The Root of Formal Beauty: How to Answer Marx’s “Three Questions on Formal Beauty”      

Author: Zhao Jinghuan

Abstract: In 1857, Marx wrote the entry of “aesthetics” in The New Encyclopedia Americana on invitation. Due to the lack of materials on philosophy, psychology and history of arts at that time, Marx raised the “three questions on formal beauty”. Afterwards, arguments had been continued. The paper attempts to provide the following answer. About the first question, i.e. the philosophical basis of formal beauty, I think that the golden rule is the visible dialectics. Being the two typical diagrams of beauty, the eccentric spiral and S-line drawn according to the data of golden rule reflect all the rules of dialects, and both belong to a kind of three-dimensional spirochete, which is the prototype of beauty. This model constitutes the central link of the system of formal beauty. About the second question, i.e. the form analysis of beauty, the essence of natural beauty is abstract formal beauty with the unity of opposites; all the formal elements of famous building, sculpture, writing, calligraphy, music, poem and painting arts constitute the dialects of golden rule presented by beauty. About the third question, i.e. the psychological analysis of formal beauty, the fact is that the subjectivity participates in the aesthetic process when the visual sense makes “feature extraction” of the effective information, and the brain makes the processing integration; aesthetics is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity.