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 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 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. 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, that, 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. The first is illustrated by Jones: a judgment of beauty, the reasons for which consists 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 has having those features; and (3) one’s reason for the judgment is one’s enjoyment. We argue for (2) in Section II; for (3), in Section III. We devote the rest of this section to explaining and defending (1).

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.[1]

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.[2]

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).

As we argue in Sections II and 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 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 true 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.

This imaginative activity is associated, not just with enjoyment, but with enjoyment of a special kind. A further consideration of the Mona Lisa example motivates this claim. 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

[1] Science and Subjectivity (Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 1. The "criteria" need not, of course, be precisely formulated or even precisely formulable; they may range from explicit methodological injunctions to shared, but not fully formulated, problem solving procedures employed in experiments and in the applications of theories to facts.

[2] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, James Creed Meredith, trans. (Oxford 1952) 284 – 85.