Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that
philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and
judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature
of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know
whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects
took a sharpened form in the twentieth century, when this part of our lives came
under a sustained attack in both European and American intellectual circles.
Much of the discourse about beauty since the Eighteenth century had deployed a
notion of the ‘aesthetic’, and so that notion in particular came in for criticism. This
disdain for the aesthetic may have roots in a broader cultural Puritanism, which
fears the connection between the aesthetic and pleasure. Even to suggest, in the
recent climate, that an artwork might be good because it is pleasurable, as
opposed to cognitively, morally or politically beneficial, is to court derision. The
twentieth century has not been kind to the notions of beauty or the aesthetic.
Nevertheless, some thinkers — philosophers, as well as others in the study of
particular arts — have persisted in thinking about beauty and the aesthetic in a
traditional way. In the first part of this essay, I look at the particular rich account
of judgments of beauty given to us by Immanuel Kant. The notion of a ‘judgment
of taste’ is central to Kant's account and also to virtually everyone working in
traditional aesthetics; so I begin by examining Kant's characterisation of the
judgment of taste. In the second part, I look at the issues that twentieth century
thinkers have raised. I end by drawing on Kant's accout of the judgement of taste
to consider whether the notion of the aesthetic is viable.
1. The Judgment of Taste
What is a judgment of taste? Kant isolated two
fundamental necessary conditions for a judgment to be a
judgment of taste — subjectivity and universality (Kant
1928). Other conditions may also contribute to what it
is to be a judgment of taste, but they are
consequential on, or predicated on, the two fundamental
conditions. In this respect Kant was following the lead
of Hume and other writers in the British sentimentalist
tradition (Hume 1985).
1.1 Subjectivity
The first necessary condition of a judgment of taste is
that it is essentially subjective. What this means is
that the judgment of taste is based on a feeling of
pleasure or displeasure. It is this that distinguishes
a judgment of taste from an empirical judgment. Central
examples of judgments of taste are judgments of beauty
and ugliness. (Judgments of taste can be about art or
nature.)
This subjectivist thesis would be over strict if it
were interpreted in an ‘atomistic’ fashion, so that
some subjective response corresponds to every judgment
of taste, and vice versa. Sometimes one makes a
judgment of taste on inductive grounds or on the basis
of authority. A more holistic picture of the relation
between response and judgment preserves the spirit of
the subjectivist doctrine while fitting our actual
lives more accurately. The subjectivist doctrine needs
to be refined in order to deal with the cases of
induction and authority. But it must not be abandoned.
The doctrine is basically right.
However, it is not obvious what to make of the
subjectivity of the judgment of taste. We need an
account of the nature of the pleasure on which
judgments of beauty are based.
Beyond a certain point, this issue cannot be pursued
independently of metaphysical issues about realism. For
the metaphysics we favour is bound to affect our view
of the nature of the pleasure we take in beauty. In
particular, we need to know whether or not pleasure in
beauty represents properties of beauty and ugliness? If
not, does it involve our cognitive faculties in some
other way, as Kant thought? Or is it not a matter of
the faculties that we deploy for understanding the
world, but a matter of sentimental reactions, which are
schooled in various ways, as Hume thought? These are
very hard questions. But there are some things we can
say about the pleasure involved in finding something
beautiful without raising the temperature too high.
Kant makes various points about pleasure in the
beautiful, which fall short of what we might call his
“deep” account of the nature of pleasure in beauty,
according to which it is the harmonious free play of
imagination and understanding. According to Kant's
“surface” account of pleasure in beauty, it is not mere
sensuous gratification, as in the pleasure of
sensation, or of eating and drinking. Unlike such
pleasures, pleasure in beauty is occasioned by the
perceptual representation of a thing. (These days, we
might feel more comfortable putting this by saying that
pleasure in beauty has an intentional content.)
Moreover, unlike other sorts of intentional pleasures,
pleasure in beauty is “disinterested”. This means, very
roughly, that it is a pleasure that does not involve
desire — pleasure in beauty is desire-free. That is,
the pleasure is neither based on desire nor does it
produce one by itself. In this respect, pleasure in
beauty is unlike pleasure in the agreeable, unlike
pleasure in what is good for me, and unlike pleasure in
what is morally good. According to Kant, all such
pleasures are “interested” — they are bound up with
desire. It may be that we have desires concerning
beautiful things, as Kant allows in sections 41 and 42
of the Critique of Judgement; but so long as those
desires are not intrinsic to the pleasure in beauty,
the doctrine that all pleasure is disinterested is
undisturbed. (Some critics of Kant miss this point.)
This is all important as far as it goes; but it is all
negative. We need to know what pleasure in beauty is,
as well as what it isn't. What can be said of a more
positive nature?
1.2 Normativity
In order to see what is special about pleasure in
beauty, we must shift the focus back to consider what
is special about the judgment of taste. For Kant, the
judgment of taste claims “universal validity”, which he
describes as follows:
… when [a man] puts a thing on a pedestal and calls
it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others.
He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and
then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of
things. Thus he says that the thing is beautiful; and
it is not as if he counts on others agreeing with him
in his judgment of liking owing to his having found
them in such agreement on a number of occasions, but he
demands this agreement of them. He blames them if they
judge differently, and denies them taste, which he
still requires of them as something they ought to have;
and to this extent it is not open to men to say: Every
one has his own taste. This would be equivalent to
saying that there is no such thing as taste, i.e. no
aesthetic judgment capable of making a rightful claim
upon the assent of all men. (Kant 1928, p. 52; see also
pp. 136-139.)
Kant's idea is that in a judgment of taste, we demand
or require agreement from others in a way we do not in
our judgments about the niceness of Canary-wine, which
is just a question of individual preference. In matters
of taste and beauty, we think that others ought to
share our judgment. That's why we blame them if they
don't. It is because the judgment of taste has such an
aspiration to universal validity that it seems “as if
[beauty] were a property of things.”
Now, if the above quotation were all that Kant had to
say by way of elucidating the judgment of taste, then
he would not have said enough. For the following
question is left hanging: why do we require that others
share our judgment? We might want others to share our
judgment for all sorts of strange reasons. Maybe we
will feel more comfortable. Maybe we will win a bet.
And if we say that they ought to judge a certain way,
we need to say more. In what sense is this true? What
if someone cannot appreciate some excellent work of art
because they are grief-stricken? What if it would
distract someone from some socially worthy project? Of
what nature is this ‘ought’?
We can recast the point about how we ought to judge in
austere terms by saying that there is a certain
normative constraint on our judgments of taste which is
absent in our judgments about the niceness of Canarywine. The most primitive expression of this normativity
is this: some are correct, others incorrect. Or
perhaps, even more cautiously: some judgments are
better than others. We do not think that something is
beautiful merely to me, in the way that we might say
that some things just happen to give me sensuous
pleasure. Of course, we might well say “I think X is
beautiful,” because we wish to express uncertainty; but
where we judge confidently, we think of our judgment as
being correct. And that means that we think that the
opposite judgment would be incorrect. We assume that
not all judgments of beauty are equally appropriate.
“Each to their own taste” only applies to judgments of
niceness and nastiness, which Kant calls “judgments of
agreeableness” (see Kant 1928, pp. 51-53, p. 149).
Of course, some people just know about food (especially
in France and Italy). There are experts and authorities
on making delicious food and in knowing what will taste
good (Kant 1928, pp. 52-53). But what these people know
is what will taste pleasurable to a certain kind of
palate. In a sense, some things just do taste better
than others; and some judgments of excellence in food
are better than others. There is a sense in which some
are even correct and others incorrect. But still, this
is only relative to “normal” human beings. There is no
idea of correctness according to which someone with
very unusual pleasures and displeasure is at fault, or
according to which the majority of human beings can be
wrong. (Kant says that judgments of agreeableness have
“general” but not “universal” validity (Kant 1928, p.
53.) But in the case of judgments of taste or beauty,
correctness is not hostage to what most people like or
judge.
To say that a judgment of taste makes a claim to
correctness this might seem merely to shift from the
problematic ‘ought’ that is involved in a judgment of
taste to a problematic ‘correctness’ or ‘betterness’.
This may be inevitable. We are dealing with a normative
notion, and while some normative notions may be
explainable in terms of others, we cannot express
normative notions in non-normative terms.
In some cases the correctness of a judgment of taste
may be impossibly difficult to decide. We may even
think that there is no right answer to be had if we are
asked to compare two very different things. But in many
other cases, we think that there is a right and a wrong
answer at which we are aiming, and that our judgments
can be erroneous. If we don't think this, in at least
some cases, then we are not making a judgment of taste
— we are doing something else.
Before we move on, it may be worth saying something
about “relativism”, according to which no judgments of
taste are really better than others. It is common for
people to say “There is no right and wrong about
matters of taste.” Or people will express the same
thought by saying that beauty is “relative” to
individual judgment, or even that it is “socially
relative.” Such relativism about value of all sorts is
part of the Zeitgeist of a certain recent Western
cultural tradition. It is part of the intellectual air,
in certain quarters. And in particular, many
intellectuals have expressed a dislike of the idea that
judgments of taste really have any normative claim, as
if that would be uncouth or oppressive. However, if we
are describing our thought as it is, not how some think
it ought to be, then it is important that philosophers
should be persistent and insist — in the face of this
Zeitgeist — that normativity is a necessary condition
of the judgment of taste. Two points ought to embarrass
the relativist. Firstly, people who say this kind of
thing are merely theorizing. In the case of judgments
of beauty, relativist theory is wildly out of step with
common practice. As with moral relativism, one can
virtually always catch the professed relativist about
judgments of beauty making and acting on non-relative
judgments of beauty — for example, in their judgments
about music, nature and everyday household objects.
Relativists do not practice what they preach. Secondly,
one thing that drives people to this implausible
relativism, which is so out of line with their
practice, is a perceived connection with tolerance or
anti-authoritarianism. This is what they see as
attractive in it. But this is upside-down. For if ‘it's
all relative’ and no judgment is better than any other,
then relativists put their judgments wholly beyond
criticism, and they cannot err. Only those who think
that there is a right and wrong in judgment can
modestly admit that they might be wrong. What looks
like an ideology of tolerance is, in fact, the very
opposite. Thus relativism is hypocritical and it is
intolerant. The time has come when this Zeitgeist
should give up the ghost. Move over geist, your zeit is
up!
1.3 Recasting Normativity
As I formulated the normative claim of judgments of
taste, other people do not figure in the account. I
gave an austere explanation of what Kant meant, or
perhaps of what he ought to have meant, when he said
that the judgment of taste claims “universal validity”,
by contrast with judgments about the niceness of
Canary-wine. Given this account, we can explain the
fact that we think that others ought to share our
judgment. They ought to share it on pain of making a
judgment which is incorrect or inappropriate. And this
would be why we do in fact look to others to share our
judgment; we don't want them to make incorrect
judgments. Kant's reference to other people in
characterizing the normativity of judgments of taste
has dropped out of the picture as inessential.
However, Kant would probably not go along with this;
for he characterizes the normativity in a way that ties
in with his eventual explanation of its possibility.
Kant expresses the normative idea in a very particular
way. He writes:
[we] insist on others agreeing with our taste (Kant
1928,pp. 53.)
And Kant says that the judgment of taste involves
a claim to validity for all men… (Kant 1928, p.
51.)
By contrast, Kant thinks that although we sometimes
speak as if our judgments of the agreeable are
universally valid (“Lamb tastes better with garlic”),
in fact they are not: judgments of the agreeable appeal
only to most but not to all men (Kant 1928, pp. 52-53).
However, in my austere characterization, I hope to
catch a more basic idea of normativity — one that might
serve as the target of rival explanations. As far as
explaining how subjectively universal judgments are
possible, Kant has a complicated story about the
harmonious interplay of the cognitive faculties —
imagination and understanding — which he thinks
constitutes pleasure in beauty (Kant 1928, p. 60). This
“deep” account of pleasure in beauty is highly
controversial and not particularly plausible (see Budd
2001). But we can see why Kant gives it. For Kant, the
normative claim of a judgment of taste has its roots in
the more general workings of our cognitive faculties,
which Kant thinks we can assume others share. Thus we
have the beginnings of an explanation of how such a
pleasure can ground a judgment that makes a universal
claim. However, Kant does not have very much to say
about the nature of the “universality” or normativity
that is being explained by such a speculative account
of pleasure in beauty. It is no accident that Kant
phrases the obligation in interpersonal terms,
considering where he is going. And it may be no great
fault on his part that he does so. But for our
purposes, we need to separate what is being explained
from its explanation. For if Kant's explanation does
not work, we want to be left with a characterization of
the normativity he was trying to explain. We need to
separate Kant's problem from his solution, so that the
former is left if the latter fails. Maybe there is an
alternative solution to his problem.
1.4 Normativity and Pleasure
As I have described it, normativity attaches to
judgments of taste themselves. What does this bode for
pleasure in beauty? Since judgments of taste are based
on responses of pleasure, it would make little sense if
our judgments were more or less appropriate but our
responses were not. The normative claim of our
judgments of taste must derive from the fact that we
think that some responses are better or more
appropriate to their object than others. Responses only
license judgments which can be more or less appropriate
because responses themselves can be more or less
appropriate. If I get pleasure from drinking Canarywine, and you don't, neither of us will think of the
other as being mistaken. But if you don't get pleasure
from Shakespeare's Sonnets, I will think of you as
being in error — not just your judgment, but your
liking. I think that I am right to have my response,
and that your response is defective. Someone who thinks
that there is, in Hume's words, “an equality of genius”
between some inferior composer, on the one hand, and
Bach, on the other, has a defective sensibility (Hume
1985, p. 230). Roger Scruton puts the point well when
he says:
When we study [the Einstein Tower and the Giotto
campanile] … our attitude is not simply one of
curiosity, accompanied by some indefinable pleasure or
satisfaction. Inwardly, we affirm our preference as
valid… (Scruton 1979, p. 105).
This is the reason why we demand the same feeling from
others, even if we don't expect it. We think that our
response is more appropriate to its object than its
opposite. And, in turn, this is why we think that our
judgment about that object is more correct than its
opposite. The normativity of judgment derives from the
normativity of feeling.
But how can some feelings be better or worse than
others? To answer this question, we need to ask: how
far does the normativity of judgments of taste inhere
in the feeling itself? The realist about beauty will
say that the feeling has normativity built into it in
virtue of its representational content; the feelings
themselves can be more or less veridical. Pleasure in
beauty, for example, has as its object the genuine
property of beauty: we find the beauty pleasurable. A
Humean sentimentalist will probably say that
normativity is something we somehow construct or foist
upon our pleasures and displeasures, which have no such
content. And Kant has his own account, which appeals to
cognitive states that are not beliefs. The issue is
controversial. However, what we can say for sure is
that it is definitive of pleasure in beauty that it
licenses judgments that make claim to correctness.
Beyond this, there will be theoretical divergence.
This normativity is definitive of the judgment of
taste, and is its second defining characteristic, which
we should add to the fact that it is based on
subjective grounds of pleasure or displeasure.
1.5 Judgments of Taste and the Big Question
We can sum things up like this: judgments of taste
occupy a mid-point between judgments of niceness and
nastiness, and empirical judgments about the external
world. Judgments of taste are like empirical judgments
in that they have universal validity; but, they are
unlike empirical judgment in that they are made on the
basis of an inner response. Conversely, judgments of
taste are like judgments of niceness or nastiness in
that they are made on the basis of an inner subjective
response or experience; but they are unlike judgments
of niceness and nastiness, which makess no claim to
universal validity. To cut the distinctions the other
way: in respect of normativity, judgments of taste are
like empirical judgments and unlike judgments of
niceness or nastiness; but in respect of subjectivity,
judgments of taste are unlike empirical judgments and
like judgments of niceness or nastiness. So we have
three-fold division: empirical judgments, judgments of
taste, and judgments of niceness or nastiness. And
judgments of taste have the two points of similarity
and dissimilarity on each side just noted.
As Kant recognized (more or less following Hume), all
this is a point from which to theorize. The hard
question is whether, and if so how, such a subjectively
universal judgment is possible. On the face of it, the
two characteristics are in tension with each other. Our
puzzle is this: what must be the nature of pleasure in
beauty if the judgments we base on it can make claim to
correctness? This is the Big Question in aesthetics.
Kant set the right agenda for aesthetics. His problem
was the right one, even if his solution was not.
However, our hope thus far has been to get clearer
about what it is that is under scrutiny in this debate.
Once we are armed with a modest account of what a
judgment of taste is, we can then proceed to more
ambitious questions about whether or not judgments of
taste represent real properties of beauty and ugliness.
We can even consider whether or not our whole practice
of making judgments of taste is defective and should be
jettisoned. But first things first.
2. Other Features of Aesthetic Judgements
There is more to aesthetic judgement than just
subjectivity and normativity, and we should describe
this more. To this end I shall here survey a number of
other candidate features of aesthetic judgements:
truth, mind-independence, nonaesthetic dependence, and
laws.
