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Monism and Pluralism: The History 
of Aesthetics and the Philosophy 
of Architecture - Part I
Paul Guyer

I. Monism and Pluralism in the Early History of 
Aesthetics

One way to think about the history of  
aesthetics since its inception as a properly named 
subdiscipline of  philosophy in the early eighteenth 
century is to think of  it as a debate about the 
right way to understand the relations among the 
terms of  the Neo-Platonist triad comprised by 
the true, the good, and the beautiful: do these 
terms designate three separate domains of  human 
interest, the theoretical, the practical and moral, 
and the aesthetic, the boundaries between which 
must be sharply defined and maintained, or do they 
designate three aspects of  human experience that 
can and should be fused in practice, indeed do they 
suggest that the distinctive function of  art among 
human activities is precisely to fuse our natural love 
of  beauty with our theoretical and moral concerns, 
to provide a kind of  unity in human experience that 
we otherwise do not find?1 Immanuel Kant might be 
thought to be the foremost of  separatists rather than 
synthesizers in the modern history of  aesthetics: his 
definition in the “Analytic of  the Beautiful” in the 
Critique of  the Power of  Judgment of  the “judgment 
of  taste” as “aesthetic,” where that means that it 
is neither cognitive nor practical, that on the one 
hand “In order to decide whether or not something 
is beautiful, we do not relate the representation 
by means of  understanding to the object for 
cognition”2 and that on the other hand “The 
agreeable, the beautiful, and the good...designate 
three different relations of  representations to the 
feeling of  pleasure and displeasure,” that “One can 



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say that among all these three kinds of  satisfaction only that of  the taste 
for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, 
neither that of  the senses nor that of  reason, extorts approval,”3 seems 
to assert that the experience of  beauty has nothing to do with knowledge 
of  truth or with practical interest of  any kind, whether merely prudential 
interest in the gratification of  the senses or a more elevated moral interest 
of  some kind. By contrast, an author like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 
third Earl of  Shaftesbury, seems to assert an underlying identity or at 
least continuity among the true, the good, and the beautiful when he says 
things like “the most natural Beauty in the world is Honesty, and Moral 
Truth. For all Beauty is TRUTH,”4 and “since for our parts, we have already 
decreed that ‘Beauty and Good are still the same’”;5  in fact, we do not 
even have to add these two statements together to get a threefold equation 
of  truth, goodness, and beauty, for although Shaftesbury continues the 
first of  these statements by saying that “True Features make the Beauty of  
a Face; and true Proportions, the beauty of  Architecture; as true Measures 
that of  Harmony and Musick. In Poetry, which is all Fable, Truth still is 
the Perfection,”6 which might suggest that Shaftesbury has in mind some 
formalist conception of  truth, perhaps as coherence in the case of  faces, 
architecture, and music, and correspondence in the case of  poetry, his 
opening statement had made it clear that he also considers honesty as 
a kind of  truth, and thus does seem to think of  all truth as having a 
moral dimension, thus of  the true, the good, and the beautiful as truly 
coextensive or unified.

Kant’s position in aesthetics is actually more complicated than these 
opening remarks suggest: they are part of  an initial analysis of  the simplest 
experience of  beauty, but by no means a complete statement of  his 
account of  art, a fortiori of  architecture. But before I say anything more 
about Kant, I want to announce the thesis of  this paper, which is that the 
history of  modern thought about architecture is marked by the same kind 
of  tension between separatist approaches on the one hand, which locate 
the value of  architecture or even define it by a single aesthetic possibility, 
and synthesizing approaches on the other, which find in architecture the 
possibility of  satisfying in a unified way a variety of  human interests. And 
my further claim will be that even though there seems to be a powerful 
human tendency to prefer simplicity to complexity, not just in academic 
philosophy but in thought in general, there is rarely a good argument to be 
made for a separatist or reductionist approach as opposed to a synthesizing 
one: to put it simply, why should we ever prefer an impoverished to an 
enriched form of  experience, at least as long as the latter does not simply 
become chaotic and overwhelming?



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My plan for this paper, which will appear in two 
parts, is as follows. In the remainder of  this section, 
drawing on my recently published A History of  
Modern Aesthetics,7 I will show how three different 
conceptions of  the source of  aesthetic value were 
introduced in the eighteenth century that were 
only partially synthesized by Kant, although they 
were more fully synthesized by several others, but 
separated again, in favor of  a purely cognitivist 
approach to aesthetics, in the hands of  German 
Idealists such as Hegel and Schopenhauer (only to 
be fully synthesized again by a few figures at the 
end of  the nineteenth century, such as George 
Santayana, and then again by a number of  the 
most interesting aestheticians of  the twentieth 
century, such as Richard Wollheim, although I will 
not have room to discuss either of  these figures 
here). In the second section, I will show how the 
separatist tendency of  Idealists such as Hegel and 
Schopenhauer manifested itself  in their thought 
about the specific case of  architecture. In the final 
section of  the paper, which will appear as Part Two, 
I will consider the synthesizing rather than separatist 
approach to architecture of  John Ruskin in The Seven 
Lamps of  Architecture (1849), although to be sure to 
be of  continued use to thought about architecture 
today Ruskin’s views must be modernized in certain 
ways, some of  which he himself  at least grudgingly 
foresaw.

