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Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
Beardsley, Monroe
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Beardsley, Monroe
(1915–1985), American philosopher and writer who had broad humanist interests that were centered in philosophy, and
aesthetics in particular.

Born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University, Monroe Beardsley
taught at a number of American universities, including his alma mater, but most of his career was
spent at Swarthmore College and Temple University.

Beardsley is best known for his work in aesthetics, but he also published articles in various areas of
philosophy, including the philosophy of history, action theory, and the history of modern philosophy.
Indeed, his interests were not confined to “pure philosophy” or even to philosophy broadly
conceived. Practical Logic (1950), his first book, was one of the first informal logic, or critical
thinking, texts of the contemporary era, and Thinking Straight, a related book, saw four editions over
a period of twenty-five years. Outside of philosophy, he wrote literary criticism and books and
articles on style, writing, and the humanities.

Beardsley's first article in the philosophy of art is probably his best known. In “The Intentional
Fallacy” (1946; written with W.K. Wimsatt), he argues that “the intention of the author is neither
available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” Nor, he adds,
is the intention of the author relevant to judging what a literary work means. When generalized to all
the arts, what this amounts to is that an artist's intentions are irrelevant to the interpretation and
evaluation of his or her work. Statements about the meaning or value of a work of art are one thing,
Beardsley insists, and statements about an artist's psychological state quite another. The latter have
to do with the artist, not the work of art, and thus have no bearing—no evidential bearing—on what
the work means, or how good or bad it is. In a companion piece, “The Affective Fallacy” (1949;
again, with W. K. Wimsatt), Beardsley takes a similar position in regard to the emotional responses
of a reader to a literary work. The affective responses of a reader say something about the reader
but nothing about the work. Once again, the thesis can be generalized to all the arts. The
interpretation and evaluation of works of art are thus independent of what, for a critic of the
Romantic school, are of the essence: the intentions of the artist and the emotions of the art critic.

Beardsley's entire philosophy of art is, in fact, anti-Romantic through and through. The school of art
criticism that he is associated with, and rightly, is the so-called New Criticism.

Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958), Beardsley's first book in aesthetics,
might even be read as a philosophical defense of the New Criticism. It is, without a doubt, and for a
number of reasons, one of the most important books of twentieth-century aesthetics. First, it is
informed with an extensive knowledge of the arts, art criticism, and the philosophy of art. Beardsley
knew and loved the arts and was, as he once wrote, addicted to art criticism. But his knowledge of
the philosophy of art was just as broad and just as profound. Second, Aesthetics is philosophically
sophisticated and argumentatively dense in a way that few preceding books on aesthetics were and,
for that matter, few subsequent ones have been. In the main, Beardsley writes as an analytic
philosopher, and is intent on making distinctions, mapping out positions—which entailed extracting,
from massive amounts of very disparate art-critical and philosophical material, common and
comprehensible arguments and principles—and arguing for and against those positions. One wag
once called him the C. D. Broad of aesthetics for his ability to make distinctions, organize material,
and expose and critique arguments. Whatever the justice of the comparison—one important
difference between the two is that Beardsley came to a definite conclusion on virtually every topic
he wrote on—Beardsley is not exclusively an analytic philosopher. Deweyan pragmaticism makes it
way into Aesthetics, as does phenomenology. Third, and most important, Aesthetics presents and
defends a truly comprehensive philosophy of art. Virtually every major issue of aesthetics is
discussed in it, and the results are woven into a consistent, unified whole. It is for that reason that
almost every major philosopher of art in the Anglo-American tradition writing after Beardsley has
had to reckon with him, and respond to his arguments.

One issue broached in Aesthetics is the ontology of art—or “aesthetic objects,” Beardsley's
preferred term at the time. Aesthetic objects are classified as “perceptual objects,” or entities (in the
broad sense of the term that includes both buildings and dances) at least some of whose properties
are sensuously perceivable. Distinctions between the productions, performances, and presentations
of aesthetic objects lead Beardsley in the direction of phenomenalism, the view that critical
statements about aesthetic objects can be translated into statements about their presentations, that
is, their appearances to particular people at particular times. Obviously inspired by empiricist,
indeed, logical positivist, theories of perception that seemed promising at the time, Beardsley later
repudiated phenomenalism and embraced a form of “nonreductive materialism.” Works of art are
physical objects, he came to think, or—and this is a second alternative he seriously considered—
some works of art are physical objects, and some are kinds of physical object. The latter category
may be necessary because multiple instances of one and the same work are possible in some of
the arts, such as lithography.

