Beauty is not a concept commonly associated with the writings of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). His baroque prose is hardly “beautiful,” as Veblen himself conceded regarding his most popular work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).Footnote ¹ As to whether Veblen's writings expressed a coherent theory of beauty, the reigning interpretation remains that of Theodor Adorno, who in 1941 described the aesthetic implications of Veblen's social theory as an “attack on culture.” In Adorno's view, Veblen's critique of prevailing taste was inimical to beauty; derived from “American pragmatism,” it proceeded from a definition of truth as “usefulness for the societal whole,” which promised only sterile functionalism if consistently applied to human creations.Footnote ² Challenging this conclusion six decades later, Clare Virginia Eby portrayed Veblen as a skillful stylist employing a host of literary techniques to criticize his culture, and inspiring contemporaries like Theodore Dreiser to merge sociology and art in their own commentary. But Eby was interested in Veblen the artist rather than in Veblen the aesthetician, and in the influence his criticism exerted on others rather than in any independent aesthetic philosophy it implied.Footnote ³ In contrast, Rick Tilman has given sustained attention to extracting a positive theory of beauty from Veblen's predominantly negative body of criticism. In 2004 Tilman compared Veblen to John Dewey and C. Wright Mills in an attempt to situate him within “a native radical tradition in American social science,” one viewing a “social aesthetics” as crucial for empowering common people to recognize and propagate values promoting the general welfare over vested interests. Yet Tilman, concerned with demonstrating the congruence between Dewey's pragmatism and Veblen's institutionalism rather than the influence of one upon the other, declined to trace the historical sources and development of Veblen's ideas. Moreover, Tilman's use of Dewey's ideas to “fill in” the gaps in Veblen's aesthetical and ethical writings, coupled with his caveat that Veblen never explicitly endorsed “the democratizing and egalitarianizing of an elitist culture” so central to Dewey's thought, leaves scholars without firm intellectual-historical grounds for accepting the social aesthetics he extrapolated from the two thinkers' texts as Veblen's own.Footnote ⁴

Yet Tilman's idea that Veblen's interest in his culture's aesthetic, ethical, and political values transcended satire, and included a desire to understand and shape their development, is compelling. A polymath who followed fields spanning linguistics, anthropology, botany, psychology, and political economy, Veblen's exposure to the fluidity of diverse disciplines reacted with his unique mental and moral chemistry to produce a radically historicist method of social analysis that did, in fact, resemble Dewey's pragmatism, and his conviction that it was unscientific and unfruitful to examine human activity in isolated categories led him to apply his method not just to economic institutions but to canons of taste and beauty. The result was a coherent aesthetic theory, describing humans as deliberate actors seeking and creating beauty in the context of their habits and experience—much as Dewey's fellow pragmatist William James linked the search for and creation of truth to humans' “will to believe.” Furthermore, just as both James and Dewey considered all philosophy a guide to conduct, Veblen considered aesthetics inextricably intertwined with the ethics of social life.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, evidence from various archives supports the conclusion that this conception of humans exercising a “will to behold,” while Veblen's own, was shaped in important ways by James's and Dewey's psychology and philosophy. Moreover, Veblen's own writings reveal that his aesthetic theory was part of an explicit project promoting the reconstruction of society along lines resembling Dewey's “industrial democracy,” giving workers more control over their labor, its product, and their lives.

Thus it is argued below that Veblen was neither philistine nor functionalist; rather, he believed all judgment originated in an impulse to imbue sense perceptions with thematic unity; that this aesthetic impulse was responsible for advancing human knowledge; and that the most beautiful objects, actions, or ideas met a standard of communal benefit reflecting humanity's naturally selected awareness of social interdependence. Though Veblen early on derived crucial elements of his aesthetics from Immanuel Kant and his idealist successors, the German aesthetic tradition proved incompatible with Veblen's social thought as it developed in response to the economic and political problems plaguing his America. In the 1890s William James's epistemology and psychology transformed Veblen's nascent aesthetics into a coherent theory with ethical and political applications to modern society as Veblen saw it, clarifying the way interactions of instinct, habit, and environment could institutionalize standards of beauty often perversely contradicting the altruistic thrust of humans' “native” aesthetic impulse. Thereafter, over a long period of frequent professional association with Dewey, Veblen concluded that such habituated aesthetic values could be transformed from bulwarks of the status quo into foundations of a more egalitarian political order. This aesthetically-derived social vision suggests that Veblen was not the modern Jeremiah depicted by influential interpreters.Footnote ⁶ Rather, Veblen's aesthetics reveals his belief in humans' potential to shape their physical and social environment for the common good through cooperative action, achieving a harmony of personal freedom and external reality—the aesthetic goal of the Germans who sparked his thinking about beauty and whose legacy remains powerful and problematic today.

VEBLEN AND THE GERMANS

Veblen's first serious encounter with aesthetics began at Johns Hopkins in 1880, where as a graduate student he studied under the Hegelian George S. Morris (also John Dewey's mentor). Finding the Hopkins curriculum too structured for his tastes, Veblen transferred and took his doctorate at Yale in 1884, where Noah Porter exposed him to the origins of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Scottish empiricism, as well as late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German idealism. Despite his teacher's partiality toward the Scots, Veblen's record and the content of his writings testify to the greater impact of the Germans on his epistemology and aesthetics.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, Veblen's first published essay, “Kant's Critique of Judgment” (1884), praised Kant for explaining the mind's assimilation of new sense perceptions in terms of a creative act—best labeled aesthetic induction—that ultimately made practical moral action possible.Footnote ⁸

As Veblen reads Kant, when the mind encounters unfamiliar phenomena, the “reflective judgment” acts upon the “principle of adaptation” to imagine a reconciliation of new and old experience before performing any critical exercise. This adaptive imperative was “the motive and the guiding principle for induction,” which (as Veblen defined it) did not derive knowledge directly from facts, but first imposed meaning upon them so as to “reduce things to system and connection” and bring them under “definite laws of interaction.”Footnote ⁹ These laws mirrored those governing the creation of knowledge: just as the mind unified percepts by hypothesizing relations among them, so the relations hypothesized were relations of continuity rather than discontinuity. In short, the principle of adaptation dictated that the mind graft new experience onto old by imagining a theme relating both to one another, and to the mind itself—an aesthetic imperative to replace discord with harmony. Yet this harmony was not the stopping-point of inquiry, for the mind could not indefinitely construe objects entirely according to its own “laws”; the “results” of aesthetic induction could only “guide us in guessing about the given data, and then leave it to experience to credit or discredit our guesses.” According to Veblen, by showing how our personal freedom to order experience could be reconciled with thought's “unavoidable determination” by the limits of that experience, Kant demonstrated the practicability of moral action in the external world—action beginning with the “aesthetic stage” of judgment that made knowledge possible.Footnote ¹⁰

