PHIL 332 Philosophy of Beauty -- Class Discussion
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Table of Contents (I've saved the old topic list to give you ideas, but new ones will be added depending on the comments received.) Some entries are double-listed because they relate to more than one category.
1. Truisms about beauty (and ugliness).........1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 30, 33, 34, 55
2. Beauties of diverse sorts..............................................8, 10, 11, 20, 34, 68
3. Scarry on beauty.................................................................3,7, 12, 18
4. Aesthetic/artistic potential of smell and taste........8, 11, 14, 16, 46, 50, 56
5. Beauty and sublimity in architecture..........................................34
6. Animal beauty (including human).........................................43, 51, 67
7. The idea in the artist's mind compared to the concrete reality......57
8. Beauty and social norms............................................27, 48
9. Facial beauty..............................................................67
10. Beauty in music..........................................................13, 63
11. Beauty in ugliness (and vice versa).............9, 30, 31, 44, 45, 48, 60, 66
12. Beauty and functionality, sustainability, etc.....................66, 67
13. Apollonian vs. Dionysian beauty............................39, 40, 49, 62
14. Beauty in abnormal states of mind (or mental illness)...........48, 60
15. Plato or Aristotle on the ontology of beauty...17, 19, 35, 45, 47, 61
16. Plato on love and beauty................................................15, 24, 26
17. Plato's normative aesthetics...........................24, 25, 45
18. Neoplatonism.................................................................42
19. Truth (love of) and beauty ................................................18
20. Ontology of color and beauty........................................58, 59
21. Symmetry and beauty..........................................................68
22. Objectivity/subjectivity/relativity + Zemach's arguments........
23. Descriptive aesthetic properties..................................................
24. Original/comparative beauty, Uniformity/Variety (Hutcheson)........
25. Optimal observation conditions..................................................
26. Hume's criteria............................................................................
27. Aesthetic pleasure............................................................2
28. Beauty and scientific theories...................................54
29. Time-sensitive properties........
30. The funny..........
31. Interpretation...............................................................
32. The lyrical, the tragic...................................................
33. The sense of beauty......................................................
34. Beauty and content .................................................20
34. Beauty and evil or defectiveness...............28, 29, 32, 44, 46, 48, 60, 66
35. Cosmetic surgery.....................................................
36. Mistakes about aesthetic properties (beauty included)...........33
37. Properties of qualitative degree............................
38. The beauty of the universe as a whole..............................36
39. Disembodied existence..................................................37, 41
40. Beauty and purity..........................................................38
41. Aesthetic vs. moral, practical, intellectual...............53
42. Beauty and illusion....................................................42
43. Beauty and arguments for God.................................64
44. Fashion........................................................................65
Contributions
1. From Brendan Sliger, 9/1/09 re. the beauty continuum. My question is in regard to the statement, "Beauty-values (+/-) lie on a continuum (rank-order) of beauty-to-ugliness." Is this to say that beauty-values lie on a line where at one end we have beauty and the other ugliness and that all things could be valued on this continuum? I would propose that there might exist a neutral center of being neither beautiful nor ugly and that that does not fit in this continuum at all. And even if such a subject existed it's lack of beauty and ugliness would be separate from this continuum, lying on another plane. Do there or do there not exist subjects to which we do not ascribe beauty? So let us suppose that we have a continuum of -10 to 10 where -10 is repulsively ugly and 10 would be euphoric beauty. Does there really exist a zero, and even if there does, can it truly exist on the same continuum of a beauty-values continuum?
JB's response. Your are right to sense that there are complications about the zero point (or rank) on the overall-beauty continuum. There are two quite different sorts of things on this level. Things can be completely bland in all respects, having no beautiful or unbeautiful properties. But there can also be things that have beautiful parts which are counterbalanced by unbeautiful parts where the two sets cancel each other out. The same pattern exists for continua of properties whenever those properties have multiple dimensions. Take the property of intelligence. Obviously it has more than one dimension, so its zero point has the same complexity. In general beauty-continua are like this, since significant beauty involves several dimensions.
A zero point outside a beauty continuum would be something that didn't have the kind of beauty/unbeauty the continuum concerns. Geological things like plate tectonics aren't purpose-motivated so can't be graceful or awkward. They can be awesomely powerful, however, and thereby have a high rank on a sublimity continuum.
2. From Corey Checketts, 9/4/09, re. Beauty as the capacity to produce cognitive pleasure.Towards the end of Part Two of Theories of Beauty you spend a few pages worth mulling over defining beauty as the ability to produce cognitive pleasure. One interesting thought there is the idea of an absolute grasp of intellectual truths, namely an understanding of reality as a whole, "a godlike omniscience in which all truths are eternally present to the mind. It is a common theme in ancient writings that this sort of perfection would be gloriously fulfilling". I want to put this thesis into question, especially in the context of beauty. Instead could it really be the case that acquiring this omniscience be a tremendous disadvantage in appreciating beauty? Sort of in the same sense that the tree of good and evil befell humanity. Could it not be the case that a childlike innocence be a valuable in our appreciation and understanding of beauty? An example to further this point, when we look at other people's faces we often find them beautiful (and rightfully so), but when looked at from another perspective (a microscope) that ceases to be the case. Then how can a face be both beautiful and ugly, especially if taken as a whole from a perspective of absolute knowledge? It seems to me at least conceivable that a complete set of knowledge of truth could be very disastrous in our pursuits of aesthetic experiences. If we had a complete knowledge wouldn't it make objects appear less magnificent even boring, dull, or bland? In the case of art, if one possesses full knowledge then in what addition ways can we view a painting? Part of the appeal of art, for instance, is that even after we have viewed a piece from a given perspective we can come back and "look into" the piece from a different lens, be it a moral, cognitive, or some other perspective. I'm not saying that increased knowledge will necessarily make something less beautiful, but I am questioning the guarantee made that such complete knowledge will without question make our experiences richer, and also I am suggesting the possibility that little or no cognitive background could in some cases make something appear far more beautiful to the viewer, listener, etc... than would be the case with complete or even more knowledge. I disagree with the idea of beauty as defined exclusively as cognitive pleasure, granted cognitive pleasure may in fact be a byproduct of beauty or aesthetic experiences in general. Some beauties for example, we admire for their simplicity and limited cognitive response. What cognitive pleasure can be derived from simple colors, or pure sounds, and yet most hold that these are in fact beautiful. Further their beauty does at least intuitively seem to be independent of their producing any cognitive pleasure.
JB's response. This is a huge topic with many angles. One is that the godlike omniscience has to be understood as bringing with it a sufficient understanding of what is known in the sense of seeing the relations between everything. And of course it means complete knowledge, not just greater knowledge than we can get. If all that were possessed, then we'd be able to appreciate both simple elegance and hugely complex beauty. There would never be a problem of knowing too many disconnected facts, which I suspect is part of what you are imagining. Also while perfect omniscience may be a beautiful state for a knower, that wouldn't imply that everything known was beautiful. To the contrary, ugly things perfectly known would be known to be ugly! So yes, if what was out there was flawed, an omniscient observer would find the glory of perfect knowledge mixed with regret for the deficiency of what was known. God suffers! But of course possessing perfect ominiscience is so far from anything we can form a concrete idea of that one may validly doubt that it has much relevance to our actual aesthetic experience.
The more down-to-earth question is whether the beauty we relish can be understood in terms of the power to give cognitive pleasure, i.e., beauty consisting of the thing being beautifully knowable or comprehensible. When we find music ravishing, isn't it because it seems to present some quality -- an emotional one, perhaps, melancholy or exaltation, in a way that makes the quality exceptionally clear? By that I don't mean that one can describe it in words, or "explain" it, but only that the quality comes through with great force, without being mixed up or confused with anything else. Music is prized for being well-constructed or well-composed, for being coherent, for all of its parts going together, being unified. Aren't those conditions ones that make the music beautiful to know?
And sure, some beauties are accessible without technical or analytical knowledge. They are beautiful to perceive. But perhaps that is because they suit our perceptual faculties. Beautiful faces are 'easy on the eyes.' Arguably that means they are easy to know perceptually.
But yes, there are plenty of complications. One is that things may seem more or less beautiful than they really are. An innocent eye may enjoy a mediocre beauty more than it deserves. That happens all the time. This brings up Scarry's reflections on over- and underestimating beauty. We can continue the subject on Tuesday when we dive into her text.
3. From Jared Florence, 9/9/09, re. errors about beauty. I wanted to share with you a thought I had about Scarrys' errors on beauty. By overestimating an object's beauty we discover it was not as beautiful as we had originally thought, however, the object still contains some beauty. When we underestimate an object's beauty we bring the idea of beauty to an object which had previously eluded us. My problem is with these two instances it seems that every object in the world could be considered beautiful. Now if everything in the world is considered beautiful how could beauty exist? Don't we need a counter example to prove that beauty does exist in the first place? How can everything be one thing? Not all actions whether good or bad can be considered just. Not all colors can be considered green. If everything was beautiful how could we distinguish what makes the beautiful, beautiful?
JB's response. First, the idea of over- and underestimating beauty doesn't entail the idea that everything has some beauty. An extreme overestimate is one that attributes beauty where there is none at all. Second, even if everything did have something about it that was to some degree beautiful, that wouldn't mean everything was significantly beautiful. Lots of things would be for all intents and purposes ugly.
What confuses the issue is using 'beautiful' of things without specifying (1) what about them is beautiful and (2) how much beauty they have. When we are more specific the scene becomes a lot clearer and the paradoxes vanish. Also, we have to remember that the threshold we happen to adopt is not important. Only the ranking our statements presuppose matters. Similarly to be 49th or 50th among the states in spending on education is not to give no support whatever (yeah, we support education), but it is still a shameful and counterproductive miserliness.
Finally, I agree absolutely that to appreciate beauty we have to grasp the contrast between beauty and unbeauty (blandness, ugliness, etc.). But this conceptual fundamental is fully satisfied by distinguishing different degrees (+/-) of aesthetic value. The popular idea of absolute beauty or absolute ugliness is incoherent.
4. From Olivia Payne, 9/10/09, re. beauty as an ideal. I was reviewing my notes on beauty and found myself questioning one of the truisms on beauty and what it supposes. We discussed how beauty is an ideal in that it has no fixed upper limit - that there could be a beauty we have never seen that is more beautiful than anything else seen so far. If this is true, wouldn't it be impossible for us to come up with a definition of beauty that would capture every beauty possible (especially those that we cannot even fathom)?
JB's response. I don't think any special problem would arise about the definition of beauty from the absence of an upper bound, that is, an unsurpassably supreme degree of beauty of this or that sort. Suppose a theory states that the master beauty-making property is X. Why would X have to have a maximum possible degree? If we think of particular sorts of beauty, say the beauty of a horse, it seems implausible to say the most beautiful one we have ever seen is at that absolute limit. To be sure, we may not be able to say right off what would make the best example we know of yet more beautiful. But we certainly can't say with any confidence that there couldn't be one. A safer formulation of the truism would be that there is no reason to think that there is an upper bound to beauty.
5. From Kelly Chubb, 9/10/09, re. the ideal. I wanted to respond to one of the truisms listed about beauty. Specifically, Beauty is an ideal. Obviously, this is easy to apply to the ultimate ideals, the most beautiful woman, or the perfectly built animal. However, I find myself applying the term beautiful to things that may not be considered ideal. Such as, a natural scene of clouds and shadows, mountains, etc. It may not be an ideal day but I consider the scene beautiful. So I feel like this truism is only applicable to human beauty or sexual preference, because like the term beauty, I feel the term ideal is questionable based on the individual.
JB's response. I think there is some confusion here. Beauty being an ideal doesn't mean that everything beautiful is ideally beautiful. Rather, it means that for any type of beauty, there is no absolute upper limit. To use one of your examples, there is no cloudscape so beautiful (for a cloudscape) that there couldn't conceivably be a still more beautiful cloudscape than it. That's true of all varieties of beauty.
6. From Kaitlin McGovern, 9/13/09, re. constancy of beauty. If you consider something to be the most beautiful of it's kind (i.e. the most beautiful woman, or the most beautiful flower), but then later you encounter something of the same kind (i.e. another woman or another flower) that you then decide is the most beautiful of its kind, does the first thing (the first woman or flower) loose any of the beauty initially attributed to it?
JB's response. At first I thought this could be answered by reference to a truism: beauty is not the same as an impression or belief about beauty. But that would not satisfy an extreme subjectivist, for whom impressions of beauty are all there is! So the answer has to be somewhat more guarded or conditional. Assuming beauty is a real fact about the woman (that is, some form of realism or objectivism) and that the woman herself hasn't changed, then the answer is no, her beauty doesn't change. Only the viewer's response is changing. And either the viewer overestimated the woman the first time around, or is underestimating it on the second, dazzled by the new beauty.
In practice we very often find our responses changing, even when the two things are present to us. That is, if the new woman shows up with the previous one, we may be more impressed by the new one. (If we have to rely on memory, then of course that's another potential source of error.) For anyone but an extreme subjectivist, one response has to be wrong. One relevant question to ask oneself is, am I confusing my liking with the beauty of the women? Liking is influenced by all sorts of factors and can't be identified with an accurate beauty response.
Another question is, am I responding to some special aspect rather than to the overall beauty? There are many different aspects and it is often a ticklish question how to sum them up. Often, very often, we have to say that persons with different combinations of beautiful and unbeautiful aspects are close enough overall for there not to be a valid basis for ranking one over another.
