bolzano on beauty (livingston)

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 54 | Number 3 | July 2014 | pp. 269–284 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayu037© British Society of Aesthetics 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

Bolzano on BeautyPaisley Livingston

This paper sets forth Bolzano’s little-known 1843 account of beauty. Bolzano accepted the thesis that beauty is what rewards contemplation with pleasure. The originality of his proposal lies in his claim that the source of this pleasure is a special kind of cognitive process, namely, the formation of an adequate concept of the object’s attributes through the successful exercise of the observer’s proficiency at obscure and confused cognition. To appreciate this proposal we must understand how Bolzano explicated a number of concepts (especially clarity, confusion, and intuition) in his Wissenschaftslehre. I argue that Bolzano was ahead of his time and anticipated some of the results of recent empirical psychological research on the relations between beauty, affect, and processing fluency. Bolzano’s remarks on ugliness and on relations between pure and mixed beauty are also of contemporary interest. The upshot is that Bolzano’s account of beauty is neither as derivative nor ‘dark’ as some of his commentators have claimed.

First published in 1843 and rarely mentioned thereafter, Bernard Bolzano’s ideas about beauty deserve to be better known.1 Bolzano accepted the thesis that the beautiful is what rewards contemplation with pleasure, but he had his own ideas about the source of this pleasure.2 Our enjoyment of beauty, he proposes, stems from the successful exercise of an ability to devise a concept that covers the attributes of a sufficiently complex object. Our knowledge of the regularity in the object’s attributes must not be acquired too easily, but nor does it require systematic recourse to the effort of distinct thought. In brief, we apprehend and enjoy beauty in a mixture of clear, obscure, distinct, and confused cognitions, in senses of these terms that Bolzano was at pains to specify.

In Section 1 of this paper, I present Bolzano’s explication of beauty and ugliness to readers unfamiliar with his text.3 In Section 2, I respond to commentators who have characterized Bolzano’s proposal as a ‘dark’ and derivative doctrine. With regard to the latter charge,

1 Bolzano remains unmentioned in all recent English-language histories and reference works devoted to aesthetics.

A valuable overview is provided in Maria E. Reicher, ‘Austrian Aesthetics’, in Mark Textor (ed.), The Austrian

Contribution to Analytic Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), 293–323. An unfortunate and highly misleading

early reference to Bolzano was made by William Knight, professor of philosophy at St Andrews and the author of

a compendious historical survey, who wrote: ‘Another of the minor Kantians, Bernhard [sic] Bolzano of Prague

(1781–1848), wrote a treatise on The Idea of the Beautiful in 1843, and one on The Division of the Fine Arts in 1847.

These works, however, have no special value’ (The Philosophy of the Beautiful: Being Outlines of the History of Aesthetics

(New York: Charles Scribner, 1891), 64–65).

2 Hugo Bergmann reports that Emil Utitz identifies Aquinas as Bolzano’s implicit source here (Das philosophische

Werk Bernard Bolzanos (Halle an der Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1909), 115; Emil Utitz, ‘Bernard Bolzanos Ästhetik’,

Deutsche Arbeit 8 (1908), 89–94). This could be right, but it is extremely likely that Bolzano was also familiar

with Hippias Major 298a, as he mentions this work in passing in §27 of the essay on beauty.

3 Bernard Bolzano, Abhandlungen zur Ästhetik. Erste Lieferung. Über den Begriff des Schönen: Eine Philosophische

Abhandlung (Prague: Borrosch und André, 1843); the same text was published in the Abhandlungen der Königlichen

Böhmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 5th series, Vol. 3, 1843. Modern editions include Untersuchungen zur

July

270 | Paisley livingston

I argue that while it is correct to observe that Bolzano was influenced by various philoso-phers (and especially by Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant), it should also be recognized that he criticized many of their views and proposed his own elucidations of the concepts he employed in his explication of beauty. To understand Bolzano’s views on beauty, we must consult some of the passages in his 1837 Wissenschaftslehre where he takes up a number of rel-evant concepts, including clarity, distinctness, ideas, judgement, intuition, and conscious-ness.4 The upshot is that Bolzano’s proposal is far less derivative than it has appeared to some of his commentators. I also argue that it is by no means as obscure as has been claimed. To that end, in Section 3, I compare Bolzano’s thoughts about beauty to the findings of some contemporary psychological research. It turns out that the results published by some empiri-cal psychologists converge on salient aspects of Bolzano’s thinking. Bolzano was ahead of his time, I claim, with regard to his criticisms of prior accounts, his own innovative proposal, and some of the problems he identified but did not solve. As I explain in Section 4, one of these problems was that of exploring the relations between what Bolzano calls ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ beauty, and Bolzano’s remarks on this topic merit our attention as well.

1. Bolzano’s Explication of Beauty

Covering familiar ground, Bolzano first sets out to distinguish between the beautiful and the good. Some but not all morally good things are beautiful, and although some beautiful things are morally good, others are not. Similarly, the beautiful is not conceptually equiv-alent to what has allure or charm (der Reiz), but is a species thereof. The taste of an apple, however pleasant or alluring, cannot be beautiful. Given that the beautiful is a source of pleasure or delight (das Wohlgefallen, die Vernügen), the key question is under what condi-tions this species of pleasure obtains. Bolzano proposes that the pleasure in an object’s beauty arises through the contemplation (die Betrachtung) of the object, and not from any other form of influence or interaction.5 The object must be appropriately (gehörig) con-templated and comprehended (aufgefasst) (§2, 13). Bolzano does not, unfortunately, offer a more detailed account of these cognitive requirements.6

Grundlegung der Ästhetik, ed. Dietfried Gerhardus (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1972), 1–118; and Bernard

Bolzano, Gesamtausgabe, I.18: Mathematisch-physikalische und philosophische Schriften 1842–1843, ed. Gottfried

Gabriel, Matthias Gatzemeier and Friedrich Kambartel (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989),

87–217. Unless otherwise stated, paragraph numbers followed by page numbers are from the 1843 Borrosch und

André edition, which is readily available on Google Books.

