PHIL 332 -- Philosophy of Beauty -- Fall 2009 -- Notes
Contents: Note especially the addition of passing references at the end; also the questions and instructions for the Fall 2009 Midterm, #19.
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1. Notes on Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Part One
Scarry talks mainly about what beauty does. It "brings copies of itself into being." And so forth. This makes it sound as it beauty is a thing, a property of some sort that has causal effects. This is, to be sure the standard way of thinking about beauty by Plato and other realists. But does Scarry really commit herself to this realist position? If we read carefully we will note that right at the outset, in the first sentence of the book, she asks "What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?" The felt experience is obviously not to be identified with what is experienced. The felt experience is in us, the beautiful flower is in the garden or meadow. So when she proceeds to talk about "beauty," if she is really talking about our felt experience of beauty, she is talking first and foremost about what happens in us when something strikes us as beautiful. And to that extent she need not be committing herself to the independent reality of beauty.
This means that all the things she says beauty does need only be things that happen in us when we see something that comes across to us as beautiful.
This puts an entirely different color on all that follows. Instead of a rather mysterious set of claims about what real beauty does or doesn't do -- mysterious because it isn't clear why beauty would do them -- we have a set of claims about what we are impelled to do when we see beautiful things. These claims aren't mysterious at all, because they concern the many desires that spring directly or indirectly from the delight we take in the beautiful thing. Suddenly we can see why it all hangs together. The things Scarry cites about our beauty related activities are natural derivatives from the original beauty-feelings we have for the object. We can organize the derivatives in terms of how closely they are related to the primal experience, somewhat as follows.
1. Primal experience: I see a beautiful young girl (Nausicaa, say, in the Odyssey) and am enraptured by her beauty.
2. First derivative: I want to go on looking at her, to see the beauty more fully and for a longer time.
3. Second derivative: (a) I want to celebrate her beauty by expressing my delight, and (b) I want to share the delight in her beauty with friends who can appreciate it.
3. Third derivative: If the setting is deficient, I want to improve it to set off her beauty better.
4. Fourth derivative: If it or the experience is fugitive, I want to replicate the beauty in those of the various ways that will best preserve or enhance my pleasure in her beauty.
5. Fifth derivative: I want to dwell upon the beauty so as to see what features make the beauty so great, in the hope of increasing my delight and gaining as intimate a knowledge of the beauty as I can.
6. Sixth derivative: I want to make myself as beautiful as I can to make myself as worthy a companion of her beauty as is possible.
7. Seventh derivative: I want to experience other beauties equal to and even superior to her beauty, in the same and in different categories.
Of course not all of these desires will grab everyone who is enthralled by the beauty of a person. All that need be claimed is that there is a natural tendency in their direction which in favorable circumstances will produce the desire. The working out of the facilitating and inhibiting conditions for these derivative desires will add up to a psychology of beauty. Not surprisingly the whole story will be quite complex.
From another angle the study of the derivatives helps us formulate a theory of aesthetic rationality. For insofar as the experience of Nausicaa's beauty provides a reason for seeking the things sought by our derivative desires, it shows how, and under what conditions, it is rational to seek these things.
Errors about beauty
If one puts together all she says about errors about beauty, it turns out that one can be as wrong about it as one can about anything else -- about vitamin C staving off colds. There are false positives (overestimations) and false negatives (underestimations). This is a welcome corrective to the initial impression that beauty just grabs us, which makes it sound as if there can't be any false negatives. I think the reader is apt to get a second initial impression: that there can't be any false positives. That is, that nothing but beauty grabs us this way. Many writers about beauty toe both lines. Kirwan, for example, says (p. 5)
I may doubt the existence of the external world, for a certain time, with at least some philosophical impunity, but I cannot doubt that what I perceive as beautiful is such; for even if a second glance reveals that the object is ugly, with the first glance I saw beauty. In the realm of beauty, esse is percipi [to be is to be perceived].
