THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY 



ESTHETICS 



BY MAX DESSOIR 

 (Translated from the German by Miss Ethel D. Puffer, Cambridge, Mass.) 



[Max Dessoir, Professor of Philosophy, University of Berlin, since 1897. b. 

 1867, Berlin, Germany. Ph.D. Berlin, 1889; M.D. Wiirzburg, 1892. Pri- 

 vat-docent, University of Berlin, 1892-97. Member German Psychological 

 Society, Society for Psychical Research, London. Author of The Double Ego; 

 History of the New German Psychology ; Philosophical Reader; jEsthetik u. All- 

 gemeineKunstwissenschaft; and many other works and papers on philosophy.] 



IN the development which our science has undergone, from its 

 inception up to the present day, one thought has held a central 

 place, --that aesthetic enjoyment and production, beauty and art, 

 are inseparably allied. The subject-matter of this science is held to 

 be, though varied, of a unitary character. Art is considered as the 

 representation of the beautiful, which comes to pass out of an aes- 

 thetic state or condition, and is experienced in a similar attitude; the 

 science which deals with these two psychical states, with the beau- 

 tiful and its modifications, and with art in its varieties, is, inasmuch 

 as it constitutes a unity, designated by the single name of aesthetics. 



The critical thought of the present day is, however, beginning to 

 question whether the beautiful, the aesthetic, and art stand to one 

 another in a relation that can be termed almost an identity. The 

 undivided sway of the beautiful has already been assailed. Since 

 art includes the tragic and the comic, the graceful and the sublime, 

 and even the ugly, and since aesthetic pleasure can attach itself to 

 all these categories, it is clear that by "the beautiful" something 

 narrower must be meant than the artistically and aesthetically 

 valuable. Yet beauty might still constitute the end and aim and 

 central point of art, and it might be that the other categories but 

 denote the way to beauty -- beauty in a state of becoming, -as it 

 were. 



But even this view, which sees in beauty the real content of art, 

 and the central object of aesthetic experiences, is open to serious 

 question. It is confronted with the fact, above all, that the beauty 

 enjoyed in life and that enjoyed in art are not the same. The artist's 

 copy of the beauty of nature takes on a quite new character. Solid 

 objects in space become in painting flat pictures, the existent is in 

 poetry transformed into matter of speech; and in every realm is a 