After publishing his essay on Kant's Critique, Veblen wrote nothing further on Kant or any of his idealist successors. Taking his degree in 1884, Veblen returned to his parents' Minnesota farm for seven years, where he apparently decided technical philosophy alone could not answer the questions raised by the price swings, credit crises, and general social upheaval afflicting his community and many others. Nonetheless, it seems one other German encountered in his studies left a permanent mark on Veblen's aesthetics: Friedrich Schiller.Footnote ¹¹

One central element of Veblen's mature aesthetics was his theory that the mind's directed efforts to interpret new experience in terms of old were joined by an “idle response” to stimulus, or what he more frequently termed “idle curiosity”: a non-teleological exploration of possible relations between phenomena, generating novel hypotheses about experience that broadened the mind's creative scope. By expanding the range of themes under which new and old experience could be provisionally unified and tested, the innovations of idle curiosity were ultimately responsible for all advances in all realms of knowledge. Idle curiosity itself, however, was an aesthetic impulse, “closely related to the aptitude for play, observed both in man and in the lower animals.”Footnote ¹² As Alan W. Dyer has argued, Veblen's association of “idle curiosity” with “play” evokes Schiller's notion of “play” as the quintessential aesthetic experience. For Schiller, “play” combined our “sense impulse” to surrender to immediate sensation with our “form impulse” to unify experience intellectually, reconciling them through a process that, in Dyer's words, was “neither exclusively contingent nor compelled.”Footnote ¹³ Analogously, Veblen held that only an impulsive mental wanderlust could explain why humans sought knowledge that tore the fabric woven by their equally impulsive ordering of experience, and took such pleasure in the work of re-creating it. Like Schiller, Veblen denied that the conclusions of such playful investigations were solely “contingent” upon the sensed environment; for, like aesthetic induction, idle curiosity was a “native gift” shaping the mind's constructive efforts. Still, neither was idle curiosity wholly “compelled” by reason, for it sought no immediate functional relationship between new experience and old—it was indifferent to the utility of knowledge. Rather, Veblen argued, knowledge acquired by idle curiosity was validated by its own “dramatic consistency,” the degree to which it imbued phenomena with an anthropomorphic purpose, or “life-history”—like myths attributing human qualities and detailed biographies to mysterious natural processes.Footnote ¹⁴ This claim that humans, through imaginative acts, take pleasure in establishing an almost social relationship between themselves and the external world is perhaps Veblen's strongest echo of Schiller, for whom play denoted the spiritual fulfillment achieved through activities mitigating the alienation from nature that accompanied self-awareness.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite its congruence with Schiller's “play,” Veblen's “idle curiosity” was but one element in an aesthetic theory that ultimately owed more to Charles Darwin and William James than to Schiller, or even Kant. As recognizably modern scientific values exerted increasing influence over all fields of inquiry in the late nineteenth century, Veblen saw wisdom in Porter's strictures on an idealist tradition that, however haphazardly, had spawned a Hegelian system in which “facts [were] scarcely considered at all.”Footnote ¹⁶ Vestiges of Kant and Schiller notwithstanding, Veblen's work after 1884 indicates the degree to which idealist aesthetics became irrelevant to what he considered the facts of industrial society. By the time Veblen returned to academia in 1891—eight years before publishing Theory of the Leisure Class—he had already concluded that modern economic conditions habituated individuals to value all things by criteria elevating costliness over other qualities, including beauty—a development he blamed for the political unrest affecting those unable to spend as the wealthy could spend. Though criticizing the socialists' a priori reasoning, Veblen agreed that changing the prevailing regime of ownership was the likeliest first step toward altering this habit, and thus a necessary experiment if social harmony was worth preserving.Footnote ¹⁷

In short, an aesthetics complementing Veblen's economic, sociological, and political concerns asked more than the Germans could give. Though Veblen interpreted Kant's aesthetic induction as the precondition for moral judgment, Kant himself denied that aesthetic values yield insights into moral truth or empirical reality. Meanwhile, Schiller's talk of an “ideal state” in which all were free to engage in play took no account of the economic impediments to its realization in a society reserving leisure to its highest echelons—impediments that would remain as long as the values of the capitalist classes dictated the structures of law and politics. As for Hegel—who saw aesthetic education as one (comparatively unimportant) motor of freedom's apotheosis in a rationally structured state—his system, in caricature, had by the 1880s become the semi-official apologetic for the German “dynastic state” Veblen considered the epitome of a predatory society.Footnote ¹⁸ Veblen may have been, as his adopted stepdaughter claimed, an “artist” above all, but as Becky Veblen realized, the “exigencies” of modern industrial society spurred him to “put a finger on the trouble” by studying the problems afflicting economic relations, in hopes of understanding other realms of human experience.Footnote ¹⁹

VEBLEN'S PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

Political economy became Veblen's primary focus from 1890 onward. Yet an aesthetic critique of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western culture was implied in his critique of neoclassical economic orthodoxy, which he thought bolstered a predatory, wasteful, ugly society. Veblen's attack on the excessive formalism of laissez-faire economic theory was inspired by Darwin's evolutionism: he thought Darwin's work revealed science itself as evolutionary, generating “transitional” truths rather than discovering the immutable laws some economists averred.Footnote ²⁰ But Veblen also rejected the psychology undergirding such laws. He denied Herbert Spencer's “associationist” claim that the mind was shaped entirely by the impinging environment, insisting that mind “seeks realization and expression through unfolding activity.” He also rejected Spencer's “hedonistic” view of the mind as a “lightning calculator” of pain and pleasure, stressing instead the social and spiritual teloi of thought evident in humans' “desire to think that their life is of some use”—a “norm of economic merit” related to “the ethical norm of conduct, on the one hand, and the aesthetic norm of taste, on the other.”Footnote ²¹

As the preceding quotation suggests, Veblen's interest in aesthetics did not evaporate after 1890, but developed in tandem with the psychological premises that shaped the whole of his social thought, and his library and writings provide direct evidence that he derived those premises from William James. Veblen read James's Principles of Psychology sometime between 1896 and 1906: both volumes of the 1896 edition of Principles are at Veblen's alma mater, Carleton College, inscribed “Veblen” on the flyleaves, in Thorstein Veblen's hand.Footnote ²² Marginalia are sparse, but a few notes and a larger number of blots and asterisks flank passages throughout. Moreover, from 1906 forward Veblen cited James's Principles in various published works. The passages marked and cited suggest James influenced three elements crucial to Veblen's aesthetic theory. First, James helped Veblen refine his view of the mind as active, creating knowledge rather than passively receiving it from the environment. Second, Veblen cited James's work to support his claim that knowledge creation began with “idle curiosity,” an aesthetic impulse to imbue experience with thematic unity. Finally, Veblen drew on James's psychology of instincts and habits to argue that the mind instinctively valued social unity above all, judging the beauty of objects and ideas by their potential to advance it, but that this instinctual attraction to the socially beautiful was perverted by habits of thinking inherited from a starkly different social past.

