Beauty

4. Response-related realist conceptions of beauty

A second sort of realism takes beauty to be essentially related to the response of humans or other intelligent creatures. 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 feeling. It speaks only of feeling which, should it 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 – and for that matter whether or not there are or ever will be minds. At the same time it ties beauty conceptually to cognitive and emotional 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, mental and abstract properties be intrinsically good to contemplate admiringly? But problems arise when one asks how to determine which ones qualify. Obviously it will not do to answer, ‘the beautiful ones’. And in the end any fuller answer seems irretrievably buried in the nature of intrinsic goodness. On Moore’s view that property is not only simple and therefore unanalysable, but nonnatural and consequently inaccessible to empirical observation. Therefore one must reach such results as one can by an intuition which, if rational, is inexplicably so.

In applying his basic conception emphasizes how essential it is to respect a distinction between the beauty of a quality and its role in regard to the beauty of an ensemble of qualities of which it is a part. A beautiful quality may cause a given ensemble to be unbeautiful, as in the case of a garish colour combination. An ugly quality may enhance the beauty of an ensemble (an ‘organic unity’ in Moore’s terms), as discords often do in music. He notes that typically the ensembles of interest are immensely complex and variable, defeating attempts to establish substantive criteria of beauty. Also on Moore’s view the intrinsic value of a state of admiring contemplation varies greatly depending on the validity of its cognitive components, i.e. whether it correctly imputes beauty to the qualities it admires and, where it concerns an existing object, whether the object really has the qualities the admirer imputes to it. A further point of importance for him is that the intrinsic value of an uncontemplated beauty is far less than that of a contemplator’s appreciation of it; but this by no means affects how beautiful the thing is. Given these caveats, it may seem doubtful that beauty conceived this way can ever be reliably judged, but Moore’s contention is that precisely where these conceptual distinctions are thoroughly understood it is probable that ‘a reflective judgment will in the main decide correctly’ especially between things that differ considerably in degree of beauty (Moore 1903:§§121 –2).

British eighteenth-century theorists (Hutcheson, for example) advanced naturalistic conceptions of beauty as a response-dependent property sufficiently similar to a sensory colour or sound for the faculty by which it is known to be 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 Hutcheson’s central idea in a realist direction 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 nonoptimality 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 advantage or 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 to be distinct from the moral good. This need is supplied by the property that elicits the pleasure, which Hutcheson calls uniformity amidst variety. Such a property clearly relates to many forms of beauty but not to moral matters. To cover things of abstract beauty, as Hutcheson means it to do, the theory must assume that the sense also yields a beauty-datum in response to the mental rather than sensory representation of theorems, proofs and so forth, under appropriate conditions of optimality.

Variations upon Hutcheson’s elements are offered by his contemporaries. Of particular interest are those that amplify the supposed beauty-datum, supplementing pleasure with associations (Alison) or emotional reverberations or imaginative projections (Gerard; Reid). These might serve as intermediaries between the data of the outer senses and the pleasure by being qualities in which that pleasure is most immediately taken. They would then function the way descriptive aesthetic qualities do according to many aesthetic philosophers today. It would not then be merely a generalized uniformity-in-variety that arouses aesthetic pleasure in, say, a well-composed pattern but something more complex, such as the pattern’s vivacity or decorous restraint.

Discussions of erroneous judgements of beauty occur in the works of all the major British theorists, Hume’s being most often cited (see Artistic taste §1). 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; only aesthetic pleasure would. 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 (but not that of his peers) all-purpose candidate for this role, as it must also be in the first-order sensory data that stand nearer in the causal chain to the pleasure of beauty. An appropriate brain structure and mode of operation 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. An air of benign presumption prevails.