An issue studiously avoided in Aesthetics is the definition of art. At the time, and for a variety of
reasons, Beardsley thought a head-on discussion of the issue ill-advised. Later, however, he joined
in the fray, and both proposed his own definition and criticized the art-historical and institutional
definitions of others. His own considered view is that a work of art is an arrangement of conditions
intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character. Basically, a
work of art is an artifact created with an aesthetic intention. Although there might be some
temptation to think otherwise, this definition does not run afoul of the intentional fallacy, according to
Beardsley, for the intentional fallacy concerns the interpretation and evaluation of art, not the
definition of art.

Literature, music, and the visual arts are all considered in Aesthetics, but literature, and especially
poetry, was always closest to Beardsley's heart. Explication, elucidation, and interpretation are
distinguished by him, though all are concerned with what a text means. Explication operates on the
local level, so to speak, and is contextual. To declare “the meaning of a metaphor, the connotation
of a work, [or] the implications of a fragment of ambiguous syntax” (Beardsley, 1958) is to engage in
explication. Elucidation involves forming hypotheses, based on textual evidence, to account for
things and events explicitly reported in a text. It is, Beardsley says, “simply causal inference” applied
to literary works; we elucidate when we “fill in the gaps” needed to make a story, poem, or essay
comprehensible. Finally, interpretation is a semantic relation between a literary work and something
outside it. Paradigmatically, to interpret is to state, based on reasons, the theme or thesis of a work.
Given his emphasis on interpretation, and given his views of what interpretation consists in, it is not
surprising that Beardsley held that literature is defined as discourse in which an important part of the
meaning is implicit. Literature, and again especially poetry, is basically semantically rich discourse.
Speech act theory, which Beardsley later incorporated into his aesthetics and especially his
philosophy of literature, helps to bolster the case for this view, he thinks. A poem, he says in The
Possibility of Criticism (1970), is a complex imitation of a compound illocutionary act. Properly
understood, this is close to the “final and familiar formula: poems are distinguished by their
complexity of meaning” (1970). This, however, provides only the genus of poetry, he admits, and not
the differentia.

Interpretation is only one of three basic critical activities in Beardsley's philosophy of art, the other
two being description and evaluation. It is an especially important activity, though, if only because
many art critics and more than a few philosophers play fast and loose with the concept. For one
thing, and despite the lax use of interpretation by some critics, interpretation is not the same thing
as superimposition (a term introduced in The Possibility of Criticism). To superimpose is to use a
work to illustrate a pre-existent system of thought, not to dig out meaning. To “interpret” The Merry
Wives of Windsor as a Marxist fable, for example, is really not to interpret at all. Marxist meanings—
the use of Marxist concepts and references to Marxist themes and theses—simply are not in the
play. Neither, of course, are authorial intentions or readers’ emotions.

But, contrary to some dissenting remarks from critics and philosophers, there is such a thing as the
correct interpretation of a literary work. Interpretations are true or false, in other words, and one can,
in most if not all cases, know whether an interpretation is correct. Disputes among critics can be
resolved if close attention is paid to the “potentialities of meaning” in a text. Determining what those
potentialities are requires knowing the lexical meanings of words and phrases that existed at the
time of composition, and knowing the rules of syntax operative at that time, so one may well have to
go outside a text in order to find what it means, and what interpretation of it is correct. Still, the
sources one consults are not narrowly biographical ones, or psychological or sociological ones.
They are sources that tell what a language allows, both actually and potentially, at a given time.
Interpretation is thus an objective activity, and the critic's duty, like that of any other objective
investigator, is to get at the truth. If, after all is said and done, multiple meanings remain, and such
meanings do not conflict with one another, they can all be accepted, Beardsley thinks, for they
would only enrich the text. On the other hand, if they conflict, ineliminable ambiguity (in the bad
sense of the term) is the result, and it is simply impossible to decide among competing
interpretations. Generally speaking, however, Beardsley thinks that this will seldom be the case.
Contextual factors, especially those having to do with the interaction of word and phrase meanings,
will eliminate almost all ambiguity.