2.1 Aesthetic Truth
The normativity of aesthetic judgements can be recast
in terms of a particular conception of aesthetic truth.
For many purposes, it is useful to do this. Some might
worry that deploying the idea of aesthetic truth
commits one to the existence of an aesthetic reality.
But this worry springs from the assumption that a
strong correspondence conception of truth is all there
ever is to truth in any area where we might employ the
notion. In many areas — scientific and psychological
thought, for example — a strong correspondence
conception of truth is likely to be in question.
However, the conception of truth applicable in
aesthetics might be one according to which truth only
implies the sort of normativity that I have described,
according to which there are correct and incorrect
judgements of taste, or at least that some judgments
are better than others.
If we deploy the notion of truth, we can express the
normative idea by saying if a judgement is true then
its opposite is false. Or we can say that the law of
non-contradiction applies to aesthetic judgements:
there are some aesthetic judgements such that they and
their negations cannot both be true. This principle
need not hold of all judgements of taste, so long as it
holds of a significant proportion of them.
Such a normative conception of truth is stronger than a
notion of truth which is merely a device for ‘semantic
assent’; that is, normative truth is more than thin
‘disquotational’ truth. Even judgements of the
agreeable, about the niceness of Canary-wine, can have
access to an inconsequential disquotational conception
of truth. We can say “;‘Canary-wine is nice’ is true if
and only if Canary-wine is nice” without raising the
metaphysical temperature. However, judgements about the
niceness of Canary-wine do not aspire to a normative
conception of truth. There are no right and wrong
answers to the question of whether Canary-wine really
is nice. And so of neither the judgement that it is
nice nor that judgement that it is not nice can it be
said that if it is true then its opposite is false. But
this is what we do say of some aesthetic judgements.
However, although we can cast aesthetic normativity in
terms of truth, we need not do so. Aesthetic ‘truth’,
in fact, adds little to the notion of correctness that
we have already encountered. We can do without the word
‘true’. We can say that something cannot both be
beautiful and ugly (in the same respect at the same
time), and that if something is beautiful then it is
not ugly (in the same respect at the same time).
(What Mary Mothersill calls her ‘Second Thesis’ in her
book Beauty Restored is the thesis that a judgement of
taste, such as “Beethoven's first Rasumovsky quartet …
is beautiful (has artistic merit)” (p. 145) “is a
‘genuine’ judgement” (p. 146). However, as she
realizes, we then need to know what makes a judgement a
genuine judgement. She mentions truth, but wisely does
not stop there. What she then adds in order to explain
this are various normative characteristics, such as the
aspiration to correctness (pp. 157-170). So in the end
her view on this matte seems to converge with the
normative idea that I have described.)
2.2 Mind-dependence and Nonaesthetic Dependence
Given an understanding of the normativity of judgements
of taste — which we might or might not express in terms
of aesthetic truth — we can and should add some more
sophisticated normative features, which are also
important.
One such feature is mind-independence. Mindindependence is best expressed as a negative thesis:
whether something is beautiful does not depend on my
judgement. Thinking it so doesn't make it so. This can
be re-expressed in counterfactual terms: it is not the
case that if I think something is beautiful then it is
beautiful. This is common sense. For example, we tend
to think that our judgements have improved since we
were younger. We think that some of our past judgements
were in error. So thinking it so, at that time, didn't
make it so.
We also think that beauty, ugliness and other aesthetic
properties depend on nonaesthetic properties.
Dependence contrasts with mind-independence in that it
says what aesthetic properties do depend on, as opposed
to what they don't depend on: the aesthetic properties
of a thing depend on its nonaesthetic properties. This
dependence relation implies (but is not identical with)
the supervenience relation or relations: (a) two
aesthetically unlike things must also be
nonaesthetically unlike; (b) something couldn't change
aesthetically unless it also changed nonaesthetically;
and (c) something could not have been aesthetically
different unless it were also nonaesthetically
different. These are, respectively: cross-object
supervenience, cross-time supervenience, and crossworld supervenience. (‘Supervenience’ is often been
discussed under the heading of ‘dependence’ but
actually they are distinct relations, related in a
complex way.) Sibley's papers "Aesthetic Concepts" and
"Aesthetic/Nonaesthetic" were pioneering discussions of
the dependence of the aesthetic on the nonaesthetic
(Sibley 1959, 1965).
Some have argued that what aesthetic properties depend
on (their ‘dependence base') extends beyond the
intrinsic physical and sensory features of the object
of aesthetic assessment (Walton 1970). The nonaesthetic
supervenience base, Walton thinks, always includes
‘contextual properties’ — matters to do with the origin
of the work of art, or other works of art. I have
disputed this (Zangwill 1999). This is one aspect of
the debate over formalism. However, this issue need not
concern us here. The important thing is that some
dependence thesis holds. The controversial question is
about the extent of the dependence base of aesthetic
properties, not whether aesthetic properties have some
nonaesthetic dependence base.