My general claim about the history of  modern 
aesthetics goes like this. Although the field was only 
named by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his 
1735 master’s thesis Philosophical Meditations on some 
Matters pertaining to Poetry,8 and the new name was 
not received into English until the early nineteenth 
century,9 this was an adult baptism: in some ways 
at least the field is as old as philosophy itself, 
beginning with Aristotle’s response in the Poetics to 
Plato’s attack upon the arts in the Republic, or even 
with Plato’s own, perhaps anticipatory response in 
the Symposium to the argument of  the Republic. In 

the history 
of modern 

thought about 
architecture is 
marked by the 

same kind of 
tension between 

separatist 
approaches ....

and synthesizing 
approaches

“

”



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the Republic, Plato argued, in the name of  Socrates but no doubt going 
well beyond anything the historical Socrates had held, that the arts 
should be largely (although not entirely) excluded from the education of  
the future rulers of  the well-ordered states, because they are cognitively 
worthless, being at three removes from the truth, and morally deleterious, 
because without a sound cognitive content they do nothing but exacerbate 
emotional tendencies that the guardians instead need to learn to control.10  
In the Symposium, by contrast, whether or not hewing more faithfully to the 
thought of  the historical Socrates, Plato had argued that the appreciation 
of  beauty in earthly things is the first step toward knowledge of  the form 
of  the beautiful itself,11 and in the Poetics Aristotle famously defended 
the cognitive import of  art by stating that “poetry is something more 
philosophic and of  greater import than history, since its statements are of  
the nature rather of  universals, whereas those of  history are singulars.”12  
My thought is that this cognitivist justification of  the value of  art, the 
thought that the experience of  beauty is actually the experience of  
something of  the greatest cognitive import, perhaps the experience of  a 
kind of  truth that is not given to us otherwise than through the experience 
of  beauty or is at least not given to us in such a palpable and moving form 
by anything other than the experience of  beauty, remained the central 
idea of  aesthetics throughout subsequent antiquity, the Middle Ages, and 
the Renaissance, and continued to be a powerful presence throughout the 
eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries, where it remained 
the foundation of  the very different aesthetic theories of, for example, 
Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno.

The cognitivist approach to aesthetics manifested itself  in the 
eighteenth century in several forms. One form was the view that the 
essential function of  art is imitation, with the underlying assumption that 
the function of  imitation is information. That all fine art could be reduced 
to the single principle of  imitation was of  course the thesis of  Charles 
Batteux, who argued in his work of  1746 whose very title promised the 
reduction of  fine art to a single principle that “it can be shown from the 
inner nature of  the human understanding that the imitation of  nature is 
the common object” of  all the arts “and that they are not distinguished 
from one another by anything except the means they apply toward the 
execution of  this imitation,”13 and who explicitly opposed Plato’s worry 
that imitation could have a deleterious effect on morals with the argument 
(appealing to the authority of  Horace) that from imitations the best 
manners and morals can also be learned.14  But before Batteux, the German 
Christian Wolff  had illustrated his idea that pleasure arises from the 
sensory perception of  perfection with the case of  painting, the perfection 



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or function of  which consists in imitation: “If  I 
see a painting that is similar to the object that it 
is to represent, and contemplate its similarity, then 
I take pleasure in it. The perfection of  a painting 
consists in its similarity” to its object. “For since 
a painting is nothing other than a representation 
of  a certain object on a tablet or plane surface, so 
is everything in it harmonious if  nothing can be 
distinguished in it that one does not also perceive 
in the object itself.”15  Wolff ’s follower Baumgarten 
might also be thought to have taken an essentially 
cognitivist approach to aesthetics, in spite of  his 
subtle transformation of  Wolff ’s formula “sensory 
perception of  perfection” into the formula 
“perfection of  sensory cognition as such,”16 which 
might seem to foreground the representation 
or medium of  a work of  art over its object or 
content, when he begins his great unfinished work 
the Aesthetica, the first philosophical treatise to 
be so entitled, with the topic of  the “beauty of  
cognition,” and lists as the first of  the beauties of  
cognition the wealth of  material or content in a 
work of  art, ubertas aesthetica.17  It is this aspect of  
art that is reflected in Baumgarten’s conception of  
a poem or other work of  art as a cognitively dense 
representation, one that is “extensively clear”18 or 
packs a great deal of  content into a pregnant image 
rather than separating content into its constituents 
as scientific analysis does. 

