Introduction to
The Metaphysics of Beauty
Nick Zangwill
Cornell University Press, 2001
Beauty does not stand alone. It cannot exist by itself. Things are beautiful because of the way
they are in other respects. Beauty is a property that depends on other properties. Moreover, when
we appreciate the beauty of a thing, we appreciate its beauty as it is realized in its other
properties. For example, suppose we find a rose beautiful. What we find beautiful is a specific
arrangement of colored stems, leaves and petals. Beauty cannot float free of the way things are in
other respects, and we cannot appreciate beauty except insofar as it is embodied in other respects.
Beauty cannot be solitary and we cannot appreciate it as such.1
What then is this beauty, which is so closely tied to other features? To say that beauty is a
property that depends on other properties is not enough. It is not all we want to know. It tells us
something that is indeed essential for a property to be the property of beauty, but it does not tell
us all that beauty consists in.
Someone might say that we cannot ask what beauty consists in like this because beauty is not
independent of the human mind. Well, this may or may not be so, and I shall have quite a lot to
say about it. But there is much that we can say about beauty without prejudging that issue. It is
uncontroversial that beauty is an object of human thought and experience. We think about beauty
and we experience it. The experience of beauty is something we value and desire; and we take our
judgments of beauty seriously, in that we think that some judgments are better than others. There
are important questions about the deep psychological nature of our experiences and judgments of
beauty.2 In this book, however, I shall not broach these important issues in any great depth.
Insofar as I shall be concerned with our experiences and judgments of beauty, I shall confine
myself to considering our concept of beauty.
I take our concept of beauty to be what we represent beauty to be in our judgments and
experiences. We can say a great deal about this while leaving open questions about the deep
psychological nature of the judgments and experiences in which we deploy the concept. Since
issues about our concepts are issues about how we represent the world to be, they are issues about
what I like to call 'folk metaphysics'. These are indeed issues about the human mind. But
investigating folk metaphysics stops short of enquiring into the deep psychological nature of the
states that deploy the concept.
In this book, I shall consider both the concept of beauty — what we represent beauty to be in
our experience and judgment — and also what beauty really is, in itself, whether or not we
represent that nature in our experience and judgment. That is, I am interested both in our folk
metaphysics and in the pure metaphysics of beauty.
This book has three parts. I begin the three chapters of part 1 with the idea that beauty is one
among many aesthetic properties, such as ugliness, elegance, daintiness, and dumpiness. But the
property of beauty is one that has a pre-eminent place. I argue that beauty depends on other
aesthetic properties. This enables us to get a clear view of the place of the concept of beauty
among other aesthetic concepts. It also enables us to give a unitary account of what makes
properties and judgments aesthetic properties and judgments. I articulate and defend the more
1
2
Plato seems to deny this. I shall comment on Plato's views in last chapter of this book.
I believe that Kant had many illuminating things to say about this.
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general idea that it is essential to all aesthetic properties to stand in a dependence relation to
nonaesthetic properties. Not only is this relation essential to aesthetic properties, it is definitive of
aesthetic concepts that we represent aesthetic properties as standing in this essential relation. I
examine the relation of aesthetic/nonaesthetic dependence, and I defend the claim that it holds
against some objections.
That much is probably part of what once would have been called the ‘analysis’ of the
concept of beauty  what I prefer to call folk metaphysics. But there are also issues about the
relation between aesthetic and nonaesthetic properties that are more substantive. I address these
issues in the five chapters of part 2. Discussions of formalism about various arts  especially
painting, architecture, music and literature  are, I think, best interpreted as being about the
scope of dependence. The issues are about exactly which nonaesthetic properties underlie
aesthetic properties. These issues are controversial, and they have been disputed among those
who think and write about the various arts, among those who practice those arts, and among those
who think and write about the aesthetics of nature. I consider what can be said for aesthetic
formalism and I assess the role of sensory properties in determining aesthetic properties. I argue
that a moderate version of aesthetic formalism can be defended and that sensory properties do
have a special role in determining aesthetic properties. These issues go beyond reflection on what
we take to be essential to the property of beauty that we represent in our experience and
judgment. The issues do not turn merely on an adequate ‘analysis’ of our concept of beauty.
Either our concept leaves open these more controversial matters, or if it does not, the disputes are
about how we ought to represent beauty in our experience and judgment. The issues are
substantive first-order ones. But that is not to say that they are not also metaphysical issues.