7. From Lindsey Van Wagner, 9/14/09, re. Scarry on beauty. I'm having difficulty grasping the concept Scarry explains about the appreciation of beauty. More or less she says the appreciation of beauty leads us to explore relationships between this new stimulus and something else more or less beautiful from the past. She states that we compare and contrast these two objects or instances. This notion also relates to the consequence of aesthetic subjectivism that states beauty judgments are, in a sense, always comparative. Is this implying that if I see a sunset and it is absolutely gorgeous and for lack of a better term "takes my breath away," then the first thing I will do in appreciating this is to think about other sunsets I have seen in the past that are more or less beautiful and rate this one accordingly? I just do not think that everyone is constantly judging past sights based on or in comparison to new ones. Every individual thing has a beauty of its own and I guess you could compare and contrast them if asked which one you think is more beautiful but I do not think this is an automatic thought process. What are your opinions on this?
JB's response. I am absolutely with you about our normally not thinking consciously of other sunsets when we are enjoying a beautiful one. Scarry isn't altogether clear here -- as in many other places. There are two plausible views to take about the matter. (1) We do respond to a stunning sunset in the context of our experience of sunsets in general. So the context of our response has an effect on the degree of enthusiasm we feel. (2) For a thinking person it is perfectly natural and appropriate to raise questions about how this sunset stands among sunsets in general and why. The 'why' will concern what makes this sunset so impressive, what its beauty-making properties are. We will go into this under the heading of "aesthetic properties" later in the course. This interest is a form of "artistic" interest in natural beauty. Scarry is operating in that way, but without the analytic cautions that a true philosopher would observe. Hence her claims are often vague and exaggerated. She is a lover of beauty who wants to know what makes beauty tick. Most people don't take that approach. But for purposes of this course it is a good approach to take as long as one follows it up with truly analytic examination.
8. From Sonam Majmundar, 9/15/09, re. beauties of smell. I understand that sight is the "most piercing of bodily sense" but how is it that smell can be distinguished as less significant? The sense of smell can bring about memories as vivid as seeing something can. Scents can bring about mental images of the thing you smelt. For example, a certain shampoo used all summer when you were 15 and you use again when you are 20 can bring about vivid memories of that summer instantly, just like a picture can.
JB's response. I agree that olfactory pleasures can be very intense. Even Plato recognized this in a dialogue called Philebus where he praises (pleasant) odors for being both delightful and "pure." By pure he means their seeming non-physicality (never mind that particles have to alight on our nasal sensors). And as you say,smells also have powerful associations with beautiful (or disgusting) things. Granting all that, there is still a striking limitation when it comes to an art of smell comparable to music, say. The same is true of taste (which in fact is largely smell). We'll discuss this in class tomorrow. You can find a lot of information on the subject in Beauty-Additions #8. Much of that will seem to support the idea that there could be a full-fledged fine art of smell, that is, one comparable to music. But there are also powerful considerations on the other side. These cast doubt on the possibility of anything like an olfactory "composition" which carries the human significance that the best music (or visual or literary) art provides -- one that could be regarded as profound, intensely moving, superbly intelligent, and the like.
9. From Holly Ahearn, 9/16/09, re. ugly aspects and overall beauty. If there can be ugly aspects about a thing but this same thing still be considered beautiful because of its beautiful aspects, then can a thing be comprised of all ugly aspects but the combination of these together deem the thing as beautiful? Can the ugly aspects when put together form a new aspect which is beautiful?
JB's response. You raise two questions. The first is whether a thing with only ugly aspects could present a beautiful ensemble, hence be beautiful overall. The answer to this is obviously no. Nothing can be beautiful if it has no beautiful properties. The other question is whether a certain combination of beautiful aspects could form a beautiful aspect. This possibility isn't so easy to dismiss. A very ugly thing might conceivably be beautifully exemplary of ugliness. Being a tip top example of a property is certainly not in itself ugly and might be beautiful. But even if a thing were a beautiful example of ugliness that wouldn't give it much beauty overall! Exemplariness is a very weak sort of intellectual beauty. Paradigm examples only serve to help us clearly conceive the type. That's worth something, but not all that much.
10. From Milt Hein, 9/16/09, re. music and abstractness. In the Philebus, Socrates compares music to the art of the builder. He talks about the "music of the flute" and how the player is mixed with doubt while playing, because the sounds come from "skillful conjecture" instead of coming from "measurement" like the builder's art does. But a builder's art, while conforming to mathematical measurements that Socrates talks about, would not produce an example of absolute beauty, because no matter what, the edges of a column will never be perfectly straight, nor will the hull of a ship ever be perfectly symmetrical. It will never be as absolutely beautiful as the abstract version. I would argue that a song played would have a better chance of coming closer to the abstract absolutely beautiful version of that piece, because music is more abstract, and the closer to the abstract, the more beautiful it is. I would think that this would make hearing a great piece of music more beautiful than the sight of a well-built ship, since Socrates believes that what is closer to the abstract is more beautiful.
JB's response. I agree that Socrates errs in thinking that the builder's art is more exact or controlled by knowledge than the flute player's. The two arts are exact in different ways and are guided by knowledge of different sorts. And of course everything Plato says about geometrical ideals counts against a ship being a perfect instantiation of geometrical beauty. But whether music is more abstract is far harder to decide. Hegel said it was, because sound seems more ethereal than any sort of physical object could be. But that seeming is deceptive, since sound waves are physical. And both ships and flute music instantiate abstract types. There's no difference there. As to whether a ship is farther from fulfilling perfectly the specifications that define its design than a flute performance is from doing the same for its ideal musical type is unclear. Performances of compositions have a complex and subtle relation to the composition they represent, don't they? Some are obviously better than others, and there may be no such thing as a uniquely best, let alone a perfect instantiation.
Can your notion of abstractness of music accommodate these points? Let me know.
11. From Tiffnie Brandt, 9/16/09, re. smell and taste. Plato explains that “sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses” and that while smell and taste can produce beauty it is to a lesser degree than sight. For example, sight allows us to appreciate art and hearing to appreciate music, but taste and smell only have the capacity to allow to appreciate things such as food or perfume. Why would Plato say that the taste of food and the aromas of perfume have less beauty than the properties of art or music?
JB's response. Plato does not analyze the different sense modalities. He is operating from our ordinary impressions. Art and music are universally accepted as giving higher beauties than food or perfume. This notion is supported by traditional theories of beauty, which consistently put art and music on a pedestal compared with the best cuisine or perfumery. We will discuss this matter in class today and the result will be recorded in one way or another. The main idea, though, is that neither taste nor smell offers a well-ordered domain of qualities where complex structural relations can be developed. Think of music with its scales, octaves, harmonies and of painting with its spatial composition and color relationships. Nothing like that seems possible with the chemical senses (in spite of what Huysmans says -- see Beauty Additions #7 on the subject).
12. From David Max Horowitz, 9/16/09, re. Scarry on cultural differences. Scarry claims, “[A]ttention to any one thing normally seems to heighten, rather than diminish, the acuity with which one sees the next” (18). Although she qualifies this statement (“normally seems”), being careful not to put too much weight on it, she doesn't examine the alternative. For many people who study or even just exclusively listen to Western music, which uses twelve-tone equal temperament, types of music which use other systems of tuning, such as just intonation or nineteen-tone equal temperament, sound terribly out of tune and generally unpleasing to the ear. Scarry uses the previously quoted claim to help explain why “[t]he attribution of a mistake to ‘cultural differences'” does not “show why caring about beauty is bad” (17). Even if the overly simplistic thesis she is arguing against is not entirely correct, do you think that there is an issue here that she is glossing over too easily?
JB's response. Yes, of course there is a big topic here. There are two main aspects, which underlie your remarks. One is that the one to which you give most attention, namely that it's very hard for most persons steeped in one sort of musical culture to be open to alien musical cultures (Westerners and Chinese opera is the standard example). The other concerns what are often called musical universals. There are definite common properties to all three equal temperaments, and it's not clear to me that pieces of the same genres in the different temperaments are less agreeable to musically savvy people. I'm now listening to Jeff Harrington's 19-et Quartet #5 and I don't find it less engaging than other late 20th century pieces. It's not as easy to like as Mozart but what would a 19-et counterpart to a Mozart string quartet would like??? Perhaps it would not be hard for a Mozart lover to get to like after a bit of acclimatization. The problem cases would seem to be those musical forms that intellectual composers produce that everyone finds difficult to enjoy, even their colleagues. But I need to get better checked out in this subject. Thanks for bringing it up.
13. From Philip Yang, 9/17/09, re. beauty in music. I am a musician myself and while we were talking about the beauty in music, some ideas hit my head. Whenever I try to compose, I first imagine or create a picture in my head. In this way, my music will be more detailed, more sensitive, and more beautiful. Whenever I try to remember a beautiful song that I heard, of course the notes of the songs come in but, the first thing that comes into mind is the vision or the picture that I had in mind when I first listened to it. I tried to remember a song w/o a picture in my head but it did not work.
Beauty in hearing is actually really sensitively connected to the beauty in seeing.
I think this also works same for the taste and the smell. Whenever you eat something very delicious or smell something that is very pleasant, you first picture something in the head.
Therefore, I was thinking maybe that any other sense (hearing, taste, smell) that seeks for beauty in its domain has to make use of the sense of seeing, or it does't work.
JB's response. It's hazardous to generalize about other persons' psychological details. I often remember just the music, without visual images. Many musicians strongly discourage visualizing. But for others visualizing works, as it does for you. You don't say whether the music in question has lyrics. That's very important, because words connect with visible things far more strongly than mere sounds do. Now please understand that I'm not denying there are affinities between even bare sounds and visual effects. Some music is water-like, either a still pool or a running stream. And so forth. So yes, there are cross-modal resemblances. That sort of relation is crucial for what philosophers call "aesthetic properties," a big subject in philosophical aesthetics that we will study later.
14. From Corey Checketts, 9/17/09, re. beauties of smell and taste. I would like to add some thought to our discussion on the distinction/contrast between beauties of sight/sound and those of smell/taste. In reading Beauty II on Plato, I came across something relevant to this discussion in one of your commentaries. In the commentary you talk about the difference between sensible pleasures and intellectual ones. Plato creates a hierarchy of beauty, which as you put it reveals his normative aesthetics. With this mentioned, the implication is that these general sensible beauties are less beautiful and magnificent than the intellectual ones; abstract objects are more beautiful than concrete particulars. I think we can use this to she some light on the distinction between sight and smell. Both paintings and musical compositions can deal with the intellectual, with properties that go beyond the mere sensible. They allow us to think on them, to contemplate them. In this regard they stand apart from smells (even the best ones). One will not after having experienced a sensational meal feel the same sort of intellectual stimulation and pleasure as another who sees into a painting. Who truly understands the political, moral, or cognitive values inherent to some dazzling song or painting/photograph etc. The absence of the intellectual is why (I am arguing) that there are no symphonies of smell, or sculptures of taste.
JB's response. I agree that the capacity of painting, sculpture and music (even purely instrumental music) to contain or express intellectual values is vastly greater than the capacity of scents or flavors to do so. And yes, that difference has played a big role in elevating the former to the status of fine arts. Perfumery and cuisine have been regarded as decorative rather than fine arts -- along with textile design and high fashion furniture. Terminology is tricky here, since we often hear of the "fine art of French cooking". What that means is that the cuisine referred to is much closer to the accepted fine arts than merely good cooking is (even state fair winners). Terms that convey the idea better nowadays are "serious art" and "ambitious art." This distinguishes American realism (in one of its uses) from world class art. But there are so many cross-currents in this field that one really has to explain one's meaning, and intellectual aspirations figure prominently in that explanation.
It's crucial to guard against restricting beauty to the elite arts. I can't stress that enough. And there are many "species" of beauty. But some arts are definitely higher in the sense of more challenging and deeper than others, and that involves beauties that are in certain ways superior to others.
15. From Alex Brown, 9/17/09, re. Beauty and love. Plato relates Beauty to Love in claiming that beauty is the ultimate object of all our love. Though this may work with our intuitions - we certainly findl love to be largely proportional with what is beautiful - I question the validity of this claim. It appears that Plato hastily jumps to this conclusion without providing sufficient support for his belief. Is his claim truly justified, or are there gaps in his reasoning that would allow us to just as easily make the opposite claim? The same line of logic could plausibly lead us to the conclusion that Love is the ultimate object of all beauty rather than vice versa, for we could find things to be beautiful in relation to how much love they inspire in us.
JB's response. First it's important to distinguish actual love from the worthiness to be loved. Plato doesn't say we love in proportion to the worthiness of things to be loved. The latter is an ideal that we don't always live up to (don't ever fully live up to, I suppose). Second, the essential connection between beauty and love comes in the experience of enjoyment. To love a person is (in brief) to enjoy their joy, to take pleasure or satisfaction in their pleasure or satisfaction. To appreciate the beauty of a thing is to enjoy seeing/hearing/smelling/etc. that thing unless something disturbs one's natural response (jealousy, fear, disapproval, etc.). That's the axiom from which other truths about beauty and love flow. Thirdly, the nature of the two concepts blocks your vice versa notion: beauty is not an attitude, so it can't seek anything. The nearest connection in that direction is this: in seeking beauty we are normally seeking something to love (we are certainly seeking something worthy of being loved). But that is fully consistent with the thesis of the Symposium.
Understand that the last observation doesn't cover the whole waterfront. A lot more detail has to be filled in. Doing that is a major purpose of the course.
16. From Peter Cooch, 9/17/09, re. Sight and hearing vs. smell and taste. Could sight and hearing be different also because of the amount of time humans use them compared to other senses. Humans seem to automatically use their sight and hearing, whereas touch, smell, and taste seem to require a more proactive approach in order to experience beauty through them. Could the extensive use of sight and hearing allow for humans to create a better, more sophisticated understanding of beauty through these senses? Since using them is so second nature, are they more attuned to detecting and experiencing beauty?
