Beauty

4. Response-related realist conceptions of beauty

A second sort of realism takes beauty to be essentially related to human response. The manner of relatedness varies. For example, G.E. Moore’s definition of beauty as ‘that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself’ avoids any reference to actual effects on human feeling. It speaks only of effects which, should they occur, would contribute to the intrinsic value of a state of mind. This allows things to be beautiful even if they are never experienced, or if experienced never admiringly contemplated. At the same time it ties beauty conceptually to human experience. At first sight such a theory has no difficulty explaining the diversity of beautiful things, for why should not endlessly diverse constellations of material and mental properties be intrinsically good to contemplate admiringly? But doubts arise when one asks how to determine which ones qualify. Obviously it will not do to answer, ‘the beautiful ones’. And in the end the answer seems irretrievably buried in the nature of intrinsic goodness, since on Moore’s view that property is not only simple and therefore unanalysable, but non-natural and consequently inaccessible to empirical observation. One must reach such results as one can by an intuition which, if rational, is inexplicably so.

British eighteenth-century theorists (Hutcheson and Hume, for example) advanced a naturalistic conception of beauty as a relational property, sufficiently similar to a sensory colour or sound to be known by a faculty called the sense of beauty. The sense is internal, in that it responds directly to mental representations, not to external stimuli. A considerably sanitized and amplified development of the central idea might go as follows. The surface colour of a red object is definable as a power (now more commonly called a disposition) to excite a red appearance in optimally colour-sighted percipients under optimal conditions; likewise the beauty of a sensible object is its power to produce, via impressions of the external senses, a beauty-datum (an ‘idea’ of beauty, in eighteenth-century parlance) in optimally beauty-receptive observers under optimal conditions. (Deviations are explained by non-optimality affecting some part of the sensory process.) The beauty-datum of choice is disinterested pleasure, defined (for instance, by Shaftesbury) as pleasure taken wholly in the object and not at all in the self, or more exactly not in the self’s pleasure. Since disinterested pleasure is arguably also a mark of moral discernment (sometimes ascribed to a companion moral sense), an additional qualification is required if beauty is not to be identified with the moral good. (See the proposal by Kant, below.) To cover things of abstract beauty, the theory must assume that the sense also yields a beauty-datum in response to the mental representation of theorems, proofs and so forth, under appropriate conditions of optimality.

Discussions of erroneous judgments of beauty occur in the works of all the major British theorists, Hume’s perhaps being most often cited. Pooling the suggestions therein, one might obtain an honestly empirical criterion of accuracy of the sense of beauty by requiring a consensus among maximal beauty-discriminators under optimal beauty-discriminating conditions. Failing that, beauty would not exist. To complete the analogy with sensory properties, the consensus would also have to correlate with a basis in the object comparable to wavelengths, reflectance and the like for sensory properties. Uniformity and variety ‘in compound ratio’ is Hutcheson’s all-purpose candidate for this role. An appropriate brain structure for the sense must also be assumed. None of the theorists acknowledges the full set of necessary components or the theoretical and practical difficulties of establishing that all of them actually exist.

Immanuel Kant’s theory of beauty introduces important new ideas, though in such a way as to provoke endless controversy over their precise content and validity (see Kant, I. §12). Aesthetic pleasure is distinguished from its moral counterpart by its freedom from concern with the actual existence or nonexistence of the object of pleasure. Kant circumvents the need to rely on actual agreement among qualified judges by an ingenious but cryptic account of the deep source of pleasure. This is, he says, the harmonious free play of the cognitive powers, the imagination and understanding – free in the sense of not being directed towards actual knowledge. In ordinary cognition the imagination supplements the received sensory data so as to fit them to a concept supplied by the understanding. The result is an objective judgment. In aesthetic contemplation the imagination is free to seek out relations of form without concern for cognitive relevance to the scene which contains them; and the understanding is free to accept the yield and set new pattern-finding tasks for the imagination. Since the routines of this play are indispensable staples of ordinary cognitive processing, they belong to the repertoire of all humans beings, and the pleasurable harmony of the faculties can be presumed universal and necessary – a pleasure we have a right to expect everyone to feel. Because the play is not controlled by definite concepts, the judgment of free beauty is irremediably singular and incapable of being generalized into a rule of beauty.

Kant also recognizes judgments of ‘dependent’ beauty, where a concept imposes a limitation. For example, to judge the beauty of a human body, one must take account of whether the properties of the body (for example, its proportions) are such as to facilitate the functions of a human being. Only such free beauty as fulfills this condition affects the overall assessment. Though less purely aesthetic than free beauty, dependent beauty is of far greater human significance. Artistic beauty falls under this head, since all art is to some extent constrained by a purpose.