Eighteenth-century German theories of beauty leading up to Kant gave weight both to objective excellences (perfections in objects, e.g. richness and variety) and subjective ones (the feeling of beauty, the pleasurable activity of the mind). Moses Mendelssohn is outstanding for the detailed and generally insightful treatment he provides of these two aspects. He celebrates the stupendous ‘ideal beauty’ of nature as a whole, which far exceeds human comprehension. Beauty accessible to humans is found only in the objective perfections that can appear to human senses. But within this restriction humans are able to imagine higher beauties than they find in nature, namely those that nature (by which he must mean the Creator) would have produced ‘if the beauty of this limited object had been its sole purpose’, a formula already popular with writers on painting and sculpture. Mendelssohn gives unprecedented prominence to excellences of states of mind. In his view all success in finding a concept to fit a sensory experience yields some aesthetic pleasure. He also believes that analysis of our aesthetic ‘sentiments’ will yield rules of beauty. However these turn out to be far from hard-edged prescriptions. Examples for painters include: strive for verisimilitude of beautiful nature (understood in the way just mentioned), organize the multiple parts of your subject into a coherent whole, and ‘put [your] entire soul on display and make it known to us’ (Mendelssohn 1997: 174ff.).

Immanuel Kant’s theory of beauty introduces important new ideas, though in such a way as to provoke vigorous controversy over their precise content and validity. Recent hard-won advances in scholarship and interpretation, however, have considerably clarified the situation. Kant distinguishes aesthetic pleasure from moral satisfaction by its freedom from concern with the actual existence or nonexistence of the object of pleasure as well as by its independence of concepts. Moral judgement is solidly based on concepts and definite rules of conduct. Aesthetic judgement focuses instead on a ‘free’ pleasure. In fact Kant’s formulations seem at first to refer only to subjective pleasure, as if the judgement has nothing to say about the object or array of sensory data but only about the mental state. But his account can be completed only by taking the distal referent of the pleasure to have the capacity to elicit that pleasure. Kant seeks to avoid an empiricist reliance on actual agreement among qualified judges by an ingenious but cryptic account of the deep source of the 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 judgement. In freely aesthetic contemplation the imagination seeks out relations of form without concern for cognitive relevance to the scene or sensory array which contains them; and the understanding is free to accept the yield and set new pattern-finding tasks for the imagination. The result is sustainable enjoyment. Since the routines of this play are indispensable staples of ordinary cognitive processing, they belong to the repertoire of all human 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 judgement of free beauty is irremediably singular and thus incapable of being generalized into a rule of beauty (see Kant, I.§12).

Though Kant seems to think it impossible or inappropriate to seek standards of accuracy or adequacy of response to free beauty, it may reasonably be doubted that his theory can do without them. Surely it is possible that some percipients are more capable than others of well-nuanced appreciation of the harmonious free play of the cognitive powers; and that some manifolds are more favourable to such free play than others, a point that Kant’s examples (flowers, decorative designs) strongly suggest is so.

Kant also recognizes judgements of ‘dependent’ (or ‘adherent’) 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 fulfils 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.

Kant also provides a novel theory of sublimity. The premier extant ancient text on the sublime, by an anonymous writer mistakenly labelled ‘Longinus’, conceived of the sublime in terms of greatness of spirit: great thoughts and noble feeling. These properties in no way prevent its being a species of beauty. Nor does referring to things being ‘sublimely beautiful’ violate our linguistic intuitions, as Sircello observes. On the other hand the revival of interest in the sublime in the eighteenth century increasingly stressed the overwhelming and even terrifying aspect to the point where the sublime stood apart from beauty. Kant’s originality in relation to this more modern idea was to perceive in the sublime a philosophic depth. On his view the judgement of sublimity is based on a universally available course of feeling more complex than the feeling for the beautiful. The subject experiences an initial (and perhaps lingering) repulsion and a deeper, more reflective sense of the high aspiration of reason (to gain knowledge of things-in-themselves) or of the indestructible dignity of the moral self. Hence the sublime offers to sensitive and stalwart minds a pleasure that is more challenging than but still as free of conceptual determination as the pleasure of free beauty. Art that cultivates the sublime is well-advised, Kant says, to temper sublimity with beauty lest the work be too difficult to relish. To some extent this admonition has in practice almost always been complied with. Even the most harrowing tragedies and the harshest depictions (Goya’s scathing etchings) contain significantly beautiful aspects.