A fuller reading of  the Aesthetica, however, 
shows that Baumgarten was not just even a subtle 
follower of  Wolff, but that he had integrated into 
his outlook a second major approach to aesthetics, 
one that overtly rejected Plato’s suspicion of  the 
arousal of  emotions through the arts and instead 
saw the arousal of  emotion as the essential aim of  
art. An early but influential advocate of  this new 
approach was the French Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du 
Bos, who in his widely read Critical Reflections on 
Poetry, Painting, and Music of  1719 asserted that “The 
soul hath its wants no less than the body; and one 



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of  the greatest wants of  man is to have his mind incessantly occupied,”19 
or to avoid ennui, and then argued the arousal of  our passions by affecting 
works of  art, such as tragedy, is so to speak the most cost-effective way to 
avoid boredom, because art, unlike say gambling, as a result of  which we 
usually end up losing our money, excites only “artificial passions, sufficient 
to occupy us while we are actually affected by them, and incapable of  
giving us afterwards any real pain or affliction.” “Painters and poets,” Du 
Bos says, “raise...artificial passions within us, by presenting us with the 
imitations of  objects capable of  exciting real passions,”20 and indeed the 
only difference between “artificial” and real passions is that the former 
do not have the same after-effects and costs as the latter. Baumgarten 
then quickly took this idea up by arguing that since what really moves 
us to pleasure or displeasure is passions, poems or other works of  art 
are most effective when they offer not just cognitively dense images but 
dense images of  affecting objects: “Since affects are noticeable degrees 
of  displeasure and pleasure, so are their sentiments those that represent 
something as good and bad,” although in the “confused manner” of  the 
cognitively dense rather than analytically separated. “Hence it is poetic,” 
he continues, “to arouse affects.”21  From the age of  twenty-one, then, 
Baumgarten’s approach to art was actually to synthesize the idea that art 
is a vehicle for a pleasing form of  cognition with the idea that art is also a 
vehicle for a pleasing arousal of  our emotions.

Yet a third approach to aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century 
is the one that we typically associate with Kant but which was actually 
introduced in Scotland, especially by Alexander Gerard in his prize-winning 
1759 Essay on Taste, the idea, namely that aesthetic experience is a pleasing 
form of  the free play of  our mental powers with our representations, 
even ones with cognitive and emotional significance, where however the 
primary source of  our enjoyment is the mind’s play with those ideas and 
not their contents. Gerard shares Du Bos’s idea that the mind must be 
occupied, but begins from the idea that it can be pleasingly occupied by its 
own activity and does not need either emotional arousal or cognitive pay-
off  to enjoy its activity. Thus the first of  the “simple principles” of  taste 
that he enumerates is our enjoyment “Of  the sense or taste of  novelty,” 
the “pleasant sensation” we have “whenever the mind is in a lively and 
elevated temper,” to be had especially when it overcomes “moderate 
difficulty, such as exercises the mind, without fatiguing it” and thus gives 
“play to our faculties.”22  This was the idea that was then taken up by Kant 
in the argument of  the “Analytic of  the Beautiful” that the state of  mind 
that could satisfy the dual constraints inherent in the idea of  a judgment 
of  taste, that it be based on a subjective experience of  pleasure on the 



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one hand yet speak with a “universal voice” on the 
other, that is, postulate or even demand consent 
from all, is not the state of  actual cognition but the 
state of  the free play of  our cognitive powers of  
understanding and imagination, a state in which “no 
determinate concept restricts them to a particular 
rule of  cognition” but which is nevertheless a 
state of  the “animation of  both faculties...to an 
activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the 
stimulus of  the given representation, in unison” or 
“harmonious” (einhellig).23 

But the “Analytic of  the Beautiful” is only 
Kant’s analysis of  the logic of  the judgment of  
taste and the experience of  beauty that makes such 
judgment possible, not his theory of  fine art. That 
comes later, presented (following Baumgarten) 
in the form of  a theory of  the artist, that is, the 
genius, and when it comes it actually represents a 
synthesis of  the new theory of  free play with the 
traditional cognitive approach to art: Kant’s idea 
is that the “spirit” of  a work of  art, whatever its 
medium, comes from “the presentation of  aesthetic 
ideas,” representations that “one the one hand...
strive toward something lying beyond the bounds 
of  experience, and thus seek to approximate a 
presentation of  concepts of  reason (of  intellectual 
ideas),” to which, “on the other hand...because no 
concept can be fully adequate to them,” can only be 
intimated by “a representation of  the imagination 
that...by itself  stimulates so much thinking that it 
can never be grasped in a determinate concept, 
hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept 
itself  in an unbounded way,”24 a representation, 
in other words, that stimulates a free play of  our 
cognitive powers.

