Edward Bullogh’s Aesthetics and Aestheticism: Features of Reality to Be Experienced (original) (raw)

Ultimate Reality and Meaning

INTRODUCTION No sooner is the word 'polymath' uttered than we realize our temporal distance from a more leisured world in which it could be applied. Edward Bulloughborn on March 28th, Easter Sunday, 1880 in Thun, Switzerland, of a German mother and a Lancashire fatherbelonged to such a world, and his early upbringing and continental education prepared him to be 'a man of unusually wide culture in a variety of subjects' (Bennet, 1934, p. 25). Subsequent to an aristocratic schooling at the Vitzthum Gymnasium in Dresden, he obtained, in 1902, his Cambridge degree in French, German and Italian with first class honours. Out of a specialization in these foreign languages and in Russian too, he originated a course which developed his linguistic and literary interests into wider 'perspectives' on civilization. It also condemned those specialist senior members of the University who were suspicious of such a new discipline. Its lectures provided him with the content necessary for his private publication 'The Modem Conception of Aesthetics' (Bullough, 1957, ch. 1). This publication in 1907 illuminated his future career with a lamp of protest against the darkness provided by an 'inhuman specialization' and 'an intellectual life divorced from actualities,' typifying what one biographer referred to as characteristic of a 'Germanic' mind (Evennett, 1934, p. 135), yet with which Bullough seemed to have to contend at Cambridge University itself. So it is not surprising to find him in that publication, trying to justify aesthetics, studies regarded doubtfully at the time, as he battled against such popular objections as 'Aesthetics is altogether a highly impractical study,' 'Aesthetics is impossible of exemplification theoretically' or that 'Aesthetics lacks a consensus of opinion in relation to matters of Art and Beauty,' objections which are still raised in the philistinism of our own time. 2. PUBLIC ACTIVITIES One of the most successful of Bullough's activities was pursued in the Cambridge School of Architectural Studies as its sheet anchor and a tactful secretary from 1909. He became a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1912, the year in which he published 201