Veblen's theory of the active mind resembled James's by the late 1890s; by 1906 he explicitly identified it with pragmatic epistemology. He had long objected to the associationist psychology upon which laissez-faire economic theory rested, but James provided the Darwinian alternative he was looking for. Veblen's 1875 edition of Spencer's First Principles of a New System of Philosophy contains marginalia advancing a purely Kantian critique of associationism—refuting, for example, Spencer's claim that “space” was abstracted from impressions of “extension” by asserting that “S. [space] is that entity which we assume to make E. [extension] possible.”Footnote ²³ In contrast, by 1898 Veblen was deploying the arguments of functional psychology against associationism. He argued that while humans obviously responded to environmental stimuli, they were also endowed “by selective necessity” with “a proclivity for purposeful action”—a talent for manipulating their environment that was their supreme advantage over other species.Footnote ²⁴ Here Veblen replaced the simple assertion of mental predispositions made in his article on Kant with an explication of their evolutionary origins that echoed James's account in Principles of Psychology. Though he cited no source, his copy of Principles contains marginalia interrogating James's arguments for the biological basis of volitional thought, in a section refuting both idealist and associationist accounts of consciousness.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, the psychological doctrines Veblen endorsed in 1898 were exactly those he affirmed in his 1906 article “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,” where he identified them explicitly with pragmatic epistemology. “Current psychology is nearly at one,” he wrote in that piece, “in saying that all learning is of a ‘pragmatic’ character.”Footnote ²⁶

The pragmatic account of the active mind helped Veblen clarify the role aesthetic criteria played in advancing knowledge. In “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” he argued that the mind's “naïve pragmatism”—his term for teleological thought directed toward a proximate, technical end—had evolved from another, now complementary process which did not create knowledge for immediate use, but merely explored aesthetically satisfying relations among phenomena: the process of “idle curiosity.”Footnote ²⁷ Though the inspiration behind the concept of idle curiosity was probably Schiller's “play,” Veblen tapped James to clarify the aesthetic character of idle curiosity and its knowledge-expanding role. Citing James's Principles as authority, Veblen claimed that the idly curious tendency to gather all experience, useful or not, under one thematic umbrella had over millennia created “a more and more comprehensive system of knowledge,” eventually engendering modern science.Footnote ²⁸ James had argued that as imagined relations between objects of thought were found congruent with the “time- and space-relations” we encountered in experience, their scientific value obscured their aesthetic character. Similarly, Veblen argued that as societies advanced, the drive to find consistency among rapidly multiplying facts demanded ever-closer analyses of experience, under which the “dramatization of phenomena” assumed a “less personal” cast. But never, he insisted, did idle curiosity “lose its dramatic character.”Footnote ²⁹ This claim that all teleological thought and the knowledge it produced was aesthetic in origin is hard to reconcile with popular portraits of Veblen, which paint him as a functionalist who evaluated objects and ideas according to their material serviceability alone.

Indeed, the central argument of Veblen's aesthetics was that human activity was largely driven by an “instinct of workmanship,” which measured both the beauty and practical value of an object or idea according to the benefits it promised to bring society as a whole. As detailed in the following sections of this essay, he considered this instinct of workmanship both an anthropological fact and a normative good; clearly, however, people seemed not to follow it. To explain why, he invoked the final psychological principle he adopted from James: the idea that a dialectic of instinct and habit conditioned all human activity, including aesthetic judgment. As Veblen wrote in 1914, instincts dictated no “determinate sequence of action,” but opened a “field for adaptation” to circumstances, and this interaction of instinct with environment often produced habits. Habits could replicate across time and culture and calcify into self-reinforcing “institutions,” so ill-adapted to changed circumstances as to divert instinctual responses into channels that frustrated the instincts themselves.Footnote ³⁰ The idea that such institutions had survived the “barbarian” stages of social development to pervert our instinct of workmanship in modern times became the crux of Veblen's aesthetic critique.

Veblen owed his instinct–habit psychology to James. He first articulated it in a series of articles from 1898, which became raw material for the work containing his most extended discussion of aesthetics, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The articles were: “Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?” (July), “The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor” (September), and “The Beginnings of Ownership” (November).Footnote ³¹ There are three reasons to believe James's psychological doctrines influenced these works. First, they advanced a theory of the active mind that anticipates Veblen's explicitly “pragmatic” rejection of Spencerian associationism and hedonism in “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,” indicating that he read James while writing them. The 1898 paper “The Instinct of Workmanship,” for instance, described the mind as a “bundle of impulsive, unfolding activity”—a position identified in another 1898 article as that of “the later psychology.”Footnote ³² Second, Veblen was at the University of Chicago when he authored these works, where colleagues John Dewey and George H. Mead, close students of James's work, likely spurred his own interest in James: Andrew Veblen recalled that he and Thorstein “talked quite a good deal together about the men in the University of Chicago,” and one colleague maintained that the instinct-psychology Veblen was then refining “was in line with James and against Spencer.”Footnote ³³ Third, the instinct psychology of the 1898 articles strongly resembles that formulated by James in chapters of Principles which Veblen read and cited in later works.Footnote ³⁴ To take an important example, James argued that one instinct could engender another over evolutionary time, if memory induced a habitual response conferring a survival advantage on those whose brains, due to “accidental variation,” most easily developed it; similarly, Veblen claimed in Leisure Class that “selective adaptation of men's habits of thought” could result in inherited impulses—a claim congruent with the passages he read in James's book.Footnote ³⁵