This claim is enormously intuitive, but let us try to
say something more in support of it. It seems to be a
deep fact about beauty and other aesthetic properties
that they are inherently ‘sociable’; beauty cannot be
lonely. Something cannot be barely beautiful; if
something is beautiful then it must be in virtue of its
nonaesthetic properties. Furthermore, realizing this is
a constraint on our judgements of beauty and other
aesthetic properties. We cannot just judge that
something is beautiful; we must judge that it is
beautiful in virtue of its nonaesthetic properties. In
fact, we pretty much always do so, and not to do so
would be bizarre. Of course, we might not have in mind
every single nonaesthetic property of the thing, nor
exactly how the nonaesthetic properties produced their
aesthetic effect. But we think that certain
nonaesthetic properties are responsible for the
aesthetic properties and that without those
nonaesthetic properties, the aesthetic properties would
not have been instantiated. Beauty does not float free,
and recognizing this is constitutive of aesthetic
thought. Our aesthetic thought, therefore, is
fundamentally different from our thought about colours,
with which they are too often compared. Perhaps colours
are tied in some intimate way to intrinsic or extrinsic
physical properties of the surfaces of things, such as
reflectance properties. But colour thought does not
presuppose this. One might think that colours are bare
properties of things. But one cannot think that beauty
is bare; it is essential to aesthetic thought to
realize that that the aesthetic properties of a thing
arise from its nonaesthetic properties.
The principles of correctness, mind-independence and
dependence can be phrased in the property mode or in
terms of truth. We can cast them either way. We can say
that whether something is beautiful does not depend on
what we think about it; but it does depend on its
nonaesthetic features. Or we can equally well say that
the truth of aesthetic judgements is independent of our
aesthetic judgements but it is dependent on
nonaesthetic truths. Semantic ascent changes little.
2.3 Dependence and Laws
Thus far we have been making positive claims about
features of aesthetic judgements. Let us now consider a
negative claim: that there are no interesting
nonaesthetic-to-aesthetic laws, rules or principles.
And the aesthetic/nonaesthetic dependence relation can
obtain, even though there are no such interesting laws,
rules or principles. By ‘interesting’ laws of taste I
mean generalizations to the effects that anything of
such and such a nonaesthetic kind is of such and such
aesthetic kind, and these generalizations can be used
to predict aesthetic properties on the basis of
knowledge of nonaesthetic properties. In this sense, it
is plausible that there are no laws of taste and
aesthetic properties are anomalous.
The problem of the source of correctness in aesthetic
thought is independent of the question of whether there
are laws, rules or principles of taste. There is no
reason to think that the possibility of correct or true
judgements depends on the existence of laws, rules or
principles from which we can deduce our correct or true
judgements. (For this reason, it is difficult to be
gripped by the central puzzle of Mary Mothersill's
Beauty Restored — which is how there can be aesthetic
truths without aesthetic laws — although this problem
is perhaps a cousin of the problem that Hume and Kant
think is central.)
Nevertheless the anomalousness of aesthetics is worth
thinking about in its own right. Many aestheticians
agree that the aesthetic is anomalous in the above
sense. But they are not agreed on the explanation of
anomalousness.
A notable exception is Monroe Beardsley, who claims —
heroically and extraordinarily — that there are exactly
three aesthetic principles: things are aesthetically
excellent either by being unified or intense or complex
(Beardsley 1958, chapter XI).) However, Beardsley's
trinitarian position faces a difficulty similar to that
faced by moral philosophers who appeal to ‘thick’
concepts. If Beardsley insists on a lawlike connection
between his three thick substantive aesthetic
properties (unity, intensity and complexity) and
aesthetic value, he can only do so at the cost of
conceding anomalousness between the three thick
substantive aesthetic properties and nonaesthetic
properties. There are three layers: and one can only
hold onto laws between the top and middle layers only
by losing laws between the middle and bottom layers.
Maybe intensity is always aesthetically good; but there
are no laws about what makes things intense.
Granting the anomalousness of aesthetic properties,
then, we need to explain it. There is great
plausibility in Hume and Kant's suggestion that what
explains the anomalousness of the aesthetic is the
first feature of judgements of taste — that judgements
of taste are essentially subjective, unlike ordinary
empirical judgements about physical, sensory, or
semantic properties (Hume 1985, pp. 231-232, Kant 1928,
pp. 55-56, pp. 136-142). This is why the two sorts of
concepts are not ‘nomologically made for each other’
(as Donald Davidson says about mental and physical
concepts (Davidson 1980)). How can we bring an
essential subjective range of judgements nomologically
into line with a range of empirical judgements? The two
answer to quite different sets of constraints. Frank
Sibley observed that aesthetic concepts are not
positively ‘condition-governed' (Sibley 1959). And Mary
Mothersill claimed that that there are no laws of
taste. But neither did much to explain those facts. The
appeal to subjectivity explains what Sibley and
Mothersill notice and describe. Indeed Mothersill
writes of her ‘First Thesis’ (FT) — that there are no
genuine principles or laws of taste: “…FT is central to
aesthetics, and there is, as far as I can see, nothing
more fundamental from which it could be derived.”
(Mothersill 1984, p. 143). But it seems that it can be
derived from the subjectivity of judgements of taste.
This kind of anomalousness is one thing, dependence or
supervenience another. Even though aesthetic properties
are anomalous, they depend and supervene on
nonaesthetic properties. Many find such a combination
of relations uncomfortable outside aesthetics, such as
in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. Yet
there seem to be good reasons to embrace both
principles in aesthetics. Both are firmly rooted in
ordinary aesthetic thought.
2.4 The Primacy of Correctness
Aesthetic judgements have certain essential features,
and corresponding to those features are certain
principles. We can group correctness, mindindependence, and nonaesthetic dependence together.
However, it does no harm to focus on the feature of
correctness or universal validity. For this is the most
basic of the features. If aesthetic judgements did not
claim correctness or universal validity, they could not
claim the other features. If explaining correctness or
universal validity is a problem, then so is explaining
mind-independence and dependence. But clearly there is
a problem about explaining all three features. For why
does our aesthetic thought have these three features
and thus operate according to these three principles?
And what is the source of the right of aesthetic
judgements to them? Hume and Kant spend much mental
effort on these questions. These presuppositions of
aesthetic judgements need to be explained and
justified. Given that our aesthetic judgements have
these commitments, we need to know how such judgements
are possible, how they are actual, and how they are
legitimate. Having described and analyzed, as we have
done here, we need to explain and justify. But, as I
said earlier, we first need a good description of what
we are trying to explain and justify.
