Hutcheson distinguished between absolute Beauty, the kind of beauty to be found in nature, and relative Beauty, the beauty that characterizes art. The difference between the two is that art is imitative, and its beauty is produced by the similarity and contrast between the imitation and its original.
Hutcheson's theory raises a number of questions. Two of them are:
- How can your taste be better or worse, more or less "fine"? Isn't it just your taste, and you like whatever you like? Yet Hutcheson did think that taste could be more or less fine.
- Hutcheson needs some way to distinguish nature from art; otherwise, using his approach, there will be no difference between them. (You can appreciate a mountain or an ocean just as much or more as a painting of one.) But does his distinction between absolute and relative beauty do the job? Does it work for non-representational art (not something he envisioned), or for music?
For more on Hutcheson, see Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: A Study of Francis Hutcheson's Aesthetics and its Influence on Eighteenth-Century Britain (NY: Burt Franklin, 1976), also Kivy's article on Hutcheson in the Blackwells Companion to Aesthetics.
back to top