Enjoyment and Beauty
Beauty is powerful. It compels our attention and appreciation and
unites us in shared visions and divides us with 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. 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 that special way. The
arguments for the second characterize beauty’s power to compel attention
and appreciation; the arguments for the third claim address its power to
unite and divide. The first claim is an essential preliminary. The inspiration
for this approach is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in which 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 judges beautiful? Yes and no. Imagine that
you and Jones are looking that the Taj Mahal. Your enjoyment leads you to
exclaim, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jones agrees, thereby expressing his own
judgment that the Taj is beautiful. Jones, however, does not enjoy the Taj.
He is not cognitively or affectively impaired; he attends to features that
people generally regard as making the Taj beautiful and makes a good faith
effort to enjoy looking at the building, but he simply does not enjoy it. He
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agrees with you because he knows that the received opinion is that the Taj is
beautiful, and his agreement acknowledges that the Taj belongs with that
diverse collection of items that people generally take to be beautiful.
Compare believing that Beijing is densely populated. One can form that
belief based in entirely on the reports of others; similarly, one can, as Jones
does, judge that the Taj is beautiful on the basis of others’ reports.
Call judgments of beauty based solely on the reports of others
derivative judgments. Not all judgments of beauty can be derivative, of
course. Your “Beautiful, isn’t it?” illustrates a non-derivative judgment.
Such judgments are grounded in one’s experience of the object in question;
one’s enjoyment, not others’ reports, supplies the reasons for one’s
judgment of beauty. The reasons consist in the features of the object one
enjoys. Suppose, for example, that Jones asks you why you think the Taj is
beautiful. He is not merely asking for an explanation of why you respond to
the Taj as you do; he is asking you to justify your judgment. You do so by
identifying the features of the Taj that you enjoy (a symmetry that is at once
simple and complex, and so on). In general, one defends one’s judgment
that, for example, a face, painting, statue, or poem is beautiful by indicating
the features one enjoys. To avoid misunderstanding, we should emphasize
that we are not claiming that, when one gives reasons for a judgment of
beauty, one expects others to infer on the basis of these reasons that the
item is beautiful. The role of reasons is not to compel agreement by
providing evidentiary grounds. We assign a far different role to reasons.
A. Enjoyment and the Judgment of Beauty
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Our account of the judgment of beauty rests on three observations
about the enjoyed features one would cite in giving reasons for a judgment
of beauty. The first observation concerns enjoyment generally; the other
two are specific to the enjoyment of beauty. The first point is one we
implicitly assumed in the immediately preceding discussion: one does not
simply enjoy an item; one enjoys it as being some way. One enjoys it, as we
will say, as having certain features. This may seem false. Suppose that one
is enjoying an ice cream cone. Why can’t one just enjoy the whole cone, not
any particular aspect of it? To begin the reply, note first that, typically, when
one enjoys something there is an answer to the question, “What do you
enjoy about it?”, where that answer specifies the features one enjoys the
item as having. If, for example, one enjoys chocolate, one enjoys it for its
bitter-sweet taste, or as a rebellion against one’s strict diet, or whatever.
Indeed, in the purported “enjoy the whole cone” counterexample, the
description of the description of the example itself specifies the relevant
feature: one enjoys the cone as a whole, where presumably what is meant is
that one enjoys the whole experience of eating the cone from beginning to
end. We offer the following argument to show that there must always be an
answer to the question, “What do you enjoy about it?” Imagine Carol claims
to have enjoyed dining out in a restaurant, but sincerely denies that there is
anything she enjoyed about it. She insists she did not enjoy the food, the
restaurant atmosphere, the experience of being waited on, the peoplewatching, or anything else. She is completely indifferent to every feature of
dining out. This is a paradigm case of not enjoying dining out, and we
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would be strongly inclined to describe Carol as just self-deceptively
believing she enjoys it. To enjoy something is to enjoy it as having certain
features. Enjoyment thus always has a cognitive component since to enjoy
something as having a certain features, one must believe it has those
features.1
The second point is that, as we will argue more fully in Section IV,
when one enjoys something one judges beautiful, the enjoyed features
typically form an organized array are typically enjoyed in relation to one
another and to the features of other objects in a variety of ways. The
beautiful item’s parts, qualities, internal and external relations present
themselves to the enjoyer as an organized interconnected whole. Even
with the simple relatively less complex beauties of flowers and geometrical
designs, the eye ranges over the form, appreciates the variations in color,
calls to mind perhaps other beautiful flowers. Even apparently simple
beauties, like the beauty of a particular shade of red, only stand out as
beautiful because of the relation of that red to its surroundings (visual or
conceptual) and our ability to compare it to many other closely similar
shades. Beauty exhibits a perceived unity is articulate. The point is
commonplace in discussions of beauty; Kant, for example, emphasizes that
one regards the items one judges beautiful as exhibiting the unity of the
objects to which the concepts of the Understanding apply (even though, in
the case of beauty, the Understanding does not actually supply any relevant
“Enjoyment” argues that this does preclude animal enjoyment—that, for example, a
dog cannot enjoy having its stomach scratched.