Veblen himself never stated that his 1890s work was indebted to pragmatism. Indeed, he sometimes seemed to disparage pragmatism: even while citing James in “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,” he claimed that “pragmatic knowledge” produced little besides “didactic exhortations to thrift, prudence, equanimity, and shrewd management,” whereas idle curiosity produced truly innovative thinking.Footnote ³⁶ Yet in a note preceding this apparent critique, Veblen explained that “pragmatism,” as defined by its practitioners, included both idle curiosity and naive pragmatism. He only distinguished between them because his discussion required “a simple term by which to mark the distinction between worldly wisdom and idle learning.”Footnote ³⁷ Why Veblen chose his terms this way is unclear. Perhaps he was distancing himself from the utilitarian caricature of pragmatism that had distorted interpretations of James's ideas since the latter adopted the term in 1898.Footnote ³⁸ In any case, Veblen's main argument in “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” was entirely congruent with pragmatism as James conceived it: to criticize the cleavage of practical and intellectual life in modern society, and protest what James called the “irremediable flatness” of experience it caused. Veblen claimed that while the “accentuated pragmatism” of modern industrialism was defining all human purpose in material terms, its antithesis, “pure science,” had become so divorced from any human purpose that its conclusions were rarely “felt to be as good and beautiful as they are true.”Footnote ³⁹

To explain how purpose, beauty, and truth were sundered, and to explore how narrow utility and aimless creativity might be resynthesized in gratifying action, were the primary goals of Veblen's aesthetic project. Congruities between Veblen's writings of the late 1890s, when he first formulated this project, and ideas he encountered in James's work after 1896 will emerge throughout the succeeding analysis, reinforcing the conclusion that pragmatic principles of psychology played a formative role not only in Veblen's aesthetics, but in his broader program of social, economic, and political reconstruction.

WORKMANSHIP, OWNERSHIP, AND WASTE: THE RISE OF THE LEISURE-CLASS AESTHETIC

Veblen's aesthetics was evolutionary, historical, and prescriptive. Veblen believed that in Western society a particularly important, species-generic instinct, “the instinct of workmanship,” had been diverted into bizarre channels by habits propagated across social space and time and now entrenched in the institution of “ownership.” Workmanship was an evolved, aesthetical–ethical “taste for effective work” seeking to “further the life of the group”; ownership was a historical convention under which labor was distasteful, yet consuming its products honorable.Footnote ⁴⁰ The perversion of workmanship explained, for Veblen, the wasteful, gaudy, and exploitative character of his culture, yet Veblen also believed that, under proper conditions, the workmanlike instinct could once again serve the “life process” of the species, a service that would be recognized as the high expression of beauty it was.

Veblen's aesthetic inquiries were predominantly critical: he was most concerned with historicizing prevailing “canons of taste,” demonstrating their economic wastefulness and debilitating effects on appreciating true beauty. From this critical analysis, however, the basic elements of Veblen's positive aesthetics emerge—for instance, his explanation for why beauty exists at all. “It may be in place to recall the modern psychological position,” he wrote in Leisure Class. “Beauty of form seems to be a question of facility of apperception,” meaning “the mind readily unfolds its apperceptive activity in the directions which the object in question affords.” Veblen clarified this obscure statement by translating it into evolutionary terms: the sense of beauty illustrated the mind's “selective adaptation” to the savage state characterizing humankind's long prehistory, during which the search for the useful in experience became essential to mental structure in ways other habits of thought were not. “Facility of apperception,” then, meant the ease with which the mind imagined a relationship between itself and the object perceived—a relationship that might be exploited to enhance survival.Footnote ⁴¹

In short, by the time Veblen wrote the above, he had reformulated aesthetic induction as an instinct, with origins in the cerebral “plasticity” James hypothesized. Moreover, Veblen concluded that millennia of attraction to and use of certain objects with easily imagined purposes had influenced psychological and physical evolution both, so that beauty and ease of manipulation were often indistinct. Yet beauty was not simply a measure of material utility: “So far as the economic interest enters into the constitution of beauty,” Veblen wrote, it was as “a manifest and readily inferable subservience to the life process,” a process comprehending the gamut of desires—the “fullness of life.”Footnote ⁴²

In fact, Veblen asserted, some objects had an “intrinsic beauty” irreducible to economic use. Gold, he argued, had a “high degree of sensuous beauty,” as did many gems, materials used for clothing, and landscapes. He even admitted that “most of the highly prized works of art are intrinsically beautiful, though with material qualification.” But Veblen never explained why exactly the mind had evolved an appreciation for these or other specific forms and substances, and Veblen's omission of any guide regarding which elements in “highly prized” works of art were intrinsically beautiful is the great disappointment of his aesthetics. One must assume our only means of discovering the beautiful in art is to follow Veblen's lead and first expose its “material qualifications.”Footnote ⁴³

Indeed, Veblen's remark that such qualifications marred even intrinsically appealing artworks raises an important question: how did his claims about humans' aesthetic instincts jibe with the rise of the “leisure class,” and specifically with the “canon of waste” he identified as the governing principle of modern culture? How had appreciation for efficiency produced “habits of thought” under which expense determined beauty, and personal consumption signified social worth? The conundrum is both aesthetic and ethical. Veblen's belief in humans' desire for “fullness of life” implied that beauty did not equal material service, nor goodness maximum pleasure. And while fullness of life included “the fullness of life of the individual,” that individual was social: the initial phase of human development was characterized by an instinctive group solidarity breeding “sympathy with all facility of human life.” Yet, as Veblen admitted elsewhere, this instinct for “generic usefulness” seemed “in sheer conflict with the conventional antipathy to useful effort” he criticized in his contemporaries.Footnote ⁴⁴

Ironically, it was a touchstone of human sociability that Veblen identified as the root of invidious waste—the “proclivity to emulation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As his copy of James's Principles explained, “emulation” was an “intense instinct” responsible for “[n]ine-tenths of the world's work . . . We know that if we do not do the task someone else will do it and get the credit, so we do it.” Unlike the related instinct of “imitation,” emulation had “little connection with sympathy, but rather more with pugnacity.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Veblen's analysis of the interplay between the emulative and pugnacious instincts, and of the interplay of both with social experience, proceeded similarly. While imitation in a culture of solidarity encouraged pursuit of the generically useful, increasing contact and competition with other human groups encouraged pugnacity, eventually making seizure of booty in war symbolic of one's tribal value. Emulation of these habits spawned the institution of ownership, which in turn bred habits diverting the instinct of workmanship toward “predatory” efficiency—habits persisting long after technology obviated the struggle for subsistence that produced them. This instinct–habit dialectic occurred, Veblen hypothesized, during the socio-organizational transition from peaceable “savagery” to predatory “barbarism,” of which modern Western civilization was a sophisticated elaboration.Footnote ⁴⁷

Veblen admitted that “appropriation of useful articles” was an instinct itself, related to idle curiosity and workmanship. But “ownership” Veblen defined as appropriation involving or symbolizing exploitation of people. Its earliest form, he wrote, was “ownership of the women by the able-bodied men of the community,” originating in the kidnapping of females from other groups. This, in turn, exemplified the barbarian's tendency to divide the world between the animate and inanimate, and to designate the bending of animate phenomena to one's own purposes (“exploit”) as men's work, and the tedious manipulation of inanimate objects (“industry”) as women's work. While “exploits” such as hunting animals and subduing other tribes, then, became honorific, the “industry” of women became the drudgery of slaves. Yet appropriating the fruits of industry indicated prowess over their creators; thus the more goods appropriated, the more powerful one seemed.Footnote ⁴⁸

Evident prowess, then, was the end served by ownership and waste, and these habits warped judgments of beauty. “Habits of thought with respect to the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions,” Veblen wrote. “So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely, influence the sense of duty, [and] the sense of beauty.” Intrinsically beautiful substances like gold became prized for public display as much as for personal appreciation. The result for human-produced goods was that “marks of superfluous costliness” were valued as highly efficient signs of excess wealth accrued through predation, while goods were “humilific, and therefore unattractive,” when demonstrating “too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end sought.” Thus the canon of waste not only turned intrinsically beautiful objects into symbols of exploitative prowess, but obscured the ancient correlation between beauty and efficiency. Judged by “the resulting standard of serviceability,” Veblen concluded, a beautiful but non-wasteful article would “never pass muster.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Veblen's exposé of “costliness masquerading under the guise of beauty” has fortified his reputation as a functionalist who exaggerated his contemporaries' emulative wastefulness and ignored the non-invidious criteria by which many judged beauty.Footnote ⁵⁰ Veblen, however, thought aesthetic judgments were compromised not only by the patent desire to consume conspicuously, but also by the principles modern aesthetes devised to trump such crass philistinism. One such principle was “archaism” or “classicism,” which protested modern society's elevation of economic over aesthetic pursuits by ignoring technological innovations that increased efficiency of production and use. The irony, in Veblen's eyes, was that archaism established its own tyranny of economic over aesthetic values, enthroning the values of the canon of waste. The Arts and Crafts Movement provided Veblen rich material on this score. The cultivated, he argued, often inferred the beauty of “handwrought” goods from their costly production and functional obsolescence. Conversely, many “machine-made goods,” admired by the untutored for their successful adaptation to use, were despised by the cultivated for their “ceremonial inferiority”—further evidence, for Veblen, that handwrought goods were valued primarily for wasting time and resources.Footnote ⁵¹

The Arts-and-Crafts canon of waste was, in Veblen's view, best represented by William Morris's handcrafted books. Veblen in fact enjoyed Morris's fiction, owning several of his books—those versions produced by modern printing processes.Footnote ⁵² Nor was Veblen indifferent to a book's aesthetic qualities: his correspondence with the publishers of Leisure Class records his keen sensitivity to the inextricability of visual appeal and ease of use in an object intended to please through sustained interaction with eyes and hands.Footnote ⁵³ But the typical handcrafted volume, if not ugly as an object per se, failed to fulfill its aesthetic function as a book, which must engage the senses in a particular way for pleasure to be derived from its text. Sometimes this failure had absurd consequences: while the “antique and obsolete processes” of the book's production were thought by most to lend it a purely aesthetic superiority, it was nonetheless “not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech.” For Veblen this confirmed that, beautiful or not, the “decadent book” was designed under “non-aesthetic” constraints requiring that the “product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be costly and ill adapted to its ostensible use.”Footnote ⁵⁴

It seems odd that Veblen would criticize a movement explicitly linking applied arts to social reform. But by this very linkage, Veblen maintained, Arts and Crafts goods perpetuated the canon of waste with ill effects beyond the aesthetic realm. Claiming that “a democratic culture requires low cost and a large, thoroughly standardised output of goods,” Veblen argued that more than any art form, “industrial art . . . must fall into line with the technological exigencies of the machine process” that made goods widely accessible. Ignoring these exigencies kept the Arts and Crafts Movement confined to the “hothouse shelter of decadent aestheticism,” and hampered the aesthetic and thus social education of common people. Veblen recognized the “artistic value” latent in many Arts and Crafts goods, but thought the social relevance of applied arts would best be assured by an emphasis on “sensuous beauty of line and color and on visible serviceability,” qualities easily attained by modern machine processes and ignored (in Veblen's opinion) by the majority of those enamored with “the industry of a past age.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In short, whatever the reform sentiments of its custodians, the Arts and Crafts canon of taste remained one of the many auxiliary canons of waste supplanting our native appreciation for the innovative and purposeful with “veneration for the archaic or obsolete.” This archaism, or “classicism,” was essentially uncreative: “Neither in matters of art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative.” In Darwinian terms, classicism was “selective only,” affording no “ground for variation and growth,” but imposing requirements for the “survival” of innovations. Veblen's choice of “classicism” to describe habits of thought hostile to growth was not casual, nor limited to aesthetics: “‘Classic’ always carries this connotation of wasteful and archaic,” he wrote. Describing classicism in Darwinian vocabulary as a stunting of development, both aesthetic and technological, Veblen surreptitiously attacked what he called the “classical” school of economists and their social-Darwinist interpreters on their own terms.Footnote ⁵⁶

Yet Veblen's indictment of prevailing aesthetic norms and, by implication, contemporary social thought could not stop with his analysis of archaism. The mantra of laissez-faire economists was “production,” and they could claim to be just as concerned with innovation as he. How did Veblen explain the proliferation of goods serving endless new purposes turned out by factories at ever higher rates? Perhaps Veblen had bones to pick with the arbiters of taste, but what had that to do with the economic system he lambasted, which, supported by “classical” doctrine, consistently generated new things? Unanswered, these objections undermine not only Veblen's case against the economic waste of laissez-faire capitalism, but his theory of the interdependent nature of economic and aesthetic (indeed all) impulses as well.Footnote ⁵⁷

Veblen preempted these objections by identifying an active principle spurring wasteful innovation: “novelty.” Again, all humans sought beauty, often in usefulness. But under the canon of waste, this urge must be “circumvented” by a feature signifying “reputably wasteful expenditure,” yet paradoxically appealing to our sense for “the useful and beautiful”—or, more often, to a habit which had usurped the function of that sense. “Novelty” was this “auxiliary sense of taste” by which wastefulness and usefulness were reconciled. Novel designs were “calculated to puzzle the beholder—to bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the improbable,” while simultaneously suggesting that far more labor was expended to produce them than their fitness for any imagined purpose could require. Novelty temporarily reconciled economic beauty and pecuniary reputability by suggesting both the possibility of usefulness for a purpose as-yet-unknown, and the possibility that time and effort were wasted creating it.

Dress was Veblen's prime example of wasteful novelty. Constant wardrobe updates evinced one's ability to consume profligately, and if the wardrobe also evinced the superfluity of “earning a livelihood,” the wearer's social status skyrocketed. Hence the impractical and debilitating corset, which demonstrated the ability “to consume a relatively large value” on the part of a wearer who “consumes without producing.”Footnote ⁵⁸

For Veblen it was the subjugation of aesthetic to pecuniary considerations that made novelties wasteful, not novelty itself. Novelty, like so many instincts, was perverted by habitual concern for pecuniary repute. Changing styles, Veblen wrote, revealed “a restless search for something which will commend itself to our aesthetic sense,” but as with archaism, the range of innovation was circumscribed by the canon of waste. In the resulting fashion dialectic, novel details strove “to avoid instant condemnation by showing some ostensible purpose,” while the selective action of the canon of waste weeded out all innovations demonstrating more than a “transparent pretense” of purposefulness. When the uselessness of an innovation became apparent, relief was sought in another “equally futile and equally untenable” novelty. Again, Veblen recognized an instinct for genuine beauty, claiming “attachment to whatever happens to be the latest [fashion] . . . lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But by no means did this constant testing of styles guarantee progress toward an absolute standard of beauty in dress. Much as James insisted upon the historical contingency of all knowledge, even moral values, Veblen thought it “very hazardous” to conclude that later styles were “intrinsically more becoming” than those of decades or even centuries before. The subjective concerns impelling any search for knowledge largely determined the character of that knowledge—fashion being a particularly obvious, but otherwise typical, example.Footnote ⁶⁰

Nonetheless, neither James nor Veblen denied that there were psychological commonalities upon which the infinitely various constructions of human experience were built. Veblen traced current canons of taste to generic impulses expressed in changing contexts: humans recognized and desired true beauty, but expressions of this desire were influenced by canons of judgment in overlapping spheres, products of centuries of invidious comparison under a predatory social order encouraging waste. A correspondingly pecuniary “schedule of aesthetic properties” was the result.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet Veblen's historicist critique of taste yielded a positive aesthetics that allowed for a new “schedule of aesthetic properties,” under the right conditions. Veblen believed individuals, if encouraged to reflect upon the contingent and conflicting nature of many of their tastes, could learn to discriminate between them, and find an aesthetic test to replace the canon of waste. Veblen thought that test should be our instinct of workmanship—our sense of usefulness, disencumbered of the strictures of pecuniary repute. Since usefulness was more easily tested than “intrinsic beauty,” yet was so often concomitant with it, ignoring costliness to give workmanship room for expression was the most promising means of discovering the beautiful. Indeed, if an appealing object failed a rigorous usefulness test yet nonetheless still seemed beautiful, there might be grounds for believing its appeal was derived from no discernible purpose, economic or invidious—grounds, that is, for believing it was intrinsically beautiful.

Given that the instinct of workmanship responded strongest to potential communal benefits, Veblen's proposition amounted to an ethics privileging altruism over individualism; an element some have found problematic in a theory of instincts.Footnote ⁶² But Veblen never advanced his altruistic aesthetics on grounds that the instinct of workmanship was more inherently natural, or absolutely moral, than other instincts. Rather, Veblen identified altruism as a test of beauty because, following Kant, he believed aesthetic judgment was a social act, in which the mind's criteria, necessarily subjective, were imagined as universal.Footnote ⁶³ More importantly, as the conclusion of this analysis will demonstrate, Veblen commended cultivation of the social, workmanlike instinct for beauty on pragmatic grounds: he believed intelligence allowed humans to adapt their behavior to context, and that the habits of workmanship were best suited to resolving the contradictions afflicting modern, industrial, interdependent society.

“THE ENDS OF LIFE”: AESTHETICS AND ETHICS

Veblen believed in “a generically human type of spiritual endowment.” Populations across time and space exhibited striking differences, but each “racial type” was nevertheless best adapted to the circumstances of its emergence, circumstances fundamentally similar for all. Thus, across the human race, “the exigencies to which its spiritual (instinctive) nature was selectively required to conform” were those of peaceable hunting and gathering—“those of the savage culture.”Footnote ⁶⁴

As discussed, this generic, savage mind lurking beneath the habituated modern consciousness had a native aesthetic sense, to which some phenomena appealed regardless of their implications for efficient (or wasteful) activity. This intrinsic beauty was a fact for Veblen, often encountered in nature. Veblen puzzled over the taste for rare flowers, but regretted the weeding of equally beautiful native blossoms; his collection of pressed wildflowers, gathered in 1878 from the prairies of southern Minnesota, is still preserved. Veblen scoffed at manicured parks ornamented with introduced deer, but delighted in pastures grazed by cattle; he denigrated those coveting “fast horses” as gambling instruments, but extolled the animals' beauty of form.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nonetheless, his preference for the “draft breeds” exemplified his belief that the highest beauty satisfied the economic instincts as well: efficiency enhanced intrinsic beauty. Veblen took pride in the simple, precisely constructed furniture he built for his succession of small homes (though, tellingly, he donated his creations whenever he relocated), and he treasured a knife his grandfather had used “habitually” till his death, the sheath and handle of which were the man's own workmanship.Footnote ⁶⁶

It is unsurprising that Veblen saw the aesthetic and economic instincts as complementary. Like beauty, he understood economic utility in terms of the generic human type, believing man was a “social animal” due to his psychological formation during the savage phase. By 1898 Veblen had concluded that during the early, industrially inefficient, stages of human development only a “sense of solidarity” more powerful than self-interest could sustain the groups that in turn sustained their members. In 1914 he based an entire book on the assumption that the “prime requisite for survival” under savage conditions was “a penchant for turning all resources of knowledge and material to account to sustain the life of the group.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The altruistic eponym of 1914's The Instinct of Workmanship was the same instinct to which Veblen traced, in Leisure Class, the “underlying norms of taste” obscured by our habituation to waste.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both works' implicit call for more equitable economic relations pervaded Veblen's criticism, at least from the time he arrived at the University of Chicago in 1892. Here, he wrote a friend in January 1896, he decided that the analysis of “leisure-class” economics he had recently begun must proceed from a broader theory of “aptitudes, propensities, and habits of thought”; here also he found that contemporary psychologists had “already worked out” such a theory—another reason to suspect he consulted James's book, the reigning authority, soon after this discovery.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, the man Veblen's stepdaughter called his “very friendly friend” at Chicago, John Dewey, was just then fully embracing James's theory of the active mind.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is thus unsurprising that just as James's and Dewey's psychology shaped their social views—which emphasized tailoring ethical, economic, and political systems to the interdependence of modern life—Veblen's similar theory of mind informed not only his economics and aesthetics, but his ethics and politics.Footnote ⁷¹ Veblen argued that, if freed from the invidious canon of waste, the altruistic instinct of workmanship would promote behaviors practically suited to modern industrial society. “The collective interests of any modern community centre in industrial efficiency,” Veblen wrote in Leisure Class, and industrial efficiency required the “peacefulness” which empathy and “absence of self-seeking” fostered. Releasing the instinct of workmanship from its bondage to the “predatory propensities” preventing peace and efficiency required legal and political reform.Footnote ⁷² As he wrote in his last (and most pessimistic) book, Absentee Ownership (1923), the “institutional holdovers” of a legal and political system rooted in eighteenth-century individualism created an “aggregate loss of life and livelihood” and an accompanying “tissue of dissension” resulting not only in a downtrodden common man, but in “mutual and collective defeat and grief.”Footnote ⁷³