JB's response. There are several aspects your subject. One is the information value of sight and hearing as opposed to smell and taste. How much knowledge of the world can be gleaned from visible and auditory waves as opposed to chemical stimuli? Another is how practiced humans are in making use of vision and hearing as opposed to smell and taste. A full theory would try to determine the inherent capacity of the data + senses, which is not necessarily the same as what humans make use of in normal or even in better-than-normal conditions. There are lots of complications, since examples like Helen Keller show how much smell, taste, and touch can do to substitute for visual and auditory experience, including aesthetic experience. But in general I agree with the mainstream view that sight and hearing carry more information about the world and are better developed in fully sense-endowed humans than are the chemical senses.
In my view the structural properties of the various sensory domains are the most basic difference bearing on the modalities' aesthetic capabilities.
17. From Shazad Ahmed, 9/17/09, re. Plato's ontology. I would like to a make a comment regarding Plato's ontology of Forms. Plato explains that the existence of Forms is separate from the existence of instances. In lecture, we illustrated this notion using the Form of a human. We said that even if humans did not exist, humanity would still be a form. So in that sense, the Form and the instance are not linked as Plato stated. However, how can we point out a Form without first witnessing an instance? For example, before discovering an animal, say a zebra, how can a Form exist? How can we conceive of a Zebra before actually witnessing one in nature? After witnessing one, we can then imagine the "Form" of an ideal zebra. In that sense, the existence of a Form depends on the existence of an instance at one point in time. Without the existence of an instance of a Zebra, how can there be the Form of a Zebra? While the Form can still be timeless, its existence is in a way linked to the existence of an instance.
JB's response. Your questions are very frequently posed, and many philosophers are skeptical (to say the least) about Plato's Forms. But some things can be agreed to by everyone. An abstract type, zebra or other, is such as may have instances and may be conceived or thought of. Abstract algebraic relations were what they were quite independently of actual instances or actual human discovery. So zebras as property-types may not have instances and may not be conceived at a given time. The big ontological problem is whether such abstracts "exist." There is something wrong in linking their existence (or their "being") to the existence of their instances because the property-type is a possibility for instances to exemplify and possibilities don't depend on "actualities" (on concrete particular instances). I can't hope to settle all the deep ontological issues here. The best I can do is to remind you of the basic argument for the existence (or reality or being) of abstracts: they are subjects of true positive propositions; truth depends correspondence with reality; therefore they are realities. If one wants to refute Plato's theory one needs to find some crack in this argument.
Note that I mentioned class the evolutionary picture of life that implies that natural species are hybrids involving both a pure abstract (anatomical type) and foundation-ancestors. The latter component brings in concrete instances. But the property-ensemble is still a pure abstract whose reality Plato would say is independent of the other.
18. From Ariel Sternberg, 9/18/09, re. love of truth and beauty. Beauty and Truth: I was considering the idea discussed about beauty and truth, and the idea that truth is eternal, even before an event or action happens, it is considered to be true, in relation to beauty. Though I think it is potentially possible that truth is eternal (though impossible to prove), I am confused about the overall relation to beauty. Do we have to have a love of truth to fully appreciate the pleasure of beauty, or is it possible to completely enjoy the pleasure of beauty without a full understanding of what is true?
JB's response. As often happens, a number of things are rattling around in your paragraph. There's the question of the timelessness of truth, but you let that drop and switch to love, understanding and appreciation of truth and beauty. The question you end with has a clear answer. Of course one's enjoyment may be unclouded, intense and lasting even if one does not fully or correctly understand what one is enjoying. Think of religious people enraptured by doctrines they certainly do not intellectually understand -- and part of their enjoyment seems to derive precisely from the doctrine being (believed to be) too exalted for any human to understand! And with beauty too, many people exult in the "je ne sais pas" ineffability of the beauty. Any time over- or underestimating of beauty occurs there is deficient understanding.
Terminology here as elsewhere is tricky. "Appreciating" is often used for cases where the expert (connoisseur) can identify the beautiful properties, as when one speaks of a person really having a refined appreciation of this or that (art, wine, etc.) But even in this usage it isn't implied that the knowledge is flawless.
The idea of a love of truth going into the love of beauty (one of Scarry's themes) is of similarly limited application. If we are intellectually demanding we may really want to love only what is really beautiful. But as I said in class, that's not the universal mind-set when people enjoy beauty. Often the question never arises and the enjoyment is floats free of any such intellectual interest.
19. From Natalie Cohen, 9/18/09, re. Plato's Forms. My question is regarding Plato's Forms- we mentioned, specifically in our notes, that the “allure” of the abstract is that it is “certain knowledge instead of mere probability”…Forms are “necessary truths rather than contingent.” Forms cannot be seen, felt, tasted- they can only be conceived of. According to Plato, senses deceive and therefore thought is the highest truth, but our imagination and mental images of things seem to be much less vivid and knowable to us. Images of Forms do not seem to posses clear properties of beauty in the way things we see, feel, touch etc. do. It has been claimed that the “truth” of an abstract does not depend on the existence of a concrete particular, but what does this truth consist of? The mere fact that the Idea is not logically contradictory, means it is of higher truth and beauty--although it may never actually exist? It seems to me that this is a lesser truth, perhaps at times not one at all.
JB's response. First, some ground-clearing. Forms are not truths, but truths about them are necessary (or a priori in later philosophical lingo). It's important not to mix up the ontological and the epistemological, what there is with our knowledge of it. The key theme in your paragraph is epistemic. It concerns the kind of knowledge we can have of the Forms, especially what knowledge we can have of beauty. Here again a bit of ground-clearing is needed, since images have to be distinguished from concepts. Images are generally regarded as possible only of concrete particulars. If this is right there are no images of Beauty itself, or beauty as a property in the abstract, only images of beautiful concrete instances (including ones of possible concrete particulars). So your point about vividness of images of Forms falls by the wayside. Still, that only shifts the subject to the experience that the beauty of Forms affords us. Is that as vivid, as clear and credible as our experience of the beauty of concrete particulars? That's the essential question, I think, and you are quite right to raise it.
We will be concerned with this question for a while, and I have invited a mathematician to give us a lecture on mathematical beauty, which may shed light on it. Granted, mathematical Forms are not necessarily representative of Forms in general and of normative Forms more specifically. There are serious problems here. But we need to progress stage by stage. Meanwhile check out 332 Theory of Beauty Pt. II section 9 on Plato's epistemology.
20. From Natalie Cohen, 9/18/09, re. beauty and content. In lecture yesterday, we discussed the association between content and the level of beauty. If beauty is connected to art and aesthetics—why do we necessarily have to consider content in evaluating it? Shouldn't we say that a poem, piece of literature, or a painting that deals with significant content/meaningful issues, is more significant/meaningful/thought-provoking.. etc. and not necessarily more “beautiful?” Why should beauty ascriptions depend on this content? Maybe we can separate beauty into different components: beauty of form and beauty of content? A poem about something insignificant may be more beautiful and skillful as an art form (complex rhythm, diction, metaphors etc.) when compared to a lesser poem that discusses deep universal themes. Some paintings that have no significant content are much more beautiful than paintings that may deal with issues such as love, justice, etc. At times, art can be considered even more beautiful because of the “lower” content of which it is comprised. The performance “STOMP” is viewed as even more beautiful because of the unconventional “instruments” used—trash cans, broom sticks. Artwork made of forks, knives and kitchen utensils is ascribed additional beauty for the very reason that ordinary content of no significance was transformed into beauty.
JB's response. Your remarks tend in two directions. The first is toward beauty being restricted to form, which is a "formalist" view. The second is a division of beauty into species, form being one, content another. I heartily endorse the second and the drift of your paragraph seems to agree with that. From the beginning I have made a point of the diversity of species of beauty, as well as the difference between overall and part/aspect beauty. So let's suppose we are on the same page concerning that and leave formalism in the dustbin. On that basis, there may in principle be all sorts of combinations, stunning formal (or decorative) beauty with trivial content and great content in a formally atrocious presentation. Much philosophical tracts satisfy the second condition! Figuring out what to say about overall beauty of such diverse types is far from easy. What is certain is that no art form in which content is trivial is going to get very high marks overall. There are thresholds that art works have to exceed in the basic types (species, dimensions) of beauty before they are taken seriously as art.
Your example of the use of basically unmusical instruments to produce music is indeed thought-provoking. My suggestion is that the beauty of the works is largely a beautiful resourcefulness, a doing that is remarkable given the initial deficit. That initial deficit (compared with instruments with more musical capabilities) consigns the works to a special category, as the special olympics is a special category of athletic contest. Does that seem plausible to you?
21. From Emily Winschatz, 9/18/09, re. comparing beauties. My question is in regards to specific attributes of an object. If someone or something has one or two unbeautiful attributes is that person or thing then unbeautiful overall? And furthermore, how can we gauge the beauty of attributes if they look completely different? For example hair can be beautiful regardless of length or color. Short red hair can be beautiful so can long blonde hair. How can the two be compared if they are both considered beautiful yet they are not really variations of one another.
JB's response. The first question is easily answered. Overall beauty is a composite of all the thing's beauties and unbeauties. So one or two unbeautiful attributes doesn't imply overall unbeauty. The latter depends on what beauties the thing has that either do or don't put it over the line for overall beauty. The second question concerns the comparative beauty of things in different categories, but it overlaps with the overall vs. part/aspect difference. That is, one can judge the beauty of a particular person's short red hair not just as hair (including or not including the cut, styling, etc.) but as contributing to the beauty of the person, esp. on its effect on the complexion. There are lots of beauty-questions here, not just one or two. This affects the comparison of the red hair with the blond: that comparison has to deal with the specifics: the hair as hair, the cut and styling, the effect on the appearance of the person, etc. In practice it is often quite possible to make fairly sharp comparative judgments of specific sorts of beauty. Things get less sharp in overall comparisons, but certainly we can make very clear and definite judgments where the difference in quality is large. The less sharp aspect will result in lots of roughly comparable beauties, that is, two contenders being on the same overall level though their strengths and weaknesses are quite different.
22. From Crystal Bagheri, 9/18/09, re. Plato on Beauty as a Form. Why in the Greater Hippias would Plato say that it is "more difficult to say what beauty unattached to an object is"? In class we have said that there are properties and structures that make an object beautiful, not that the object is beautiful because of those properties. The attitude of being serene and pleasant is beautiful and is not attached to any object. I am just confused why Plato (or the author thought to be Plato) would say something like that when other ideas like the kinds of beauty and levels of beauty unattached to an object were discussed in that time as well?
JB's response. People generally feel more confident judging the beauty of concrete particulars than they do abstract types, especially those that are very general or unspecific. The beauty of virtue, justice, or equality seems harder to get a handle on than the beauty of a particular rose or vista or human face. But yes, of course these particular things are beautiful because they have beautiful ensembles of properties and anything that has the same ensemble is also going to be beautiful. To that extent beauty can be separated from particulars.
Another way in which beauty is harder to grasp in the abstract is that the beauties we can most readily appreciate resist reduction to any simple beauty principle or recipe that enables us to judge the beauty of different things, especially things of different sorts (see the comment in the previous item, #21). Perhaps there are reliable general principles of beauty but they have largely eluded us so far. This is a big subject that will continue to occupy us during the semester.
23. From Aldo Coreas, 9/17/09, re. beauties of scent and taste. I'm curious about beauty involving the different senses. Experiences brought about by sight and hearing can produce higher beauties than those of smell and taste. Sight and hearing are used automatically but the other senses involve more work. It seems to me they can produce great pleasures, as when food critics obtain great happiness when experiencing great food. Could understanding and appreciation of beauty be higher if there was more emphasis placed on the senses that brought about lower beauty (while not lowering the attention to sight and sound)?
JB's response. First, separate off the pleasure the food critic has in being nourished and replenished by the food. This pleasure is not taken in the beauty of the food's flavor and scent but in its beneficial effect on the person's vigor and bodily well-being. Second, the fact that the connoisseur of food has to develop her sensitivity and concentrate hard to reach a fair estimate of it doesn't really distinguish high-level beauty discrimination in one sensory domain over another, for it is true of all of them. It might mean that the persons who succeed in developing such a sensibility are more beautifully developed (in that respect) than common folk, but again that doesn't elevate the beauty of the things they appreciate. However, you are right that we need to look closely at the senses and the qualities they detect in order to reach a fair assessment of the different aesthetic domains.
24. From Daniel Ahn, 9/18/09, re. personal and impersonal love. As you were discussing Plato's Symposium, you stated (well, Plato stated) that the higher the love, the higher the beauty. You also stated (if I heard correctly) that there are different types of beauty that are applicable to persons and we don't grow to love the person, but rather, what types of beautiful Forms they exemplify. The higher we learn or come to love, the more should be able to love the Forms, rather than the person who in some way expresses mere reflections of these Forms. My question is, doesn't it seem inherently wrong to say "I don't love YOU, I only love the reflection of Forms that are found in you"? What is to stop us from looking for higher Beauty Forms because, as stated earlier in the semester, Beauty lures us to look for more Beauty. That being the case, where is the exclusivity in the love between friends? The love in a marriage? We would never be satisfied - leaving old friends for new ones with more Beauty and constantly switching mates that are more beautiful. It is as if we don't love the person, we merely love what they can offer us or what they represent.
JB's response. This is a very important subject and your complaint is one that is often directed against Platonic love. Regardless of Plato's merit or shortcoming in the matter, I think a Platonic theory of beauty/love can be developed that can defend itself against the criticism. But doing this requires some careful qualifications of the theory. Personal love, on any Platonic theory, has to be regarded as love of a lower grade of reality than love of Forms. But that need not mean it is less important to the quality of human life. The higher level of beauty that abstract things have means that love of them is more "spiritual," exercises a higher part of human nature, than love of persons does -- in general, that is. But on the other hand the highest sort of personal love must include dedication to joint spiritual elevation, lovers helping each other love the Forms. So the two types of love are not completely separate, but joined in an essential way.