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unity-creating concept). We paraphrase this point by claiming that the
enjoyed features of a beautiful object form an organized array.
We can summarize the first two points as follows: enjoying x as
having this or that feature requires believing that x has the feature; hence,
where one judges beautiful, the associated enjoyment of x as having an
organized array A of features requires believing that x has A. The third point
is that this belief is subjective.
A subjective judgment is one that is not objective. Israel Scheffler
captures the relevant sense of “objective”:
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
It is a fundamental fact about beauty that one does recognize the “authority
of persons in the realm of cognition” in the ascription of enjoyed features to
items judged beautiful, as the following example illustrates. When Brian asks
Brianna why she thinks the Mona Lisa is beautiful, Brianna describes the
organized array of features she perceives the painting as having. In doing
so, she is not merely repeating what she has read or otherwise acquired from
others; she sees the painting as having the array of features for herself,
through her own eyes. In response, Brian produces a painting—the faux
Mona Lisa—having all of the specified features. Brianna denies it is beautiful.
When Brian complains that the two paintings are relevantly the same, that
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both have the specified array of features, Brianna responds by pointing out
relevant differences—“the background is different,” “the use of light is
different,” “the eyebrows are different,” and so on. None of the features she
mentions were included in her earlier specification of the array. She insists
that the differences mean the faux Mona Lisa does not exhibit the same
organized array of features as the true Mona Lisa.
Could Brianna be making a mistake about a matter of objective fact
when she denies that the faux Mona Lisa lacks the relevant organized array?
She could be—if she were, for example incorrectly reporting the results of
imposing a grid over a digitized image of the painting and analyzing the color
distribution. But she is doing no such thing. She is (perhaps
incompletely) specifying the array of features she enjoys, and which she
would identify in giving a reason for her judgment of beauty. In such a case,
she cannot be making a mistake about a matter of objective fact. Suppose
the opposite; then it would follow from the objective fact that the two
paintings have the same specified features, that Brianna, on pain of
inconsistency, must judge the faux Mona Lisa beautiful. There cannot,
however, be an objective fact that entails that she must judge the faux Mona
Lisa beautiful. 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 judgment 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
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to these arguments. I try the dish with my own tongue and palate,
and I pass judgment according to their verdict.3
Brianna is deaf to Brian’s arguments and passes judgment according to her
own tastes. Her rejection of the faux Mona Lisa as beautiful even though it
has all the specified features merely reveals that specification as incomplete.
As we will express it, Brianna first-person-authoritatively believes that
the Mona Lisa has a certain array of features, and, as a consequence, she is
authoritative with regard to whether the faux Mona Lisa shares that array. It
is essential to be clear about just what sort of “authority” is involved.
B. First-Person-Authoritative Beliefs
The first step in clarifying the nature of such beliefs is to note that the
features that concern the way the item appears to the person enjoying it.
When, on the basis of one’s enjoyment, one judges something beautiful, one
enjoys the item for the way it appears, for the way in which it manifests an
organized unity through the presented array of features. One may, for
example, enjoy the way the colored squares in the abstract painting appear
to dance; the way the (real or painted) ship’s gently full sails mirror the
tranquility of the sea; the way the washerwoman has the face and bearing of
a Madonna; the way the statue of Aphrodite presents the goddess’s flesh as
at once marble-hard and humanly soft; the way that the strong diagonal
elements are broken up to just the right degree, just short of being
mechanical, in a painting, building, face, or body.
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In all the above examples, an item sensuously appears to one as
having an organized array of features. Compare cases involving an
appearance albeit not a sensuous one. There are also non-sensuous
examples. Consider Stephan’s first encounter with Cantor’s diagonal proof
that there are uncountable sets; after an initial moment of incomprehension,
the light dawns and the proof makes a powerful impression. The elements of
the proof organize themselves for one with an astonishing simplicity and
clarity, making it seem to Stephan that the proof has invested him with the
power to tame the infinite. The proof makes an impression which, although
it is non-sensuous, has a force and immediacy analogous to a sensuous
appearance. We will call such impressions non-sensuous appearances. The
first-person-authoritative beliefs with which we are concerned are beliefs that
an item sensuously or non-sensuously appears to one as having a certain
organized array of features. One is Individuals are authoritative about
whether the item appears to them in that way. The critical question is,
What is it to have such authority?