2.5 Disinterestedness
An idea that plays large role in Kant's discussion of
the subjective universality of the judgement of taste
is that of disinterestedness, and so some words about
this idea are in order. Kant claims that (a) pleasure
in the beautiful is ‘disinterested’, and (b) only
pleasure in the beautiful is ‘disinterested’. (Kant
1928, pp. 42-50.) And this plays a large role in Kant's
project, for Kant connects disinterestedness with the
claim to universal validity of the judgment of taste.
However, before we go any further is crucial to
recognize that the German word “interesse” has a
special meaning in 18th Century German, and should not
be confused with similar sounding English words or even
contemporary German words. For Kant an interesse means
a kind of pleasure that is not connected with desire:
it is neither grounded in desire, nor does it produce
it.
We should distinguish Kant's ambitious thesis that only
pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested from his
less ambitious claim simply that pleasure in the
beautiful is disinterested — for it seems that there
could be other disinterested pleasures. The less
ambitious claim, however, is certainly controversial
enough. The more uncontroversial component of that less
ambitious claim is that pleasure in the beautiful is
not grounded in the satisfaction of desire. It is
plausible, surely, that when we take pleasure in
something we find beautiful, we are not pleased that we
have got something that we desire. Moreover, Kant wants
pleasure in the beautiful to be open to all (so there
should be no ‘aesthetic luck’), and if desire varied
from to person, it seems that we could not require that
pleasure from everyone, as the idea of universal
validity requires. Hence the claim to universal
validity would be lost if pleasure in beauty were not
disinterested in the sense of not being based on
desire.
However, it is not so clear that pleasure in the
beautiful cannot produce desire, which Kant requires
for disinterestedness. The issue here is whether it can
produce desire from itself. Kant admits that we have
certain general concerns with beauty that mean that
desire may follow from a judgment of beauty; but,
according to Kant, such desires do not have their
source solely in the pleasure in the beautiful (Kant
1928, pp. 154-162, on ‘empirical interest’ and
‘intellectual interest’). So the less ambitious thesis
is controversial because of the second component.
Moreover, whether only pleasure in beauty is
disinterested, because no other kind of pleasures are
disinterested — the ambitious thesis — is even more
controversial. These are live issues.
3. The Notion of the Aesthetic
3.1 The Problem, and Some Terminological Remarks
The predicate “aesthetic” can qualify many different
kinds of things: judgments, experiences, concepts,
properties, or words. It is probably best to take
aesthetic judgments as central. We can understand other
aesthetic kinds of things in terms of aesthetic
judgments: aesthetic properties are those that are
ascribed in aesthetic judgments; aesthetic experiences
are those that ground aesthetic judgments; aesthetic
concepts are those that are deployed in aesthetic
judgments; and aesthetic words are those that are
typically used in the linguistic expression of
aesthetic judgments.
The most common contemporary notion of an aesthetic
judgment would take judgments of beauty and ugliness as
paradigms — what I called “judgments of taste” in part
1. And it excludes judgments about physical properties,
such as shape and size, and judgments about sensory
properties, such as colors and sounds. However, in
addition to judgments of beauty and ugliness, the
contemporary notion of an aesthetic judgment is
typically used to characterize a class of judgments
that also includes judgments of daintiness, dumpiness,
delicacy and elegance. In this respect, the
contemporary notion seems to be broader than Kant's,
since he focused just on judgments of beauty and
ugliness. However, there is also a respect in which the
contemporary notion seems to be narrower than Kant's
notion. For Kant used the notion to include both
judgments of beauty (or of taste) as well as judgments
of the agreeable — for instance, the judgment that
Canary-wine is nice (Kant 1928, pp. 41-42 and p. 54).
But the modern notion, unlike Kant's, excludes
judgments of the agreeable. The contemporary notion
also excludes judgments about pictorial and semantic
content. For example, although the judgment that a
painting represents a flower might be “relevant” to an
aesthetic judgment about it, it is not itself an
aesthetic judgment.
The question is: is the contemporary classification
arbitrary? What is it that distinguishes these
judgments as aesthetic? What do they have in common?
And how do they differ from other kinds of judgment? Do
these judgments form a well-behaved kind?
Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning that the
notion of an aesthetic judgment should obviously not be
elucidated in terms in terms of the idea of a work of
art: we make aesthetic judgments about nature and we
make nonaesthetic judgments about works of art.
The articulation and defence of the notion of the
aesthetic in modern times is associated with Monroe
Beardsley (1958, 1982) and Frank Sibley (1959, 1965).
But their work was attacked by George Dickie, Ted Cohen
and Peter Kivy among others (Dickie 1965, Cohen 1973,
Kivy 1975).
Beardsley claimed, somewhat heroically, that aesthetic
experience is distinguished by its unity, intensity and
complexity. Dickie argued, in reply, that such
characeristics were either not plausibly necessary
conditions of aesthetic experience, or else that
Beardsley's description of them was inadequate. Part of
Dickie's attack was completely beside the point, since
he confused aesthetic experiences with the experiences
of works of art; the fact that some experiences of
works of art are not as Beardsley describes is, or
should be, irrelevant. But it cannot be denied that
Dickie was right that even if the problems of
characterizing the three features were resolved, it
would still not be remotely plausible that the three
Beardsleyian features are necessary (or sufficient)
conditions of aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, all
that would show would be that Beardsley's account of
the aesthetic is inadequate. That Beardsley's
extraordinary and heroic Trinitarian doctrine cannot be
maintained does not mean that the notion of the
aesthetic should be abandoned. That would be a flawed
induction from a single instance.