Personal love entails loyalty, as you say. This is not independent of the beauty of the persons involved, since the beauty of their personal narratives (so to speak) will be affected by their fidelity to each other. There are countless complications here, of course, but the ideal interpersonal love relation will involve both good judgment in whom you love and good conduct in the intimate relation that develops as well as keen enjoyment of each other for each other's good qualities. There are lots of beauties in all this and they add up to an impressive totality. To abandon a deserving lover in order to try out a new one is disruptive and is doubtfully justified in terms of beauty even if the new person is more beautiful overall than the prior one. But as things are, most love relations are flawed in all sorts of ways and abandonment is often not an offence against beauty, all things considered. It may be imperative! And failing to recognize superior beauties in other persons than one can find in one's mate is certainly no virtue. Equally, pursuing "higher'" beauties in art, science or philosophy to the detriment of one's mate may be justified if one's mate is not up to sharing that quest with you.
Would you disagree with any of this after having given it due consideration?
25. From Whitney Pulliam, 9/18/09, re. the unity of beauty according to Plato. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around Plato's idea of a hierarchy of beauty. Plato commits to beauty being a single property. Does that mean that beauty is comparable in that differences in beauty are looked at from the aspect of that property only? This doesn't really make sense to me because there are many things that are considered beautiful, but for many different reasons. If Plato is right about this, I think that the concept of beauty is not really known because the "single property of beauty" is not known either. How can everything be compared on this singular scale?
JB's response. I think the single scale (or rank order) is a big mistake. But one has to be careful. Even things that are very different can be compared in a rough and ready way. A badly stitched seam is not as beautiful overall as a painting by Raphael. For that matter a beautifully stitched seam is not either. There aren't enough beautiful aspects in something so simple as to add up to as impressive a compound beauty as is found in a painting by Raphael. But a single scale implies that a superbly engineered and well decorated automobile can be compared with a well-composed sonata, and that doesn't seem sensible. The best we could say is that they are both quite beautiful and let it go at that. With two sonatas or two automobiles we can make a more fine-grained comparison. In practice we concentrate on comparing things of the same type because we find it helps us become more discriminating whereas far-flung comparisons don't. But that reasonble allotment of attention doesn't invalidate the rough and ready comparisons mentioned above. It would be a theoretical error not to acknowledge that kernel of truth in Plato's idea.
26. From Hayley Noveck, 9/20/09, re. Plato on love and beauty. Plato's Symposium makes the connection between love and beauty by stating that the subject of love is always for beauty; and that to be beautiful the object must possess beautiful properties; ultimately it is the love of the properties that creates the love for the overall object and therefore one would love the properties wherever they are found. What if we love someone for their beautiful properties both physical and personality, is it not possible to assume that we could meet another individual with the same properties and not find them beautiful? What if we met identical twins who were physically identical and shared moe or less the same personality traits, would Plato's symposium suppose that we would inherently love both individuals because they possess the same beautiful properties? And are there not many instances where someone loves one person and not another even when they have the same beautiful properties, or would Plato's theory assume that we love both and merely choose one or the other?
JB's response. This is a variation on item #24 and my response to that item covers much of your subject. The key point, which needs to be stressed and stressed again, is that interpersonal love is also crucially about a historical lives. I meet a person and fall in love with him or her. That is a unique event in my life and in the life of the beloved. The beauty of that particular cannot be simply replaced by a later event of meeting an equally beautiful person -- without, that is, having an effect on the overall beauty of the lives. Plato does not make a special point of this in the Symposium, and on the whole he seems more interested in impersonal love of beautiful properties expressed in rapt admiration where individuals are sidelined. But I think we should hesitate to assume he doesn't also value the virtues attaching to the best sort of interpersonal love. Beautiful friendships were highly valued by the Greeks. What wouldn't be valued would be loyalty to bad or wicked friends.
27. From Anshu Khetan, 9/20/09, re. beauty and social norms. there is one aspect I cannot completely understand...You said in class that if someone finds a murder beautiful, then that person is probably crazy. I agree with this, however, can we really make the claim that this person is crazy? I understand that if we are looking at things in terms of social norms why we can say that, but is that a valid thing to do? After all, social norms change all the time. In ancient Rome, a murder in a Colosseum might have been seen as a beautiful thing. Essentially, I'm just curious as to how we can say something is beautiful or not beautiful at all without being completely biased.
JB's response. Three sorts of clarifications are needed here. The first is to distinguish between the whole and its aspects. A murder has an unbeautiful aspect, which is (roughly) it's being an illegal premeditated killing. That (central) aspect of it cannot be said to be beautiful. That means, assuming the law is a reasonable one, a killing cannot be beautifully deliberately illegal, just as a killing cannot be beautifully cruel or brutal. This doesn't mean it can't be beautifully well-planned, executed, etc. The second clarification concerns the different types of killing. Gladiator killings are not murder any more than are killings in wartime combat. Even assassinations may not be murder but acts in declared or undeclared wars. The law recognizes lots of differences (emphasis on lots) and philosophy of law recognizes even more. However all killing is problematic, morally and aesthetically, which means that it is to some extent and in some way regrettable. Therefore there is something unbeautiful about it. The final clarification regards social norms. Roman approval of gladiator killings does not automatically free them from justified criticism. But it does lessen the overall unbeauty of cases where the contest is fair and voluntary. As to norms of sanity, there are well-founded general criteria that apply to many, many cases. But of course norms are often abused, one form of which is trying to draw the line too precisely or in some self-serving way, e.g., to repress political dissent. These abuses do not invalidate the general criteria.
28. From Shruti Rastogi, 9/20/09, re. Plato on beauty and virtue. Plato's view that beauty has a good effect on the soul is validated by the fact that all human beings react positively to the experience of something they find beautiful. Socrates believes that the disorderly state of affairs in Greek arts could be rectified by searching for artists gifted in discerning the true nature of the beautiful and graceful. He believes that these artists will cause the youth to “swell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything…” (Republic) However, the youth of the 21st century essentially has access to every kind of beautiful music that exists and is no better for it. He might argue that they are not listening to artists that have the ability to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful and that there is a standard form of each. However, people will listen to the artists that they find the most beautiful to listen to and that beauty despite Plato's or Socrates' objections is subjective. Person A may find no beauty in certain types of music, but that's not to say Person B won't.
JB's response. Well, cultural effects are dependent on multiple causes. Having access to beneficial music doesn't mean everyone will flock to it in preference to harmful music. Plato would be incredulous in face of acid rock or punk rock or gangster rap -- incredulous and appalled. On the other hand, these forms have some beauty and are not as evil as up-tight moralists claim. They do, however, raise questions about the reasons behind their creation and appreciation. Their appeal comes out of social dysfunctions of one sort or another. Lots of art comes out of deprivation and defect. On the high end, tragedy obviously does. On the low end we have sadistic horror flicks, chainsaw massacres, and hard core pornography. The pleasure people get from the latter involves a kind and degree of beauty which is overwhelmed by massive unbeauty. On the high end tragedy is redeemed by nobility, courage, eloquence of speech and maturity of thought, so the best examples come out very beautiful overall in spite of the unbeauty of the negative stuff in them (think Hamlet).
29. From Shruti Rastogi, 9/20/09, re. beautiful but evil persons. [As a continuation of the general subject in #28, which responds to Plato's claims about beauty in the Republic.] Another case of beauty having a downside is represented by the strong archetypal character of the malicious beautiful woman or man in society. This character uses his or her beauty to manipulate others. However, despite the emotional, mental, or physical harm caused by said beautiful person, it was not the beauty that inflicted the harm. It was the manipulation done by the beautiful person that inflicted the harm. The beauty inspired a general positive feeling in the direction of the beautiful person that the person does not deserve. Beauty inspires feelings of self-worth and confidence in both the beautiful person and the people they interact with. While beauty has a good effect on the soul, it can be used against the individual to make him or her too confident and thus too blind to see the harm that is currently being inflicted upon him or her.
JB's response. Yes, beauty can be a danger, depending on the circumstances, to possessor and admirer. Some of the problem comes from failure to see beyond the beautiful facade to the ugly aspects -- or to do so quickly enough to avoid the harm. This is difficult to avoid since we learn early that to enjoy life we have to overlook lots of negatives in all sorts of situations. Usually the things we sideline are fairly harmless, the thorns in rose stems, etc. But in personal relations all too often we are, as you say, suckers for beauty. Some of it may be in our genes. Indeed, if one thinks about it deeply can one imagine a world in which this danger is not pervasive? I mean a real world that comes about by natural means? I doubt that such a world is conceivable. What do you think?
30. From Mandana Marashi, 9/21/09, re. beauty and ugliness. When I was reading your response to Holly Ahearn- ugly aspects and overall beauty, a question accured to me. In your response, you have mentioned that a thing with only ugly properities will not be considered beautiful. My question, then is what are our criteria for considering a property as ugly or beautiful? What are our standards and where do they come from? Where has been the source of our judgement in the first place? For example, how did it become the standard judgment to think that a big nose is considered ugly? or a big wide eye as beautiful and attractive? I also thought that you mentioned in class that nothing is absolutely ugly or beautiful. In that case, how can we have a thing that only has ugly properties and not a single beautiful property?
JB's response. The question of criteria is of course a hotly disputed one, especially between realists and subjectivists about beauty. It divides into the ontological question and the epistemological one. The latter concerns our beliefs and that's what you seem mainly interested in. It's best to wait until we get to the sense of beauty theories (TOB Pt III) before we tackle that in detail. For now it's enough to say that what the best efforts of human beings converge upon is very likely to be near the truth. Why are (really) big noses unattractive? Partly it's a matter of not fitting in with the other features of the head (and even body). An oversize nose doesn't make for harmony with the shape of the head, mouth, eyes and eyebows, etc. It's like a blaring trumpet in meditative music. Of course this is a matter of degree and a fairly large nose can suit a face that is generally craggy. Harmony/disharmony of this sort is an aesthetic universal. Noses can also be too small. Cartoonists specialize in funny looks that no one thinks beautiful because of the disunity created by the comical combination of features.
I agree that a thing with only ugly properties -- or even with no beautiful ones -- cannot be beautiful. That is as close to an absolute as we can get. Any other notion of absolute ugliness is incoherent, but sometimes people talk as if absolutes were more absolute than that. It's that latter mystical talk that I was rejecting in the comment in class.
31. From Millard Watkins, 9/21/09, re. beauty and ugliness. Could there conceivably be something in some degree beautiful about everything, or would that undermine the whole idea of beauty? Could ugliness in and of itself, in a sense, be considered beautiful? Without ugly--being the polar opposite of beautiful--would not beauty cease to exist? Of course, ugliness with respect to beauty (or compared to beauty) is not beautiful--or rather, it is not beautiful overall. But is it safe to say that ugly does have a beautiful quality: that our concept of beauty almost hinges on its existence.
JB's response. The idea of beauty depends on the idea of unbeauty -- all concepts have complements. But all that implies is that there are differences in rank ordering of aesthetic goodness. And in the abstract the concept of a world without anything bad enough to deserve to be called ugly makes perfectly good sense. However, ugliness in itself is not a beautiful quality and it does not have anything beautiful about it -- taken in and of itself. But when the question is asked about things with many properties, a sculpture, a person, a landscape, overall beauty is quite consistent with significantly ugly aspects. That's the way of the world.
It is also true that we might not notice beauties as much as we do if they weren't made easier to notice by the contrast provided of unbeauty -- blandness and ugliness. We might not appreciate them as keenly as we do. But it's important not to confuse this with the other points.
32. From Sergey Pshenitskin, 9/21/09, re. conceivability of a world without dangerous beauty (#29). I think that a world in which beauty is not dangerous is conceivable, but not practical. It is very unlikely that such a world could come about by natural means. I'm reminded of the sirens in Greek mythology who sang beautifully in order to lure sailors into rocks where their ships would crash. It could be the case that genes play a role in our interpretation of beauty. There was a study done using several sets of twins which where separated at birth. When those twins were re-united, it was discovered that they had a startling number of similarities beyond physical appearance. One pair of twin brothers each had a wife named Laura. If genes are what determine our idea of beauty, what happens when we are attracted to someone who uses their beauty in an ugly way? After all, it would not really be our fault because we can't control our genes. Is there any way for us to avoid being "suckers for beauty"? While it is true that we can control our actions, it doesn't seem as though we can control our feelings or our perceptions, which is what we use to determine what is beautiful to us.
JB's response. Partly I agree that such a world is unthinkable as the product of a natural evolutionary process, as my comment in #29 indicates. And yes, I think genetics has something to do with it. The trouble is that we have to learn and that generally takes some hard knocks, practicalities being what they are. Often when we know better it's too late. Another thing: we can easily conceive of creatures that have a sheltered existence, but they wouldn't be keen beauty discriminators. Genetics (over the course of evolutionary history) supplies us humans with the general capabilities but training is essential if we are to attain substantial knowledge.When we achieve that our feelings are considerably modified (partly by being directed to many more objects) and our ability to control them is vastly strengthened. But of course this still leaves room for falling on one's face.
If there were a deity who micromanaged everything the hazards could be fewer and milder. But there would still be question about how wise humans could become if they had to grow into it, as opposed to being led by the nose.
33. From Allyn Rose, 9/23/09, Can wrong appreciaion be beautiful? Does someone's over exaggeration of beauty make the thing less beautiful than the exaggeration? Who decides? Can the idea in one's head (the overestimation of beauty) become a sort of abstract (Plato) beauty and therefore gain some substance? And if the beauty is overestimated, are the person's "mistaken" thoughts beautiful? Can they hold enough weight to make the actual object more beautiful? And further, if there is no 'concrete' definition of beauty, how can any one view of beauty be an over-estimation if the person truly believes that it holds that much weight?