Metaphor is another topic that Beardsley had a keen interest in, and he returned to it a number of
times over the years, sometimes modifying his views slightly, but always maintaining essentially the
same theory. Indeed, returning to an issue, surveying recent literature, rebutting or accepting
criticism, and modifying his position while remaining very much in the same camp—that is
characteristic of Beardsley's approach to aesthetics. In Aesthetics, he argues for what he calls the
Controversion Theory of metaphor, but essentially the same theory appears as the Verbal
Opposition Theory in “The Metaphorical Twist” (reprinted in The Aesthetic Point of View [1982]).
According to this theory, a metaphor is not an elliptical simile, nor does it work by comparing two
objects. Rather, metaphor is “a special feat of language, or verbal play, involving two levels of
meaning in the modifier” (1982) that is, in the term to be taken metaphorically. When a predicate is
metaphorically adjoined to a subject, “the predicate loses its ordinary extension because it acquires
a new intension—perhaps one it has in no other context. This twist of meaning is forced by inherent
tensions, or oppositions, within the metaphor itself” (ibid.). There are metaphorical as well as literal
senses, then, and in metaphor a term can acquire a new sense, perhaps even a nonce sense. But,
contrary to the view he originally proposed, Beardsley came to hold (in “The Metaphorical Twist”
and the “Postscript, 1980” to the 1981 edition of Aesthetics) that “the meaning of a metaphorical
word cannot be limited to its pre-existing connotations: the metaphor transforms what were
previously [known or believed] contingent properties of the things referred to [by the metaphorical
modifier] … into meanings [of that modifier].” Metaphors thus have cognitive value, and help to
extend the language.

Beardsley's views on literature in general also hold for his views on one species of literature,
namely, fiction: in being subsumed under speech act theory, the positions he argues for in
Aesthetics are not abandoned, he says, but are subsumed, reinforced, and enriched. [See FICTION.]
A fictional text is the representation or depiction of an illocutionary action, with this meaning, to use
a comparison to help make the position clearer, that a kiss in a work of fiction stands to a real kiss in
much the same way that a painting of a cow stands to a real cow, or a murder committed in a play
stands to a real murder. One reason that fiction is not a record of actual illocutionary acts, according
to Beardsley, is that fictional sentences “fail … to connect with the real world in a certain way: the
weddings narrated in the novel never took place, the names of the characters do not belong to real
persons, and so forth.” “Mr. Pickwick” and other fictional names do refer, however, even though
there is no Mr. Pickwick. What “Mr. Pickwick” refers to is, quite simply, Mr. Pickwick. One can refer
to what does not exist (or subsist), in other words, with one principal reason for holding to this
admittedly minority view being that if one did not, it would be very difficult to explain certain
fundamental facts about fiction, such as that one can refer to the same fictional character with
different tokens of the same name. As for the truth-values of fictional sentences, such sentences—
those in a fiction—are neither true nor false, Beardsley thinks. A critic's sentences about a fiction,
however—those about Othello or King Lear, for example—are a different story. They are either true
or false.

Expression theories of art are handled very roughly in Aesthetics, and Beardsley never did retreat
from his view that such theories are fundamentally misdirected. Central to expression theories is
“the assumption that artworks—or successful artworks—are created by a process in the course of
which an artist expresses his emotions, and that the special character and value of an artwork is the
result of its having been brought into being in this way” (1958). All of this is an evident hangover
from Romanticism, and none of it is correct. An artist need not express his or her emotions in the
course of creating a work of art, successful or not; and expressing emotions in creating a work of art
does not guarantee anything at all, aesthetically speaking. “The special character and value” of a
work of art—roughly, its aesthetic qualities and aesthetic value—are at best contingently related to
the emotional state of its creator, and aesthetic qualities (e.g., vivacity) can be accounted for quite
independently of any assumptions about a work's origin or manner of production. In a nutshell, the
principal problem with expression theories is that they try to explain what a work of art expresses
(e.g., majesty, remoteness) in terms of what the artist expressed, when explanation should run in
exactly the opposite direction. In other words, according to expression theories, the act or process
of expression is basic, and statements about the expressive qualities of a work derivative, because
they carry with them “an implicit reference to the expressing agent.” In point of fact, things have to
be understood the other way around. An artist's act of expression is conceptually derivative, and has
to be understood in terms of the act of creating something expressive. As always with Beardsley,
the work of art and its qualities are primary.