Should the waste of predatory conventions be exposed, reasoned Veblen, the instinct of workmanship would interact with other propensities, such as emulation, to narrow the gap between technological and cultural evolution. Under a code of workmanship, material pursuits exploiting technology to facilitate “human life on the whole,” rather than the “interest of one as against another,” would be emulated.Footnote ⁷⁴ The instinct of workmanship would also synergize with another of humankind's most primal instincts: the “parental bent,” which extended concern for one's children to include concern for human life in the abstract. Veblen concluded that actualizing this concern for the group's economic future was “an essential function of the instinct of workmanship,” the emulation of which advanced human mastery of the environment. Veblen's belief that a taste for serving the community and its heirs might “catch on,” so to speak, and prove itself prerequisite to continued technological development, indicates his conviction that our deepest aesthetic and economic drives are ultimately social and ethical.Footnote ⁷⁵

That powerful social and ethical impulses were not always discernible in human behavior was due to the fact that the workmanlike instinct and parental bent had been directed into unexpected, yet sometimes persistent, channels over time—not least because the specific ends these instincts served were “so many and diverse.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Veblen recognized that the endless variety of goals, individual and collective, established by humans throughout history were merely impelled by the instincts, not defined by them with any specificity. The latter was the function of reflection—and habit. Without such proliferation of ends, the habits he traced to the barbarian past never would have developed.

Yet the instincts consistently resurrected themselves. The “impulse to mutual service” characterizing early Christianity, for instance, indicated that savage humanity's “spiritual heritage” of voluntary reciprocity had survived ownership (and organized religion) and might revivify modern economic life. Despite Western society's blasphemous (from a primitive Christian perspective) tendency to define individuals in terms of “pecuniary efficiency,” the “Natural Rights” invoked to justify a competitive economic system had borne “Rights of Man” that in fact undermined the coercive property laws sustaining it. Thus, Veblen predicted, “the ancient racial bias embodied in the Christian principle of brotherhood should logically continue to gain ground at the expense of the pecuniary morals of competitive business.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet Veblen was too much a Darwinist to believe things destined to unfold that way. The future of Western civilization depended on successful adaptation to the “altered scheme of life” its own growth had imposed. Unfortunately, in Veblen's view, the “self-regarding sentiments” underlying contemporary Western culture bred coercive relations, stifling the workmanlike traits by which individuals helped societies adapt. Only by cooperating to establish conditions allowing “the ancient bent” to surmount the “canons of convention” could Western peoples roll the stones of history from civilization's tomb.Footnote ⁷⁸

Nevertheless, Veblen accorded Western civilization a distinct advantage in beginning this work. He did not think adaptation required a cataclysmic alteration in social relations, as those contrasting Veblen's alleged fatalism with Dewey's activism would have it.Footnote ⁷⁹ Rather, Veblen argued that, like rights discourse, the “machine process” of modern industry undermined the pecuniary competition it ostensibly served. The logic of the machine process presumed “a certain intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of the workman” that discouraged his imputing “animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties” to material facts and their relations. It was a historicist logic that eroded the framework of law and convention legitimating the predations of “business enterprise” and instead encouraged judgments based on “tangible performance.”Footnote ⁸⁰

On first blush, this “discipline of the machine” has grim implications for the aesthetics and ethics thus far attributed to Veblen. Its materialist corrosion of “teleological” interpretations of cause and effect seems hostile to idealistic and creative human nature, as Veblen himself lamented in “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization.” John Dewey, in his own discussion of machine industry's democratizing potential, worried that its “soulless monotony” would debase workmen deprived of the chance to balance efficiency with “inventiveness.” But Veblen did not believe escaping waste and exploit meant embracing functionalism. The machine process did not negate human creativity, but merely vitiated the barbarian tendency to view the laws of physics as the actions of a humanoid entity with humanoid goals. In this barbarian mindset, wrote Veblen, a worker's “creative imagination” was stunted by the assumption that mechanical processes must be carried out according to fixed ideas of “sufficient reason” rather than “efficient cause.” By contrast, machine discipline encouraged constant reevaluation of “sufficient reason” in light of changing experience and objectives, ensuring that reasons sufficient to guide activity in the past were equally sufficient in the present, and were modified if not. In effect, machine discipline encouraged the pragmatic turn of mind.Footnote ⁸¹

But a pragmatist might raise another, ethical objection. If machine discipline were required to eradicate wasteful habits, must society be directed by an elite corps of efficiency experts? Again Dewey's concerns are relevant: “Personal control of power, strong discontent with whatever subordinates mental capacity to merely external regulation, must be made primary” in an industrial democracy. The emphasis on “immediate” efficiency must be checked, “so as to secure powers which will enable individuals to adapt themselves to inevitable change.”Footnote ⁸² Veblen was more obscure on this score, and critics have seen him as heralding an engineering aristocracy in both the workplace and society generally.Footnote ⁸³ This was not Veblen's vision. The critical and experimental habits of machine discipline “must be found in the workmen under whose tendance these processes and appliances are to work out the designed results,” not just in the engineers overseeing them. Furthermore, the machine discipline was already extending beyond the industrial workforce “so as in great part to determine the habits of all members of the modern community.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Though Veblen was vague as to how, society at large was developing the means, at least, of becoming a more efficient community of inquiry.