JB's response. I've picked out the one new morsel in this paragraph. The other parts are repeats already commented on. Suppose I am entranced by what I take to be the beauty of something. If I am overestimating it, can my state of mind still be beautiful? I would say yes, this may certainly be the case. But explanation is needed. The judgment cannot be beautifully exaggerated, since exaggerating is a fault. But from that exaggeration a state of harmony in other respects is quite possible, and in fact frequent. So it boils down to a question of what aspect is beautiful. There is also the question of overall beauty of the state of mind. Here it seems reasonable to say that a small exaggeration that produces great harmony could give quite a substantial overall beauty to the state of mind. But a big exaggeration pushes the state below the line overall. There are of course lots of particular cases that would require thought in order to settle, and quite a few would probably end up on the same (fuzzy) level.
34. From Hayley Noveck, 9/28/09, re. inherent vs. contextual beauties. When considering beautiful architecture do we only analyze something to be beautiful by its physical appearance, or can ancient temple architecture be beautiful based on the analysis of its history. For example, can we consider Apollonian (or even Dionysian) architecture to be beautiful based on the immense effort and manual labor it took to create such a strong and robust building, such as the fact that many laborers or even slaves had to carry by hand heavy blocks of marble long distances to create the large structures? Can we consider it beautiful not only for its seemingly almost perfect right angles and complex structures, but more so based on the consideration that there was limited scientific or mechanical advancement (compared to engineering of today) during the time? Can one find the architecture itself to be beautiful for these non-physical aspects, or must the architecture's beauty be based solely on its physical properties?
JB's response. It's essential to distinguish between the properties that belong to the building itself from those that are a matter of its context of production. A good way to do this is to define the "thing" that is beautiful in each case. The production of a temple is a huge project, and it can be organized well or badly. If exceptionally well organized it makes sense to call it beautifully organized. Of course that organization has lots of parts, so there's diversity there too. There's the production of the columns and blocks, the transportation, the preparation of the site, the erection, etc., etc. The financies are different from the engineering. The management of the labor force is another. The basic point is that the beauty of the production (or part of it) is the beauty of a different thing than the temple itself. The latter doesn't become more beautiful because its production was beautifully managed. Nor does beautiful management require that the product be beautiful. All this comes under the heading of truisms about beauty (Lecture 1 and TOB Introduction).
The temple itself will not just be physically b'ful or unb'ful). It will b'ful or unb'ful in expressiveness, in suitability for worship services, etc. The basic lesson is that there are lots of different beauties associated with it. That's why it's so essential to identify the right subject of any particular claim about "its" beauty.
35. From Kelley Chubb, 10/04/09, re. Plato's Forms. I need help connecting Plato's account in the Republic with our discussion of the Forms because based on my interpretation of the cave analogy, Plato did not think much of a table in real life, because this concrete particular is just a copy of the Form of a table and therefore nowhere near as beautiful and not even truly real. Also, would Plato agree that a form is beautiful because it is the purest aspect of a particular, and that every copy reproduced is less and less beautiful because less pure?
JB's response. Plato's allegory of the cave compares ordinary folk with people living in a cave where they can only see shadows of objects thrown on the wall in front of them. They can't turn around to see how the shadows are produced, let alone escape into the outside light to see the true realities (the Forms). Philosophical enlightenment enables the best of them to escape and learn the truth about the genuine realities and about the appearances that represent them. What we ordinarily call real objects, namely concrete particulars, are like those shadows. They aren't truly real and aren't capable of giving us true knowledge.
In my summary of Plato's ontology I sidestepped his claim about the unreality of concrete particulars because that clutters things up unhelpfully. Even if unreal, particulars are of a type that differs from abstractions, and they are more or less beautiful depending on their properties. (I have added a paragraph in TOB Pt. 2 about this.) To reconstruct a Platonic theory of beauty that is as plausible as possible we must take concrete particulars at face value.
When we do that, does the idea of their being copies of the Forms explain why concrete particulars are less beautiful, as Plato's allegory insinuates? No, copies can be just as beautiful as, or even more beautiful than, originals. The Republic is unfair to copies on this point. (Also 'copies' doesn't strictly fit the relation of particulars to Forms.) What about the idea of concrete particulars being less "pure" than Forms? In a way this is correct -- recall what I have said in class about this. And yes, this does relate to beauty, since there is always something in a concrete particular that is unbeautiful. But let us not be too hasty. Perhaps Forms also have their aesthetic limitations. We'll discuss this in the next several classes.
36. From Peter Cooch, 10/8/09, re. the beauty of the universe. A possible answer to the question you brought up at the end of class regarding having a more beautiful universe. You seemed to question whether or not a universe lacking in viruses or diseases (bad ones) would make the universe more beautiful. But it seems to me that from a naturalistic standpoint these destructive things create more beauty. The viruses and disease, although sometimes tragic, eliminate things in the universe that are less beautiful i.e. weaker animals with less beautiful attributes. After a disease has ran its course, the world is left with stronger animals that can pass on their better, more beautiful properties. In this case, the bad seems to create more beauty.
JB's response. Unquestionably, things in themselves unlovely or destructive of beauty can have positive aspects or consequences. The question in any given case is what is the overall value of the universe with them being what they are, as opposed to the overall value of the universe without them. I mentioned viruses because we think of them as undesirable from a narrowly anthropocentric point of view, which needs some justification. The viruses may have beauties and if so, we should count those into the overall calculation. And as you believe, the overall effect of them may be positive. The mass extinctions are another matter. Since none eliminated us, we may take them lightly. But they can occur again and there's no assurance that creatures at our level will ever emerge from the rubble. So it won't do to say these gigantic catastrophes are OK because a better world will arise from them.
You have picked up on one theme in the line of questioning I opened up in class, namely that in order to evaluate the universe we have to take into account everything in it, and things are so interconnected that this is a huge task. Good for humans may be bad for viruses, short-term bads may be long-term goods, etc.
There is another theme also. Imagining an improvement in one aspect with everything else remaining no worse overall is idle until one imagines a way in which a naturally evolving universe could achieve that two-part condition. Philosophers have never even tried to be specific as to ways and means when they talked about "evil" in the universe. Being specific about ways and means is an even more stupendous task than the task required for the first theme.
37. From Philip Yang, 10/14/09, re. disembodied existence. Yesterday, at the end of the class, you were talking about this theory that if one doesn't have a body, he will be freed from all the physical or mental subjects such as smoking, or the loving relations. At first, it seemed pretty much resonable and somewhat persuasive, but the question is it is just a theory; nobody ever experienced living w/o the physical body. Based on this theory, you are freed when you are the Soul itself, but we do not know for sure how you can live w/o the physical body. Perhaps maybe when you die, you will become a soul, but this also is a assumption, not a truth. It seems that if you are freed from your physical body, you will be freed from all the worries and the p&M materials, but there are not enough evidence for it.
JB's response. The context was the higher rating given to the abstract and my point was that people confuse abstractness with disembodiment. But independent of that many in the long soul vs. body tradition have supposed that bodiless existence would be much better. You raise the question whether such a thing is possible, given the way things actually work in the world. But this never entered into the discussions, first because God was assumed to be able to handle the ways and means, and second because the theme was in a way hypothetical. IF we were disembodied and yet retained our cognitive competence, ability to move our point of view, etc. could our life be more blissful than it can be if we are burdened by a physical body? This sort of thought experiment is about values, not about practicalities.
However, even understood as purely hypothetical, it is by no means easy to figure out the consequences of disembodiment and therefore fairly assess the benefits. Our sense perception would have to be mental imagery caused in some other way than by outer things interacting with our neural systems, since we wouldn't have a neural system. It's not easy to work out a scenario in which we have experience of things in the world without having any experience of a body. What sort of experience of controlling our perception could we have if we have no experience of turning our eyes, closing them when the light is painfully bright (and would we have pain sensations at all)? This is the kind of question that is relevant to ask to test whether disembodied cognitive competence is a coherent idea -- and thus to discover whether it would be a better form of life than we can have when embodied.
38. From Tiffnie Brandt, 10/15/09, re. beauty and purity. When comparing purity to diversity or vivacity what is purity, is it characterized as clarity or perception? If I can't find the beauty in something would it then lack purity? Also, how is purity contrasted with beauty and does purity have to enhance beauty?
JB's response. Purity is always purity of some particular sort. Pure water is water without any contaminants, pure blue is perfectly uniform blue without any speckles of other colors, a pure tone is a tone without dissonant overtones or any disorganized sound (noise). The purity that figures in the arguments for the superior beauty of abstracts is a bit more complex. Platonists value the idea of a thing more than the concrete embodiment because the latter contains so many properties that have nothing to do with the idea. For instance the idea of a beautiful human face doesn't include anything about the countless anatomical details -- the cell structure, the glands, the secretions from the pores, the hairs in the nose or the millions of microorganisms swarming on the skin -- that are a part of any actual face. So the idea seems 'cleaner' than the actual face. Also the idea remains constant while any actual face changes (think of the expressions, the signs of fatigue, the grime that accumulates, the ageing, etc.).
I contrasted purity with diversity to boil all these complications down to a single term. The idea (or Form) is simpler than any concrete reality. I brought in vivacity as a counterweight: the idea has much less vivacity than a concrete reality. The idea serves intellectual purposes but it's 'pale' compared to a concrete reality (a actual beautiful face, for instance).
As to the other questions about how much purity in a given respect contributes to the beauty of a thing, that varies a lot with particular cases. Purity of color or tone can be boring in a painting or musical work (can be, not that it always is).
There's also the concept of a thing being purely beautiful, which is a matter of it having no flaws -- that is, having only beautiful properties. Few things can claim to meet this standard, so we use the phrase for ones that come notably close, having lots of beautiful properties and no really serious defects. The evening sky is sometimes purely beautiful by this standard.
39. From Shazad Ahmed, 10/19/09, re. Apollonian and Dionysian beauty. We learned that Plato favored Apollonian beauties for the logic and clarity behind them. I was wondering, how does someone who favors Dionysian beauties justify anything as being beautiful? The Apollonian beauties appeal to our virtues, but what would the Dionysian beauties appeal to in that same way? Also, what can be said about the beauty of something that may have both Apollonian and Dionysian beauty? For instance, the Alhambra in Spain has Apollonian beauty in the geometry of its structure/floor plan, but it also has Dionysian qualities with the Arabic scripture and gardens. Would Plato think the Alhambra is beautiful?
JB's response. Dionysian ideals are passion, imagination, sensuality, verve, and sensitivity to the darker side of life. You are right to insist that there must be something positive in their appeal. It won't do to treat them as vices like gluttony, lust, and irrationality. And the relation of them to logic and clarity are interesting. There is order in Dionysian music like Wagner's (and even in Led Zeppelin's!), there is brilliant imagination in romantic poetry. A fully flourishing life certainly requires a quota of excitement, exhilaration, immersion in sensory pleasures, exertion to the point of exhaustion, impossible dreams, exuberant wit, and in general the pushing of one's capacities to the limit. In Dionysian states there are also moments of clarity that the central sort of Apollonian misses. The two ideals are best conceived, I think, as different parts of a continuum. There are good forms of them and not so good forms, perversions even.
As to the Allambra, there is quite conspicuous order, harmony, and proportionality of the larger parts so that there is a counterbalance to the dazzling profusion of decoration. Here is an image that represents both parts of the spectrum:
Would Plato accept the room on the left as highly beautiful? Probably not. It's too sumptuous in its decorative splendor. But it certainly can be regarded as a fusion or Dionysian and Apollonian, whereas the room of the stalactites on the right, the Hall of the Abencerrajes, with its 'honeycomb' ceiling, is more Dionysian.
40. From Shazad Ahmed, 10/19/09, re. Apollonian and Dionysian. We used tangible objects/structures to give examples of Apollonian/Dionysian beauties. I was wondering how human beauty and actions would be classified under Apollonian/Dionysian beauty? How could one determine how to classify something like a human face or an action such as a baby laughing?
Jb's response. If the baby's laughter is normal I think each of the ideals will embrace it as a modest sort of beauty. For a higher ranking in the eyes of the Apollonian there would have to be suggestions of intelligence and self-possession that the baby is not up to. Likewise the Dionysian would not be able to find in it the passionate verve that is central to that ideal. Both ideals favor the healthy and positive, however, and the normal baby's laughter is both of those.
41. From Daniel Ahn, 10/19/09, re. Plotinus on bodiless beauty. Plotinus claimed that being bodiless would be more beautiful because of the freedoms that come with it. I would have to agree with Plotinus' claim that being bodiless would be pretty awesome IF it came with all the ideals we hope for (going through walls, no knowledge of exhaustion, etc). However, you threw in that being bodiless is more appealing due to the fact that physical pains no longer exist. I would have to agree if physical pains were the worst kind of pain, but it's not. Aren't pains of the soul much more agonizing than those that are physical? Many times people commit suicide (physical pain) because of various non-physical pains. There are many more instances of nonphysical pains damaging the human psyche in unmeasurable ways (often leading to more nonphysical pain and even sometimes physical pain). Doesn't that lead us to believe that emotional/spiritual is much worse than those physical and therefore, even in the ideal bodiless state, we would still remain with the nonphysical pain? Does evidence of this still allow the bodiless to be "pure"? It just seems like it's "better than what we had before", the lesser of two evils.
JB's response. I certainly agree that disembodiment would not necessarily free us from pain in the sense of distress. Strictly speaking it wouldn't necessarily free us from the illusion of physical pain! For even without a body we could conceivably have the illusion of a body, and the experience of amputees shows that we can have pain from phantom limbs. Moreover, since the hypothesis is comparative, perhaps we should ask whether a much better body might do as much for us as disembodiment? Lots too think about here.
