Enjoyment and Beauty
Beauty is powerful. It compels our attention and appreciation, unites
us in shared visions, and divides us through profoundly different ones. Our
goal is to describe beauty in a way that illuminates its power. The
description consists of arguments for three claims. First, one enjoys the
items one judges to be beautiful (enjoyment and judgment need not be
cotemporaneous; one may have enjoyed the item, or expect to do so in the
future). Second, the enjoyment is a special kind; one does not enjoy in that
way items one does not find beautiful. Third, to believe that something is
beautiful is to believe, on the basis of the special kind of enjoyment, that
others will, other things being equal, enjoy the item in tat special way. The
arguments for the second claim and third claims characterize beauty’s power
to compel attention and appreciation and address its power to unite or
divide. The first claim is an essential preliminary. The inspiration for this
approach is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where Kant (arguably) advances all
three claims. Our concern, however, is with the truth of the claims, not with
Kantian exegesis, and our arguments will not, for the most part, be the same
as Kant’s.
I. The First Claim
Must one enjoy what one finds beautiful? The question arises because
it seems possible to think something beautiful without enjoying it. Imagine,
for example, that you and Jones are looking that the Taj Mahal. Your
enjoyment leads you to exclaim, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jones agrees, thereby
expressing, or at least seeming to express, his own judgment that the Taj is
beautiful. Jones is not, however, enjoying looking at the Taj. He is not
cognitively or affectively impaired; he attends to the features that people
generally regard as making the Taj beautiful, and he makes a good faith
effort to enjoy looking at the building, but he simply does not enjoy it. He is
indifferent. He agrees with you because he knows that it is the received
opinion that the Taj is beautiful. His agreement acknowledges that the Taj
belongs with that diverse collection of items that people generally take to be
beautiful. Isn’t this enough to show that one can fail to enjoy what one
judges to be beautiful?
A first shot at an answer is that judgments of beauty are typically
based on enjoyment (past, present, or expected). The explanation is that it
is one’s enjoyment that reveals the reasons for the judgment. We consider
first the claim that we do indeed have reasons for the judgment, and then we
turn to the reason-revealing role of enjoyment. One does not treat the “Taj
is beautiful” like “Chocolate tastes good.” If you and Jones disagree over the
latter, you will not (unless you are a child or emotionally disturbed) try to
change Jones’ mind by offering reasons to think that chocolate really does
taste good. Chocolate tastes good to Jones but not to you, and that is the
end of the matter. In contrast, it would neither be out of place nor unusual
for you to try to change Jones’s mind by offering him reasons to think the Taj
is beautiful. You goal however would not be to have Jones infer on the basis
of the reasons that the Taj is beautiful. Your plan would be to get Jones to
enjoy the Taj in the way you do in the hope that he would then also regard it
as beautiful. The reasons you offer are designed to this: you defend your
judgment that the Taj is beautiful by citing the features you enjoy. Your
belief that the Taj has these features is the ground of your judgment that it
is beautiful. We take this to be the typical pattern: one defends one’s
judgment that a face, painting, statute, or poem, for example, is beautiful by
citing the features one enjoys; we hope to secure the agreement of others
through their enjoying and consequently judging as we do.1
But is this typical pattern is also necessary? Why can’t Jones depart
from the typical pattern by judging that the Taj is beautiful without ever
enjoying it? He cannot base his judgment on his own enjoyment, but why
can’t he base it on the reported enjoyment of others? Compare believing
that Beijing is densely populated. One can form that belief based in entirely
on the reports of others, that, so why can’t one, on the basis of reports,
judge that the Taj is beautiful?
The answer lies in the subjectivity of judgments of beauty. A
subjective judgment is one that is not objective. Israel Scheffler captures
the relevant sense of “objective”:
There will always be such features: when one enjoys something, one enjoys it as
having one or more features. In support of this claim, consider first that, when you
enjoy something, there is typically an answer to the question, “What do you enjoy
about it?” If, for example, you enjoy chocolate, you enjoy it for its bitter-sweet
taste, or as a rebellion against your strict diet, or whatever. The answer to, “What
do you enjoy about it?” specifies the features you enjoy it as having. To see that
there must always be some answer to that question, imagine Carol claims to enjoy
dining out in restaurants, but sincerely denies that there is anything she enjoys
about it. She insists she does not enjoy the food, the restaurant atmosphere, the
experience of being waited on, the people watching, or anything else. She is
completely indifferent to every feature of dining out. This is a paradigm case of not
enjoying dining out; Carol just self-deceptively believes she enjoys it.
1
A fundamental feature of science is its ideal of objectivity, an ideal that
subjects all scientific statements to the test of independent and
impartial criteria, recognizing no authority of persons in the realm of
cognition. The claimant to scientific knowledge is responsible for what
he says, acknowledging the relevance of considerations beyond his
wish or advocacy to the judgment of his assertions. In assertion . . .
he is trying to meet independent standards, to satisfy factual
requirements whose fulfillment cannot be guaranteed in advance.2
In this case of judgments of beauty, one does recognize the “authority of
persons in the realm of cognition,” as the following example illustrates.
When Brian asks Brianna why she thinks the Mona Lisa is beautiful,
Brianna describes an organized array of features she ascribes to the painting.