We answer by distinguishing two ways in which one may fail to know:
failures due to lack, impairment, or misuse of a recognitional ability; and
failures due to, as we will say for the moment, “other sources.”4 One has
the ability to recognize instances of F if and only if one can, in normal
circumstances, reliably identify instances of F. We will ultimately define a
first-person authoritative belief as one that can be false only through lack,
J. L. Austin draws a similar, if not entirely explicit, distinction in "Other Minds", in J.
L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (eds.) (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979), 79-80.
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impairment, or improper use of a recognitional ability. To motivate and
explain this definition, we compare and contrast two claims to know: the
claim to know by sight that the animal in the field is a fox and the claim to
know that the cloud looks like the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków. We begin
with failures to know because of lack, impairment, or improper use of the
relevant recognitional ability. Such failures can occur in the case of both
examples. We then turn to failures from “other sources.” We will argue that
such failures can occur only in fox-type examples.
Lack of ability. Ignorant of the color, size, and shape of a fox, you do
not have the ability to recognize a fox by sight and hence do not know that
the animal is a fox. You believe the animal is a fox because you mistakenly
believe you have the ability to recognize foxes by sight. For a joke, we told
you that the only small, pointy-eared animals around were foxes, when in
fact the area is full of small, pointy-eared dogs. The same thing can happen
in the case of the claim that the cloud looks like the Wawel castle. You have
never seen or even heard of the castle, and, for a joke, your friends show
you a picture of the Janowiec castle and convince you that it is the Wawel
castle. When you look at the cloud you believe that it looks like the Wawel
castle. When your friends latter reveal their deception, you respond, “So I
was wrong. I thought the cloud looked like the Wawel castle, but it really
looked like the Janowiec castle. I just did not realize it.”
Impaired ability. You have the ability to recognize foxes by sight;
however, the ability is impaired. An impairment is an interference with the
operation of a recognitional ability that makes the belief-formation process
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unreliable. There are various possibilities; for example: you are very drunk,
or you have been drugged or given a relevant post-hypnotic suggestion; or
have a neurological disorder. There are various “interfering somethings” that
interfere in various ways, and one may not have any detailed picture of just
how the interfering factors disrupt the recognitional process. One knows that
people who are drunk enough make misidentifications, but one may not have
any idea of the underlying psychophysiology that explains why this happens;
nonetheless, the accusation, “You’re too drunk to tell whether that is a fox,”
can show that you do not know. The same points hold for the cloud’s looking
like the castle. Suppose you are quite drunk when you look at the cloud.
You think it looks like the Wawel castle, but, the next day, when you recall
the way the cloud looked, it is obvious to you that it did not really look like
the castle. You just thought it did.
Improperly used ability. You have the unimpaired ability to recognize
foxes by sight, but you merely glance for a second at the animal—not nearly
long enough to see what you need to see to determine if it is a fox;
nonetheless, because you are being careless, you form the belief that it is a
fox. Given the way in which you employed (or tried to employ) your
recognitional ability, you do may not know that the animal is a fox.
Improper uses arise from various forms of lack of careful attention—
carelessness, over-hastiness, distraction, and so on. Similarly, lack of careful
attention can lead you to mistakenly believe that the cloud looks like the
castle.
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These possibilities are exhaustive of the ways in which failures to know
can be laid at the door of recognitional abilities. If you have the unimpaired
and properly employed ability to recognize foxes by sight, or to tell when
something looks like the Wawel castle, how could you fail to know because of
something wrong with the recognitional ability? We will say that a claim to
know that x has F is ability-falsifiable if and only if the claimant either lacks
the ability to recognize instances of F, or that ability is impaired or
improperly employed. We will define a first-person authoritative belief as a
belief that can only be ability-falsifiable. The next step in working toward
this definition is to failures to know from “other sources.”
The essential point is that you can fail to know in this way that the
animal you spot is a fox but not that the cloud looks like the castle. We
begin with the fox. Suppose you exercise your unimpaired, properly
employed ability to recognize foxes by sight; as a result, you form the belief
that a certain item being is a fox. In response, I tell you that earlier, as a
practical joke, I placed holograms of foxes in various spots; the holograms
are indistinguishable by sight from real foxes. I ask you how you know that
the apparent fox is not just a hologram. You are at a loss to answer,
revealing that you do not know that the object is a fox.5 Here your
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You fail to know because I have given you good reason to think that what you
see might be a hologram; having been given such a reason, to know that what you
see is a fox, you have to know that it is not a hologram. The reason you fail to know
is not that to know that p one must know whatever p entails. It is not true that to
know that p one must know all that p entaills; see, e. g., Robert Nozick, Philosophical
Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), chp. 3. However, to
know that p one must know that not-q, in those cases in which q and p cannot both
be true, and one has (at least in light of certain considerations) good reason to think
q might be true. See Austin, “Other Minds.”