Thus Kant’s theory of  fine art represents 
a synthesis of  the traditional idea of  beauty as a 
form of  cognition of  the highest things with the 
new theory of  beauty as that which occasions a 
free play of  our mental powers. Indeed, one might 



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suggest that because Kant assumes that the ideas presented by works of  
art are morally fraught ideas such as “rational ideas of  invisible beings, the 
kingdom of  the blessed, the kingdom of  hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well 
as...death, envy, and all sorts of  vices, as well as love, fame, etc.,”25 ideas that 
are ordinarily accompanied with great emotional impact, he must be on 
his way toward a synthesis of  all three approaches, the traditional cognitive 
approach to art, the new theory of  free play, and the idea of  the emotional 
impact of  art, which Baumgarten had synthesized only with the first but 
not the second of  these approaches. However, since Kant is throughout 
at such pains to argue that any genuinely aesthetic experience is disinterested 
and produces only a simple feeling of  pleasure but not any more particular 
emotion, I count him as someone who was willing to countenance only a 
twofold synthesis of  approaches to aesthetics, not a threefold synthesis: 
he was willing to combine the traditional theory of  cognition through art 
with the new theory of  mere play with our cognitive powers, but always 
strove to keep the emotional impact of  art at arm’s length.

Perhaps a better model for a thoroughly synthetic rather than 
separatist approach to art in the eighteenth century is the 1762 work by 
another Scot, Henry Home, Lord Kames, modestly entitled Elements of  
Criticism, not “The Elements of  Criticism,” to signal that the arts offer us 
numerous possibilities of  pleasure, which cannot be reduced to a single 
avenue or even exhaustively enumerated.26  Kames begins with what 
seems like an emphasis on the free play and emotional impact aspects 
of  aesthetic experience: his first chapter concerns “Perceptions and Ideas 
in a Train,” and argues that “we are framed by nature to relish order and 
connection”27 even when perceived without overt regard to truth, while 
his second, very large chapter concerns “what power the fine arts have to 
raise emotions and passions,” and argues that “The principles of  the fine 
arts, appear in this view to open a direct avenue to the heart of  man.”28  
But there is a cognitive dimension to both of  these as well: in the first 
chapter Kames argues that “Every work of  art that is conformable to the 
natural course of  our ideas, is so far agreeable; and every work of  art that 
reverses that course, is so far disagreeable,”29 which suggests that we enjoy 
not just the orderly play of  our ideas but correspondence between those 
suggested by art and by nature, or between representation and object, 
which is the essence of  cognition; and Kames continues our quotation 
from the second chapter by stating that “The inquisitive mind beginning 
with criticism, the most agreeable of  all amusements, and finding no 
obstruction in its progress, advances far into the sensitive part of  our 
nature; and gains imperceptibly a thorough knowledge of  the human 
heart, of  its desires, and of  every motive to action,”30 thus implying 



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that the arousal of  emotions by works of  art is 
enjoyable not just in its own right but as a source of  
self-knowledge. Kames goes on to enumerate many 
more “principles” or sources of  pleasure from art: 
beauty, grandeur and sublimity, motion and force, 
novelty, resemblance and similitude, uniformity and 
variety, congruity and propriety, dignity and grace, 
and more, a list that suggests that art offers us the 
possibility of  free play with formal aspects of  its 
objects, e.g., uniformity and variety; of  emotional 
and moral response, for example to propriety and 
dignity; of  cognitive discovery, e.g. of  novelty, and 
so on. There is no suggestion that these need be 
separated from each other, let alone that any one is 
more important to the other; on the contrary, the 
suggestion is always that the more “elements of  
criticism” a work of  art affords us, the fuller and 
more pleasurable our experience may be -- though 
at the same time, Kames never makes an argument 
that the pleasures in these different dimensions 
of  art are strictly additive, that a work of  art that 
exploits more of  these dimensions is always more 
pleasurable than one that exploits fewer. The list of  
elements of  criticism is not intended as a rule of  
addition. Yet this qualification being noted, it seems 
safe to say that Kames offers a richer model of  the 
possibilities of  aesthetic experience than Kant’s 
merely twofold synthesis does.

Both Kames and Kant raise the question of  
how architecture, with its inescapable concern for 
the intended function of  its products, is to be fitted 
into an account of  art that stresses any combination 
of  cognition, free play, and emotional impact, none 
of  which are overtly connected to functionality. 
They both remain within the Vitruvian tradition of  
combining utilitas and venustas (in my opinion, two 
ends to be supported by an underlying foundation of  
firmitas as a means) by seeing the intended function 
of  a structure as providing constraints within which 
the other aesthetic goals identified by their theories 
for all arts can also be pursued: as Kant famously 

Kant was 
willing to 

combine the 
traditional 

theory of 
cognition 

through art 
with the new 

theory of mere 
play with 

our cognitive 
powers, but 

always strove 
to keep the 

emotional 
impact of art 

at arm’s length

“

”



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says in his account of  “adherent beauty,” “One would be able to add much 
to a building that would be pleasing for the intuition of  it if  only it were 
not supposed to be a church”;31 but that also implies that there is much 
that can be added to a building -- on Kant’s theory, the expression of  an 
aesthetic idea -- that is consistent with its intended function as a church. 
But I am not going to expand on this point here,32 for what I now want 
to argue is that what followed the period of  Kames and Kant was not 
a continuation of  their synthesizing strategies, but a return to a single-
minded cognitivism in the aesthetics of  German Idealism that took the 
better part of  the nineteenth century to recover from within philosophical 
aesthetics, and, in a very general way, with however one major exception, 
perhaps even longer within architectural theory and practice.