In response, Brian produces a painting—the faux Mona Lisa—having all of the
specified features. Brianna denies it is beautiful. Brian complains that the
two paintings are relevantly the same: the Mona Lisa, according to Brianna,
has an organized array of features, and the faux Mona Lisa has that same
array. Brianna denies the identity by pointing out relevant differences--e. g.,
“the background is different,” “the use of light is different,” “the eyebrows
are different,” and so on. None of the features she now mentions were
included in her earlier specification of the array, but that just shows that her
specification was incomplete.
Thus: she believes that the true Mona Lisa
has a certain organized array of features, and she denies that the faux Mona
Lisa has the same. She insists that the differences mean the faux Mona Lisa
does not exhibit the same organized array of features as the true Mona Lisa
Science and Subjectivity (Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 1. The "criteria" need
not, of course, be precisely formulated or even precisely formulable; they may range
from explicit methodological injunctions to shared, but not fully formulated, problem
solving procedures employed in experiments and in the applications of theories to
facts.
2
and is not beautiful. The essential point is that no amount of empirical
evidence can show that she is wrong. As Kant notes,
If any one reads me his poem, or brings me a play, which all said and
done, fails to commend itself to my taste, then let him adduce . . .
critics of taste, with the host of rules laid down by them, as a proof of
the beauty of his poem; let certain passages particularly displeasing to
me accord completely with the rules of beauty (as . . . universally
recognized) . . . I take my stand on the ground that my judgment is
one of taste . . . This would appear to be one of the chief reasons why
this faculty of aesthetic judgement is has been given the name of
taste. For a man may recount to me the ingredients of a dish, and
observe that each and every one of them is just what I like . . . yet I
am deaf to these arguments. I try the dish with my own tongue and
palate, and I pass judgement according to their verdict.3
One recognizes the authority of persons in the judgments of beauty. Brianna
is authoritative with regard to whether the two Mona Lisa’s share the same
organize array of features. There are two dimensions to her authority:
whether the paintings possess certain features, and whether they features
are organized in a certain way. Her authority may extend to both; “may”
because if one of Brianna’s organized features is simply “red there,” we do
not want to claim she is authoritative about that; if however, the feature is
“a certain interaction of light and dark in the background,” she may be
authoritative in this regard (one may try to decompose this feature into an
array of features over which Brianna is not authoritative; we will not pursue
this possibility). Given her first-person-authoritative, no amount of empirical
evidence can refute Brianna’s claim that the two Mona Lisa’s do not share the
same organized array.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, James Creed Meredith, trans. (Oxford
1952) 284 – 85.
3
For now, we will simply assume that one who judges an item beautiful
forms the first-person-authoritative belief that the item has a certain
organized array of features. We will argue for this assumption in Section IV.
We also claim that one who judges an item beautiful has reasons for the
judgment provide by the judger’s enjoyment (past, present, or expected) of
the item as having the relevant organized array of features. We clarify what
we mean by enjoying an item as having certain features, and then we
motivate the claim about enjoyment’s reason-revealing role, a claim for
which the entire paper is in some sense the argument.
The first point to note is that whenever one enjoys something, one
one enjoys it as having one or more features. When you enjoy something,
there is typically an answer to the question, “What do you enjoy about it?”
If, for example, you enjoy chocolate, you enjoy it for its bitter-sweet taste, or
as a rebellion against your strict diet, or whatever. The answer to, “What do
you enjoy about it?” specifies the features you enjoy it as having. To see
that there must always be some answer to that question, imagine Carol
claims to enjoy dining out in restaurants, but sincerely denies that there is
anything she enjoys about it. She insists she does not enjoy the food, the
restaurant atmosphere, the experience of being waited on, the people
watching, or anything else. She is completely indifferent to every feature of
dining out. This is a paradigm case of not enjoying dining out; Carol just
self-deceptively believes she enjoys it. The enjoyment of items we firstperson-authoritatively believe to have a certain array of features is just a
special case of the general true that to enjoy is to enjoy an item as being
some way.
We take it to be clear that when we defend our first-personauthoritative judgments of beauty, we articulate our reasons by identify the
array of features we enjoy. We do not see how it could be otherwise. To
count as making any judgment of the form some item has such-and-such
feature, one must at least have a rough-and-ready conception of a paradigm
case, and a commitment to judge relevantly similar items in the same way in
the future. In the case of judgments of beauty, the particular organized
array of features serves as the paradigm case, and enjoyment (the special
kind of enjoyment characterized in the next section) is the litmus test of
whether other items (or even the same item again) are relevantly similar.
Relevant similarity is determined by whether one enjoys (in the same way)
the items as having the same relevant organized array. We see nothing
other than one’s enjoyment that could play this role.
A further consideration of the Mona Lisa example motivates the claim
that, when we enjoy something we find beautiful, the enjoyment is a special
kind. Imagine that, although Brianna does not find the faux Mona Lisa
beautiful, she nonetheless enjoys it as having a certain organized array of
features, just not the same array she believes the true Mona Lisa as having.
Her enjoyment of the true Mona Lisa provides with her reasons to think it is
beautiful, but her enjoyment of the faux Mona Lisa does not. What accounts
for the difference? The relevant differences she points out between the two
paintings do not constitute an answer to this question. They merely show
that she is not guilty of failing to treat like things alike; they do not provide
an explanation of how one enjoyment plays a reason-providing role and the
other does not. The explanation is, we suggest, that reasons for a firstperson-authoritative judgment that something is beautiful are provided by a
special kind of enjoyment.