Sibley claimed that the discernment of aesthetic
properties requires a special sensitivity, whereas the
discernment of nonaesthetic properties could be
achieved by anyone with normal eyes and ears.
Furthermore Sibley claimed that it was distinctive of
aesthetic terms or concepts that they were not
“condition-governed”, in the sense that they had no
nonaesthetic positive criteria for their application.
He thought of the faculty of taste as special mental
faculty, possessed by people with a special
sensitivity. This account of the aesthetic was
inadvisable, since it allowed critics like Cohen and
Kivy to argue that ascribing aesthetic properties did
not in fact require a special faculty, since anyone can
distinguish and graceful line from an ungraceful line.
Moreover, some aesthetic ascriptions do seem to be
nonaesthetically condition-governed, in Sibley's sense.
Nevertheless — once again — that Sibley's positive
account of the aesthetic is implausible should not lead
us to despair about the aesthetic. On the other hand,
the pessimistic induction, now with two instances under
its belt, is perhaps looking a little less unhealthy —
especially given two such distinguished exponents.
Despite this, Sibley was surely minimally right to
think that ascribing aesthetic properties to a thing
requires more than merely knowing its nonaesthetic
properties. Whether or not it is distinctively
difficult, erudite, sophisticated or non-conditiongoverned, aesthetic understanding is something over and
above nonaesthetic understanding. So perhaps we should
keep on trying to articulate the notion of the
aesthetic, or at least a useful notion of the
aesthetic.
3.2 The Hierarchical Proposal
Let us pursue the following strategy. Begin with the
account of what it is to be a judgment of taste, or of
beauty and ugliness, that was outlined in part 1, and
then use that to elucidate the broader notion of an
aesthetic judgment. To recall, it was argued that Kant
was right, with qualifications, to think that the
crucial thing about the judgment of taste is that it
has what he calls “subjective universality”: judgments
of taste are those that are (a) based on aesthetic
responses, and (b) claim universal validity, where that
can be minimally interpreted as a normative aspiration.
The present strategy is to use this Kantian account in
order to ground a wider category of the aesthetic,
which includes judgments of taste along with judgments
of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy, elegance, and the
rest.
Let us call judgments of taste, or judgments of beauty
and ugliness, “verdictive aesthetic judgments,” and let
us call the other aesthetic judgments (of daintiness,
dumpiness, elegance, delicacy etc) “substantive
aesthetic judgments.” The idea is that these
substantive judgments are aesthetic in virtue of a
special close relation to verdictive judgments of
taste, which are subjectively universal. (We can assume
that judgments of beauty and ugliness coincide with
judgments of aesthetic merit and demerit. However, even
if beauty were taken to be a substantive aesthetic
notion, like elegance, delicacy or daintiness, there
would remain some other overarching notion of aesthetic
merit or excellence, and we could take that notion as
central.)
On this approach — which is unashamedly traditional —
judgments of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy and
elegance stand in a special and intimate relation to
judgments of beauty and ugliness (or aesthetic merit
and demerit), and it is only in virtue of this intimate
relation that we can think of all these judgments as
belonging to the same category.
Now, what exactly is this special intimate relation
between verdictive and substantive aesthetic judgments?
The proposal is this. Firstly, substantive judgments
describe ways of being beautiful or ugly (Burton 1992,
Zangwill 1995). It is part of what it is for a thing to
be elegant, delicate or dainty that it is beautiful in
a particular way. And secondly, it is part of the
meaning of substantive aesthetic judgments that they
imply verdictive aesthetic judgments. This is the
hierarchical proposal.
[Remark: this may not be true of words like “dainty”
and “delicate,” but it is true of the particular
substantive judgments that we linguistically express in
such words on particular occasions. Both Beardsley and
Sibley, seem to have made the mistake of casting these
issues at the linguistic level rather than at the level
of thought; they should have focused not on aesthetic
words but on aesthetic judgments and responses. (Sibley
did say in footnote 1 of Sibley 1959 that he was
concerned with “uses” of aesthetic words; but he and
everyone else ignored that qualification.)]
Now, let us now see how this hierachical proposal
works. Consider an abstract pattern of curving lines,
which is elegant. It might be necessary that that
pattern is beautiful. This is because the beauty
depends on or is determined by that specific pattern.
But it is not part of what it is to be that pattern
that it is beautiful. That is, the pattern is
necessarily beautiful but it is not essentially
beautiful. (On the general distinction between
necessity and essence, see Fine 1994.) Furthermore, we
can think of that pattern without thinking of it as
beautiful.
By contrast, it is both necessary and essential that
something that is elegant is beautiful. And this is
reflected in our concepts and judgments. We can think
of the pattern without thereby thinking of it as
beautiful, but to think of the pattern as elegant is to
think of it as beautiful, at least in certain respects.
Hence elegance is an aesthetic concept.
Are representational properties aesthetic properties?
Suppose that a painting represents a tree and is a
beautiful representation of a tree. It is not merely
beautiful and a tree representation but beautiful as a
tree representation (Zangwill 1999). Of course, that
the painting represents a tree is “relevant” to whether
it is beautiful because it is part of what determines
its beauty. But being beautiful is not part of what it
is to be a representation of a tree. Moreover, to think
that the painting represents a tree is not thereby to
think that it is beautiful. Being beautiful is not an
essential property of the representation, and thinking
of the representation does not mean thinking of it as
beautiful, even though it is may be necessary that it
is beautiful. Hence representational properties are not
aesthetic properties.
The hierachical proposal thus seems to characterise a
non-arbitrary and useful notion of the aesthetic. The
contemporary notion can be vindicated.
3.3 Aesthetic Morals
Substantive aesthetic judgments have attracted much
attention in the latter half of the twentieth century.