 

II. A Monistic Approach to Aesthetics and Architecture: German Idealism

One might have thought that, particularly with the example of  the 
syncretic or even eclectic approach to aesthetics of  Kames before them, 
the response of  Kant’s successors to the twofold synthesis of  cognitivist 
aesthetics and the aesthetics of  free play represented by his theory of  
“aesthetic ideas” would have been to lift his ban on the emotional impact 
of  art and give that its proper due. Indeed, it might even be argued that 
the Germans had a domestic model for that in the versions of  Kantian 
aesthetics developed by Friedrich Schiller and the lesser known Karl 
Heinrich Heydenreich,33 the latter in his own System of  Aesthetics34 published 
in 1790, the same year as Kant’s third Critique, and Schiller in his unpublished 
“Kallias letters” of  1793 as well as the Letters on Aesthetic Education of  1795.35  
However, the German Idealists instead rejected Kant’s theory of  the free 
play in order to focus exclusively on the intellectual content of  art: in 
other words, they largely removed from Kant’s concept of  aesthetic ideas 
the element that he thought was distinctively aesthetic and returned to the 
cognitivism of  Aristotle’s response to Plato, or perhaps better, given the 
pronouncedly metaphysical character of  their conception of  the content 
of  art, to the response of  Plato’s Symposium to his own Republic. This turn 
also had pronounced results for their treatments of  architecture.

I will illustrate this development with the cases of  Hegel and 
Schopenhauer who make the Platonic and therefore cognitivist affinity 
of  their thought explicit. Hegel asserted that “the beautiful is...the pure 
appearance of  the Idea to sense”36 without accepting the idea that the 
mind of  the subject of  aesthetic experience can play freely with the form 
of  the sensory appearance of  the Idea or with the indeterminate relation 



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between the form of  appearance and its content. 
For this reason Hegel can say that “fine art [is] 
truly art, and...only fulfils its supreme task when 
it has placed itself  in the same sphere as religion 
and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of  
bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, 
the deepest interests of  mankind, and the most 
comprehensive truths of  the spirit.”37  This might 
sound like a ringing endorsement of  the enduring 
importance of  all forms of  art, but in fact it is the 
premise that leads directly to Hegel’s notorious 
thesis of  the “end of  art,” the thesis that “art, 
considered in its highest vocation, is and remains 
for us a thing of  the past,”38 because Hegel’s view 
is that art is actually competing with religion and 
philosophy to express the same content, but is 
doomed by the indeterminacy of  its means of  
expressing this content: art is essentially cognitive 
but essentially inadequate as cognition. Thus for a 
philosophical enlightened age such as Hegel’s own, 
art is doomed to irrelevance, doomed to serving 
as a reminder of  our more primitive past but as 
nothing more.

And architecture is Hegel’s poster-boy for 
this argument. Hegel is actually responding to a 
fact that has been emphasized in some of  the best 
recent writing on architectural theory, namely that 
the existence of  determinate sets of  forms within 
some architectural styles, such as the existence of  
the columnar orders in classical and neo-classical 
architecture, cannot justify the interpretation of  
architecture as a language, because without any 
determinate semantics for reference to ideas 
outside of  itself, the use of  such forms to organize 
the design of  structures cannot really count as a 
linguistic syntax;39 for Hegel, architecture is the 
paradigmatic art of  the earliest phase of  art, 
the “symbolic” phase, in which the Idea that “in 
itself...is still abstract and indeterminate”40 seeks 
expression in forms that, as symbols, would in any 
case be too indeterminate to express even a more 

Both Kames 
and Kant raise 

the question 
of how 

architecture, 
with its 

inescapable 
concern for 
the intended 

function of its 
products, is to 

be fitted into 
an account 
of art that 

stresses any 
combination 
of cognition, 

free play, and 
emotional 

impact, none 
of which 

are overtly 
connected to 
functionality

“

”



