Beauty, Unity, and Multiplicity

Aesthetics is traditionally the study of Beauty, the essence of which is Harmony. Harmony, in general, consists in the coherence of the elements of an Artwork, and since that manifold is perceivable, one main challenge in Aesthetics is to explain their Unity. One of the enduring strengths of Platonism has been its efficacy in this respect--Beauty is an eternal Form in which a Beautiful Artwork participates. Even one of Platonism's rivals, Empiricism, defers to it on this topic, when Hume admits that Empiricism cannot explain how it is possible for someone to imagine a shade of Blue that they have never previously perceived, simply on the basis of perceiving shades slightly darker and slightly lighter. Platonism's principle that all the color shades are eternal Forms that exist independently of sensory experience, is generalizable to the existence of the Form of Beauty. Instead, the most frequent Empiricist explanation of Beauty, that it is a Feeling in the perceiver, reduces it to matter of arbitrary subjective taste, forcing such ad hoc solutions as Mill's distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. One innovative Empiricist solution has been Alexander's notion of Beauty as an 'emergent' property of Aesthetic experience, but this has not been widely embraced by Empiricism, because it deviates from its traditional Atomism. In contrast with both Platonism and Empiricism, Formaterialism rejects their shared analysis that Harmony is a given multiplicity, the transcendent Unity of which being what requires explanation. Rather, it interprets Multiplicity and Unity as abstractions from the interplay of its two dynamic Principles, Becoming-the-Same and Becoming-Diverse, and the genius of the great Art consists in striking a balance between the two. Hence, what is perceivable in Beauty is a balanced tension between Unity and Multiplicity, which, as dynamic, is an expression of the Vitality of the Artwork.