4 Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre: Versuch einer ausführlichen und grösstentheils neuen Darstellung der Logik mit steter

Rücksicht auf deren bisherigen Bearbeiter, 4 Vols (Sulzbach: Seidelschen, 1837). In what follows I give page numbers

in this edition, available in a somewhat lacunary scan on Google Books. For partial translations and paraphrase of

selected sections, see Theory of Science, ed. and trans. Rolf George (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).

5 Although in some contexts Betrachtung can be translated as ‘observation’, Bolzano holds that not everything

beautiful is observable in the sense of perceptible. So in some cases the more inclusive term ‘contemplation’ is a

more appropriate translation (e.g. in §13, 32).

6 It may be helpful to note that ‘cognition’ in what follows translates Erkenntnis, which for Bolzano entails truth

(Wissenschaftslehre, §26, 117). He uses Wissen for a species of knowledge in which we have an unassailable

conviction (Wissenschaftslehre, §321, 288).

Bolzano on Beauty | 271

With these preliminaries in place, Bolzano considers a counterexample. When Robinson Crusoe finds a useful tool, he contemplates it with great pleasure, but this is not an expe-rience of beauty. Bolzano proposes that in order to rule such cases out, we must specify conditions pertaining to (i) the nature and special qualities of the contemplation, such as its contents, and/or (ii) the nature and basis of the pleasure. In this regard, Bolzano explicitly rejects Kant’s manner of explicating and applying the idea that a judgement of beauty must be ‘without interest’. Bolzano proposes that we should replace Kant’s and various other philosophers’ notions of disinterestedness with a condition to the effect that neither the pleasure in the object nor the content of the experience hinges primarily on an exclusive relation to the contemplator. The observer’s attention, he specifies, cannot be exclusively directed towards a relation between the object and the observer’s individuality (individuo) (§14, 31). Nor can such an exclusive relation be the basis of the pleasure taken in the object, as would be the case, say, in a shopper’s delight in his acquisition of some new possession. Similarly, if what Crusoe is contemplating is his possession of the tool and the utility it will have for him and him alone, he would not be experiencing the tool’s beauty, even if his cognition of this object satisfied Bolzano’s other conditions.

Bolzano observes that many philosophers, including Kant, have held that a judgement of beauty makes a claim to a general or even universal validity, and while Bolzano agrees that some such condition is warranted, he thinks a more precise analysis is needed. Bolzano says that it would be wrong to deny the differences between people with regard to their ability to judge and enjoy beauty. This ability depends upon the natural development and exercise of various skills, especially our powers of recognition or knowing (das Erkennen) (§6, 18). Bolzano adds that while few thinkers have doubted that beings with far more perfect powers than ours could also know beauty, some, such as Schiller, have believed that the contemplation of beauty could not be a source of pleasure for angelic beings, and this is a point that Bolzano seems prepared to endorse.7

Bolzano conjectures that the very fact that the nature of beauty has so long eluded analysis gives us a valuable clue: perhaps our recognition of beauty, which is normally accomplished with speed and ease, does not arise from cognition that is clear and distinct. Our contemplation of beautiful objects is like other observations in that we search for a concept, an idea or a rule, from which the attributes (Beschaffenheiten) of the thing before us can be derived. Memory, imagination, understanding, reason, and judgement work together in this process, but Bolzano cannot accept Kant’s evocation of a ‘free play’ of faculties in the formation of a judgement of beauty. Nor does he understand how a cog-nitive activity could be purposeful without actually being oriented towards a purpose.8

7 Bolzano did, however, contend that in the afterlife we will continue to enjoy beauty, even though our cognitive

powers will be greatly improved and we will accordingly have far more clear and distinct ideas and judgements

(Athanasia; oder, Gründe für die Unsterblichkeit der Seele: Ein Buch für jeden Gebildeten, der hierüber zur Beruhigung

gelangen will, 2nd edn rev. (Sulzbach: Seidelschen, 1838), 150, 171).

8 These are not the only criticisms of Kant’s aesthetics made by Bolzano. For an able survey, see Peter McCormick,

‘Bolzano and the Dark Doctrine: An Essay on Aesthetics’, in Barry Smith (ed.), Structure and Gestalt: Philosophy and

Literature in Austria-Hungary and Her Successor States (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981), 69–113.


Brentano proposes instead that on the basis of what is perceived in the object or thought about it, our minds formulate guesses or anticipations about other possible attributes of the object. In an easy and swift cognition we settle on a concept that covers other attri-butes we subsequently perceive in the object. We enjoy this discovery of a pattern without having a clear and distinct representation of how it has been achieved.

Bolzano grounds this explanation in a more general account of the sources of pleasure. Whenever the activation of our powers is neither too easy nor too hard, we experience pleasure. Whatever is taken as a means to those events whereby our powers are increased can be a source of pleasure, as can events apprehended by us as ‘signs’ of such enjoyable increases of our capacities. Merely to exercise one’s powers, and thereby to become aware of them, can be an improvement if it contributes to the correct employment of the ability in question.

Carrying these assumptions over to the case of beauty, Bolzano reckons that the source of our pleasure is not the thought of some particular advantage that might be had from the object. Instead, the source of the pleasure is the beneficial activation of our powers facilitated by our engagement with the object. As beauty is not enjoyed by creatures with significantly lower or higher powers than our own, the source of our pleasure ‘must be determined through the relation in which the beautiful object stands to our cognitive pow-ers [Erkenntniskräften]’ (§10, 24; Bolzano’s emphasis). Those objects that stimulate in us the pleasures of beauty are ones the attributes of which manifest regularities that are neither too easy nor too difficult for us to process, that is, those the contemplation of which trig-gers the right sort of activation and employment of our cognitive powers.