But to some extent this may have been a mistake, since
the role of such judgments is to serve verdictive
aesthetic judgments of beauty and ugliness. Beauty and
ugliness are the primary aesthetic notions, which give
sense to the wider class that contemporary
aestheticians include as “aesthetic”. We need a
hierarchical rather than an egalitarian conception of
aesthetic notions. The broad notion of the aesthetic
can be fixed by what it is to judge that something is
beautiful or ugly, or that it has aesthetic merit or
demerit. Only by seeing beauty and ugliness as the preeminent aesthetic notions can we make sense of a
unitary category of the aesthetic, which includes the
dainty and the dumpy, and which excludes physical,
sensory and representational properties of things, as
well as their agreeableness. The hierarchical proposal
allows us to make the aesthetic/nonaesthetic
distinction in a useful way and answer Beardsley and
Sibley's critics. Thus the notion of the aesthetic can
be defended. That leaves open the deep question of how
aesthetic judgments are possible — a matter not
addressed here.
Bibliography
References
* Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics, Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1958.
o An extraordinary work, staggering in scope,
deploying the notion of the aesthetic. The target of
Dickie's critique.
* Beardsley, Monroe. The Asthetic Point of View,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
o A selection of Beardsley's essays.
* Blackburn, Simon, 1998: Ruling Passions, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
o A defence of expressivism, a modern version
of Hume's sentimentalism.
* Budd, Malcolm. “The Pure Judgement of Taste as an
Aesthetic Reflective Judgement,” British Journal of
Aesthetics, 2001.
o Refreshingly less deferential than many
writings on Kant.
* Burton, Stephan. “Thick Concepts Revisited,”
Analysis, 1992.
o An insightful account of substantive
aesthetic descriptions, and also of so-called “thick
moral concepts.”
* Cohen, Ted. “A Critique of Sibley's Position,”
Theoria, 1973.
o Argues that Sibley's account of what makes
concepts aesthetic will not do.
* Dickie, George. “Beardsley's Phantom Aesthetic
Experience,” Journal of Philosophy, 1965.
o Argues that Beardsley's account of
aesthetic experience will not do.
* Davidson, Donald, 1980: “Mental Events”, in
Essays on Actions and Events, Blackwell: Oxford.
o A classic paper in the philosophy of mind
arguing for a version of materialism without strict
laws relating the mental and the physical.
* Fine, Kit. “Essence and Modality,” Philosophical
Perspectives, 1994.
o Distinguishes essence from modality; of
general philosophical importance.
* Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste” in
Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, Eugene Miller
(ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty, 1985.
o Hume's classic attempt to reconcile
sentimentalism with normativity.
* Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans.
Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928.
o Includes the idea that judgments of beauty
and ugliness are subjectively universal, and much else.
* Kivy, Peter. “What Makes ‘Aesthetic’ Terms
Aesthetic?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
1975.
o Argues that Sibley's unitary notion of the
aesthetic has no basis. Kivy also makes a positive
suggestion.
* Mothersill, Mary. Beauty Restored, Oxford, 1984.
o An exploration of the notion of beauty,
with some historical coverage.
* Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination, London:
Methuen, 1974.
o A wide-ranging book, in which the role of
imagination is highlighted.
* Scruton, Roger. The Aesthetics of Architecture,
London: Methuen, 1979.
o A superb discussion of architecture, but
also contains much material relevant to more central
topics in aesthetics.
* Sibley, Frank. “Aesthetic Concepts,”
Philosophical Review, also reprinted in Approach to
Aesthetics, Clarendon: Oxford, 2001, 1959.
o Sibley's classic paper, which makes the
notion of the aesthetic central. The target of Cohen
and Kivy's critques.
* Sibley, Frank. “Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic,”
Philosophical Review, 1965, also reprinted in Approach
to Aesthetics, Clarendon: Oxford, 2001.
o Explores the dependence of aesthetic
features on nonaesthetic features. This paper was
originally the second part of Sibley's paper “Aesthetic
Concepts.”
* Zangwill, Nick. “The Beautiful, The Dainty and
the Dumpy,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 1995,
reprinted slightly modified in The Metaphysics of
Beauty, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
o Includes a statement and defence of the
centrality of beauty and ugliness among other aesthetic
concepts.
* Zangwill, Nick. “Feasible Aesthetic Formalism,”
Noûs, 1999, reprinted in The Metaphysics of Beauty,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
o Argues for a “moderate” formalist view that
allows that things can be “dependently beautiful,” in
Kant's sense.
* Zemach, Eddy. Real Beauty, Penn State Press,
1995.
o Argues for an extreme realist view.
Further Reading
* Bender, John. “General but Defeasible Reasons in
Aesthetic Evaluation: The Generalist/Particularist
Dispute”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
1995.
* Dickie, George. Evaluating Art, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1988.
* Goldman, Alan. Aesthetic Value, Boulder,
Colorado: Westview, 1995.
* Greenberg, Clement. Homemade Esthetics, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
* Hanslick, Eduard. On the Musically Beautiful,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986.
* Kivy, Peter. "Aesthetic Aspects and Aesthetic
Qualities", Journal of Philosophy, 1968.
* Levinson, Jerrold. “Pleasure and the Value of
Works of Art”, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1995.
* Levinson, Jerrold. “Aesthetic Properties,
Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility”,
Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, E. Brady and
J. Levinson, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001.
* McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic, New York: SUNY
Press, 1987.
* Plato. Hippias Major.
* Saito, Yuriko. “Everyday Aesthetics”, Philosophy
and Literature, 2001.
* Scruton, Roger. "Understanding Music", in The
Aesthetic Understanding, London: Carcanet, 1983.
Other Internet Resources
* American Aesthetics Association site: Aesthetics
On-line
Related Entries
pleasure | relativism