If there be righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there be beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there be harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there be order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

Confucianism

The U.S. federal bureaucracy is the result of almost two centuries of tinkering and compromise. During the early days, executives were recruited mainly from an educated class interested in a long-term career in government. In 1820 Congress imposed a 4-year term for federal administrators, leading to rapid turnover and the beginning of a spoils system that allocated jobs to political supporters of the party in power.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 created a competitive civil service, dedicated to professionalism and nonpartisanship. During the 20th century, as these attributes of political independence took hold, the civil service came under fire for being insufficiently responsive to Congress and the president. At the same time, critics complained about its bureaucratic aspects. In 1978 Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act, which replaced the Civil Service Commission with the Office of Personnel Management, under closer control of the president. The act also established the Senior Executive Service to provide presidents with greater discretion in reassigning top officials to various departments and agencies.

Traditionally, in most societies, art has combined practical and aesthetic functions. In the 18th century in the West, however, a more sophisticated public began to distinguish between art that was purely aesthetic and art that was also practical. The fine arts (French beaux arts)óincluding literature, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and architectureóare concerned primarily with aesthetics. The decorative or applied arts, such as pottery, metalwork, furniture, tapestry, and enamel, are often useful arts and for a time were demoted to the rank of crafts. Because the Šcole des Beaux-Arts in Paris taught only the major visual arts, the term art was sometimes narrowed to mean only drawing, painting, architecture, and sculpture. Since the mid-20th century, however, greater appreciation of non-Western and folk traditions and of individual work in a mechanized society has tended to blur the old distinction. Both categories are becoming valued as art.

Aesthetics, branch of philosophy concerned with the essence and perception of beauty and ugliness. Aesthetics also deals with the question of whether such qualities are objectively present in the things they appear to qualify, or whether they exist only in the mind of the individual; hence, whether objects are perceived by a particular mode, the aesthetic mode, or whether instead the objects have, in themselves, special qualitiesóaesthetic qualities. Philosophy also asks if there is a difference between the beautiful and the sublime.

Criticism and the psychology of art, although independent disciplines, are related to aesthetics. The psychology of art is concerned with such elements of the arts as human responses to color, sound, line, form, and words and with the ways in which the emotions condition such responses. Criticism confines itself to particular works of art, analyzing their structures, meanings, and problems, comparing them with other works, and evaluating them.

The term aesthetics was introduced in 1753 by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, but the study of the nature of beauty had been pursued for centuries. In the past it was chiefly a subject for philosophers. Since the 19th century, artists also have contributed their views.

The first aesthetic theory of any scope is that of Plato, who believed that reality consists of archetypes, or forms, beyond human sensation, which are the models for all things that exist in human experience. The objects of such experience are examples, or imitations, of those forms. The philosopher tries to reason from the object experienced to the reality it imitates; the artist copies the experienced object, or uses it as a model for the work. Thus, the artist's work is an imitation of an imitation.

Traditional aesthetics in the 18th and 19th centuries was dominated by the concept of art as imitation of nature. Novelists such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in England and dramatists such as Carlo Goldoni in Italy and Alexandre Dumas fils (the son of Alexandre Dumas pËre) in France presented realistic accounts of middle-class life. Painters, whether neoclassical, such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, romantic, such as EugËne DÈlacroix, or realist, such as Gustave Courbet, rendered their subjects with careful attention to lifelike detail.

In traditional aesthetics it was also frequently assumed that art objects are useful as well as beautiful. Paintings might commemorate historical events or encourage morality. Music might inspire piety or patriotism. Drama, especially in the hands of Dumas and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, might serve to criticize society and so lead to reform.

In the 19th century, however, avant-garde concepts of aesthetics began to challenge traditional views. The change was particularly evident in painting. French impressionists, such as Claude Monet, denounced academic painters for depicting what they thought they should see rather than what they actually sawóthat is, surfaces of many colors and wavering forms caused by the distorting play of light and shadow as the sun moves.

In the late 19th century, postimpressionists such as Paul CÈzanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were more concerned with the structure of a painting and with expressing their own psyche than with representing objects in the world of nature. In the early 20th century this structural interest was developed further by cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso, and the expressionist concern was reflected in the work of Henri Matisse and other fauves and by the German expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The literary aspects of expressionism can be seen in the plays of August Strindberg, a Swede, and Frank Wedekind, a German.

Closely connected with these relatively nonrepresentational approaches to art was the principle of "art for art's sake," which was derived from Kant's view that art has its own reason for being. The phrase was first used by the French philosopher Victor Cousin in 1818. This doctrine, sometimes called aestheticism, was espoused in England by the critic Walter Horatio Pater, by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by the expatriate American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In France it was the credo of such symbolist poets as Charles Baudelaire. The "art for art's sake" principle underlies most of avant-garde Western art of the 20th century.

Four philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been the primary influences on present-day aesthetics. In France Henri Bergson defined science as the use of intelligence to create a system of symbols that supposedly describes reality but actually falsifies it. Art, however, is based on intuition, which is a direct apprehension of reality unmediated by thought. Thus art cuts through conventional symbols and beliefs about people, life, and society and confronts one with reality itself.

In Italy the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce also exalted intuition, but he considered it the immediate awareness of an object that somehow gives that object form. It is the apprehension of things before one reflects about them. Works of art are the expression, in material form, of such intuitions; but beauty and ugliness are not qualities of the works of art but qualities of the spirit expressed intuitively in these works of art.

The American philosopher and poet George Santayana argued that when one takes pleasure in a thing the pleasure may be regarded as a quality of the thing itself, rather than as a subjective response to it. Just as one may characterize some human act as good in itself, instead of calling it good merely because one approves it, so one may say that some object is beautiful, not merely that one's aesthetic delight in its color and form leads one to call it beautiful.

John Dewey, the American educator and philosopher, viewed human experience as disconnected, fragmentary, full of beginnings without conclusions, or as experiences deliberately manipulated as means to ends. Those exceptional experiences that flow from their beginnings to consummations are aesthetic. Aesthetic experience is enjoyment for its own sake, is complete and self-contained, and is terminal, not merely instrumental to other purposes.

Sigmund Freud believed the value of art to lie in its therapeutic use: It is by this means that both the artist and the public can reveal hidden conflicts and discharge tensions. Fantasies and daydreams, as they enter into art, are thus transformed from an escape from life into ways of meeting it. In the surrealist movement in painting and poetry, the unconscious is used as a source of material. The stream-of-consciousness technique of fiction, notably in the novels of the Irish writer James Joyce, was derived not only from Freud's work but partly from The Principles of Psychology (1890) by the American philosopher and psychologist William James and partly from the French novel We'll to the Woods No More (1887; translated 1957) by Edouard Dujardin.

More recently, the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre advocated a form of existentialism in which art is seen as an expression of the freedom of the individual to choose, and as such demonstrates the individual's responsibility for his or her choices. Despair, as reflected in art, is not an end but a beginning, because it eradicates the guilts and excuses from which people ordinarily suffer, thus opening the way for genuine freedom.

Academic controversies of the 20th century have revolved about meaning in art. The British critic and semanticist I. A. Richards claimed that art is a language. He asserted that two types of language exist: the symbolic, which conveys ideas and information; and the emotive, which expresses, evokes, and excites feelings and attitudes. He regarded art as emotive language, giving order and coherence to experience and attitudes, but containing no symbolic meaning.

The US is an Oligarchy in business and government.
Is there really any differences?

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