Enjoyment and Beauty
Beauty is powerful. It compels our attention and appreciation, unites us in shared visions, and divides us through profoundly different ones. 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 (enjoyment and judgment need not be cotemporaneous; one may have enjoyed the item, or expect to do so in the future). 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 tat special way. The arguments for the second claim and third claims characterize beauty’s power to compel attention and appreciation and address its power to unite or divide. 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. 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, or at least seeming to express, his own judgment that the Taj is beautiful. Jones is not, however, enjoying looking at the Taj. He is not cognitively or affectively impaired; he attends to the 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. Isn’t this enough to show that one can fail to enjoy what one judges to be beautiful?
A first shot at an answer is that judgments of beauty are typically based on enjoyment (past, present, or expected). The explanation is that it is one’s enjoyment that reveals the reasons for the judgment. We consider first the claim that we do indeed have reasons for the judgment, and then we turn to the reason-revealing role of enjoyment. One does not treat the “Taj is beautiful” like “Chocolate tastes good.” If you and Jones disagree over the latter, you will not (unless you are a child or emotionally disturbed) try to change Jones’ mind by offering reasons to think that chocolate really does taste good. Chocolate tastes good to Jones but not to you, and that is the end of the matter. In contrast, it would neither be out of place nor unusual for you to try to change Jones’s mind by offering him reasons to think the Taj is beautiful. You goal however would not be to have Jones infer on the basis of the reasons that the Taj is beautiful. Your plan would be to get Jones to enjoy the Taj in the way you do in the hope that he would then also regard it as beautiful. The reasons you offer are designed to this: you defend your judgment that the Taj is beautiful by citing the features you enjoy. Your belief that the Taj has these features is the ground of your judgment that it is beautiful. 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; we hope to secure the agreement of others through their enjoying and consequently judging as we do.[1]
But is this typical pattern is also necessary? Why can’t Jones depart from the typical pattern by judging that the Taj is beautiful without ever enjoying it? He cannot base his judgment on his own enjoyment, but why can’t he base it on the reported enjoyment of others? Compare believing that Beijing is densely populated. One can form that belief based in entirely on the reports of others, that, so why can’t one, on the basis of reports, judge that the Taj is beautiful?
The answer lies in the subjectivity of judgments of beauty. 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.[2]
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 ascribes to the painting. 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: the Mona Lisa, according to Brianna, has an organized array of features, and the faux Mona Lisa has that same array. Brianna denies the identity 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 now mentions were included in her earlier specification of the array, but that just shows that her specification was incomplete. Thus: she believes that the true Mona Lisa has a certain organized array of features, and she denies that the faux Mona Lisa has the same. She insists that the differences mean the faux Mona Lisa does not exhibit the same organized array of features as the true Mona Lisa and is not beautiful. The essential point is that no amount of empirical evidence can show that she is wrong. 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.[3]
One recognizes the authority of persons in the judgments of beauty. Brianna is authoritative 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 they 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 want to 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 this feature into an array of features over which Brianna is not authoritative; we will not pursue this possibility). Given her first-person-authoritative, no amount of empirical evidence can refute Brianna’s claim that the two Mona Lisa’s do not share the same organized array.
For now, we will simply assume that one who judges an item beautiful forms the first-person-authoritative belief that the item has a certain organized array of features. We will argue for this assumption in Section IV. We also claim that one who judges an item beautiful has reasons for the judgment provide by the judger’s enjoyment (past, present, or expected) of the item as having the relevant organized array of features. We clarify what we mean by enjoying an item as having certain features, and then we motivate the claim about enjoyment’s reason-revealing role, a claim for which the entire paper is in some sense the argument.
The first point to note is that whenever one enjoys something, one one enjoys it as having one or more features. When you enjoy something, there is typically an answer to the question, “What do you enjoy about it?” If, for example, you enjoy chocolate, you enjoy it for its bitter-sweet taste, or as a rebellion against your strict diet, or whatever. The answer to, “What do you enjoy about it?” specifies the features you enjoy 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 true that to enjoy is to enjoy an item as being some way.