“Modern life goes by clockwork,” then, but not wholly. By “native endowment,” Veblen maintained, humans are best adapted to “a moderately advanced savagery” allowing free expression of the instinct of workmanship, an expression requiring leisure to experiment, to be idly curious. Conversely, those “held unremittingly to the machine process ‘break down.’” Life never should or would be fully automated, for human beings could not tolerate it. For all its abstractions, modern scientific inquiry spoke to this human instinct for “action by contact”—those imaginative and critical interactions with the material world that had defined human life since its dawn. Veblen claimed science's idly curious alternative to machine-like thinking had added balance to modern intellectual life, and after remarking that “the fact that it works is conclusive of its truth,” noted that “Pragmatism” was the term for this concept of “efficiency . . . as the bench-mark of actuality.”Footnote ⁸⁵

This was a strangely simplified definition of pragmatism from one who, in 1906, had carefully distinguished the “naïve pragmatism” of immediate application from a broader pragmatism embracing idly curious experimentation.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nevertheless, Veblen here endorsed a hybrid that, whatever he called it, resembled the pragmatic method as actually practiced by Dewey and James. During and after World War I, moreover, convergences were frequent and obvious between Veblen's and Dewey's ideas—and their politics. In 1917 both insisted, in Veblen's words, that “abrogation of the rights of ownership” was the precondition for both domestic and international peace, and in 1919 Veblen called for the type of self-governing workplace and public control of critical industries Dewey had long advocated—even suggesting a general strike among industrial “technicians” to push such reforms forward. By 1923 Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct (1922) was Veblen's standard authority for explaining why social-democratic reform was both demanded and constrained by the psychology of the common man in modern society, and though postwar America's persisting “derangement” led Veblen to doubt a workmanlike society was as close as he had once believed, he continued exposing the dangers of institutional inertia as Dewey's colleague at the New School for Social Research—established to promote “a searching readjustment of the established order.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Most importantly, Dewey and Veblen shared similar ideas about the role of aesthetic judgment in human thought. In Art as Experience (1934), Dewey wrote that coherent thinking “has its own esthetic quality,” an “internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement.” Not only did such “consummation” of thought motivate inquiry, but no intellectual activity was truly an “experience” unless it was “rounded out” this way—and the same held true for “dominantly practical” activities. Like Veblen (and perhaps Schiller), Dewey believed the most gratifying courses of action lay on a broad spectrum between “the poles of aimlessness and mechanical efficiency,” seeking the harmonization of our own purposes with the facts of the natural world. He concluded that the problem with conventional morality was its “anesthetic quality,” a focus not on “wholehearted action” but “grudging piecemeal concessions to the demands of duty.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Thus Dewey linked aesthetics with the efficient consummation of action, and both with moral conduct.

Veblen, too, saw aesthetics as an important auxiliary to ethics. The “functional content” of the instinct of workmanship was “serviceability for the ends of life, whatever these ends may be.” Workmanship itself was a gratifying but indeterminate end, comprising “the ways and means of life” as opposed to “any one given ulterior end.” In a sense, then, Veblen's aesthetics are functional, though not as the term is commonly understood. Veblen thought that beauty indicated fitness for achieving ends, but ends set by the myriad interests of socially interdependent beings. It pointed to the good. Because of the human impulse to manipulate the environment, the good and beautiful ends associated with objects were often material, but the indeterminacy of the workmanlike instinct meant its ends emerged not only from our economic impulses, but also from the interplay of “the various other instinctive dispositions.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Such a wide net might cover many familiar definitions of the aesthetic and its role: Plato's anamnesis and eros; Aristotle's catharsis; Keats's truth. A first step toward determining the value of Veblen's aesthetics for contemporary thought might be to compare it with the German tradition he studied at Yale.Footnote ⁹⁰ Like Kant, Veblen believed beauty was subjective, yet implied universality, and he resembled Schiller in believing that the highest forms of beauty evoked nature and the exercise of human freedom in it. Nonetheless, Veblen differed from Schiller in interpreting humans' naturally selected capacity to manipulate the material environment as a supreme expression of both human freedom and nature's creative power, and thus eminently beautiful. Moreover, Veblen believed, first, that because cooperative organization benefited from and advanced material efficiency, the highest ends of such efficiency were social, and, second, that “idly curious” exploration of experience—what Schiller might have recognized as “play”—was the crucial mechanism by which the scope of social creativity was broadened. Thus not only material efficiency, but also intellectual, moral, and spiritual fulfillment, through enhancement of communal life, were the highest standards of beauty, to which humans responded instinctively even when their conclusions were warped by historically conditioned habits of thinking.

Elaborated thus, Veblen's aesthetic theory suggests new solutions to some old problems in aesthetic discourse. While Kant claimed our concept of an object's purpose sullied its beauty by tying it to subjective interests, Veblen asserted that genuine beauty suggests social, ethical, and thus universal purpose—perhaps preserving what Kant called “free beauty.” And while Schiller lamented the self's separation from nature (which his successor Hölderlin claimed only death could overcome), Veblen's pragmatic conception of self-consciousness as evolutionary denied the sharp divide between self and nature, reinvigorating Schiller's hopes for reconciling form and sense. Veblen also avoided the apolitical consequences of Schiller's aesthetics, insisting as early as 1891 that reforming both the state and the pecuniary values it promoted were simultaneous and immediate tasks, and granting that certain state capacities had even proved useful in beginning them.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, despite his critique of modern culture, Veblen departed from the German tradition's view that modern society was necessarily hostile to the unity of self and nature. For Veblen, society could be the vehicle by which individual freedom and external reality were reconciled through social creativity—a collaborative work of art. In this view the increasing interdependence of modern society expanded the scope of phenomena with which the self interacted, and thus the opportunities for having the aesthetic experience of active, social freedom.

In fact, Veblen's work might speak to what Jane Forsey has diagnosed as the “disenfranchisement of philosophical aesthetics.” Forsey's call to dismantle the model of “spectator aesthetics” that followed the antagonistic movements of logical positivism and “art for art's sake” could be answered by Veblen, whose views prefigure those of art historian E. H. Gombrich: “Art is something with a skill. There's no disembodied skill as such; skill is always applied to a particular task.” If, as Forsey insists, we learn again to “begin with art as an activity,” one arising from and impacting the concerns of daily life in society, “we may yet be able to claim that art encompasses an aspect of human life that merits philosophical attention.”Footnote ⁹² Veblen related beauty to conduct along lines resembling Forsey's, arguing that beautiful ideas and actions were those which, with workmanlike efficiency, served generic human ends and enhanced the individual's sense of solidarity with others. Cautious, but no cosmic pessimist, Veblen viewed skepticism as a creatively destructive catalyst of cultural growth; as he impressed upon his stepdaughter, there flowed through all his criticism “an undercurrent of faith in human capabilities for good . . . an awareness of all that W. James and others were making common knowledge.”Footnote ⁹³ Whether or not we find Veblen's economics useful or his anthropology to our taste, this aspect at least of his social vision is something to behold.