7 Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Aesthetics

Leo Tolstoy quotes on aesthetics

54. People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

55. In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

70. ...having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.

71. The partisans of aesthetic theory denied that it was their own invention, and professed that it existed in the nature of things and even that it was recognized by the ancient Greeks. But... among the ancient Greeks, due to their low grade (compared to the Christian) moral ideal, their conception of the good was not yet sharply distinguished from their conception of the beautiful. That highest conception of goodness (not identical with beauty and for the most part, contrasting with it) discerned by the Jews even in the time of Isaiah and fully expressed by Christianity, was unknown to the Greeks. It is true that the Greek's foremost thinkers - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - felt that goodness may not coincide with beauty. ...But notwithstanding all this, they could not quite dismiss the notion that beauty and goodness coincide. And consequently in the language of that period a compound word (????-???????, beauty-goodness) came into use to express that notion. Evidently the Greek sages began to draw close to the perception of goodness which is expressed in Buddhism and in Christianity, but they got entangled in defining the relationship between goodness and beauty. And it was just this confusion of ideas that those Europeans of a later age...tried to elevate into law. ...On this misunderstanding the new science of aesthetics was built.

72. After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ...the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Benard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

75. The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. ...life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea... an idea not definable by reason... yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful... is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good. ...the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty... we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.

77. And so the arbitrary union of three incommensurate, mutually disconnected concepts became the basis of a bewildering theory... [by which] one of the lowest renderings of art, art for mere pleasure - against which all of the master teachers warned - was idealized as the ultimate in art.