We take it to be clear that when we defend our first-person-authoritative judgments of beauty, we articulate our reasons by identify the array of features we enjoy. We do not see how it could be otherwise. To count as making any judgment of the form some item has such-and-such feature, one must at least have a rough-and-ready conception of a paradigm case, and a commitment to judge relevantly similar items in the same way in the future. In the case of judgments of beauty, the particular organized array of features serves as the paradigm case, and enjoyment (the special kind of enjoyment characterized in the next section) is the litmus test of whether other items (or even the same item again) are relevantly similar. Relevant similarity is determined by whether one enjoys (in the same way) the items as having the same relevant organized array. We see nothing other than one’s enjoyment that could play this role.
A further consideration of the Mona Lisa example motivates the claim that, when we enjoy something we find beautiful, the enjoyment is a special kind. Imagine that, although Brianna does not find the faux Mona Lisa beautiful, she nonetheless enjoys it as having a certain organized array of features, just not the same array she believes the true Mona Lisa as having. Her enjoyment of the true Mona Lisa provides with her reasons to think it is beautiful, but her enjoyment of the faux Mona Lisa does not. What accounts for the difference? The relevant differences she points out between the two paintings do not constitute an answer to this question. They merely show that she is not guilty of failing to treat like things alike; they do not provide an explanation of how one enjoyment plays a reason-providing role and the other does not. The explanation is, we suggest, that reasons for a first-person-authoritative judgment that something is beautiful are provided by a special kind of enjoyment.
II. The Second Claim
The distinguishing feature of the relevant kind of enjoyment is the presence of a certain type of reason, a presence caused (or causally sustained) by the enjoyment itself. Section B characterizes the type of reason; section C addresses the causal claim. Section A explains what we mean by a reason for action. Given the weight we will place on that notion, the clarification is an essential preliminary.
A. Reasons for Action
What is it for something to be a reason for a person to perform an action? Our answer begins with the observation that reasons typically play a characteristic motivational-justificatory role. An example: Smith devotes considerable time to chess; he studies the game, analyzes his past games, seeks out chess partners, browses in the chess section of bookstores, and so on. When asked why he engages in these activities, he explains that a well-played game displays the beauty of forces in dynamic tension and reveals creativity, courage, and practical judgment in an exercise of intuition and calculation akin to both mathematics and art. The considerations play a motivational-justificatory role: they motivate him to engage in a variety of activities; and, they serve as his justification for performing the very actions they motivate. The example is just one illustration of the complex motivational-justificatory role of a reason. We assume it is clear that reasons play a distinctive motivational-justificatory role, and that it can be adequately characterized without an objectionably circular reliance on the concept of a reason for action itself. We offer no such characterization, however; our goal is the limited one of simply making it clear how we mean by a reason for action.
The focus on explicit articulation of reasons may suggest the implausibly rationalistic view that a reason always plays its motivational-justificatory role through explicit reasoning prior to action. Worse yet in the context of our discussion of beauty, it may associate reasons for action with dispassionate reflection. Reasons may of course operate explicitly and dispassionately. For example, reflecting on his need to improve his ability to blend strategy and tactics, Smith may—explicitly and even dispassionately—reason his way to the conclusion that he should study former world champion Mikhail Tal’s games. The same reasons, however, could operate implicitly and in the presence of passion. Imagine that Smith, without prior reasoning, he accidentally happens on a collection of Tal’s games while wandering around a bookstore to kill time. The collection catches his eye; the conviction, “I need this!” takes hold of him and he straightaway decides to buy the book. The thought and the decision occur against the background of an emotion-laden memory of a recent bitter defeat caused by his lack of skill in blending strategy and tactics. Despite the passion and lack of explicit reasoning, the same reasons that figure in the explicit reasoning may also operate in this case. If Smith were later asked why he bought the book, it would hardly be odd for him to give a reason by saying, “I realized I need to study Tal’s games to improve his ability to blend strategy and tactics.” He doing so he would not only be justifying his choice, he would be citing the reason’s motivational power as an explanation of the action. While on occasion we treat such after the fact rationalizations skeptically as the likely products of self-deception or fabrication, on the whole they are part and parcel of the routine conduct of everyday life, and we, without specific grounds for doubt, we regard them as true.