Back to Scarry: how exactly are we to interpret her remark about error? Remember we're really talking (primarily, anyway) about our experience of beauty. What would a false negative be in our beauty-experience? Scarry's example of the palm tree is the answer. It's a negative B-experience followed by a positive one that seems more authoritative. Here the key question is, Why should it seem more authoritative?
Answers are best found in particular cases. Take the festering lily in Shakespeare's sonnet. What exactly is going on here? I find two cases. One is where the lilies are actually rotting. The other is the unpleasant smell they have even when in prime condition. Both are interesting in relation to error. In both cases the only error is in one's anticipation. We see the lily in the vase from a distance. It's lovely to look at. We don't expect its pollen to smell bad. So when we come up and sniff it we may be shocked. But that's not a very big error, since we had no positive reason to think it would smell good just because it looks good.
In the other case the flower and stem even look unbeautiful. So where's the error? The only opening for error seems to be an expectation, formed when we saw the flower in peak condition, that it wouldn't ever rot. But we know better, which makes the expectation questionable. Do we really form such a contrary-to-fact expectation? Perhaps it's only that we don't think of its later stage when we're relishing its look, and then when we see it rotting we're saddened by the transience of such beauty? That such beauty could come to this.
Then there is the case of Scarry's palm. Here's a clear false negative. It's based on casual experience of palms at a distance. Then standing on a balcony she sees one up close. She's enclosed by the great fronds and finds herself overwhelmed by the splendor of the tree. What does this show? Likely, it shows that the tree wasn't so beautiful seen at a distance, compared with its beauty up close, and certainly it shows that the up close beauty wasn't easy to predict from the distant look. Equally it shows something absolutely fundamental: things have many beauties and unbeauties that are perceptible only when experienced in the right way. That's worth putting up on your refrigerator.
Here are two of the paintings Scarry talks about, plus two more which illustrate my commentary on her discussion.
Above, in order: Interior at Nice: seated woman with a book (1920), Philadelphia Museum of Art; Interior with a violin (1917-8), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; My room at Beau-Rivage 1917-8), Philadelphia Museum of Art; Waiting (1921-22), Collection of the late Lucien Abrams. Photos from Henri Matisse: the early years in Nice, 1916-1930, National Gallery of Art: Washington/Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: New York, 1986.
Matisse's paintings at Nice
A. The early ones, 1916-1930
Scarry's freedom and even fancifulness in interpreting these shows her delight and her fixation upon the palm. As she says, the palm does not bulk very large in these pictures. It's frequent, certainly, but then it's a signature part of the landscape at Nice. So he'd include it even if he wasn't fixated upon it the way Scarry is. After all there is a palm right outside his studio window, as is shown in photographs. He takes advantage of it. The stripes of light on the shutters and from them in the room, on the floor, for instance, are phenomena that, as Scarry says, are reminiscent of the palms but they'd be there even if palms weren't in one's mind. And the painter's fondness for striped cloths goes along with his love of bold patterns in general, like the ones tacked underneath the window sills, some striped and some with arabesques, Moroccan patterns, and so forth. Doubtless the painter saw a connection, how could he not? But significantly he doesn't make it a theme, not really. It's Scarry who does that.
B. The late ones, ca. 1948
The two that are mentioned now foreground the palm. Here is where Scarry's great palm-experience is somewhat matched. The light does really explode from the palm in the Egyptian Curtain. One reason it does is that the room itself is dark, with the vivid colors of bowl, table, curtain making a super-rich color chord. Back in Nice there are a few paintings that use this combination too, notably one with a red violin in a blue blue case. The lighting outside is the more scintillating because of the dark but vividly accented interior.
Notice that what Scarry is doing is properly called an appreciation more than
an analysis. And her appreciation is definitely personal. By that I mean she
presents a mixture of observation and fancy, and the fancy makes it seem to
her that things are going on in the picture that may not be really going on.