Once he has identified in this general way the source of the pleasure we take in the contemplation of beautiful objects, Bolzano provides additional remarks about the process involved in the corresponding employment of our powers. In Bolzano’s paradigm case, we find ourselves in a situation where we are not troubled by any urgent needs. We perceive or think about some object that draws our attention, and we consider this object more closely. We recognize a significant number of attributes, some of which we cannot readily derive from the others. Usually without making any conscious decision to do so, we set ourselves the task of finding a concept that will cover all of these attributes. Our imagina-tion becomes active and generates thoughts of other possible attributes of the object. We reason about those attributes and form judgements as to which of them are most likely to belong to the object. We thereby form a concept of the object, which we test by means of further observations and thoughts. We discover that some of the attributes that we had guessed at, or that could be derived from those guessed at, actually belong to the object, which provides us with a kind of proof that our conception was correct. This successful deployment of our cognitive powers gives us pleasure.

To the objection that this analysis resembles far too closely the process in which we might solve mathematical problems, Bolzano responds that there are important dif-ferences to be noted (and one of his criticisms of Herbart’s account of beauty is that it fails precisely in this regard; §52, 76). In mathematics and in speculative thinking more generally, we should attempt to bring together our thoughts as clearly and distinctly as possible. We tread carefully as we seek to move from one concept, proposition, or con-clusion to the next. (In a long footnote to this remark, Bolzano rails eloquently against


Hegelian violations of this basic norm of enquiry; §10, 25–26.) It is different in the case of beauty, where we move as swiftly as possible from one thought to another. Here our skill (Geschicklichkeit) is engaged and improved by means of thoughts that are ‘dark’ or ‘obscure’ in a sense discussed below. What is more, the pleasures are different in these two sorts of cases. The ability to think correctly by means of obscure ideas is more gener-ally useful in practical life, so it is not surprising that the exercise of this ability is more ardently enjoyed. The pleasure we take in beauty is at bottom ‘a pleasure in our own contemplation itself’, a pleasure, however, which we necessarily transfer to its object, since without the mediation of this object we would not have had the occasion to engage and improve our cognitive powers (§10, 26). We only feel the proficiency (die Fertigkeit) of our powers, Bolzano adds, without having any awareness of its components, and usually without having a clear idea or judgement of it.

Drawing these threads together, Bolzano offers a definition of ‘beauty’ that is repeated with minor variations at several points in his text:

The beautiful must be an object the contemplation of which can give pleasure to all human beings whose cognitive faculties are properly developed. The reason why such observers experience this pleasure is that when they have contemplated some of the beautiful object’s attributes, they form a concept of the object that allows them already to guess at other attributes to be found through further observation and contempla-tion. The formation of this concept is neither too easy nor requires the effort of dis-tinct thought, and the observers thereby have at least an obscure apprehension of the proficiency [Fertigkeit] of their cognitive powers. (§18, 37; cf. §11, 27, §14, 30, 31)9

Before he moves on to a discussion of some of the implications of this explication of beauty, Bolzano briefly discusses a few examples. The first is the logarithmic spiral. As we contemplate a drawing of this kind of spiral, we look for a regularity, have a clear but confused apprehension of the pattern, and find it pleasing. It does not follow that we are in a position to identify the mathematical formula governing this figure, nor that all beautiful figures of this sort must partake of some underlying form of beauty. Bolzano does not, by the way, contend that the spira mirabilis has a beauty superior to that of the Archimedean spiral and other figures.

A second example is the fable of the wolf and the lamb, which Bolzano had earlier discussed in a passage in the Wissenschaftslehre, where he introduces some thoughts about works of fiction and poetic imagery.10 Those who devise a Dichtung or poiema, Bolzano there notes, do not have the intention of getting us to believe that the represented events refer to actual, particular objects or events in the real world. Instead the goal is to inspire resolu-tions and feelings. In the essay on beauty, Bolzano says that what makes this fable beautiful is the way the parts of the story fit together to serve the point the author wants to convey. Without having to bring our thoughts about these parts into our awareness, we grasp the pattern and are delighted by this proof of our intellectual proficiency (Denkfertigkeit): ‘herein lies the ground of our finding the work beautiful’ (§11, 28).

9 I have done violence to Bolzano’s torturous syntax here. For help in this, I thank Andreas Matthias.

10 Wissenschaftslehre, §284, 66.


Bolzano gives a brief analysis of ‘ugliness’ and signals an ambiguity that would appear to have no analogue in the case of beauty. In one sense, ‘ugliness’ refers to attributes that cause displeasure in a way that runs directly contrary to the way beautiful objects can give pleasure. When we experience some of the object’s attributes, we try to discover in it other, corresponding features, but in the case of ugliness our hope is disappointed when we encounter something that defeats our attempt to frame a conception of the object’s regularity. The process whereby these expectations and disappointments occur does not require what Bolzano calls ‘the effort of distinct thinking’ (die Mühe des deutlichen Denkens) (§18, 37). Bolzano’s examples of ugliness include a failed or false rhyme in a poem and a break in symmetry in a building. This is not, however, the only kind of ugliness to be identified. Some things are ugly, Bolzano proposes, in the sense of being immediately repugnant or hateful.

Bolzano argues that his explication of beauty has several implications that speak in its favour. First of all, it helps explain why it has proven so difficult to provide explicit grounds for particular judgements of beauty, since these judgements involve obscure and confused cognitions. Bolzano does not, however, endorse de gustibus; nor does he speak of beauty as a je ne sais quoi, by definition indescribable or even inexplicable. Stating himself to be in agreement with Moses Mendelssohn in this regard, Bolzano writes that instead of referring to a darkly known unity (dunkel erkannte Einheit), it would be more accurate to speak of a darkly knowable (erkennbare) unity, the point being that the parts and relations that make up a beautiful object are not necessarily inaccessible. Nor are they detectable only through the operation of a specialized faculty or sense (§29, 49). Yet Bolzano is very critical of previous attempts to identify a particular type of order or organization (such as unity in diversity, harmony, proportion, or symmetry) as the essence of beauty. None of these overly broad terms picks out the sole type of order capable of supporting the special type of cognition giving rise to the enjoyment of beauty.