Aesthetic qualities are not, as such, discussed in Aesthetics, but something in the near
neighborhood is, namely, regional qualities. A regional quality is a quality that a complex (an object
having proper parts) has as a result of the characteristics of its parts and the relationships among
them. The restfulness of a Kandinsky painting is obviously a regional quality of it, and it is also an
aesthetic quality of it. Not all regional qualities are aesthetic qualities, though. Squareness, for
example, is a regional quality, but not an aesthetic quality. More promising is the suggestion that
aesthetic qualities are human regional qualities, a human regional quality being a regional quality
designated (perhaps metaphorically) by a term that also applies to human beings. Splendor, charm,
wit, dignity, and relentlessness are all human regional qualities, and all are also aesthetic qualities.
Beardsley's considered view, however, is that aesthetic qualities need not be confined to human
regional ones, even metaphorically. Rather, an aesthetic quality is a quality that counts directly for a
judgment of aesthetic value (goodness) or disvalue (badness). Aesthetic qualities supervene on
nonaesthetic qualities, just as all gestalt qualities do, and, a few exceptions aside, Frank Sibley is
right in maintaining that aesthetic terms do not have conditions of application—that is, necessary or
sufficient conditions for their application—and are not applied in accordance with rule-governed
criteria. Taste is required for their application, as Sibley says, but taste is not a mysterious faculty. It
is simply the ability to make fine and sensitive discriminations by using one's usual perceptual
equipment. One hears, in the usual sense of the term, the agitation of a musical composition; and
one sees, again in the usual sense of the term, the delicacy of a Ming vase.

Even conceding that the art critic qua art critic engages in, or at least might be required to engage
in, as many activities as Beardsley thinks—description, explication, elucidation, interpretation,
exposition of aesthetic qualities and their bases, and so on—there is still, he thinks, one essential
critical task as yet unmentioned: critical judgment or evaluation, saying how good or bad a work of
art is. The evaluation of works of art as works of art—and they can certainly be evaluated from other
perspectives, as, say, propaganda or moral instruction—is aesthetic evaluation, in Beardsley's view.
The evaluative judgments of critics, then—and a critic qua critic must evaluate—are judgments of
aesthetic value; or, better, they are estimates of aesthetic value, the latter term being preferable
because quantifiable accuracy is usually impossible in critical judgment, and confidence may be
lacking as well. Negatively, this implies that critical judgments are not many things: they are not
predictions of what others will like or appreciate; they are not statements of the tendency of a work
of art to have “sticking power” or attract people; they are not verdicts, or statements involving a
choice or a decision tied to social consequences; they are not propaedeutic aids to call attention to
something, to open people's eyes or ears, or to tell them how to look or listen or read in some
preferred way; and they are not personal endorsements, or the critic “giving his word” for the
benefits of spending time with a work of art. They are estimates of aesthetic value, and necessarily
call for support with objective reasons, reasons that cite features found in the work itself. Such
reasons can cite a work's simple qualities, its relational properties, its meanings, its references, its
aesthetic properties, and so on, for all can figure as criteria of critical judgment. On a higher level of
generality, though, there are three primary reasons, three general criteria or general canons, as
Beardsley calls them in Aesthetics, of critical judgment, which lower-level reasons factor into, and
which are the ultimate bases for critical judgment. Unity, complexity, and intensity of regional quality,
Beardsley argues, hold across the board, for all the arts, as general standards of critical judgment,
or general criteria for estimates of aesthetic value. Thus, Beardsley, never a critical skeptic, not only
thinks that criticism is based on reason and that the reasons it is based on are objective, but he also
thinks that there are fundamental standards of evaluation common to all the arts, and, as he should,
he supplies them, and argues for them.

Hinted at in much of the preceding discussion are two themes at the core of Beardsley's aesthetics:
the independence or autonomy of the work of art, and the primacy of the aesthetic. The autonomy of
works of art can be seen in their descriptive, interpretative, and evaluative independence from their
creators and from their immediate audience, and their stubborn possession of whatever descriptive,
interpretative, and evaluative properties they have, once created, across different contexts, cultural
and otherwise. That is why criticism is a search for truth, according to Beardsley, and why the critic
is an objective investigator. A being (a supernatural being, if that is required) may create a rock, but
once created, the rock has the properties it has. Those properties are in the rock, and the job of the
geologist, an objective investigator, is to discover those properties and report the truth about the
rock. That truth will not change, and is not a function of what concepts the geologist possesses, or
whether different geologists come to different assays of the rock, or whether the rock is displayed
and analyzed in different cultures. Rocks are independent or autonomous objects. They are just like
works of art, in Beardsley's view.

No less important to Beardsley's aesthetics is the primacy of the aesthetic. The main reason that art
is so important is that it is one of the main sources of a distinct and very important kind of value,
aesthetic value. Aesthetic value may be available to use outside the arts—Beardsley would be the
last to deny that nature supplies us with aesthetic value—but works of art are our principal sources
of aesthetic value, and one of our most certain ones as well. We can count on works of art to deliver
the goods, aesthetically speaking, and the goods they deliver are often concentrated, intense ones.