For instance the palm standing for the artist's brush, or more generally the
palm being at the root of everything. She is inviting us to share both her observation
and her fancy, although presenting all of it as impersonally valid, as what
is there. A more soundly based interpretation would be less fanciful, trimmed
to the probabilities about the artist, the art tradition, and so forth, but
not necessarily less intensely appreciative.
Matisse, Egyptian Curtain, 1948. Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Here are some questions relevant to aesthetic appreciation of Matisse's Egyptian Curtain, relevant to the term paper projects.
1. Are the colors hot, cool or neither?
Specify for the different colors.
2. Are they harmonious or garish?
Esp. the pink and the orange.
3. Is the light bright, dim or somewhere in between?
4. Are the textures in the table soft, hard, or what?
Does it look solid?
5. What shapes are given to the fruit?
6. Is the palm expansive or contractive or neither?
7. What terms describe the marks on the palm fronds?
Do they look lively or leaden? Bristly or limp?
8.
Try comparing the strokes with music.
Are they staccato or legato?
9. Is the painting overall tight or loose?
10.
Does it suggest thought or sensuous feeling?
12. Does it suggest sharply focused or somewhat unfocused vision?
Other images of palms to compare and contrast with Matisse's, ones shown in class.
Winslow Homer, Nassau, Bahamas, 1898/99. Watercolor. 15 x 21 1/16 in. Private collection. Published in Helen Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors, National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 1986. Published in Helen Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors, National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 1986.
Winslow Homer, Under the Coco Palm, 1898. Watercolor over graphite. 14 15/16 x 21 3/8 in. Harvard Art Museums (Fogg Art Museum), Cambridge, Massachussets. Purchase, Louise E. Bettens Fund. Published in Helen Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors, National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 1986.
2. Leonardo's take on human beauty's effect on vision and other senses
Here is a passage from Leonardo's notebooks that fits nicely with Scarry's claims about how beauty "replicates" itself in all sorts of different modalities:
... human beauty will stimulate love in you, and will make your senses envious, as if they wished to emulate the eye -- as if the mouth would wish to suck it into the body, as if the ear would seek its pleasure in being able to hear visual beauty, as if the sense of touch would wish it to be infused through the pores, and as if the nose would wish to inhale it with the air that it continually exhales.
3. Notes on Scarry, Part Two: "On beauty and being fair"
This half of the book is harder for the reader to digest than the first. Mixed with valid points are many attacks on doubtful targets, or "straw-men" as they are called, views so extreme that few if any have ever adopted them. Our purpose is constructive, so we need to extract the valid points from the controversy, leaving the rest behind. Here are some that I think valid when properly qualified. The disputants often forget the qualifications.
To what extent do you think the points are correct – given what qualifications? Think of examples where the point holds, and ones where it doesn't.
a. Certain sorts of looking at a beautiful object can be injurious.
(feminists)
The origin of all this is the "male gaze" literature in which much visual art is condemned for reflecting and encouraging the predatory masculine ogling of women, particularly beautiful women. The male gaze injures by relegating the woman to a status of inferiority, as if all that counted about her was what satisfied the male's sexual fantasy, and by leading many women to accept such a position in order to align themselves with masculine power in society. [Note that the male gaze is by no means purely aesthetic admiration.]
b. Better sorts of gazes, by males or females, of beautiful females
or males, are free of the defects of the "male gaze." (Scarry)
Admiration of beauty doesn't necessarily imply disrespect, lack of affection,
devaluation of other personal attributes (intelligence, imagination, etc.).