Bolzano contends that a second advantage of his proposal is that it provides additional support for the traditional idea that the only senses that contribute directly and indepen-dently to our experience of beauty are sight and hearing (§16, 34–35). Here he appeals to his own version of the familiar claim that the other senses cannot provide combinations and successions manifesting an order or pattern of the sort required for beauty—where in Bolzano’s account, this is a matter of the pattern being susceptible to the sort of cognitive process referred to in his definition.

Thirdly, Bolzano claims that his explication best explains why in some cases we take the most pleasure in the beauty of an object when we have not experienced it before. What matters is the complexity of the object and the relative ease or difficulty with which someone can grasp its pattern. There are cases where on a first encounter it is neither too easy nor too hard to do so. In other cases, where the pattern is more complex and harder to grasp, repeated experiences may be required if the object’s beauty is to be appreciated. Bolzano also contends that his account explains why people who have differ-ent degrees of education, training, or experience diverge in their enjoyments of different kinds of beauty. Some people prefer beauty’s simpler and more accessible forms, while others derive greater enjoyment when the object’s regularity is more complex and so less obvious.


Bolzano anticipates and responds to several objections to his proposal. A first objection has it that even a simple colour or sound can be beautiful, and that in such cases there is no complex apprehension of a regularity amongst the object’s qualities. One way of deal-ing with this familiar Plotinian objection would be to classify such cases as instances of what is pleasant to the senses but not beautiful. Yet Bolzano argues instead that even an experience of a single unbroken tone or uniform field of colour has unrecognized, con-fusedly represented constituents. For there to be an enjoyment of the beauty of a single coloured surface or a single enduring sound, there must be complex underlying sensorial and mental processes, which Bolzano evokes, following Kant on Euler, with reference to the ‘vibrations of the aether or air’ and its actions on our nerves, none of which is the object of a clear and distinct cognition when the object is enjoyed (§19, 38–39). As he puts it in the Wissenschaftslehre, ‘the individual ideas pass by too quickly for us to intuit them individually’.11

Yet if the obscurity and confusedness of such seemingly simple perceptions is admit-ted, it might be objected that Bolzano’s previous exclusion of the pleasure granted by the exercise of the ‘lower’ senses from the domain of beauty must be reconsidered. Why should the delights of the three ‘lower’ senses not be recognized as beautiful delights? Is there no exercise here of the proficiency of obscure cognition? Bolzano’s response to this question is that the cognitive processes involved differ significantly. Although the sense of touch can in some cases detect a pleasing pattern of some complexity, this could not be an experience of beauty because it would require too much of an effort of distinct analysis to yield pleasure in the right sort of way (§16, 34–35). In other cases, the sensorial delights brought by taste, touch, and smell would fail to satisfy the ‘not too easy’ condition on the cognitive process involved. That the exercise of these sensory modalities has more com-plex and sophisticated rewards is not something Bolzano denies, yet he contends that in such cases—his example being someone’s knowledgeable appreciation of food or wine—we reason from a perceived taste to its ingredients or origins. This is different from the appreciation of sounds or colours in which we arrive at a successful concept on the basis of a clear but confused cognition of the attributes and relations of the object itself.

A second anticipated criticism is that Bolzano’s account makes the appreciation of works of art too easy, since beauty must be recognized without the effort required to come up with a lucid and detailed analysis of the object’s components and their relations. Is not scholarly knowledge a prerequisite to the understanding and appreciation of some works? In response to this question, Bolzano can invoke his broad claim that the object of beauty must be contemplated appropriately and with understanding. He can coherently allow, then, that in some cases difficult study is indeed required before a pleasant experi-ence of the object’s beauty can be had. He also insists that the guesswork and reasoning involved in experiences of beauty are distinct from the pursuit of strictly necessary rela-tions characteristic of mathematical reasoning.

To the objection that he reduces beauty to regularity, and that there are both irregu-lar beauties as well as regularities devoid of beauty, Bolzano responds that indeed many regularities cannot inspire the kind of cognitive process referred to in his explication of

11 Ibid., §286, 90.


beauty, and so are not beautiful. The beauties thought to be wholly irregular are only so in relation to certain expectations about what kinds of regularities there are, but not to all actual regularities. And to those who might complain that beautiful art is the product, not of rule-following, but of freely acting genius, Bolzano replies that whether an object is actually beautiful is not determined by this aspect of its emergence or production. If it is objected that it follows from his account that a perfectly predictable play or musical com-position is a beautiful one, and that all surprises must be ugly, he replies that the objection is met by his condition that it must be neither too easy nor too difficult to come up with a confused conception of the object’s regularity. A totally predictable composition would not allow us to exercise our cognitive powers in a rewarding way and so would be boring, not pleasant.

Half of Bolzano’s essay on beauty is devoted to a highly detailed critical review of the literature on the topic. I shall refer to this fascinating material only very selectively in what follows.

