Once described by Etienne Gilson as ‘the forgottentranscendental’, in this book Jaroszyñski explainswhy beauty has come to be forgotten, having beeneclipsed by modern aesthetics, and why reacquaintingcontemporary aestheticians with a metaphysical con-ception of beauty requires conceiving it as a relationaltranscendental. This book, then, is fairly ambitious inits design. The author divides the work into threeparts: the first two parts survey the conceptual historyof beauty and the genesis of modern aesthetics; thethird commends a medieval, transcendental concep-tion of beauty as a remedy for the errors diagnosed inthe first two parts. Lest one regard this as an uncriticalreturn to a pre-modern conception of beauty, theauthor incorporates modern emphases, which not sur-prisingly also identify this Thomist retrieval as dis-tinctively ‘Lublin.’
The first part briefly outlines ancient, medieval,and modern theories of beauty. Unlike historians of aesthetics, Jaroszyñski’s offers a ‘more philoso-phical approach that considers both the theory of being and the theory of man, and is not limited toa narrow aesthetic point of view.’ The authordescribes this ‘aesthetic point of view’ as a distinc-tively modern development coinciding with theemergence of the fine arts as a separate discipline. Inthe second part, Jaroszyñski ssfurther details thisdevelopment by proffering two interrelated histories:i) the modern restructuring of the relation betweenbeauty and nature, and ii) the gradual decline andfall of metaphysics and metaphysical accounts of beauty.
Those familiar with Gilson’s Being and Some Phi-losophers will recognize Jaroszyñski’s history of thecollapse of metaphysics traced from Avicenna andScotus through Suarez to Descartes and Kant. Alsolike Gilson, this account, which takes only a hundredpages, may prove to be frustratingly too cursory.While inevitably there is much missing in this shorthistory – the author only mentions Kant’s conceptionof the sublime in passing – there is also much worthyof attention. Even in its brevity, it evidences remark-able erudition. Readers will likely find the author’shandling of Schelling and Hegel particularly interest-ing as he enumerates the subtle ways that they eachdivorce beauty from nature in a way that provesdetermining for the history of modern aesthetics.
Suffice it to say here that for Jaroszyñski both think-ers presume the ‘negation of the knowability of being’ and therefore adopt a ‘subjective startingpoint.’ One consequence of this is that beauty istotally ascribed to art and excluded from nature,having become solely an expression and product of the creative subject. In such framework, beauty canonly be accidental to being.
As a remedy to this dilemma, the author proposesa metaphysical conception of beauty, though one thatacknowledges the modern turn to the subject. A tran-scendental conception of beauty incorporates andintegrates both of these moves. ‘When we speak of aphilosophy of beauty, two disciplines come into play:metaphysics as the theory of being, and philosophicalanthropology. Anthropology must be present becausetranscendent beauty belongs to the group of rela-tional transcendentals. The relational transcendentalsare the properties of being that express the connec-tion between a being and a person . . . such a devel-opment is needed if the classical conception of beauty is to become relevant in our culture.’ Jaro-szyñski derives his relational-transcendental concep-tion of beauty from Aquinas’ famous definitions: pulchra sunt quae visa placent (‘those things arebeautiful which please when they are seen’) and pul-chrum est cuius ipsa apprehensio placet (‘that isbeautiful the very knowing of which pleases’). Buthow is it that these seemingly subjective definitionssupport a transcendental conception of beauty? Whatis particularly at stake here is whether Aquinas’ defi-nitions entail the kind of universality requisite forbeauty to be conceived as a common property of being: ‘is every being capable of pleasing us whenbeheld, regardless of whether we experience somesort of intense joy as we look at something beauti-ful?’ Too complex to detail here, Jaroszyñski’sanswer to this question remains faithful to Thomistrealism though now augmented with conceptions of personhood and love. Jaroszyñski intricately inter-weaves these three, ‘If I look at something and seethe agreement with my faculties of cognition andlove, and if moreover I see the unity of lovablenessand intelligibility in the same being, then the beingappears before me as beautiful.’
In sum, while there are some important interlocu-tors missing from this work like Jan Aertsen and Mark Jordan, and many Polish thinkers with whomfew Anglophone readers will be familiar, this work should be regarded as one of the most nuanced,extensive, and accessible arguments for beauty being a transcendental in Aquinas available inEnglish today.
Nathan R. Strunk
McGill University