In fact, in a sense, Beardsley's whole aesthetics both leads up to and is founded on the notion of the
aesthetic. Criticism is founded on an interest in the aesthetic, and its job is to detect and explain
aesthetically relevant properties of works of art. Ultimately, it must issue, and justify, a judgment of
aesthetic value. A vital issue for Beardsley, then, is, What is aesthetic value?

Beardsley is committed not just to providing an answer to that question but to characterizing
aesthetic value as a distinct sort of value, not reducible to other kinds of value, such as moral,
historical, or cognitive value. In addition, he has to ground aesthetic value in terms that are not
ultimately aesthetically laden; for, if the concept were defined in aesthetic terms, and those terms
were themselves defined in aesthetic terms, and so on, the result would be an unhelpful circular
explication. In Aesthetics, the aesthetic is grounded by isolating and describing, in general terms,
“certain features of experience that are peculiarly characteristic of our intercourse with aesthetic
objects” (1958). That done, aesthetic value is defined in terms of this kind of experience, aesthetic
experience. Aesthetic experience, Beardsley argues, is experience characterized by unity
(coherence and completeness), intensity (“concentration of experience”), and complexity (“diversity
of distinct elements”). Aesthetic value is simply “the capacity to produce an aesthetic experience of
fairly great magnitude.”

Over the years Beardsley came to think that, although his earlier definition of aesthetic experience
was basically sound, it failed to capture a broader notion of the aesthetic that is “important, indeed
essential, to introduce.” This is the notion of the aesthetic in experience, or the aesthetic character
of experience. An experience, Beardsley says, has aesthetic character if and only if it has the first of
the following five features and at least three of the others:

1. Object directedness. A willingly accepted guidance over the succession of one's states by
phenomenally objective properties (qualities and relations) of a perceptual or intentional field on
which attention is fixed with a feeling that things are working or have worked themselves out
fittingly.

2. Felt freedom. A sense of release from the dominance of some antecedent concerns about past
and future, a relaxation and sense of harmony with what is presented or semantically invoked by
it or implicitly promised by it, so that what comes has the air of having been freely chosen.

3. Detached affect. A sense that the objects on which interest is concentrated are set a little at a
distance emotionally—a certain detachment of affect, so that even when we are confronted with
dark and terrible things, and feel them sharply, they do not oppress but make us aware of our
power to rise above them.

4. Active discovery. A sense of actively exercising constructive powers of the mind, of being
challenged by a variety of potentially conflicting stimuli to try to make them co-here; a keyed-up
state amounting to exhilaration in seeing connections between percepts and meanings, a sense
(which may be illusory) of intelligibility.

5. Wholeness. A sense of integration as a person, of being restored to wholeness from distracting


and disruptive influences (but by inclusive synthesis as well as by exclusion) and a corresponding
contentment, even through disturbing feelings, that involves self-acceptance and self-expansion.
This passage is from The Aesthetic Point of View (1982), Beardsley's last book. The title of the
book is a good indication of Beardsley's overall approach to art, the philosophy of art, and the
aesthetic; and the passage, in its eloquence, sensitivity, and eminently humanist understanding
of an important sector of human experience, is characteristic of his entire philosophy of art.

See also CRITICISM; INTENTION, overview article; INTERPRETATION; METAPHOR; and NEW CRITICISM.

Bibliography

Works by Beardsley
Beardsley, Monroe The Intentional Fallacy. Sewanee Review 54.3 (Summer 1946): 468–488. Collaboration
with W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.

Beardsley, Monroe The Affective Fallacy. Sewanee Review 57.1 (Winter 1949): 31–55. Collaboration with
W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.

Beardsley, Monroe Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York, 1958; 2d ed. with
postscript, Indianapolis, 1981.

Beardsley, Monroe Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present:A Short History. New York, 1966;
reprint, Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1975.

Beardsley, Monroe The Possibility of Criticism. Detroit, 1970.

Beardsley, Monroe The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays. Edited by Michael Wreen and Donald
Callen . Ithaca, N.Y., 1982.

Other Sources
Aagaard-Mogensen, Lars, and L. De Vos , eds. Text, Literature, and Aesthetics: In Honor of Monroe C.
Beardsley. Amsterdam, 1986.

Fisher, John , ed. Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley. Philadelphia,
1983.

Michael J. Wreen

Copyright © Oxford University Press 2007 — 2012.

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