Beauty

5. Restoration of beauty as a theoretical subject

Twentieth-century philosophies of beauty were comparatively rare, due to a general shift of interest towards the aesthetic sometimes conceived more broadly than will fit traditional standards of beauty and sometimes more narrowly than will do so; and also towards artistic innovations that seemed to give short shrift to beauty. Moore’s chapter in Principia Ethica cited above is an honourable exception. But though a paradigm of minute and rigorous analysis as far as it goes, Moore’s discussion comprises only a prolegomenon to a theory of beauty. Further, the precedent it set was not followed up. A less rigorous but more expansive, broad-gauge treatment was offered by Guy Sircello (1975). He observes that the beauty of anything consists in its having beautiful qualities and therefore the first task of a theory of beauty is to determine what qualities are beautiful. The answer given is that they are ‘properties of qualitative degree’ (PQDs) such as the vividness or softness of a colour, the brilliancy of a sound, and so forth. These properties admit of no quantitative analysis, and are not themselves ‘species of beauty, ’ since if they were the theory would be viciously circular, and have much in common with Sibley’s aesthetic properties of the descriptive sort (see Sibley, F.). PQDs are beautiful when (roughly) they are intense, non-defective and non-defective-seeming, defectiveness being assessed on nonaesthetic criteria. Thus joyfulness is beautiful if intense and in no way defective (psychologically, cognitively, morally). On this basis (more fully developed than is here indicated) Sircello reviews in commendable detail manifold domains of beauty, whose reach now extends over all conceivable (qualitative) values, intellectual (beautiful inventiveness) and moral (beautiful honesty) conspicuously included. However, as PQDs are highly context-dependent for both their existence and their status as non-defective and non-defective-seeming, it is hard to be sure of their ontological or, to an extent, their epistemological standing. The case made for their objectivity in either respect is weak. Moreover, Sircello does not hazard a sufficient condition for the overall beauty of things as opposed to their beauty in respect of this or that property. Finally the role of pleasure is left indefinite, though interesting things are said about it. In short we are offered promising components of a theory without convincing closure.

Another effort was made to revive the theory of beauty by Mary Mothersill (1984: 347), springing from reflection on Kant’s aesthetics, and especially from his dictum that there can be no laws of taste. On her view ‘Any individual is beautiful if and only if it is such as to be a cause of pleasure in virtue of its aesthetic properties’. The latter are understood in a new way, namely as properties so sensitive to their context as to be incapable of being possessed by two individuals unless the latter are perceptually indistinguishable under standard conditions of observation. For example, the distinctive wavelike contour running through El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz, when taken in the full context provided by the painting, is qualified by the totality of perceptible relationships between it and all other features of the design. In this way she supports Kant’s idea of the judgement of beauty being logically singular, since such radically contextualized properties cannot figure in nontrivial laws or principles. But such intense contextualization raises questions about the validity of judgements based on the properties.

The turn of the millennium has witnessed a remarkable surge of theorizing about beauty. Kant’s ideas have been in the forefront in one way or other (Guyer 2005; Kieran 2005; McMahon 2007; Zangwill 2001), though without Kant’s metaphysical baggage. The leading idea has been retained of beauty having a deep connection with cognitive processing, a link encouraged by the advent of cognitive science. Evolutionary developmental biology has also been invoked to explain aesthetic responses in and out of the arts, for instance the remarkable worldwide agreement on the most preferred landscape type (Dutton 2009). At least one radically objectivist theory has been put forward on a different but allegedly scientific foundation (Zemach 1997). Even Neoplatonism has been reincarnated in a phenomenological guise with a mystical twist that might enchant Plotinus (Kirwan 1999). The relation between beauty and moral goodness has been probed more searchingly than before. Environmental and everyday aestheticians have pushed into (or back into) the comparatively neglected domains of natural beauty and the ‘minimal’ beauty (Scruton 2009) of ordinary life (decor, manners, gestures, well-conducted enterprises). As a result of this rising tempo, one may hope that theorizing about beauty (and aesthetic value generally) is finally coming of age.

There have also been outstanding contributions to central issues, for instance a set of proposals by Walton (2008). He construes paradigm aesthetic appreciation of a thing as pleasurable admiration of it without respect to what type of value underlies the admiration: practical, moral, intellectual, artistic – the key is that one enjoys admiring it on that basis. One’s appreciation is yet more paradigmatically aesthetic when accompanied by an additional, second-order pleasurable admiration of the object for eliciting the first-order pleasurable admiration. Wonder and awe are alternatives to admiration especially in the case of natural things; and shock and revulsion become the occasions for pleasure in some avant-garde art. Aesthetic value is then understood in terms of the capacity of a thing to elicit appropriately pleasurable attitudes. Thereby the huge diversity of claimants to aesthetic value may be brought within a unified conception. One such might well be mathematical beauty, which aestheticians since Kant have tended to dismiss from the properly aesthetic domain, over the objections of many ardent and mathematically expert advocates. This exclusion is typically based on limiting the aesthetic to what can be brought before the senses (or the sensory imagination). But it is open to dissenters to deny that the category of the aesthetic, so conceived, is wide enough to embrace the totality of beauty.

Metaphysical issues have been rather lightly explored by aestheticians in contrast to their colleagues in ethical theory, whose cultivation of parallel issues in their domain has engendered an intricate web of distinctions and controversies. The latter can serve to mark out paths of progress in relation to beauty and other aesthetic concepts. Issues of central importance are: which precise concept of supervenience best applies to the relation between physical and sensory properties, on the one hand, and between sensory and aesthetic properties on the other; and which of the many possible forms of realism and nonrealism is (or are) most credible all things considered? Zangwill (2001) works over this terrain more comprehensively than has anyone before him, and it is to be hoped that others will take up cudgels (or scalpels) and bring the metaphysics of beauty to a condition comparable to that attained by metaethics. How fruitful this will ultimately prove to be in either domain remains to be tested, but it is hard to rest content until the wherewithal exists to put it to the test. (Clearly it will not do to pursue metaaesthetics to the detriment of research in normative aesthetics.)