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determinate content, the more fully developed understanding of  the 
spiritual nature of  reality that Hegel means by “the Idea.” Hegel’s view is 
that it is the essence of  a symbol that it “should not be wholly inadequate 
to its meaning” but that “still conversely, in order to remain a symbol it 
must not be made entirely adequate to that meaning”; in symbolic art “the 
content remains also indifferent to the shape which portrays it, and the 
abstract determinacy which it constitutes can equally well be present in 
infinitely many other existents and configurations,”41 and conversely “the 
look of  a symbol as such raises at once the doubt whether a shape is to 
be taken as a symbol or not, even if  we set aside the further ambiguity 
in respect of  the specific meanings which a shape is supposed to signify 
amongst the several meanings for which it can often be used as a symbol 
through associations of  a more remote kind.”42  Hegel then illustrates this 
thesis with such examples as the pyramids43 and labyrinths44 of  Egyptian 
architecture, which are forms too abstract to express any very definite 
ideas about divinity, or the attempt of  Indian architecture to represent 
the “procreative force” of  the Absolute through buildings in the shape 
of  “generative organs” with numerous “solid phallic columns.”45 And 
what we might have thought would count as one of  the pinnacles of  
architectural accomplishment, the Greek temple, is in fact nothing more 
than the form of  an ordinary house46 writ large as a house for the statue 
of  a god: it is only in the statue that it houses and not in the structure 
that houses it that art can make manifest “the free spirit” as “spiritual 
individuality equally determinate and inherently independent,” only the 
representation of  a god in human form that “constitutes the centre and 
content of  true beauty and art”47 —although on Hegel’s account the 
classical representation of  divinity in strictly human form will also turn 
out to be inadequate. Thus architecture plays a strictly supporting role in 
housing a form of  the representation of  the spirit that will itself  turn out 
to be inadequate and that needs to be superseded by a purely philosophical 
rather than artistic understanding of  reality. That there might be other 
values in housing as such, independent of  the function of  housing a god, 
plays no role in Hegel’s assessment of  architecture. Architecture therefore 
enjoys a very lowly place in Hegel’s strictly cognitivist hierarchy of  the arts, 
which themselves enjoy only a lowly place in the hierarchy of  forms of  
cognition more generally.

Schopenhauer’s cognitivism takes a different form than Hegel’s, 
but results in an equally lowly status for architecture. Schopenhauer’s 
aesthetics might be thought to be a development from Kant’s conception 
of  the disinterestedness of  aesthetic experience and the judgment of  
taste, but Schopenhauer has no more room for the idea of  free play than 



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does Hegel,48 and looks to the experience of  art 
only for a momentary release from the frustration 
of  the ordinary life of  the will, comprised as it 
is either by desires that go unsatisfied or that, 
even if  satisfied, soon lead to more unsatisfied 
desires. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience 
is an intuition in which the individual “has lost 
himself ” and become “the pure, will-less, painless, 
timeless subject of  cognition,” and this state is 
induced by the contemplation of  an object, or the 
artistic representation of  one, that has lost its own 
individuality and manifold connections to the world 
of  will and use, and become only “the Idea of  its 
species.”49  By contemplating the essences of  the 
species of  things — in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, 
the characteristic forms of  the different degrees of  
the “objectification of  the will” that underlies all 
reality — or what he calls “Platonic Ideas,” notice, 
not “aesthetic ideas,” the human subject becomes 
detached from her own individuality and its woes, 
and enjoys if  not positive pleasure then at least 
momentary respite from pain. “In this state, pure 
cognition draws towards us, as it were, to deliver 
us from willing and the stress of  willing...but only 
for a moment: we are always torn back again from 
peaceful contemplation by willing, by the memory 
of  our personal aims,”50 and ultimately need to 
turn from art to ethics to achieve a more enduring 
transcendence of  our own painful individuality. 
Thus in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as in Hegel’s, 
the value of  art and aesthetic experience as a whole 
is subordinate to that of  a form of  philosophy, 
although in this case to ethics rather than 
metaphysics.

And even within the sphere of  the arts, 
the value of  architecture is minimal, because 
within Schopenhauer’s cognitivist aesthetics what 
architecture represents is the most elementary 
forces of  nature, but nothing about the human will, 
which is our only real clue to the ultimate character 
of  reality. “The only intention we can attribute to” 

Architecture is 
Hegel’s poster-

boy for the 
argument that 

art is doomed 
to irrelevance, 

doomed to 
serving as a 

reminder of our 
more primitive 

past but as 
nothing more

“

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architecture, Schopenhauer argues, “is that of  bringing some of  the Ideas 
at the lowest levels of  the objecthood of  the will more clearly into intuition, 
namely: gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, these universal qualities of  
stone, those first, simplest, and dullest visibilities of  the will, the sounds 
of  the ground bass of  nature; and then, alongside these, light, which is in 
many respects their opposite.” 51 For Schopenhauer, architecture does not 
attempt, as a symbol, to give us knowledge of  the Spirit, but fail at that; 
rather, through its structure, its solids and voids, through light and dark, 
it offers us Platonic Ideas of  natural forces, but these forces are only the 
“ground bass” of  nature, and do not seem very important. In particular, 
while no contemplation of  Platonic Ideas can release us from pain for 
very long, architecture is decidedly inferior to music, where, paradoxically, 
we get the greatest release from the painful demands of  our individual 
wills by contemplating as directly as we can the essential forms of  willing 
as such.52  On Schopenhauer’s account, architecture does give us some 
genuine knowledge, but not very important knowledge; and if  knowledge 
is the only source of  value in art, then architecture is not very important 
—“the objective significance of  what architecture reveals to us is relatively 
small.”53 

