, comfortable, orderly, predictable, delimited, formed, balanced

SUBLIME: Asymmetrical, uncomfortable, chaotic, unpredictable, limitlessness, shapeless, distorted

In this article I will focus on an understanding of the beautiful aesthetic experience.

Briefly put, the beautiful can be defined as a mode of expression that complies with the aesthetic ground principles concerning, for example, color harmonies and composition. As the counterpoint to the beautiful, the sublime characterizes phenomena or objects that provide receivers with a kind of aesthetic pleasure that doesn’t match the “classical” concept of beauty, or that disrupt the universal ground rules of aesthetics.

The beautiful is mainly linked to shape or to proportional, harmonic objects that provide the receiver or viewer with immediate pleasure. The connection between the beautiful and shape, or proportion and balance, is rooted in ancient times.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) describes in his Metaphysics how the Pythagoreans (from the 6th century BC) viewed the world’s manifestations as mathematically structured and determined by numeric relations. To the Pythagoreans, beauty was identical to order and thereby not only linked to the human experience of the world, but rather to something absolute, something unchangeable and universal. Beauty was seen as the sum of the world’s harmonious, symmetrical, proportional forms.

To Plato (c. 428–348 BC), a physical object can be considered beautiful if it clearly expresses the form or idea that gave birth to it. A beautiful chair, according to this way of thinking, is a chair that is clearly recognizable as being a chair and that is good at being a chair. There is thus a kind of precision to beauty. Beauty is precise and unambiguous in its expression. Beautiful physical objects are clearly expressed and decoded as what they are, at the same time as they are good at being what they are.

Such a viewpoint contains the germ of a functionalist approach to thinking aesthetics.

Functionalism, a term for defining the style and historical context of early 20th century design and architecture, is dominated by simplicity and objectivity, understood as form being subservient to function. “Form follows function” is a well-known adage ascribed to functionalism, which aimed to cleanse form of anything but the absolute most necessary elements. The famous phrase was uttered by the American architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924), and it was in direct opposition to the organic decorative idiom of the previous art-nouveau period.

The Bauhaus architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) called his chairs “sitting machines” and hereby gestured to the ancient idea that a chair is beautiful if it is good at being what it is. A chair becomes a sitting machine insofar as it is good to sit in. The form and expression of an object are thus inferior to its function. This is the functionalist definition of beauty.

In part, then, beauty is about functionality. Or, at least, about a precise, unambiguous minimalist idiom that is easy to decode or “take in.”

In the Platonic dialogue Greater Hippias (c. 390 BC) Socrates and Hippias are searching for a definition of beauty, and as part of this search, they try to determine whether a spoon made from gold is more beautiful than one made from figwood. Socrates feigns uncertainty. Of course, a golden spoon is finer (and more attractive) than its wooden counterpart, but it is harder to handle when eating soup. In the final analysis, the wooden spoon is more beautiful since it is better at being what it is (that is, a spoon); it is more functional, useful.

To Plato, beauty is linked to the good. In this way, for an object to be considered beautiful, and durable, the material must, crucially, follow form.

Plato’s way of correlating beauty with the good (or the functional) is in contradiction with my hypothesis that aesthetic appeal is foundational to aesthetic durability.

On the one hand, it can seem right that an object should be good at being what it is (it is after all pleasurable to experience and interact with an object that seems to perfectly aligned with its functional basis of existence). On the other hand, there are objects whose primary function seems to be that of producing aesthetic pleasure for human beings. We would call such objects aesthetically functional. Functionality should thus not be understood solely in terms of usefulness, and consequently, usefulness should not be the only determining factor for assessing an object’s durability.

In the context of the beautiful, in contrast to the sublime, functionality can therefore be defined as accommodating humanity’s preference for the orderly, the proportional, and the well-structured.

Based on a functionalist and constructivist approach to design, instructors at the Bauhaus School — such as Walter Gropius (1883–1969), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Johannes Itten (1888–1967), Paul Klee (1879–1940), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), Herbert Bayer (1900–1985) og Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) — attempted to locate a universal idiom that would give form to an international style, a style that would cancel out local differences and that could be decoded and appreciated by all, regardless of cultural background or contemporary preferences.

Function was superior to form, just as function should adapt to the needs of the human body.

For the Bauhaus designers, the minimalist, functionalist expression — which they sought, investigated, and applied — was a universal idiom since it, devoid of ornament and symbolism, was able to minimize “misunderstandings” in decoding objects. Moreover, the idea was that a minimalist and “neutral” design object more easily would fit into a number of contexts — or put differently, it would be highly adaptable to its surroundings. This adaptability, and in turn, durability, stemmed from the fact that it didn’t create any visual noise.

The quest for a durable design expression was immanent to the Bauhaus mission, which was focused on creating time- and placeless expressions. The universality of Bauhaus was thus linked to a direct disassociation from time and place.

Moving away from an aesthetic that is tied to a time and place, according to Bauhaus, can minimize the risk of aesthetic decay or outdating, which by definition is attached to cultural preferences for “good taste” that are influenced by fashion and lifestyle trends. In this way, a mode of expression that manages to stay time- and placeless, due to its universality, can be considered beautiful.

(More on the sublime in my forthcoming article)

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