"An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination"
About this Quote
Beauty, for Eduard Hanslick, does not pass through the heart so much as through the imagination. The claim reframes the purpose of art, and music in particular, away from arousing feelings toward presenting forms that invite pure contemplation. Hanslick, the 19th-century Viennese critic best known for On the Musically Beautiful (1854), argued that music’s essence lies in tonally moving forms rather than in expressing definite emotions or stories. Feelings may accompany listening, but they are contingent effects, not the content or goal of the artwork.
The phrase organ of pure contemplation echoes a Kantian ideal of disinterested pleasure: the listener sets aside practical desires and private moods to attend to the work’s intrinsic order. Imagination becomes the faculty that holds patterns, proportions, and relations before the mind, weighing them for their coherence and grace. Under this view, beauty is not sentimental flattery but an intellectual-aesthetic achievement, grasped through attentive perception.
Hanslick’s stance took shape against Romantic expressivism and the rise of program music championed by figures like Wagner and Liszt. He defended absolute music, which speaks through its own inner logic without narrative props. The aim is not to paint a sunrise or narrate a love story, but to unfold a design whose movement and balance satisfy the imagination’s demand for form.
This demand does not preclude emotion; it redirects it. The listener’s pleasure flows from recognizing necessity within freedom, surprise within order, tension and release governed by structure. Critics have found Hanslick austere, charging that he underestimates music’s undeniable power to stir the passions. Yet his insistence on contemplation safeguards the autonomy of art, resisting reduction to moral lessons, propaganda, or mere sentiment. It invites a mode of listening that honors craft and complexity, trusting that beauty itself, apprehended by the imagination, is sufficient motive and reward.
The phrase organ of pure contemplation echoes a Kantian ideal of disinterested pleasure: the listener sets aside practical desires and private moods to attend to the work’s intrinsic order. Imagination becomes the faculty that holds patterns, proportions, and relations before the mind, weighing them for their coherence and grace. Under this view, beauty is not sentimental flattery but an intellectual-aesthetic achievement, grasped through attentive perception.
Hanslick’s stance took shape against Romantic expressivism and the rise of program music championed by figures like Wagner and Liszt. He defended absolute music, which speaks through its own inner logic without narrative props. The aim is not to paint a sunrise or narrate a love story, but to unfold a design whose movement and balance satisfy the imagination’s demand for form.
This demand does not preclude emotion; it redirects it. The listener’s pleasure flows from recognizing necessity within freedom, surprise within order, tension and release governed by structure. Critics have found Hanslick austere, charging that he underestimates music’s undeniable power to stir the passions. Yet his insistence on contemplation safeguards the autonomy of art, resisting reduction to moral lessons, propaganda, or mere sentiment. It invites a mode of listening that honors craft and complexity, trusting that beauty itself, apprehended by the imagination, is sufficient motive and reward.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), 1854 — expresses that art aims to produce beauty affecting the imagination (pure contemplation) rather than directly moving the feelings. |
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