42. From Holly Ahearn, 10/19/09, re. Plotinus on intellectual beauty. Beauty of moral/intellectual actions; Plotinus: How can one describe or even begin to think that he can decide what an intellectual beauty is if the ultimate beauty, according to Plotinus, is out of this physical world, is above anything a human has and ever will imagine? Moreover, how can there be a mental or intellectual beauty if the scale of beauty goes outside of the spectrum of what humans can conceive of? I can imagine this type of beauty being possible for physical things like faces or plants, even stars, but as for the mental... there is already a lack of a scale as to how to appropriately rank morals (due to differences in cultures, religions, governments, etc.) so to rank anything mental as BEAUTIFUL seems absurd on Plotinus' theory of ultimate beauty. (side comment: also, putting the "mental" with the "intellectual" and considering them under one category could cause problems because those two can be possibly categorized as two separate "things".)
JB's response. Hm. You raise lots of questions in one paragraph. As to moral beauty, the basic idea is of some actions and feelings being morally beautiful, things like courage when courage is called for, kindness when that fits the case -- things involving restraint of one's cruder passions when decency is preserved and harmony furthered by doing so. Societies differ somewhat in their circumstances, the beliefs held about the facts of the case also have an effect, but the wise heads in a society don't differ all that much. Beautiful intelligence is also pretty widely recognized. But you claim that Plotinus doesn't have a right to such beliefs because his ultimate beauty is so transcendent. I don't quite see how you arrive at this conclusion. I certainly grant that Beauty Itself, or the beauty of the One (Being itself) is mysterious, but to me that suggests that Plotinus ought to reconsider that rather than questioning the familiar beauties, including the intellectual or mental sorts. However, the pat answer to the problem of the intellectuality of the highest beauty is that if our minds were more powerful we would be able to grasp the One and its beauty. As it is we can only form the idea of something that 'surpasses ordinary beauties infinitely in the direction of superiority,' to use a phrase of Medieval philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
As to mental and intellectual properties being different classes, I'm unclear as to why that would undermine Plotinus' view. The received view is that they overlap, some mental properties being sensory rather than intellectual. But even so, they both stand apart from physical properties. To be sure there's an important question about sensory impressions, looks, feelings, etc. Why should they be elevated by a Platonist above the physical? Plotinus never discusses this, so far as I am aware. But presumably he holds that the intellectual is much higher than the sensory. So my grouping them together is somewhat misleading. When I did that I was really just underlining the mental status of the intellectual.
43. From Milt Hein, 10/19/09, re. criteria of beauty of animals. In Beauty-Notes 11, you proposed 4 criteria for beauty among animals. They were 1) structural beauty and beauty of action, 2) adaption to difficult conditions, 3) adaption to a wide range of conditions, and 4) structural features suggestive of higher cognition and feelings. My question then, is suppose if we use these criteria to rank the beauty of different animals, would this give us any objective reasons to believe that one animal is more beautiful than another animal? It seems that ranking beauty in this way is subjective, because one could rank an animal that scores really high on criteria 4 but really low on 1,2, and 3 higher than an animal that scores higher on 1,2, and 3, but lower on 4.
JB's response. Sure, assigning weights to the different dimensions is bound to be a delicate matter. This is a main reason why overall beauty tends to be much less precisely assessable than the beauty of aspects. The best idea I have heard of is what Rawls calls reflective equilibrium, which is a state of reflection reached when one's intuition about a case matches the result of one's theory about that case. In the present instance I should think that we would start out with the theory that each of the four deserves equal weighting and see what the results are. Then we ask, does that seem a fair assessment? Is there any reason for disagreeing with the ranking so obtained? Most people would probably favor the good-lookingness of the creature because that's the easiest to access. But that overlooks the functional beauty on which the creature's flourishing depends. Can it be right to downgrade that just because it's harder for us to access? Shouldn't we expand our horizons to embrace real harmonies whether or not they are so readily available to our senses?
You pick out 4 as particularly vulnerable to unfairly high weighting, if I understand you. I think that would be a danger if we didn't observe the animal closely to see how well-founded the look of intelligence was. For that we need to get to know it. Animal scientists are doing just that for a variety of species, and that should in time lead to more reliable looks of that sort. Perhaps you would still suspect that we would rate intelligence too high when figuring overall beauty. I'm not sure of that. But perhaps you would agree that manifestations of intelligence add to a species' beauty.
I don't pretend to know how things would shake out in a full-scale, serious course of collective reflection on this matter. We'd just have to try it out and see what reflective equilibrium we can achieve.
44. From Olivia Payne, 10/20/09, re. Can irregular buildings be beautiful? My question comes from our lecture last Thursday when you were going over the assignment on the four variations of the temples. Someone in our class brought up the question of why structurally interesting variations (ones that are not structurally perfect) could not be considered as beautiful as a structurally perfect one. For example:
This image of the leaning tower of Pisa is beautiful because it is structurally flawed, is it not? It is the quirky nature of it that separates it from your standard building our temple. Would this just not be considered Apollonian beauty, but a form of Dionysian (due to it's imaginative nature - see B'ty Discussion #39) because it is skewed negatively in the Apollonian sense?
Or did I just misunderstand what you were saying when you ranked structurally perfect buildings over those with variations?
JB's response. As I think my straightening of the tower shows, the lean is not really beautiful. Try sliding the pictures so that only one is visible at a time. It's just a curiosity to see a building lean, like seeing wrecked cars that don't become beautiful just because they are smashed.. As I said somewhere to one of you recently, but can't remember just to whom or where, no one would intentionally build a leaning tower, not in this architectural style anyway. Being imaginative isn't enough, unless the imagination is put to a good purpose! One can imagine something ugly. That doesn't make the ugly thing beautiful!
45. From Alex Brown, 10/20/09, re. Plato on beauty of microstructures. In class we were posed the following question: Would Plato's view of the world of space and time have been less dismissive if he had known that the microstructure contained such striking and beautifully intricate sights such as the photographs taken through a powerful microscope? Though he clearly was never given the opportunity to view such pictures, and such beauty would be entirely new to him, can't Plato's theory of the Forms be extended to cover this new category of concrete particulars? It seems he could apply his theory to the microstructure level, and could make the claim that there exists a Form of the microstructure that all particular instances within this level strive to imitate. It does not appear that these intensely detailed photographs threaten Plato's views of abstracts vs particulars.
JB's response. You're right, of course, that Plato's ontology of Forms wouldn't be threatened by beautiful microstructures. There would be applicable Forms for all these phenomena. But the question of why or how Forms are more beautiful than concrete particulars gains urgency as the beauty of particulars is found to be more extensive and more striking than was previously thought. Also I grant that this is not as central to his advocacy of abstracts as other ideas are, but also I think he is deterred from fairly acknowledging the real beauties of particulars by squeamishness about familiar unpleasant aspects of physicality.
46. From Jared Florence, 10/20/09, re. In regard to sight and hearing being favored over taste and smell. Couldn't this be simply an evolutionary preference? In the case of humans, it seems that sight and hearing became a necessary condition for us to evolve as a species. I do not believe we would have flourished so greatly had it not been for the fine development of these senses. I am not discrediting the role smell and taste has played in our evolution, however, I do believe that if one of these senses (taste or smell) were damaged we would more or less have evolved just as well. However, I cannot say the same for sight nor hearing.
JB's response. What you suggest may have merit if we can assume that sight and hearing have a deeper connection with advanced cognition than do smell and taste. If they have such a connection I think it has to be because of the intrinsic structure that visual and sonic data have and that smell and flavor lack. That's an idea worth developing. It doesn't preclude smells and tastes having some beauty, but it poses limits of complexity of that beauty both sychronically and diachronically. But we must also be careful not to rest beliefs about what beauty isout there in the world upon our comparatively low level of competence in these sensory domains. Thought experiments along Huysman's lines are relevant, in which we try to imagine having much sharper and more retentive chemical senses.
47. From David Horowitz, 10/20/09, re. Aristotle vs. Plato on ontology. Can a modified version of Aristotle's ontology, specifically his notion that universals are present only though their exemplifications, exist without the Unmoved Mover? If so, is there a particularly good reason for adopting Plato's ontology, specifically his idea of the world of forms, over such an ontology? It seems to me that if there is no particularly good reason, it would be silly to create a more complicated ontology by permitting an additional domain that we have no direct access to or knowledge of.
JB;s response. That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it will work. If universals only exist in exemplifications, mental or physical, and yet there's no Unmoved Mover, wouldn't that just mean they don't always exist? Would that undermine truths of mathematics or any other abstract domain? Not necessarily, since those truths could refer hypothetically to possible applications. Two plus two could equal four (in base ten) in any exemplification physical or mental. When none such happens to exist the statement is only true hypothetically. That seems a simpler ontology than either Aristotle's or Plato's
Aristotle did have arguments for the reality of the prime mover, five in fact. Perhaps you know them. I don't give any credence to them and think he would have been well advised to do without that notion. But like many philosophers he was intensely ambitious to know the answers to big questions so he, like many, many others, overreached.
48. From Corey Checketts, 10/20/09, re. beauty and violence. I know I'm putting it off to the last moment, but there is an issue I've been formulating for sometime that I wanted to sit down and write up, and wanted to see your thoughts on the subject. In your response to Anshu Khetan, 9/20/09, re. beauty and social norms you clarify (and rightfully so) the distinction between the whole and its aspects. But does this take into consideration the aestheticization of violence, the stylistically extensive representation or depiction of violence? For me it doesn't seem all that unreasonable for there to be a certain aesthetic element in the act of murder. There are plenty of examples in pop culture; namely, movies where it seems that more violence tends to make the movie better, more beautiful. For example, Kill Bill, Vol. 1 where Tarantino merges extensive violence as a form of expressive art. Or take the most prominent case I can think of A Clockwork Orange, where the protagonist Alex and his gang of ruffians commit acts of "ulta-violence", violence for violence's sake in the most excessive and unjustified way. Clearly, we can question whether Alex is a rational agent, but deriving pleasure in the violent doesn't seem that far fetched, or that strange. Aristotle in the Poetics talks about part of our joy in tragedies comes from the pleasure we get out of enjoying the misfortunes of those depicted. In short, I find it difficult to necessarily separate a beautifully executed murder from a case of 'ultra-violence' or a movie which uses scenes of violence to enhance the film. In this sense it seems at least plausible for there to be cases where murder or violence can be evaluated as beautiful on the whole or as a property enhancing a larger collective work (e.g. a novel or play).
JB's response. You raise a large question with a number of angles. I'll deal only with some. First violence can be graceful, skillful, dramatically appropriate, and lots of other things. If it's beautiful because of these properties then it is beautifully graceful, skillful, dramatically appropriate or whatever. The violence isn't beautiful just because it's violent, i.e., extreme. And when it's bad it isn't beautiful because it's bad but because it's one of these other good things.To be dramatically appropriate it may have to be bad, disgusting, disgraceful, etc. But there is always a positive reason that lies beyond it's mere badness.So being beautifully bad is always a misnomer.
Of course people can get pleasure from really nasty violence. We know plenty of that! But is there any good reason for saying that pleasure is beautiful, or that it's a reason for saying its cause or object is beautiful? I don't see it. The nasty violence can have something beautiful about it but that something will not be its nastiness, its immorality, its savagery, etc. or the pleasure anyone takes in it. I don't think there is anything beautiful about the protagonist's hyped-up violence in Clockwork Orange though that doesn't mean there is no beauty in the filmic presentation of it. If someone finds pleasure in what that guy does (in the story) than that viewer is either not attending to the moral quality of the act or is in an emotionally defective state. Sadistic pleasures are defective pleasures, I believe. The way to see this clearly is to take all the incidental beauties away from a sadistic act. Then the sadism stands forth without any ornaments and pleasure taken in it can't be confused with aesthetic pleasure.
Even if beauty ultimately turns out to be a matter of the capacity to cause pleasure, it is not just the capability to cause just any sort of pleasure!
49. From Kaitlin McGovern, 10/21/09, re. Dionysian vs. Apollonian beauties. In class we said that a type of flaw that a Dionysian beauty had would be an early death, because a longer life of the same quality of a shorter life is always better. This made me think about comparisons that could be made between short and long lives of varying quality. Is a brief but wonderful, productive, and happy life worse than a very long life of poor or mediocre quality? How mediocre or poor would a long life have to be to be better than a short, productive and happy life? Is the short life more beautiful because it is positive, or is the longer life more beautiful because of its length?
JB's response. Some brief lives are clearly far better than some long ones. It's not difficult to sketch examples. But our ability to sum up complex plusses and minuses isn't strong enough to draw fine distinctions. Length is not in itself an asset, however. A long wretched life can easily be worse than a short wretched one. (Eternity in Hell is supposed to be the worst fate possible!) Rather than seeking some simple formula one really has to look at cases. Then one can often reach a reasonable judgment as to which is better or worse for the person living it.
50. From Lindsey Van Wagner, 10/21/09, re. smells and tastes. I understand most of the reasoning for why visual and sonic works are more beautiful than scents and tastes but when you say that scents and tastes do not allow for the complexity of sights and sounds, I have trouble grasping that. How about the composition of a perfume? Or what chefs go through to get something to taste just how they want it to? Is that so different from composers experimenting with sound until they discover which combination of notes delivers the most beautiful piece?
JB's response. First a minor point: the question is not about how beautiful smells or tastes are but what capacity for diverse beauty they have. They can be very beautiful in certain ways. But have they the capacity for the kinds of complex organization required for beautiful compositions, as in music or painting? This is what you are really interested in. On this main topic I don't deny that flavors and scents can be subtle and somewhat complex. But the analogy in music would be a subtle and somewhat complex lingering chord being sounded and allowed to fade away, maybe several times. That falls far short of the complexity of a musical composition. A superfine meal (as in Babette's Feast) provides much more sequential complexity in the gustatory experience (the preparation is another matter, not strictly relevant to the beauty of the product.). But tasting experiences too have their limits. The largest problem here seems to be the comparative lack of recognizable structural complexity in the flavor domain (so far as anyone has been able to discern so far). There is considerable diversity of good flavors and flavor sequences. But this multiplicity doesn't seem to allow for complex patterns that we can recognize as the same, or different, or the same with differences that are. So it isn't just difference that counts, but difference of recognizable patterns.
