BERTRAND RUSSELL ON THE TOPIC OF BEAUTY:
Dr. Paul R. Shockley
In a 3 April 1902 letter to Gilbert Murray regarding ethics (with particular attention given to a critique on utilitarianism), Bertrand Russell makes some interesting comments in the area of aesthetics. He writes:
Also I reflected that the value of a work of art has no relation whatever to the pleasure it gives; indeed, the more I have dwelt upon the subject, the more I have come to prize austerity rather than luxuriance. It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny, because, in fact, it constructs an ideal where everything is perfect and yet true. Again, in regard to actual human existence, I have found myself giving honour to those who feel its tragedy, who think truly about Death, who are oppressed by ignoble things even when they are inevitable; yet these qualities appear to me to militate against happiness, not only to the possessors, but to all whom they affect. And, generally, the best life seems to me one which thinks truly and feels greatly about human things, and which, in addition, contemplates the world of beauty and of abstract truths. This last is, perhaps my most anti-utilitarian opinion: I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist-all that is commonly called Science-to be of very slight value compared to the knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made. My point in all of this, is to suggest that my opinions would be shared by most moral people who are not biased by a theory. Archimedes, I believe, was despised by contemporary geometers because he used geometry to make useful inventions. And utilitarians have been strangely anxious to prove that the life of the pig is not happier than that of the philosopher-a most dubious proposition, which, if they had considered the matter frankly, could hardly have been decided in the same way by all of them. In the matter of Art, too, I certainly have educated common sense on my side: anyone would hold it a paradox to regard Home Sweet Home as better than Bach. In this connection, too, it is necessary for the Utilitarian to hold that a beautiful object is not good per se, but only as a means; thus it becomes difficult to see why the contemplation of beauty should be specially good, since it is scarcely deniable that the same emotion which a person of tastes obtains from a beautiful object may be obtained by another person from an ugly object. And a person of taste can only be defined as one who gets the emotion in question from beauty, not from ugliness. Yet all of us judge a person to be the better for the possession of taste, though only a blind theorist could maintain that taste increases happiness. Here is a hard nut for the Utilitarian!
Cited from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951, 1967), 254-255.
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