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recognitional ability is entirely in order. It is unimpaired—you are not drunk,
drugged, hypnotized, fatigued, or any such thing; and, it is properly
employed—you have not been inattentive, careless, or any such thing. The
problem is not your ability; it is the holograms. The fox example illustrates
in cases in which the relevant recognitional ability is possessed, unimpaired,
and properly employed, circumstances may still conspire to make something
appear as if it were something else.6
In such cases, we will say the claim to
know is circumstance-falsifiable. More precisely: a claim to know that x has
F is circumstance-falsifiable if and only and it merely appears to one that x
has F, and would do so even if the claim should happen not to be abilityfalsifiable.
Contrast the cloud’s looking like the Wawel castle. As you gaze at the
cloud, you form, as the result of the activation of your unimpaired, properly
employed ability to recognize when things look like the castle, the belief that
the cloud does indeed look like the castle. Could it nonetheless be true that
it merely appears to you that the cloud looks like the castle? Surely not; in
such a case, to appear to look to you like the castle is to look to you like the
castle. All the counterexamples to this claim involve lack, impairment, or
misuse of the relevant recognitional ability. To generalize, consider any
Some may object that all fox-hologram example shows is that you lack the ability
to recognize foxes: if you really had it, you would be able to tell a fox from a
hologram. This objection overlooks the fact that one can have the ability to
recognize F's without having the ability to recognize F's in all circumstances.
Suppose, as we are about to go out fox hunting, I ask you, "Can you recognize a fox
when you see one?" Your "yes" answer means that—in normal circumstances—you
are a reliable detector of foxes. Your inability to distinguish the real foxes from the
holograms does not show that you lack the ability you attribute to yourself. One has
the ability to recognize instances of F if and only if one can, in normal circumstances,
reliably identify instances of F.
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belief that an item sensuously or non-sensuously appears to one as having a
certain organized array of features. We contend that such beliefs cannot be
circumstance-falsifiable. Further support of this claim would require an
exhaustive consideration of possible counterexamples, and we will put that
task aside and assume from here on out that the relevant beliefs cannot be
circumstance-falsifiable.
We interpret first-person-authority as a belief that cannot be
circumstance-falsifiable. One first-person-authoritatively believes that x has
an array A of features when and only when one believes that it sensuously or
non-sensuously appears to one that x has A, and that belief cannot be
circumstance-falsifiable. Such beliefs are subjective. Recall that a subject
belief is simply one that is not objective. An objective belief is circumstancefalsifiable. The reason is that, as Scheffler puts it, the “claimant to scientific
knowledge . . . is trying to meet independent standards, to satisfy factual
requirements whose fulfillment cannot be guaranteed in advance.” One is
not doing so if one regards mere lack of ability-falsifiability as a sufficient
ground for a claim to know. One must submit to tests beyond the mere
unimpaired proper operation of one’s recognitional abilities. To refuse to do
so is to assert that what appears to one to be true is true. The hallmark of
scientific objectivity is to submit what appears to be true to “factual
requirements whose fulfillment cannot be guaranteed in advance.” Brianna’s
first-person-authoritative belief that the Mona Lisa has a certain array of
properties is subjective precisely because one does, in that case, regard the
belief as true provided only that that is not ability-falsifiable.
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C. The Free Play of the Imagination
It is tempting, following Kant, describe Brianna’s subjective ascription
of an array of features to the Mona Lisa as a product of the “free play of the
Imagination.” Of course, the Imagination to which Kant appeals is a
transcendental faculty, and we wish to avoid any such appeal. We can
nonetheless non-transcendentally describe Brianna’s perception as a result of
“free play of the imagination” in the following sense: the organized array of
features Brianna ascribes to the Mona Lisa is her own first-personauthoritative construction. What Brianna does is akin to seeing shapes in
clouds, an activity that one might well describe as a free play of the
imagination. Unlike one’s typical attitude toward clouds, however, one
typically repeatedly contemplates and investigates things one finds beautiful
in ways that extend and enrich the array of features one apprehends it as
having. Beauty creates opportunities for imaginative interaction,
opportunities we value highly. The interaction is typically temporally
structured in a way which involves attention to the various features in
question as a sustained appreciation of the whole.
This imaginative activity is associated, not just with enjoyment, but
with enjoyment of a special kind. A further consideration of the Mona Lisa
example motivates this claim. 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
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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 reasonproviding role and the other does not. We suggest that what accounts for
the difference is that the basis of a judgment of beauty is a special kind of
enjoyment.
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