2. A Dark, Derivative Doctrine?

In a paper on Bolzano’s account of beauty, Peter McCormick writes: ‘The problem of course is understanding just what it is to which Bolzano is referring in his metaphorical talk of dark apprehensions.’12 Unable to solve this problem, McCormick concludes bleakly that ‘Bolzano’s doctrine of the dark judgment is itself a dark doctrine’.13 Disagreeing explicitly with this verdict, Achim Vesper states that Bolzano’s ideas about ‘aesthetic per-ception’ derive from Leibniz and his followers, especially Wolff and Baumgarten:

Bolzano patently borrows from the traditional distinction between clear and distinct ideas. For Wolff, the specificity of distinct ideas is precisely that we are conscious of what they imply: in the same manner, Bolzano speaks of ideas without distinct con-sciousness when the consciousness of the ideas is not joined to a consciousness of what they imply. It follows that a subject who perceives aesthetically, while being conscious of his or her ideas, does not at the same time know what they imply in detail.14

As I shall argue at greater length below, Vesper is right to hold that McCormick’s dark conclusion is unwarranted. Yet in response to Vesper I would say that Bolzano neither for-mulates nor seeks to defend a general account of ‘aesthetic perception’. More importantly, perhaps, Bolzano did not passively accept what Vesper calls ‘the traditional distinction’, if only because he found that philosophers using the words klar, dunkel, deutlich, undeu-tlich, and verworren (as well as the related terms in Latin and other languages) disagreed with each other quite significantly over their meanings. Bolzano remarks, for example, that ‘in the determination of the concepts of clarity [Klarheit] and darkness [Dunkelheit]

12 McCormick, ‘Bolzano and the Dark Doctrine’, 103.

13 Ibid., 106.

14 Achim Vesper, ‘Contempler, distinguer: Bolzano sur la conceptualité de la perception esthétique’, in Charlotte

Morel (ed.), Esthétique et logique (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012), 51–70, at

56–57, my translation. Vesper draws an interesting connection to Johann Georg Sulzer on 57 n. 16.


philosophers diverge sharply’.15 In the essay on beauty he says that the conceptual clarifi-cations provided by the members of the Leibniz-Wolff school (and he refers explicitly to Baumgarten, Delbrück, and Maass) were limited by their failure to understand the dif-ference between the Bestandtheilen (components) and Merkmale (marks or attributes) of a concept (§26, 45–46); this complaint crops up again below.

In his lengthy critical notes on the literature, Bolzano passes judgement on the ways other philosophers have sought to define terms and clarify concepts. On the crucial topic of what constitutes the clarity of subjective ideas and judgements, he remarks that what-ever weaknesses Descartes’ explanation of clarity may have had, he was right to say that clear subjective ideas and judgements are those to which the mind directs its attention and that are intuited (angeschaut).16 Bolzano then cites and rejects Locke’s identification of ‘full and evident perception’ as the criterion of the clarity of an idea, on the grounds that Locke’s remarks are ambiguous and overlook the possibility of someone having a clear but non-perceptual idea, such as a thought of virtue.

Bolzano also cites two of Leibniz’s statements on the topic: ‘a cognition is clear if I have it in such a way that I can re-identify the thing represented’, and ‘an idea is clear when it suffices to recognize and distinguish the thing; without this the idea is obscure’.17 Bolzano adds that Leibniz’s definition is ‘essentially retained by Wolf [sic]’ and several other phi-losophers.18 Ambiguity is again Bolzano’s main complaint. He lays out different senses of ‘the object of an idea’ and tries to determine whether any of them fits Leibniz’s remarks. If the thesis is that an idea is clear only if it suffices to pick out some single actual thing, Bolzano objects that not every clear idea has an actual object: one can have a very clear idea of a man with a golden tongue. We could also have a clear idea of a distant object without being able to distinguish it from others or recognize it later on. Bolzano com-ments: ‘When we refer to the clarity of an idea we are now accustomed to thinking of a certain relation between that idea and our consciousness; but whether a given idea A suffices to pick out the object to which we relate it does not depend on how this idea is represented in our consciousness, but on its relation to that object.’19

Bolzano attributes to Kant the thesis that ideas are clear when they are conscious (bewusst) and dark when they are not. To support such a thesis, he adds, it would be necessary to have a more precise determination of what is understood by consciousness. Bolzano then explores the proposition that to be conscious of an idea is to form a belief or judgement that one has it. He considers and rejects the thesis that consciousness is a


16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., §280, 31. The first citation, given in Latin in Bolzano’s text, is from the second paragraph of Meditationes

de cognitione, veritate et ideis, in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin:

Weidmausche, 1880), Vol. 4, 422; the second citation, given in French in Bolzano’s text, can be found in the

Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement, Book 2, chapter 29, paragraph 2, page 256, in Œuvres de Leibniz, ed. A. Jacques (Paris:

Charpentier, 1846), 265. For an informative discussion of Leibniz’s views on topics in aesthetics, see Frederick

C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: OUP, 2009). See also Christia

Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).


19 Ibid., §280, 32.


matter of being disposed to form a higher-order judgement about one’s own ideas. He takes up the possibility that the clarity of an idea depends on the way we actually represent it to ourselves, where this representation is achieved by a higher-order idea that refers exclusively to its object. Such a representation is not the same thing as having a compound concept or a description of the idea, such as ‘the idea I had precisely at midnight on New Year’s Eve in 2012’, since one could have such a thought without being aware of what that idea was. Bolzano then reaches the following conclusion: ‘An idea is clear if we represent it to ourselves by intuiting [anschauen] it. When this is not the case, I will call it obsure [dunkel].’20 Bolzano subsequently distinguishes between clear and obscure judgements along precisely the same lines,21 where by ‘judgement’ he means what is common to assertion, belief, holding true, and opining.22

What, then, did Bolzano mean by Anschauung, and why might he have thought this notion could be used to elucidate cognitive ‘clarity’? Like Kant, Bolzano may have been influenced by some of the ways in which medieval philosophers used the term intuitio to refer to introspective and singular cognition.23 He did not, however, use the term Anschauung just the way Kant did.24 So on this topic we would do well to turn to the rel-evant sections of the Wissenschaftslehre, including the section entitled ‘What the Author Understands by Intuitions’.25

Even a brief and selective presentation of Bolzano’s relevant contentions on this topic must begin by mentioning his distinction between subjective and objective ideas. A subjec-tive idea is what we would today call a token mental event whereby someone ‘occurrently’ has a certain idea (and for Bolzano, ideas or Vorstellungen are constituents of propositions). Objective ideas (or ideas ‘in themselves’), on the other hand, are the possible contents or ‘immediate matter’ of subjective ideas; objective ideas may or may not have been thought by someone, and may or may not represent actual items. Bolzano applies this subjective/objective distinction to propositions, concepts, and intuitions.

