Enjoyment and Beauty
Beauty is powerful. It compels our attention and appreciation and unites us in shared visions. Our goal is to describe beauty in a way that illuminates its power. The description consists of arguments for three claims. First, one enjoys the items one judges to be beautiful. Second, the enjoyment is a special kind; one does not enjoy in that way items one does not find beautiful. Third, to believe that something is beautiful is to believe, on the basis of the special kind of enjoyment, that others will, other things being equal, enjoy the item in that special way. The arguments for the second and third claims characterize beauty’s power to compel attention and appreciation and address its power to unite. The first claim is an essential preliminary. The inspiration for this approach is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where Kant (arguably) advances all three claims. Our concern, however, is with the truth of the claims, not with Kantian exegesis, and our arguments will not, for the most part, be the same as Kant’s.
I. The First Claim
Must one enjoy what one finds beautiful? The question arises because it seems possible to think something beautiful without enjoying it at any time. Imagine, for example, that you and Jones are looking that the Taj Mahal. Your enjoyment leads you to exclaim, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jones agrees, thereby expressing his own judgment that the Taj is beautiful. Jones is not, however, enjoying the Taj. He is not cognitively or affectively impaired; he attends to features that people generally regard as making the Taj beautiful, and he makes a good faith effort to enjoy looking at the building, but he simply does not enjoy it. He is indifferent. He agrees with you because he knows that it is the received opinion that the Taj is beautiful. His agreement acknowledges that the Taj belongs with that diverse collection of items that people generally take to be beautiful. Jones’s statement that the Taj is beautiful may be misleading since it is typically one’s enjoyment that convinces one that something is beautiful. But surely Jones can consistently say, “I believe the Taj is beautiful, although I do not, never have, and expect I never will enjoy it.” Even if Jones cannot base his judgment on his own enjoyment, he can base it on the reports of others. Compare believing that Beijing is densely populated. One can form that belief based in entirely on the reports of others, so why can’t one, on the basis of reports, judge that the Taj is beautiful? In response, we distinguish two types of judgments of beauty. Jones’ judgment of beauty illustrates the first; the defining feature is that the reasons for judgment consist entirely in the reports of others. The following conditions characterize the second type of judgment: (1) one forms the subjective conviction that the item has certain features; (2) one enjoys the item as having those features; and (3) that enjoyment is one’s reason for the judgment. By “a judgment of beauty” and similar expressions, we shall mean a judgment of this second sort unless we explicitly indicate otherwise. Section II discusses (2); Section III, (3). We devote the rest of this section to explaining and defending (1). In doing so, we assume that a judgment of beauty is something for which one typically has reasons.
To see that one typically has reasons for a judgment of beauty, suppose that, in the Taj example, Jones asks you why you think the Taj is beautiful. Jones is not asking for an explanation of why you respond to the Taj as you do; he is asking you to identify what you regard as the features which are key to experiencing it as beautiful. You answer by citing the features you enjoy. We take this to be the typical pattern: one defends one’s judgment that a face, painting, statute, or poem, for example, is beautiful by citing the features one enjoys. It is a fundamental fact about beauty that the features are unified; the beauty items parts, qualities, internal and external relations present themselves to the enjoyer as an organized whole. The enjoyment reveals the item as having these features and his enjoyment-mediated revelation serves as the reason for the judgment of beauty. It is a fundamental fact about beauty that, as we will argue in Section IV, this revelation is articulated. Even apparently simple beauties, like the beauty of a particular shade of red, only stand out as beautiful because of the relation of that red to its surroundings (visual or conceptual) and our ability to compare it to many other closely similar shades. To avoid misunderstanding, we should emphasize that we are not claiming that, when one gives reasons for a judgment of beauty, one expects others to infer on the basis of these reasons that the item is beautiful. The role of reasons is not to compel agreement by providing evidentiary grounds. We assign a far different role to reasons in Sections II and III. Now we turn to the claim that, when one judges something beautiful, one forms the subjective conviction that the item has certain features. We begin by explaining what we mean by “subjective.”
A subjective judgment is one that is not objective. Israel Scheffler captures the relevant sense of “objective”:
A fundamental feature of science is its ideal of objectivity, an ideal that subjects all scientific statements to the test of independent and impartial criteria, recognizing no authority of persons in the realm of cognition. The claimant to scientific knowledge is responsible for what he says, acknowledging the relevance of considerations beyond his wish or advocacy to the judgment of his assertions. In assertion . . . he is trying to meet independent standards, to satisfy factual requirements whose fulfillment cannot be guaranteed in advance.
In this case of judgments of beauty, one does recognize the “authority of persons in the realm of cognition,” as the following example illustrates. When Brian asks Brianna why she thinks the Mona Lisa is beautiful, Brianna describes an organized array of features she perceives the painting as having. Here we understand “perceives the painting as having” to mean that she is not, for example, merely repeating what she has read; she sees the painting as having the array of features for herself, through her own eyes. In response, Brian produces a painting—the faux Mona Lisa—having all of the specified features. Brianna denies it is beautiful. Brian complains that the two paintings are relevantly the same: both have the array of features Brianna specified. Brianna responds by pointing out relevant differences--e. g., “the background is different,” “the use of light is different,” “the eyebrows are different,” and so on. None of the features she mentions were included in her earlier specification of the array. She insists that the differences mean the faux Mona Lisa does not exhibit the same organized array of features as the true Mona Lisa.
