BEAUTY AND FORM

One of the major topics of discussion apropos of aesthetic Appreciation is the form of beauty. We can identify a person, an animal, or a flower, reflecting certain features of their beauty. What characteristics do they share, which give them that status? One of the main problems that emerged was concerned with the definition of “form”. The first gap is related to the “demarcation” problem of form, whether a form is confined by boundaries or limits, like a frame or lines, or the concept of form should be the ambient environment extending beyond the bounding lines? Furthermore, how much extension should have been considered to call it a “form”? To the incertitude of beauty form, we need also to include agreements and disagreements related to the solid Pythagorean tradition. The question is - Can we evaluate a beauty form only through its perfection and symmetry? The first tentative to answer the disoriented domain, has been covered by Clive Bell, who suggested that beautiful forms have to convey something meaningful; not all forms are able to convey a meaning, only a “significant form” has the gift of transmission to convey the “aesthetic experience”. We also studied how theories of form have to consider the thesis of the inseparability of container and its very quintessence. The internal form cannot be segregated from the external one - what is seen externally is a reflection of the internal viewpoint. The interesting point of reflection remains Kant's theory of sublime, according to which the sublime should be considered formless. What is shocking cannot belong to any cognitive category. If on the one hand, Kant claims that the sublime is formless, then the theory of Bell's significant form remains inapplicable to the sublime. According to Clive Bell, everything we see should have a significant form, so the sublime remains an area of further analysis. Albeit Bell relates the concept to visual form, we can work on the margins to expand the concept of form to the sublime, as a container of significance