Beauty

2. Specimen issues concerning beauty

Perhaps the most fundamental issue is whether beauty exists in any substantial sense. The common saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, taken straightforwardly, amounts to a denial that beauty is a property of anything or that anything is genuinely worthy of being aesthetically admired. This denial is a first principle of aesthetic subjectivism (or nihilism), which, if consistent, confines its theorizing to the analysis of aesthetic preference as a sociopsychological phenomenon and as a variably rational or nonrational part of life. Generally, subjectivists in aesthetics, like those in ethics, retain the usual value terms but reinterpret them as avowing, expressing or soliciting preferences. In contrast, aesthetic realists seek to identify the property or state of affairs that beauty consists in and to explain how it can be known. These issues are much confused by the all-too-prevalent tendency to speak of beauty as an emotion, a feeling or a pleasure, which on any theory properly understood is a gratuitous confusion of categories.

Many issues are common to aesthetic realism and subjectivism. For instance: (1) What is the range of things to which terms of beauty can be meaningfully applied? Some take beauty to be a transcendental, in the medieval sense of being a category that is applicable to everything. Others deny that it applies to certain classes. Flavours, scents, bodily sensations, thoughts, theories, abstractions, virtues and even natural objects are excluded by one thinker or another. Many reject the possibility of intellectual or moral beauty. Some allege that the proper referent of terms of beauty is never a physical (or abstract) object or event but an appearance or ‘semblance’. (2) To what extent can aesthetic value be subsumed under the beautiful? Are the pretty, the cute, the witty, the sublime and the tragic species or degree-ranges of beauty, or are they distinct values? (3) To what extent may things of different types be meaningfully compared in respect of beauty? Parrots of a given species may be judged beautiful relative to one other, but can they be ranked against horses or houses? If not, can the beautiful be a single category of appraisal? (4) How determinate can judgements of beauty be when many factors enter into the case? On the face of it we stand on firmer ground in judging that a musical work is beautifully tender or sprightly than when we pass a summative judgement on the total ensemble of its beauty-relevant qualities. This has an obvious impact on comparisons: Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth S ymphonies are replete with beautiful aspects and moments, but can we sum these so exactly as to say which work is more beautiful?