When Brianna denies the faux Mona Lisa lacks the relevant organized array, she is not—cannot be—making a mistake about a matter of objective fact. As Kant notes,
If any one reads me his poem, or brings me a play, which all said and done, fails to commend itself to my taste, then let him adduce . . . critics of taste, with the host of rules laid down by them, as a proof of the beauty of his poem; let certain passages particularly displeasing to me accord completely with the rules of beauty (as . . . universally recognized) . . . I take my stand on the ground that my judgment is one of taste . . . This would appear to be one of the chief reasons why this faculty of aesthetic judgement is has been given the name of taste. For a man may recount to me the ingredients of a dish, and observe that each and every one of them is just what I like . . . yet I am deaf to these arguments. I try the dish with my own tongue and palate, and I pass judgement according to their verdict.
One recognizes the authority of persons in ascriptions of features to the items we judge beautiful, as illustrated by Brianna authority with regard to whether the two Mona Lisa’s share the same organize array of features. There are two dimensions to her authority: whether the paintings possess certain features, and whether those features are organized in a certain way. Her authority may extend to both; “may” because if one of Brianna’s organized features is simply “red there,” we do not claim she is authoritative about that; if however, the feature is “a certain interaction of light and dark in the background,” she may be authoritative in this regard (one may try to decompose all such features into arrays of features over which one is not authoritative; we will not pursue this possibility). A similar point holds for the organization of the array of features. The organization of the array consists in relations among features. Brianna may not be authoritative with regard to all such relations. She would not, for example, be authoritative about there being a blue brush stroke approximately two inches above the red region, but she may be about whether the blue brush stroke softens the harshness of the red. As we will argue in Section III, the organization of the array cannot consist entirely in relations that obtain, or fail to obtain as a matter of objective fact. Some of the relations must be subjectively ascribed; that is, one must first-person-authoritatively believe that the item has the relevant array.
The subjectivity of the ascription of the array has a consequence that is essential to a plausible description of the ways in which we experience beauty: namely, any specification of the array of features is provisional. To see what we have in mind, consider that, when Brianna looks at the Mona Lisa, enjoys the painting, and thinks, “Beautiful!”, her conscious attention need not be focused on any particular array of features. It may be only on further contemplation, investigation, and reflection that she can describe the organized array of features she enjoys; moreover, as the faux Mona Lisa example illustrates, any specification of these features Brianna offers to others or to herself, will be provisional. She is authoritative we regard to (at least some aspects of) the organized array of features, and later she may, with any imputation of error about an objective matter of fact, elaborate, modify, or extend the specification. Indeed, one who finds something beautiful typically does so. One typically discovers beauty in a sustained and variegated experience of the object over time as one replaces one provisional specification of an array of features with another richer, more detailed, and more complex one.
As we argue in Section III, Brianna’s reason for her judgment that the Mona Lisa is beautiful is her enjoyment of the painting as having the organized array of features she subjectively ascribes to it. The Taj Mahal example illustrates the same point. Jones judges that the Taj is beautiful merely based on the reports of others. You—we may assume—form a first-person authoritative belief that the Taj has a certain organized array of features, enjoy the Taj as having that array, and for that reason judge it beautiful.
We should clarify what we mean by enjoying an item “as having an array of features.” Consider first that, whenever one enjoys something, one enjoys it as having one or more features. There is typically an answer to the question, “What do you enjoy about it?” If, for example, one enjoys chocolate, one enjoys it for its bitter-sweet taste, or as a rebellion against one’s strict diet, or whatever. The answer to, “What do you enjoy about it?” specifies the features one enjoys it as having. To see that there must always be some answer to that question, imagine Carol claims to enjoy dining out in restaurants, but sincerely denies that there is anything she enjoys about it. She insists she does not enjoy the food, the restaurant atmosphere, the experience of being waited on, the people watching, or anything else. She is completely indifferent to every feature of dining out. This is a paradigm case of not enjoying dining out; Carol just self-deceptively believes she enjoys it. The enjoyment of items we first-person-authoritatively believe to have a certain array of features is just a special case of the general truth that to enjoy is to enjoy an item as being some way.
We conclude this section with a final comment on the Mona Lisa example. It is tempting, following Kant, describe Brianna’s subjective ascription of an array of features to the Mona Lisa as a product of the “free play of the Imagination.” Of course, the Imagination to which Kant appeals is a transcendental faculty, and we wish to avoid any such appeal. Even so, we can still non-transcendentally describe Brianna’s perception as a result of “free play of the imagination” in the following sense: the organized array of features Brianna ascribes to the Mona Lisa is her own first-person-authoritative construction. What Brianna does is akin to seeing shapes in clouds, an activity that one might well describe as a free play of the imagination. Unlike one’s typical attitude toward clouds, however, one typically repeatedly contemplates and investigates things one finds beautiful in ways that extend and enrich that array of features one apprehends it as having. Beauty creates opportunities for imaginative interaction, opportunities we value highly. The interaction is typically temporally structured in a way which involves attention to the various features in question as a sustained appreciation of the whole. Even with the simple beauties of flowers and geometrical designs, the eye ranges over the form, appreciates the variations in color, calls to mind perhaps other beautiful flowers. Beauty is typically discovered in a sustained and variegated experience of the object over time. The experience would not be the kind of experience it is without the features of the object in question; they are in that sense necessary to the experience of beauty, as is the object itself. But the beauty is the object's as a whole.