In the abridged survey in Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre und Religionswissenschaft, Bolzano’s discussion of intuition is prefaced by the statement that it is undeniable that we have the ability to form ideas of our own ideas, for otherwise we would not be able to speak about them and say we have them.26 The account of intuition that he sets forth here as well as in

20 Ibid., §280, 29.

21 Ibid., §295, 116.

22 Ibid., §34, 154.

23 John Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2007),

285–287.

24 This point is established in great detail in Timothy Rosenkoetter, ‘Kant and Bolzano on the Singularity of

Intuitions’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 85 (2012), 89–129.

25 Wissenschaftslehre, §72. Sandra Lapointe discusses Bolzano’s account of intuitions in her Bolzano’s Theoretical

Philosophy: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31. Valuable background is provided in Mark

Textor, ‘Bolzano’s Anti-Kantianism: From A Priori Cognitions to Conceptual Truths’, in Michael Beaney (ed.),

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 227–249.

26 Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre und Religionswissenschaft in einer beurtheilenden Uebersicht (Sulzbach: Seidelschen, 1841),

72. Although Bolzano is referred to in the third person throughout this anonymously published work, it is

generally agreed that it was written by Bolzano himself.


the Wissenschaftslehre runs as follows. Something causes a modification of the mind—for example, I open the package and smell the aroma of freshly ground coffee. My attention is drawn to this mental change, and the next and immediate effect of this attention is that a subjective idea of this change arises. This indexical idea refers exclusively to the mental event that is its proximate cause, namely, this immediate, attentional modification of one’s mind. The idea’s extension is singular because it picks out this and only this individual and non-repeatable mental event. The subjective intuition is a simple idea as well, since its content is just this immediate change. Given Bolzano’s subjective/objective distinction, we can say that the subjective intuition is caused by a mental modification represented by the objective intuition that is the content of the subjective intuition.

An intuition of one’s immediate idea can be accompanied by other ideas or judge-ments. Bolzano writes of ‘mixed ideas’ in which non-intuitive ideas—for Bolzano, con-cepts—are compounded with intuitions. Some of these mixed ideas can be classified as intuitions due to the importance of their intuitive constituent(s). In Bolzano’s examples, ‘This, which is a colour’ is an intuitive mixed idea, while ‘The truths contained in this book’ is a conceptual mixed idea. Bolzano also introduces a distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘external’ intuitions, where the difference hinges on whether the change and object of the idea is itself another idea or judgement, or instead some external object that effected the change.27

Given this explication of ‘intuition’, we can say that for Bolzano an idea or other men-tal event lacks clarity, and so is ‘obscure’ or ‘dark’, because there is no intuition, that is, no higher-order, indexical simple and singular idea, that represents it. Clarity, following Bolzano’s explication, is not a matter of degree: either we have a subjective intuition of some token mental event of ours or we do not. Vividness, force, perfection, and dis-tinctness are different sorts of possible attributes of mental events, conducive but not equivalent to clarity. In the essay on beauty there is additional textual evidence indicating that Bolzano thought of obscure cognition as thinking that lacks a higher-order intuitive representation. When we enjoy beauty because of the successful exercise of our cognitive powers, we have no second-order cognition of our cognitive proficiency or of the process whereby its exercise gives us pleasure.

What about the putative link between clarity and consciousness? Remarks that crop up here and there in the Wissenschaftslehre indicate an inclination on Bolzano’s part to favour what we would today call an actualist higher-order thought view of consciousness.28 Yet Bolzano probably did not think he could provide the successful, reductive explica-tion of consciousness needed to support a strong thesis about a conceptual link between


28 Bolzano’s remarks in this vein include the comment that animals ‘may not be able to judge that they have made

a judgement, and thus not have any distinct consciousness (§35, 161, italics); and ‘in doing this [compounding

a concept] the mind does not form the judgement that it does it, but … performs these operations without

being clearly conscious of them’ (§302, 139–140, my italics). This is puzzling: if consciousness is a matter of the

clarity given by intuitions (higher-order indexical thoughts), and never a matter of degree, in what sense could

consciousness be ‘obscure’?


consciousness and clarity. He may have prudently refrained from proposing such an expli-cation of consciousness.

I turn now to the contrast between distinct and confused ideas or judgements. That on this issue Bolzano was influenced by Leibniz and others should not be questioned, yet it is important to point out that Bolzano did not merely echo Leibniz’s, Wolff’s, or any one else’s opinion on the matter. He complains, for example, that Leibniz confounds the components of which an idea is composed with the various properties of the object rep-resented by this idea, where only the former are relevant to the definition of the idea and to its classification as distinct or confused.29 Bolzano charges Baumgarten with attempt-ing a mistaken explanation of distinctness in terms of clarity alone. More specifically, the objection is that the distinctness of a complex subjective idea does not follow merely from a clear representation of the ideas of which it is composed, but also requires that the subject know that the compound idea is composed of these parts. Bolzano’s point here is that knowledge (Wissen) of component ideas as such, and of their relations to each other within the complex idea as a whole, is different from just having discrete intuitions of the component ideas.

Setting aside Bolzano’s criticisms of other views on the matter, we can briefly char-acterize his preferred manner of drawing the relevant distinctions as follows. He claims that if an idea is simple and the person who has this idea knows it to be so, it is distinct. If it is simple, but the person who has the idea somehow does not know this, it is indis-tinct (undeutlich). If someone has an idea and knows it to be complex, and also knows what its parts are, then it is distinct (at least to the first degree, since there can be known or unknown parts within known parts, and so degrees of distinctness, as Leibniz con-tended). If the subject knows that an idea is complex, but does not know what the parts of this idea are, then it is confused (verworren). If someone does not know that an idea is complex (either because it is wrongly taken to be simple, or the person has no thought on the matter), then this idea is confused. Both sorts of ‘confusion’ are relevant to the apprehension of beauty as Bolzano understands it.