Indeed, Schopenhauer does not merely ignore other sources of  
potential value in architecture, its value for housing a variety of  human 
functions, as does Hegel, but specifically rejects such “other, practical 
purposes” of  architecture as “foreign to art itself.” The “great merit of  
the architect consists in carrying through the purely aesthetic goals” of  
architecture, the exhibition of  Platonic Ideas of  gravity, rigidity, and so on, 
“in spite of their subordination to foreign ones.”54  Schopenhauer must argue 
this, because on his theory of  human willing in general, the attempt to 
fulfill specific practical purposes through architecture, as in any other way, 
is doomed to lead to failure and frustration in either the short or long run: 
either the work will fail to achieve its intended purpose, and thus frustrate 
anyone involved with it, whether directly or even only sympathetically, 
or even if  it does fulfill its intended purpose, that will either just lead to 
satiety and boredom or else to other, frustrated desires. Functionality can 
never be an enduring source of  pleasure in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic 
view of  human existence, so whatever value architecture might have has 
to be in spite of  its functionality, not in addition to or in conjunction with 
its functionality.

We now have some examples of  how the one-sided cognitivism of  
German Idealist aesthetics led to reductionist conceptions of  architecture 
and in turn to negative assessments of  the value of  architecture. I think 



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it could readily be shown that many twentieth-
century conceptions of  architecture, particularly 
the linguistic models of  architecture so effectively 
attacked by Richard Hill and Edward Winters but 
also forms of  structuralist rather than programmatic 
functionalism, to borrow a distinction from Viollet-
le-Duc,55 are versions of  this one-sided cognitivism; 
and even if  they have not led to overtly negative 
evaluations of  architecture of  the sort we have 
found in Hegel and Schopenhauer, they have at 
least sometimes led not only to simplified theories 
but to unsatisfying architecture. But rather than 
pursuing that argument, I will, in Part Two, turn to 
one nineteenth-century treatment of  architecture 
that is pluralistic rather than monistic and thus in 
at least some ways points to the possibility of  a 
more satisfying aesthetics of  architecture. I refer 
to the theory of  architecture adumbrated by John 
Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of  Architecture, which even 
though it must be shorn of  some of  the Romantic 
assumptions long ago pointed out by Geoffrey 
Scott,56 nevertheless offers at least a model for a 
synthetizing rather than separatist approach to 
architecture.

Part II of  this essay will appear in Vol. 1, No. 2 of  
Architecture Philosophy.

Endnotes
1. Frederick C. Beiser stresses the importance of  the 

Neo-Platonic triad, what he calls the “classical 
trinity,” to what he considers the rationalist tradition 
in eighteenth-century aesthetics in Diotima’s Children: 
German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 41-44. 

 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, 
edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and 
Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2000), §1, 5:203 (p. 89).

 3. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §5, 5:209-10 
(p. 95).

Within 
Schopenhauer’s 

cognitivist 
aesthetics what 

architecture 
represents is the 
most elementary 
forces of nature, 

but nothing 
about the human 
will, which is our 

only real clue 
to the ultimate 

character of 
reality

“

”



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 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of  Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, an Essay 

on the Freedom of  Wit and Humour, Part IV, section III, in Characteristicks of  Men, 
Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by Philip Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
1999), vol. I, p. 77.

 5. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, Part III, section II, in 
Characteristicks, vol. II, p. 112.

6. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, Part IV, section III, in Charackeristicks, vol. I, p. 77.
7.Paul Guyer, A History of  Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2014).
8. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema 

pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, 
edited and translated by Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 
1983); Reflections on poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosphicae 
de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, translated, with the original text, by Karl 
Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University 
of  California Press, 1954). The discipline of  aesthetics is defined in §CXVI 
of  this work as episteme aisthetikē, the logic of  aisthetá or the objects of  the 
senses.  

9. The earliest occurrence of  the word “aesthetics” recorded in the Oxford 
English Dictionary is in an 1830 entry in the Penny Cyclopedia (I.156), where 
it was defined as “the designation given by German writers to a branch of  
philosophical inquiry, the object of  which is a philosophical theory of  the 
beautiful.” 

10. The argument for the cognitive worthlessness of  art is made above all in 
Book X of  the Republic, where it provides a foundation for the exclusion 
of  most poetry from the education of  the guardians previously developed 
in Books II and III (376d-403c). Alexander Nehamas has discussed the 
connection between Plato’s argument in Book X, which is overtly concerned 
with painting, with the case of  poetry in “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in 
Republic X,” in his Virtues of  Authenticity (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1998), pp. 251-78, and Stephen Halliwell has demonstrated that Plato’s 
argument in Books II and III is really directed against allowing the young 
guardians to perform roles that exemplify the kind of  emotional abandon 
that they will have to learn to control; see The Aesthetics of  Mimesis: Ancient 
Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 

11. See Socrates’s recounting of  what he was told by Diotima at Symposium 
201d-212c.

12. Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, 1451b5-7; translation by Ingram Bywater in The 
Complete Works of  Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1984), vol. II, p. 2323.