Insofar as the issues are about the scope of dependence they are both substantive and
metaphysical.
The theses I advance in parts 1 and 2 concerning the dependence of aesthetic properties
on nonaesthetic properties and the nature of the relevant nonaesthetic properties leave open the
deepest, purely metaphysical questions about the property of beauty. These questions I address in
the four chapters of part 3. Is beauty a projection of the human mind? In particular, is beauty a
projection of our sentimental nature? Or is beauty a real property? If so, is it a mind-dependent or
a mind-independent property? I first argue against Hume’s sentimentalism. I then defend
aesthetic realism against an argument of Roger Scruton's. Next I argue against extreme aesthetic
realism, in favor of a certain kind of mind-dependent view of aesthetic properties. Lastly, I
compare my view with several rival metaphysical views, and end by rejecting sociological
skepticism about the aesthetic. Once again, it might be that we represent beauty in our experience
and thought as having a certain metaphysical status, even though beauty itself does not in fact
have that status, or else there is no such thing as beauty as it is represented. The metaphysical
truth about the property of beauty may or may not be built into our experience and thought. In
part 3, I am concerned only with the pure metaphysics of beauty.3
Here in somewhat more detail is what I do in each chapter.
In chapter 1 (“The Beautiful, The Dainty, and The Dumpy”), I argue that J. L. Austin was
wrong to recommend that aestheticians should cease concentrating on ‘verdictive’ judgment of
beauty and ugliness, and of aesthetic merit and demerit, and he was wrong to recommend that
they ought instead to focus their attentions on 'substantive' aesthetic descriptions, such as the
dainty and the dumpy. I defend the more traditional idea that the judgment of beauty is an apt
paradigm of aesthetic judgment. I argue that verdictive properties are determined by substantive
properties and that they are both determined by nonaesthetic properties.
3
It should not need to be said, but to be on the safe side, I will mention that nothing in this book is
intended to be a general theory of the nature of art. Moreover, I am not providing a theory of artistic
value, although I do of course think that aesthetic values are important artistic values.
2
In chapter 2 (“The Concept of the Aesthetic”), I defend the modern concept of the aesthetic,
which embraces both verdictive and substantive judgments while excluding judgments about
representational properties. I consider a ‘neo-Kantian’ program of showing how verdictive and
substantive judgments are ’subjectively universal’ in something not too far from Kant’s sense, but
representational judgments are not. I eventually abandon that approach. Instead of the neoKantian program, I recommend appealing to the determination of verdictive properties by
substantive properties. I argue that this is built into the meaning of substantive judgments, and
here there is a contrast with representational judgments. This close link between verdictive and
substantive judgments justifies grouping them together in one category. But I argue that this does
not commit us to the view that there can be reasoning about aesthetic judgments.
In chapter 3 (“Aesthetic Supervenience Defended”), I defend aesthetic supervenience against
three objections. First, I consider the extent of the supervenience base of aesthetic properties. I
argue that the view that aesthetic properties depend or supervene on nonaesthetic properties is
consistent with the contextualist view that the aesthetic properties of a work of art depend on
relational properties, such as the history of production of the work of art. Second, I argue that the
vagueness affecting aesthetic/nonaesthetic dependence should not lead us to reject it. And third, I
argue that it is a mistake to expect supervenience to have any interesting epistemological
consequences.
In chapter 4 (“Feasible Aesthetic Formalism”), I argue that there is considerable truth in the
much-reviled doctrine of formalism. I give an account of how non-formal aesthetic values are
related to formal values and other aspects of works of art. The account of formal properties
deploys Kant’s notion of dependent beauty and it allows us to formulate a ‘moderate formalist’
view. I explore the way that account deals with the arts of representational painting, architecture,
literature and music. In each case I show that the phenomena of the art form can best be
understood in terms of moderate formalism.
In chapter 5 (“In Defense of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism”), I argue against Kendall
Walton’s anti-formalist argument that we must always take the history of production into account
in ascribing aesthetic properties to works of art. I concede that he is right about representational
properties and about what I call ‘contextual’ properties of works of art. But that conclusion
cannot be generalized to abstract and non-contextual art, and it cannot be generalized to the nonrepresentational and non-contextual features of representational and contextual works of art. I
then dispute Walton's intriguing guernicas argument. I also consider Walton's other
counterexamples. I argue that art historical categories can be put to one side when we consider
the aesthetic nature of abstract and non-contextual abstract works of art. However there is no
doubt that many other works of art possess significant non-formal aesthetic values.