51. From Aldo Coreas, 10/21/09, re. judging animal beauty. I have problems seeing how the 4 criteria for judging animals can all be considered equal. The 1st and 4th one are the most easily accessible and while the 2nd and 3rd aren't. It is easier to judge an animal's beauty than their versatility or adaptability. It seems to be it's harder to find out about 2 and 3 since one would have to take an animal and put them in different environments to test their adaptability and versatility where as judging their beauty is simpler. Also, some animals may not have to be all that adaptable or versatile since they survive perfectly well in their on niche and there could be beauty in that. Unless I'm just off base I'm not seeing how the 4 criteria could be seen as equal.
JB's response. Well, I don't say they are equally easy to apply. Or even that they should be equally weighted. All I maintain at present is that we can start out supposing they are equally important until we get results that are problematic. To this I can add that it isn't out of the question to predict about the likely result of a changed environment. Up to a point animal scientists collect evidence on this point by actual tests. (Zoos provide a limited amount of evidence.) Historical records can also shed some light on how resistant and resilient species are. But sure, it's not easy to learn as much as we'd like about animal functionality. That's one reason why the subject remains poorly developed and why questions will always remain. Still, the recent advances in knowledge have been wonderful.
52. From Sergey Pshenichkin, 10/21/09, re. the reliability of the sense. Having recently finished a paper on Rene Descartes, and after staring at the illusion with the cylinder and checkerboard, I find myself doubting the reliability of my senses. There is little argument that beauty is at least partially subjective. That said, how can we say that what we see is beautiful if we can't even be sure of what we see? Illusions wouldn't usually be considered beautiful, since they are a deception, and deception is rarely (if ever) beautiful. Since this is the case, how can beauty exist when anything could be an illusion? Is beauty a mental state that we can't be wrong about (such as doubt, fear, hope, belief) even though we are having an illusion? More specifically, is something beautiful (to the observer) just because they think it is beautiful, similar to how the only requirement to be in pain is to think you are in pain?
JB's response. The question about illusion is answerable by pointing out that illusions can be beautiful. Even in folk aesthetics (so to speak) this is widely recognized. Of course a beautiful illusion of, say, a sunset is not in itself a beautiful sunset. An illusion theory of sensory knowledge would entail only skepticism about the objective world being beautiful. No inconsistency here, only skepticism.
Part of what you say against illusions could be expressed by saying that they aren't beautifully deceptive. I can agree with that. Nothing is beautifully defective, and illusions are cognitively defective. They have to be beautiful in other ways (e.g., beautifully good-looking). One could go a bit further and ask whether a thing's capability to cause beautiful illusions is a beauty in it of at least some degree. Producing beautiful illusions is a lot better than producing unbeautiful ones, so why not? The next question is how much beauty that confers on the reality that has that capacity. For my money, it would confer some. We'll go into this when we discuss the sense of beauty theory, to which it is highly relevant.
53. From Natalie Cohen, 10/22/09, re. The domain of the aesthetic. In our Beauty Truisms and throughout the course we have stated that beauty is an aesthetic value, and to "relate a theory to aesthetic judgments." In the first lecture, we specified that we should "distinguish beauty from ethical and practical value" and distinguish questions of beauty from "psychological/social ones." I understand the difference between overall beauty ascriptions and aspect specific, and that overall may include sub-descriptions such as "intellectually beautiful," "morally beautiful," etc. But, how should we determine what is within the field of aesthetics-what an aesthetic value is if we often include such elements in assessing overall beauty/aesthetic values? In your introduction text you say that "serious, discriminating use of the term maintains the distinction between beauty and other values (moral, practical, intellectual). Is it just that we should not confuse these with the actual value of beauty itself?-That although these separate values may add up to a (higher)overall beauty ascription they are indeed different?
JB's response. The question you raise is both important and difficult. Lots of controversy in the field today about this. My view is that routine moral, practical and intellectual goods are less than beautiful, though that doesn't make them ugly. Compare ordinary utterances, compared with poetry. And it isn't enough that they be tremendously important to us, even crucial to life. One kind of moral beauty is the beauty of moral conduct, which is a matter of the discernment, grace, and efficacy with which one relates to others in moral matters. Practicality carries the suggestion that anything that secures the end is OK. Beauty takes more than that. It will come in only where the way in which the end is achieved is somehow exceptionally good. So we (I) speak of beautifully organized production lines. From recent experience I can say that Northwest-Delta is not beautifully organized so far as passenger convenience is concerned. And some parts of air travel are quite beyond anyone's present ability to organize beautifully, for instance boarding and deplaning, given the carry-on luggage madness. We'll talk more about both these and intellectual beauty in due course.
As to the concept of the aesthetic, for now let me just say that I think it requires worthiness of being enjoyed for itself, which means being enjoyably contemplated, dwelt upon, recapitulated, etc. Aristotle's saying isn't bad. The beautiful is the good that is pleasant to apprehend. But that will have to be further specified.
54. From Brendan Sliger, 10/22/09, re. effect of scientific analysis on one's feeling for beauty. This article
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18019-mona-lisas-smile-a-mystery-no-more.html
is a discussion of the possible scientific explanation of one of the most alluring features of one of the most admired and recognizable paintings ever. One of their larger claims is as follows: " So did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not to mention scientists? Absolutely, Otero Martinez contends. 'He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street.' " If it is true that we can simplify both beauty and artistic intent into these purely non-meta-physical aspects is it possible that it loses some of it's allure? Is it possible that the longing for perfect and seemingly ineffable beauty will disappear in a completely neurophysiological view of beauty? Do objects lose their artistic value in a strictly scientific view or do they still have the same beauty values and only lack some sort of artistic integrity that we once thought they had?
JB's response. I don't see why any of the allure of the painting would be lost just because we discovered that the saliency of the smile varied with how we looked at the painting. What matters about the smile is its magnetism when we look at the painting over time, letting it work upon us and convey the impression of a fascinating living individual (sort of) before us. How this effect is achieved is beside the point, though it is interesting enough from a scientific point of view. Consider perspective. Knowing how an artist gets a strong sense of recession doesn't diminish the effect of almost real pictorial depth. So why should the interesting explorations neuroscientists are conducting diminish our sense of Mona Lisa's smile?
55. From Emily Winshatz, 10/22/09, re. truisms about absolute and comparative beauty. I was curious about the truisms of beauty and beauty as an ideal. If "absolute beauty" is ambiguous, how do we know where objects fall on a continuum of beauty? And if people participate in beauty and might share a common property that is beautiful, how can we compare them on the continuum if we are giving them the same beauty value even though they are different objects? Shouldn't objects only be of equal beauty if they are identical?
JB's response. "Absolute beauty" is sometimes used for perfect or supreme beauty and sometimes when we want to say a thing has a certain standing in the world at large rather than a limited comparison class. The first usage speaks for itself. The second one needs to be explained. We might want to say X is the best in a mediocre class (say, senior citizens' paintings) without ascribing any significant beauty to it absolutely, that is, in relation to the universal comparison class. So it doesn't have any beauty judged absolutely. A particular use of "absolute" needn't be ambiguous because the context can make plain what the sense of it is.
You ask whether if a number of things have the same beautiful property, how can they be differently ranked. I assume you mean, ranked overall. But the answer is pretty plain. They must differ in other ways. They may be equally richly (and nondefectively) colored, perhaps, but differ in representational properties. So overall their beauty is far from the same. Your other question about whether a thing's beauty is individual to it and therefore couldn't be equal to that of any other, requires a bit of study. Here there is some ambiguity. Having the same beauty can mean, having equal beauty (X is as beautiful as Y). Or it can mean, having all and only the same beautiful properties. If X and Y had all and only the same beautiful properties they would indeed have the same overall beauty. Would that keep them from being different individuals? No, since they might differ in properties that have no effect on their beauty, for instance having been created at different times or being created out of different materials.
56. From Shruti Rastogi, 10/22/09, re. scent, taste, and touch. It seems to the consensus among philosophers that visual and sonic beauties are of greater importance than taste, smell, or touch. However, even though a lack of the three lesser senses in an individual may not greatly hinder that individual's ability to live in society, I believe that philosophers are wrong in assuming these beauties are of a lower level. These senses are heavily tied to an individual's cognitive abilites despite what others may say. Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory. Taste is a basis of Dionysian beauty, as is touch (food and sex). Just because the word beauty is not strongly connected to these senses does not mean they are not beautiful. Could it just be that words/phrases like delicious, pleasant-smelling, and "good-feeling" are just synonyms for beauty on a separate plane of human senses?
JB's response. Everyone agrees that these senses provide knowledge -- quite essential knowledge, in fact. Also I for one agree totally that scents and flavors can be beautiful. Terminology is indeed tricky. The term "beauty" has often used only for things deemed highly beautiful. "Delicious" has also been used in a more subjective sense (delicious= pleases me greatly) because of the great variation among individuals in regard to food. Scent likewise has been dismissed as too variable in its effect to be thought of as a property of the flower or perfume. I think that a better view of the matter is that the chemical senses present us with beautiful phenomena, which partly supports your suggestion, if I understand you. Still scents and flavors don't seem to have as much potentiality for the elaborate beauties we find in the arts or in the visual and auditory phenomena generally. See my response to #50. Being tied to cognition and offering pleasures is not enough to put them on a par with the other senses.
57. From Mandana Marashi, 10/26/09, re. imagining perfection. Last week a question was mentioned in class. It was as follows. Can we imagine a more beautiful image than any picture we have ever seen? I think this would be very hard question to answer. First, we have to know that how we define perfection. What is the image of perfection? And if we have never seen a perfect image, how can we imagine one? Also, how do we compare the two togather?
JB's response. What is needed is just an image of something clearly better than any example one has ever known. This is often possible to imagine. We can imagine a singer with a larger range of clear, strong tones than any actual singer -- from the base to the high soprano level -- or a flutist whose breathing is never audible regardless of how long the time is between breaths. But when we come to a musical composition or a sculpture or painting the difficulty of imagining is much greater because (a) there are so many features to imagine and it's extremely difficult to imagine them all specificially enough to be sure they add up to greater beauty; and (b) the known examples of first-class beauties of that sort are already so beautiful that our capacity to exceed them just by imagining is in serious doubt. These circumstances are what stands in the way of imagining yet more perfection in the cases Cicero and Plotinus have in mind.
What is clearly possible on that level is for an artist to try to represent things that are yet more beautiful, and also try to produce a painting that is yet more beautiful, than any prior examples. For this it is not necessary to imagine the outcome in advance. It is only necessary to recognize greater beauty when one sees it in what one has done, so that one stops changing the work. The experience of greater perfection comes after the fact, not before it.
58. From Tiffnie Brandt, 10/27/09, re. color. If color is based on psychological experiences, how do we explain color blindness? If it is your perception of the color, and as I believe color blind people can discriminate between color, how can anyone be color blind? Isn't it just their experience of the color? Also, the in the reading it mentions that, “ a fully color-sighted person is one who has the accurate color-perception…” but how can we say someone has accurate color perception if color is based on psychological experience of a color and experience is subjective?
JB's response. Color blindness is deficient sensitivity to color (to hue), proven when a person cannot distinguish between samples that other percipients can distinguish and also that have different physical properties. The organic deficiency is the failure of the cones on the retina to respond. There are different sorts of color blindness or anomalousness. Only one sort completely wipes out one's capacity to distinguish hues. Color blind people often can tell whether the traffic light is red or green because of tonal differences, which are separate from hue-differences. As to subjectivity, all experience is "subjective" in the benign sense of being psychological but not in the sense of being untrustworthy (mere opinion). All our knowledge of the world involves experience, so if it were always untrustworthy we wouldn't have any knowledge of anything.
59. From Tiffnie Brandt, 10/27/09, re. color. If color is based on psychological experiences of each color, how do we distinctly characterizes one color as a specific color? How do we know that we are having the same experience of colors? How do we know that we are actually referring to the same color? What if we both say that something is green but your green is actually red? If two people disagree about color, what does that say about their each of their experience given that both of them have “accurate color perception”?
JB's response. This is much disputed in the literature. What is clear is that maximal discriminators have experiential color spaces with the same structure, that is, the same relationships among the experienced colors: complementaries, central primaries, and similarity sequences. The only reasonable doubt is about whether some persons' spectral experiences might be reversed, which is the red-green situation you mention. On this point there are two grounds for denying the imagined variation. The uniformist view is simpler, so more credible on general epistemic principles (don't complicate hypotheses beyond need). Second, and to my mind even more forceful, is the fact that red and green have quite different apparent temperatures. Red is warm and green is cool. Try to imagine experiencing red as cooler than green. Such spontaneous cross-modal effects are universal among percipients who have them at all. You can imagine that a red surface is in fact colder than a green one, but you can't get it to look that way.
60. From Allyn Rose, 10/28/09, re. beauty and sexual deviancy. We discussed in class that higher beauties cannot include something like a sexual deviance
because they come from someone who has is, in someway, mentally defective.
But then, is beauty created/considered by those mental defectives less beautiful since they consider
it beautiful? Does their opinion somehow mar the beauty? And further, if something like art is created by a mental defective, can it be beautiful since it came from a "defective" mind? Did it take the masses to make it a greater beauty?
