Beauty

6. Subjectivism and relativism regarding beauty

As we have seen realist views can be particularist in rejecting rules of beauty, but they are committed to beauty judgements being true or false (cognitivism) and to their not being reducible to avowals of personal preference or reports about a culture’s preferences. In contrast subjectivists concerning beauty (as ‘subjectivism’ is here construed) are relieved of the commitment to the reality and knowability of beauty. Some, like Santayana, hold a ‘projective’ theory according to which what we call beauty is merely pleasure projected upon an object that pleases us, thus an illusion rather than a real property; on such a view the idea of pleasure being subjectively universal is rejected out of hand. However in forswearing any warrant for their aesthetic preference subjectivists do not escape important problems involving the rationality of that preference. If a judgement of beauty, taken as merely avowing or expressing an aesthetic pro-attitude, can be counted unjustified if based on factual error or ignorance regarding its object, then aesthetic subjectivism can impute fault without implying that beauty is a property of anything. Is subjectivism amenable to principles of rationality beyond that point? Can it justify favouring consistency in aesthetic attitudes over time or the subsumption of particular attitudes under attitudes of wide scope? If people generally concur in a factually error-free aesthetic attitude regarding a thing, does that give one a reason for suspicion about one’s own dissenting but equally error-free attitude? Finally, should a subjectivist regard a life of refined aesthetic sensibility more creditable than one that is coarser in that respect, other things being equal? If the answers to these questions are affirmative then subjectivism may be subject to constraints of procedural rationality.

Much of the motivation of subjectivism dissipates if convergence in taste proves obtainable under epistemically optimal conditions. However, even a robust realist must admit that in practical terms these conditions cannot be fully met. What a realist of any stripe will not accept without a strong showing are unbridgeable rifts in aesthetic comprehension. The fact that human cognizers are equipped with the same basic capacities of cognition and feeling makes it antecedently likely that the sincere appreciations of any are capable of being appreciated by all well-disposed others, given favourable conditions. So subjectivists would seem to have a problem motivating their theoretical stance in the face of the data. Realism can also accept that individuals can pursue minority or even idiosyncratic tastes without fault. Three considerations suffice to support this: (1) There are endlessly many beauties of significant degree; (2) All aesthetic cultivation requires selectivity; (3) Aesthetic cultivation itself is valuable. Unorthodox aesthetic lives can therefore be quite creditable if they are finely discriminating and appreciative of some set of significant values even if those values are not the highest. Subjectivists often defend their position on the ground that even if human agreement can be construed as falling within realist limits, equally competent cognizers can be conceived whose considered aesthetic preferences do not. But no one has ever worked up a thought experiment of this sort describing even in outline how equal cognitive (including imaginative) competence could, in the real world, be consistent with radically different aesthetic responses. Thus the dispute is at stalemate pending advances in understanding of the deep sources of aesthetic response, as well as in discernment of subtle distinctions within the responses themselves.

Relativism holds that beauty varies with cultures or ‘taste-publics’ without collapsing into personal preference. A version of relativism close to the dispositional account in §4 is obtained by relativizing the beauty-disposition to the maximal discrimination-capacities attainable in distinct cultures, especially if some neural explanation of the difference can be found – following the analogy of sensory colour, which is vulnerable to the same relativization if different cultures (human or other) are found to have different but equally acute colour-sensibilities. Typically, however, relativists tend towards a notion of aesthetic taste so malleable as to leave no chance of reconciliation with realism – without, it must be observed, offering anything like compelling evidence. An alternative explanation of cultural difference as a specialization-phenomenon is at least as plausible. On this (realist) view, cultures develop special competences in different but overlapping ranges of beauty, without there being any incompatibility among the values most reliably assessed by the respective cultures. Evidence of this is found in the fairly ready comprehension and dawning appreciation of other cultures’ values when their works are available. This is compatible with a culture’s continuing preference for its home values. We can live only so many lives.