In chapter 6 (“Defusing Anti-formalist Arguments”), I propose a systematic method for
resisting anti-formalist arguments. The method is to apply one of three strategies for dealing with
potential counterexamples to moderate formalism: tactical retreat, irrelevance, and benign
dilemma. I show these neutralizing strategies at work with seven objections to formalism.
In chapter 7 (“Formal Natural Beauty”), I defend moderate formalism about the aesthetics of
nature. I try to make the view plausible by arguing that anti-formalists cannot account for the
incongruousness of much natural beauty. This shows that some natural beauty is not kinddependent. I then tackle several anti-formalist arguments that can be found in the writings of
Ronald Hepburn, Allen Carlson, and Malcolm Budd.
In chapter 8 (“Aesthetic/Sensory Dependence”), I argue that aesthetic properties always
depend on sensory properties. I tackle cases which at first sight seem to be counterexamples. I
deal with the aesthetic properties of architecture and representational painting by arguing that
sensory properties are necessary even if they are not sufficient to determine the work’s aesthetic
properties. I deal differently with literature and with the symbolic and narrative properties of
painting. There I argue that any properties that do not depend on the sound of words or the colors
on the surface are not in fact aesthetic properties. We sometimes make value judgments that
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deploy typically aesthetic terms about literature and about the symbolic and narrative properties
of painting, but I argue that such terms are used metaphorically and that the properties that we
describe in such cases are not aesthetic properties. Lastly, I consider various other cases —
proofs, theories, chess-moves, machines, goals and deaths — where we are inclined to talk about
"beauty" and "elegance". But here too I argue that the use is metaphorical and that the properties
that we are describing are not aesthetic properties.
In Chapter 9 ("Hume, Taste, and Teleology"), I examine Hume’s various strategies for
reconciling his sentimentalist account of aesthetic judgment with the normativity implicit in our
aesthetic judgments. As possible sources of excellence or fault in our sentiments, Hume appeals
to fine-grainedness, practice in judgment, a broad experience, being in the right mood, and the
absence of prejudice. I argue, in turn, that none of these features delivers the normativity we
require. In addition I observe that what underlies all of Hume's strategies is what I call his
'optimism' — the idea being that our faculty of taste will function if we merely develop the
potential that lies within it and isolate it from extraneous interference. But I argue that this
assumption helps itself to the normativity that needs to be earned. So I conclude that Hume does
not succeed in capturing normativity for a sentimentalist account, and thus, in the absence of any
other suggestions, we are entitled to think that sentimentalism is unsatisfactory.
In Chapter 10 (“Metaphor and Realism in Aesthetics”), I discuss Roger Scruton’s argument
to the effect that aesthetic realism cannot give a satisfactory account of the prevalence of
metaphor in aesthetic descriptions. He argues that an aesthetic realist cannot account for the
sameness of meaning of the descriptive terms which are deployed both in and out of aesthetic
contexts. I reply by distinguishing aesthetic thought from aesthetic talk. I argue that the realist can
allow for the sameness of meaning at the linguistic level, but I insist on a difference at the level of
thought. Thus there can be distinctively aesthetic thoughts which can only be expressed by means
of metaphor. I give an explanation and defense of the idea that some aesthetic thoughts are
literally inexpressible.
In chapter 11 (“Skin-deep or in the Eye of the Beholder?”), I begin by describing and making
attractive a physicalist aesthetic realist view of aesthetic properties. I then argue against this view
on the basis of two premises. The first premise is the thesis of aesthetic/sensory dependence that I
defended in chapter 8. The second premise is the denial of a mind-independence thesis about
sensory properties. I give an argument for that denial. Lastly, I put these two premises together
and conclude that physicalist aesthetic realism is false. I articulate and give a limited defense of
the view that if aesthetic properties exist at all, they are a certain kind of mind-dependent
property.
And finally in chapter 12 (“Differences”), I briefly discuss some authors who hold different
views from the ones I favor, and I finish with a rejection of sociological approaches.4
4
I have written two lengthy survey essays, on beauty and on aesthetic properties, which cover some
of the terrain of this book. They can be found in the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerry
Levinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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