To sum up, it should be acknowledged that Bolzano explicitly sought to provide precise conceptual explications for a discourse based on such contrasts as light vs dark, transpar-ent vs opaque, and clear vs unclear. Although he did not attempt a reductive analysis of consciousness, he did explicate the metaphorical use of ‘clarity’ by turning to an analysis of what he called Anschauung, which he in turn explicated in terms of a second-order singular thought caused by the event that is its object.30 Bolzano’s explications of these notions do, of course, leave some difficult questions unanswered. Yet it was not just a metaphorical ‘shot in the dark’ on Bolzano’s part to refer to many of our responses to beautiful objects as obscure or dark, because what he literally meant was that we do not have second-order indexical singular thoughts about each of the mental events that occur

29 Wissenschaftslehre, §281, 43; cf. §64.

30 Unless we refrain from translating Bolzano’s Anschauung as ‘intuition’, it is potentially misleading to explicate

Bolzano’s reference to ‘dark’ ideas or judgements as a kind of ‘intuitive’ cognition, as does Maria E. Reicher in

her ‘Austrian Aesthetics’, in Mark Textor (ed.), The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy (London: Routledge,

2006), 293–323, at 300. For Bolzano, the intuitive is clear, while dark thoughts are those lacking intuition.


as we observe and judge these objects. More specifically, there is the tendency on the part of observers of beauty not to recognize that the source of their pleasure in beauty is not just the features of the object, but the exercise of cognitive powers of which they are usu-ally only dimly aware. It was not just a ‘dark doctrine’ to propose that even when we intuit (in his sense) some of our feelings and thoughts about a beautiful object’s qualities, it does not follow that we know the components of these thoughts and feelings, or that we know all of the parts of these components.

3. Bolzano Today

It turns out that some recent empirical work in psychology meshes nicely with salient aspects of Bolzano’s speculations about beauty, and in this section I shall briefly evoke a few of these connections.

Bolzano, I have observed, stressed the prevalence and practical value of ‘dark’, ‘indis-tinct’, and ‘confused’ cognitive processes. With reference to decades of empirical investi-gations into implicit learning and tacit knowledge, Arthur S. Reber provocatively proposes that the burden of proof should be shifted onto the shoulders of those who wish to claim that a particular cognitive process is conscious or reflective rather than unreflective and unconscious. The evidence, he contends, amply supports the conclusion that ‘any sensible theory of mind is going to have to have in it a rich cognitive unconscious processing system or systems’.31 Consider in this regard what contemporary psychoacoustics has to teach us about the nature and audition of even the simplest harmonic chords. As Juan G. Roeder puts the basic point, ‘music is made up of complex tones, each one of which consists of a superposition of pure tones blended together in a certain relationship so as to appear to our brain as unanalysed wholes’.32 The psychoacoustic research corroborates Bolzano’s suggestion that our response is ‘confused’ in the sense that it is not a matter of a stepwise higher-order recognition of the concurrent and successive parts of our processing of the complex stimuli to which we respond.

Contemporary psychologists do not speak of ‘the effort of distinct cognition’, nor do they wield the idiom of ‘clear but confused’ ideas about an object’s attributes.33 Psychologists Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman do, however, refer to a subject’s ‘implicit learning’ of ‘stimulus regularities’, where such learning involves unconscious processing converging on the recognition of a pattern. Their results support the thesis that what they call ‘processing fluency’ correlates significantly with ‘positive

31 Arthur S. Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford: OUP, 1993), 21.

32 Juan G. Roederer, The Physics and Psychophysics of Music: An Introduction, 4th edn (New York: Springer, 2008), 113.

33 Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman, ‘Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty

in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?’, Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004), 364–382; see also

Piotr Winkielman et al., ‘The Hedonic Marking of Processing Fluency: Implications for Evaluative Judgment’,

in Jochen Musch and Karl Christoph Klauer (eds), The Psychology of Evaluation: Affective Processes in Cognition and

Emotion (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), 189–221.


aesthetic response’, and even with preferences indicative of a more specific judgement of beauty.

What psychologists understand by ‘processing fluency’ is the ease, speed, and accu-racy with which the relevant physical and semantic features of a stimulus are identified. Fluency, in the specified sense, is correlated with positive affect, and this experienced affect, and not a direct experience of the processing fluency, is the basis of the judgement of beauty. In Bolzanian terms, this is a matter of saying that the enjoyment felt by the subject has its source in the ease and success of the pattern recognition, not in any clear idea of the underlying proficiency. The evidence for this fluency-affect link is provided in subjects’ statements of preference and other reports, but also by such psychophysical measures as facial electromyography.34

As Bolzano would have it, the affective response is interpreted by the subject as a reaction to the features of the target object, not as the effect of the fluency with which the stimulus was processed. The affective reward yielded by processing fluency medi-ates between the judgement of the object’s merit and the various factors that indirectly influence the subject’s preferences, such as regularities in the stimulus (symmetry, ‘good form’, prototypicality), previous experience, and implicit learning (defined as a non-reflective apprehension of a rule or pattern). Beauty, these psychologists propose, is nei-ther an objective property nor whatever pleases the senses; it is instead ‘grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver that emerge from the interaction of stimulus properties and perceivers’ cognitive and affective process’.35

The psychologists whose research I have mentioned above acknowledge that ‘moderat-ing variables’ can vitiate the simple thesis that ‘the more fluently the perceiver can process an object, the more positive is his or her aesthetic response’.36 In the case of Bolzano’s pro-posal, the simple thesis was already blocked by his condition on the use of the observer’s cognitive proficiency, his assumption being that beauty is not enjoyed when the recogni-tion of the pattern comes too easily. The psychologists observe that whether the subject expects it to be easy to process something can make a difference in that surprising fluency can yield more enjoyment than expected fluency, just as extensive prior knowledge of the source can diminish the effect. Bolzano made no observations relevant to the latter variable, but he did, as we have seen above, underscore the influence of surprise in our cognition of beauty. Systematic differences with regard to the subject’s degree of exper-tise in the domain in question have also been investigated with regard to their influence on the correlation between rewards and fluency. As might be expected, art experts may enjoy a work of art partly due to the ease with which it was grasped by them, but they may also rank it less highly in terms of its beauty, artistic excellence, or some other aesthetic desideratum. Bolzano has room for the variable of expertise in his account and adverts to differences in the appreciation of beauty that are explicable precisely along these lines.