JB's response. By "the masses" I suppose you mean the consensus of mentally healthy people. The source of creation is not the problem. What counts is the content or character of the work (supposing we are talking about art). Any aspect of the work that is sadistic or coprophiliac, for example, would not be a beautiful aspect. On the other hand a character in a beautiful work might have those obsessions, just as The Silence of the Lambs may be beautiful even if Hannibal Lector is repulsively deviant (though he has certain intellectual beauties). As to the aesthetic opinions of sick minds, the fact that such a person considers something beautiful and enjoys it doesn't prove anything about whether it really is beautiful. But it is always wrong to assume that such a person's liking is invalidated until and unless it is proven to be defective.
61. From Anshu Khetan [taken from his midterm test because it brings up a subtle but essential distinction]. One reason why Forms are considered superior to particulars is that a particular has a mixture of properties: a tree may be large as a tree but small as a building. "The Form of a tree has no size. It is simply a tree...eternal and unchanging..."
JB's response. It is true that abstract things strictly speaking have no physical size, since they aren't physical (or mental either, for that matter, on a strict Platonic view). The Form of treeness has none of the properties that enter into treeness. The Form consists of the ensemble of properties. Size may be among these. Thus the Form of Redwood Treeness will have the size attributes of redwoods among the ensemble of properties that constitutes the Form, but only concrete particulars will have (possess, exemplify) those size properties. The distinction here is basically the one that separated Beauty =Beauty from Beauty is beautiful.
62. [Another extract from a midterm: from Jared Florance, re. Apollonian vs. Dionysian]. To compare the Led Zeppelin piece with Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" we would have to imagine that if this or that were changed in the Led Zeppelin piece it could be made into an Apollonian piece. By doing this we would be stripping the piece of what makes it so special. We could also not change the Ode to Joy to make it Dionysian or its structure would fall apart rendering it unrecognizable.
JB's response. This raises a lot of questions. Does comparison require that we be able to imagine such transformations? I don't think so. One only has to find differences of overall merit (if evaluation is our aim). Most who wrote on this (including Jared) favored Led Zeppelin so they did compare the two. But the comment does raise the question of what an Apollonian would want Led Zeppelin to be like, and what a Dionysian would want the Ode to Joy to be like. I think this is an interesting question and that an answer can be given for a large-minded person in each camp. The Apollonian would want the frenzy in Led Zeppelin to be toned down some and the lyrics to be improved. Keep the piece passionate but make it more intelligent. The Dionysian would want fewer starts and stops in the Beethoven so as to obtain a more continuous outpouring of exultation. I can't access the YouTube video I played for you because apparently there's a copyright problem, but 'Whole Lotta Love' is available and it is a better example in that it is more radically Dionysian. (link and lyrics below). But even the less radical piece we listened to in class could be made more in line with Apollonian standards without being ruined.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU-PoUwECjI
You need coolin', baby, I'm not foolin',
I'm gonna send you back to schoolin',
Way down inside honey, you need it,
I'm gonna give you my love,
I'm gonna give you my love.
*Wanna Whole Lotta Love (X4)
You've been learnin', baby, I been learnin',
All them good times, baby, baby, I've been yearnin',
Way, way down inside honey, you need it,
I'm gonna give you my love... I'm gonna give you my love.
* Chorus
You've been coolin', baby, I've been droolin',
All the good times I've been misusin',
Way, way down inside, I'm gonna give you my love,
I'm gonna give you every inch of my love,
Gonna give you my love.
* Chorus
Way down inside... woman... You need... love.
Shake for me, girl. I wanna be your backdoor man.
Keep it coolin', baby.
Let me float a trial balloon. We would never want to act in life the way they do on stage, and wouldn't want to be around people who did, isn't that right? So they aren't models for life the way actors or film stars often are. So what, I wonder, do we wish to take into our selves of their passionate intensity? Suggestions will be appreciated.
63. [A third extract from the midterm, from David Horowitz, re. music and mathematics] It is very important that for something to be beautiful it is accessible to humans...pure geometry cannot be the be-all and end-all. Think of a piece of music you find particularly beautiful. I'm going with Grieg's Lyric Pieces. Now imagine that piece at a much higher pitch with the same templ and ratios between notes, so that when played at a normal volume it is on the average listener's threshold of pain or simply out of the range of human hearing. It seems to me that no one, including those with a high standard of taste, would find that piece of music beautiful...even though the geometry and internal relationships were perfectly maintained.
JB's response. I agree with you wholeheartedly that the transposition of the piece to a painful or inaudible register would not be beautiful music for humans. But would that count against it being beautiful in a more abstract sense -- as tone, though, not just as pure geometry? That is not so clear. Accessibility is required for suitability but musical beauty may plausibly extend beyond what is suitable for human listeners. Suppose there were creatures with our cognitive powers but with senses keyed to that high register so that theycould listen with ease and delight to your super-high Grieg transposition but couldn't process the same at a human register. It would be quite suitable for them. And if so, it's hard to see how it could fail to be beautiful in and of itself. Then we have two sorts of beauty: beautiful suitability and beauty of a more abstract sort.
However, you could respond by citing a number of complications. The most obvious is the performance aspect. Grieg composed for musicians playing on normal instruments incapable of producing the transposition you imagine. Also music is made by a culture to fit the bodily resonances of a certain type of recipient, so if we were going to imagine a suitable audience for the sky-high transposition it would have to be a species for which vibrations like those super-high ones played the role in their bodily life that the normal musical vibrations do in ours. So it isn't just a matter of their being audible and painfree, but harmonious with the vibrations in the intended audience. Come to think of it the relations to the things that populate the world, especially those that produce sounds are also highly relevant to music as an art. Wow. That would make for a strange audience in a strange world with strange musical instruments! Well, strange but not necessarily unbeautiful.
64. From Philip Yang, 11/2/09, re. mathematical beauty and belief in God. I am a math lover and am fascinated by math formulas and proofs. It occurred to me that if there are some people who are trying to prove how mathematics works there should be some being who created it. I believe it is something higher being than human beings, since math is very very complicated but also so very beautiful that it keeps us awed. I would really like to see what people would think about this subject because this can be seen as a topic that is related to the question, "Does God (upper being, omnipotent being) exist?"
JB's response. Believers in a divine creator have long used the beauty of the creation as a justification for their belief. They haven't often mentioned mathematics because mathematical objects and relations are not things that come into existence and thus do not depend on a creator. But the human capacity for mathematics does come into existence and so can fit their purpose. However, the argument is flawed in well known ways and cannot be made rationally compelling to a mind that is not already committed to the existence of a creator. This is not a course in philosophy of religion so it's not appropriate to launch into a discussion of arguments for God. It's enough to note that aesthetic judgments cannot be bolstered logically by reference to God or any other religious hypothesis. We have to arrive at aesthetic judgments independently. Atheists, agnostics and religious believers should all operate on the same level in aesthetics.
65. From Kaitlin McGovern, 11/12/09, re. fashion beauties. Today when we were discussing the Yves Saint Laurent men's fashions, we talked about how most of the clothes were unwearable under normal circumstances. However, I think that if one were to work in the fashion industry it would be acceptable to wear those type of clothes. This type of reasoning can be applied to many other types of clothing. It would look ridiculous, for example, for an accountant to wear a construction workers' hat. Similarly, it would look very odd if a fisherman were to wear a business suit. Do the YSL fashions' lack of practicality for many people make them less beautiful? Is their function as a wearable garment inextricably tied to their beauty? Are they more beautiful because of their interesting uniqueness and difference from normal men's clothing?
JB's response. I didn't mean to suggest that the limited use most people would have for the samples shown of Yves Saint Laurent's clothing meant the outfits had no beauty. They are certainly stylish. And they are also appropriate for high fashion occasions, especially for celebrities. As you probably know YSL also sells normal street wear (even I used to have one of his off-the-rack suits). My purpose was just to point out that the samples we saw fit a very narrow slice of the clothes market. I also think that they some of them are a bit precious. These suggest foppery rather than dedication to more serious values if worn by anyone other than a person in the fashion or theatrical worlds. By foppery I mean an interest in having all eyes open wide when you enter the room -- in short, narcissism. But of course this varies with context. It depends a lot on what the haberdashery norm is in the venues in question. If anyone, even a good-looking young blade, turned up in one of these at an evening gala reception at the Mariners' Museum in my home territory of Newport News, Virginia, he would certainly look foppish. At a New York art gallery opening reception it would be different. I wonder whether Allyn would be comfortable going to the movies in Bethesda Row with an escort dressed in one of the fancier of the outfits we saw.
66. From Tiffnie Brandt, 11/15/09, re. functional beauty/ugliness. If you have an ugly functionality for example, a beautiful woman who uses her beauty to seduce men and kill them, how would this affect beauty for she would be beautiful and ugly? Is that possible? Her beauty is a component of her functionality, can you be beautiful and have an ugly functionality? Can functionality even be characterized as ugly or beautiful or good or bad or useful or useless?
JB's response. Mixed cases are the norm, certainly. That is virtually a truism. What is mainly beautiful is bound to have some unbeautiful aspects. What is ugly is likely to have something beautiful about it. When we are struck by a beautiful aspect we generally ignore the rest, especially if it is a familiar beauty. But on reflection we can easily be brought to acknowledge the other side. The case you have in mind is one of conflict between two familiar values, one positive and the other negative, the beautiful femme fatale. I assume there is no problem about her being physically beautiful and well-mannered when she wants to be. The problem arises because the functional aspect of the case is complex, since the seducer's use of her beauty may be very clever, very subtle, and in that way have something beautiful about it even though the use as a whole is highly defective, unscrupulous, and vicious. What I would say is that her functioning in that way is not beautifully self-serving or beautifully seductive or beautifully murderous, etc. Defective properties can't be beautiful and that includes functionalities. Yet the perpetrator's manipulation can be beautifully clever, just as Hannibal Lector's actions are. Cleverness is not in itself defective so a wicked goal can be pursued in a beautifully clever way.
The result is that the seductively murderous functionality is far less beautiful overall than intelligently virtuous functionality would be. Note that when we condemn such behavior we do so primarily on moral grounds, not on aesthetic ones. What we usually refer to as ugly functionality is dysfunctionality, cases where the functionality is counter-productive, wasteful, harmful. That is an aesthetic judgment, in my view, not a moral one.
67. From Alex Brown, 11/19/09, re. the beauty of the human body. In lecture, we were asked the following: If uniformity of the whole was essential to the beauty of form, how are we able to justifiably claim the human form to be beautiful? The main motivation behind believing the human form to be beautiful is likely linked to its function. We observe the human body, and in doing so we think about that body moving and carrying out its human function. From this, I believe we attribute more beauty to the form itself. Can you please clarify the role of function in Hutcheson's Uniformity/Variety ratio, or how it plays a part in his beauty criteria?
JB's response. A well-formed human body obviously has some beauty-favorable properties, as we might call them. Symmetry is an obvious one. Straightness of legs and a good proportionality of parts is another. (Lots of details here.) Smoothness of skin is another universally recognized contributor. When the body is well-conditioned the musculature is also beauty-favorable. These properties will include lots of uniformity among the different parts, which is directly relevant to the uniformity of the whole. Of course the uniformity of the whole is by no means as great as in, say, regular polygons!
You are right that the fitness for human functions is highly important. It affects good proportionality, even. A beautiful body at rest is one that allows for beautiful movements and postures. There are countless questions in this area. Imagine humans with arms as long as monkeys' arms. It takes some thought to figure out what that would do to the repertoire of human behavior. And there is also the complicated matter of the expression of complex emotion and intelligence by body language and, preeminently, by facial expresions. The human face plan seems extraordinarily well suited to that.
I have said already that Hutcheson's uniformity and variety, plus his notion of relative beauty, is inadequate, even if we sharpen the notion of variety by equating it with the number of uniformities. Functional beauty can't be reduced to those elements and that plays a central role in all beauty of organisms, humans included. What we can say with confidence is that all of the above are involved in the beauty of the human body. The rank humans deserve relative to other organisms is a big, big question. Given the functional parameters (I have argued that judgments of overall good-lookingness must be situated within such parameters) it is very, very hard to redesign the human body to make it more beautiful-looking. The best imaginations of artists to date have only resulted in better looking versions of the same plan. Imposing on human organisms a too-uniform overall form just doesn't work.
68. From Shazad Ahmed, 11/22/09, re. inner beauties. Regarding the comment and response from 11/19, I was wondering what we can say about intangible/non-visible beauties? You mentioned beauty-favorable properties such as symmetry, straightness of the legs, and proportionality. These are all outwardly visible beauty properties. However, what can we say about inwardly beauty properties? For instance, a well-known cliché is to say that someone is beautiful on the inside. What we mean is that he/she has non-visible, intangible properties that cause our minds to claim he/she is beautiful. Perhaps he/she has a beautiful soul or is spiritually radiant, who knows? I was just wondering what we can say about those inward properties in relation to the previous comments? Can these inward beauty properties even be acknowledged as actual properties?
JB's response. The properties that count are those that can be specified, though it isn't easy to do that. Before we get to the heart of the matter, notice that a beautiful soul is plausible only if it shows in behavior, both in action and reaction. So an important part of these 'inner' properties is behavioral in the broad sense. But there are mental aspects also, the thoughts and feelings. Concepts like symmetry and proportion have to be taken quite abstractly to cover these. But it does make sense to speak of a feeling being proportionate to a situation as opposed to being excessive or deficient. Thought can also match or fail to match a situation, understanding another person involves empathy, which similarity of feeling, feeling as the other person feels. In short there is a large topic here where we don't lack concepts that relate to the good and bad of inner phenomena. A beautiful soul is one that is remarkably insightful, well composed, appropriately empathic and compassionate, realistic, and large minded (the list is not exhaustive!). It doesn't make sense to be stuck in skepticism. Rather we should get to work gathering evidence. Literature is full of helpful indications and introspection of our own life experience also offers leads. Ask yourself, what do I really admire -- indeed, love -- in mental life in myself or others?