13. My translation from Charles Batteux, Einschränkung der schönen Künste auf  einen 
einzigen Grundsatz, translated by Johann Adolf  Schlegel (Leipzig: Weidmanns 
Erben und Reich, 1770), p. 8. 

14. Batteux, Einschränkung, pp. 34-5.



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15. Christian Wolff, Vernüftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen 
(1719), fourth edition (Halle: Renger, 1751), §404.

16. My translation from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik (1750-58), 
translated into German with facing Latin text by Dagmar Mirbach, 2 vols. 
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), §14, vol. I, pp. 20-1. 

17. Baumgarten, Ästhetik, §115, vol. I, pp. 92-3.
18. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XVII.
19. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, translated by 

Thomas Nugent, 3 vols. (London: John Nourse, 1984), Part I, chapter I, vol. I, 
p. 5. 

20. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, Part I, chapter III, p. 22.
21. Baumgarten, Meditationes, §XXV, pp. 24-5.
22. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London: A. Millar, and Edinburgh: A. 

Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759), Part I, section I, pp. 3, 7.
23. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §9, 5:217, 219, pp. 102, 104.
24. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §49, 5:314-15, pp. 192-3.
25. Kant, loc. cit.
26. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of  Criticism, sixth edition (1785), edited by 

Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Original Introduction, 
vol. I, p. 19. 

27. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter I, vol. I, p. 26.
28. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter II, vol. I, p. 32.
29. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter I, vol. I, p. 27.
30. Kames, Elements of  Criticism, chapter II, vol. I, p. 32.
31. Kant, Critique of  the Power of  Judgment, §16, 5:230; p. 115.
32. I have discussed this issue in “Kant and the Philosophy of  Architecture,” Journal 

of  Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2011): 7-19. For a more general discussion of  
Kant’s concept of  “adherent beauty,” see “Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest 
Proposal,” British Journal of  Aesthetics 42 (October, 2002) 357-66, reprinted in my 
Values of  Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2005), pp. 129-40. For another recent discussion of  the implication for 
Kant’s aesthetics to the theory of  architecture, see Edward Winters, Aesthetics 
and Architecture (London: Continuum, 2007), especially Chapter 2, “Modernism,” 
pp. 25-37.

33. On Schiller, see my Kant and the Experience of  Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1993), chapter 3, pp. 116-30, and “The Ideal of  Beauty and 
the Necessity of  Grace: Kant and Schiller on Ethics and Aesthetics,” in Walter 
Hinderer, editor, Schiller und die Weg in die Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & 
Neuman, 2006), pp. 187-204. On Heydenreich, see “The Perfections of  Art: 
Mendelssohn, Moritz, and Kant,” in Kant and the Experience of  Freedom, pp. 131-
60, at pp. 144-7, and “Heydenreich, Karl Heinrich,” in Michael Kelly, editor, The 
Encyclopedia of  Aesthetics, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 
2, pp. 400-1.



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34. Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, System der Ästhetik (Leipzig: Göschen, 1790), 

facsimile edition with an afterward by Volker Deubel (Hildesheim: 
Gerstenberg Verlag, 1978).

35. See Friedrich Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried 
Körner,” in J.M. Bernstein, editor, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 145-83, and On the 
Aesthetic Education of  Man in a Series of  Letters, edited and translated by Elizabeth 
M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

36. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated 
by T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) (based on the 
posthumous edition of  1835 by H. Hotho), vol. I, p. 111. 

37. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 7. 
38. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 11.
39. See Richard Hill, Designs and their Consequences (New Haven and London: 

Yale University Press, 1999), chapter 5, “Meaning,” especially pp. 109-116, 
and Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture, chapters 5-7, especially chapter 7, 
“Architecture and Semantics,” pp. 84-91.

40. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 300.
41. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 305.
42. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 306.
43. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 354-6.
44. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 647.
45. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 641.
46. See Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, pp. 662-3.
47. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 432.
48. For documentation of  this, see my “Back to Truth: Knowledge and Pleasure 

in the Aesthetics of  Schopenhauer,” in Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway, 
editors, Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of  Value (Chichester: 
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 11-25.

49. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, translated 
and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Third Book, §34, pp. 201-2. 

50. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §51, p. 277.
51. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §43, p. 239.
52. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §52, pp. 

282-95.
53. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §43, p. 241,
54. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §43, p. 242.
55. See Winters, Aesthetics and Architecture, pp. 40-1.
56. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of  Humanism, first edition 1914, second edition 

1924 (New York: Scribner’s, n.d.), especially Chapter V, “The Ethical Fallacy.”