34 Piotr Winkielman and John T. Cacioppo, ‘Mind at Ease Puts a Smile on the Face: Psychophysiological Evidence

that Processing Facilitation Leads to Positive Affect’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001),

989–1000.

35 Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman, ‘Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure’, 365.

36 Ibid.


4. Pure and Mixed Beauty

Bolzano does not explicitly develop a distinction between pure beauty and some other kind of beauty, but in his critical comments on prior proposals in the literature, he casti-gates others for having overlooked this matter.37 The enjoyment of pure beauty, he tells us, is different from prevalent experiences in which the pleasure yielded by beauty interacts significantly with pleasures from other sources, such as sensory arousal, the prospect of instrumental pay-offs, or our admiration of what is morally good. These sorts of advan-tages may heighten the pleasure we take in some object, but they do not belong on the scales that measure an object’s pure beauty. Bolzano judges, for example, that the beauty of music is not to be reckoned in terms of the particular charm of an instrument or voice.38 These considerations lead Bolzano to write more generally of the mixed beauties of musical and literary works. He comments as well that the beauty of the human face is a very mixed beauty, since it involves not only symmetry or regularity of the features, but the expres-sion of physical and spiritual health, good judgement, and moral virtue.

These points have implications for Bolzano’s views about the relative role of confused and distinct cognition in an adequate evaluation of an object’s beauty. Consider a relatively simple example. Auditors are asked to listen to a melody played in two versions: first the melody is played on an instrument that has a strikingly unpleasant timbre, and then it is played on a piano. Hearing the first version causes the auditors to grimace. According to Bolzano, the object of their response is not the pure beauty of the melody, but the timbre of the instrument, which has a kind of ugliness distinct from the sort of ugliness that would stand in direct contrast to pure beauty as Bolzano understands it. Suppose now that when they hear the second version, the subjects recognize that the melody is quite lovely and enjoy hearing it. It would seem, then, that their negative response to the first version involved a confused cognition in which the different components (i.e. the attributes of the melody and the timbre of the instrument) were not distinctly recognized. If so, this was a case where a confused cognition precluded an accurate judgement of the melody’s pure beauty. Expert auditors should be capable of having a distinct cognition in which the beauty of the melody is recognized, if not enjoyed, on a hearing of the first version. Similarly, some observers may be capable of appreciating the beauty of a representational work the subject matter of which includes unattractive elements. Bolzano allows, for example, that a beautiful whole could contain components that are ugly. He suggests that a repellent face (e.g. that of the villain) that appears in the right place in a dramatic representation could be relatively beautiful in that it contributes to the overall beauty of the play as a whole.

Bolzano does not go on from here to attempt to identify principles governing the inter-action of the various factors involved in a mixed apprehension of beauty or ugliness, just as he refrains from trying to say what place pure beauty has in the overall merit of a work of

37 This complaint is levelled against associationist theories of beauty (Locke, Home, and Sayers) in §32, 52–53, and

against Umbreit in §57, 90, who is said to be clueless about this ‘nöthig’ distinction.

38 Bolzano follows Kant in this regard; cf. the assertion that the ‘tone’ of musical instruments belongs only to the

agreeable in §7 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft.


art. In an anticipation of what we might today call a ‘contextualist’ position, he indicates that he thinks the relations between these sorts of different factors are too complex and tangled for any straightforward principles to be set forward. It does not follow, however, that Bolzano should be classified as a forerunner of an aestheticist or immoralist position. Bolzano observed that people wrongly deprive themselves of many pleasures in life by fail-ing to think about how to make things more beautiful. Yet to this endorsement of the ‘art of living beautifully’ was added a reservation about carrying an interest in beauty too far.39 In some cases our concern for beauty must be subordinated to other factors. If it conflicts with our overarching goal of enhancing the general happiness of all sentient beings, our otherwise legitimate interest in beauty must be sacrificed.40,41

Paisley LivingstonLingnan [email protected]

39 Bernard Bolzano, Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste: Eine ästhetische Abhandlung (Prague: Gottlieb Haase,

1849), §1, 4; §5, 8–9. In this regard Bolzano approvingly cites several texts by Wilhelm Bronn, including his

Kalobiotik, oder die Kunst schön zu leben: wissenschaftlich aufgefasst (Leipzig: R. Bünder, 1839).

40 For background on Bolzano’s ethics, see Bernard Bolzano, Selected Writings on Ethics and Politics, ed. and trans.

Paul Rusnock and Rolf George (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

41 I am grateful to Rafael De Clercq, Andrea Sauchelli, and two anonymous readers for helpful comments on a draft

of this paper. I also thank Stuart Brock, Stephen Davies, Sondra Bacharach and other participants for helpful

comments and questions after talks I gave at Hong Kong University, Victoria University of Wellington, and the

Universities of Auckland and Otago.

mailto:[email protected]?subject=

Copyright of British Journal of Aesthetics is the property of Oxford University Press / USAand its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv withoutthe copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, oremail articles for individual use.

bolzano on beauty (livingston)

Documents