(Scarry)
Not even sexual attraction need injure or put at risk the beautiful object of
desire. (Scarry)
c. Even purely aesthetic admiration of beautiful persons or things may
be injurious to those persons or things in all sorts of ways: (feminists)
d. Emphasis on beauty may be injurious to unbeautiful persons or things. (feminists)
e. Emphasis on beauty of appearance leads us to search out other beauties in persons or things that lack that beauty, hence giving them more recognition (lateral distribution). (Scarry)
f. Purely aesthetic admiration of beautiful things need not be injurious to them, and in the case of many sorts of things, cannot affect them at all. (Scarry)
g. Purely aesthetic admiration of beautiful persons or things may be their salvation.(Scarry)
h. Cultivation of aesthetic interests has a tendency to upstage cultivation of other more important interests. (feminists)
i. Cultivation of aesthetic interests has a tendency to encourage cultivation
of other more important interests (Scarry)
discrimination in moral or intellectual matters. (Scarry)
j. Stress on aesthetic properties like beauty may lead to neglect of non-aesthetic properties of great value: health, functional efficacy, genetic character, social relationships, etc. (feminists)
k. Stress on super-beauty may lead to the "star" system of exaggerated differences between best and good examples, with all the hoopla of Hollywood and the glitterati. (feminists)
l. Beautiful persons or things commonly do not deserve any accomplishment-credit for their natural or inherited beauty. (feminists)
m. Scarry's rejoinder: Many other praiseworthy things would be wrongly devalued by the standard of l: the clear sky, e.g., to say nothing of many human excellences.
n. Possible feminist reply: Persons should be valued only for what they have accomplished, since they are creatures who have the power to accomplish things.
o. Scarry's reply: Many human beauties are created or sustained, hence are accomplishments.
p. Rapt gazers are also vulnerable to injury because of their obsessive gazing, often more so than the object of their gaze. (Scarry)
General caution: Scarry's charges of contradictions do not hold water, since feminists need not commit any contradictions. The faults of their views are mostly faults of one-sidedness and exaggeration, which are forms of falsity, not contradiction. Only when Scarry caricatures their views do they become self-contradictory. This is a rhetorical device, not a sustainable charge against thoughtful feminists.
We haven't yet reached the connection of beauty with justice. That will come in due course.
4. Scarry's Part Two concluded (beauty and justice) -- pp. 86ff.
In my view this is the hardest part of Scarry's book to follow. Her aim is to show how "beauty assists us in getting to justice" (94). She argues that it does so by sharing traits with justice, particularly symmetry, which she says is "the single most enduringly recognized attribute [of beauty]" and is also "key" to justice. Justice in a society is "a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another." (97) This is more than an analogy, she adds, because beauty promotes justice simply by exhibiting symmetry to people, cultivating the love of it, so that when the society matures they tend to put into social practice higher levels of symmetry (fairness)
She cites notable ancient and medieval authorities on the beauty of equality (one form of which is symmetry) of everything except social relations and asks: how can one doubt that this will spill over into those relations. (99) Further she points out that beauty is available to the senses whereas justice is not, so beauty has more power to bring the mind to justice than justice has toward beauty. (101) Not that justice is always invisible. In certain cases, for instance in the Athenian warship with equal citizens manning the 170 oars, equality becomes visible, she says. [A no less compact example of social equality would be the Spartan lines of peers shield to shield four or more rows deep pushing forward in flawless accord.]
In summary Scarry says, "The equality of beauty enters the world before justice and stays longer because it does not depend on human beings to bring it about; though human beings have created much of the beauty of the world, they are only collaborators in a much vaster project." (108) Its being available on all sides constantly pushes us toward the creation of its counterpart in human relations.
Another connection between the two exists in the context of admiration of beauty. Here we find ourselves lifted out of our usual self-centeredness into a state of "unselfishness, objectivity and realism," a condition of "unselfing" (Murdoch) that frees us to concentrate all our energies on the joyful perception of the beautiful thing. We feel "merely adjacent, or lateral (or even subordinate)" (113) and at the same time "experience extreme pleasure." (114) People experiencing this will feel on a level with each other, hence prepared to accept a fairness as a social ideal.
Thirdly, in creating or protecting beautiful things we are made vividly aware of our own powers to change things for the better -- so that the decentered state is promoted in all viewers.
In view of all this, it is no surprise that even the adversaries of beauty in recent decades would not want beauty to be absent or surpressed for long. They want their descendants to enjoy beauty and to remember present culture as beauty-loving. They unselfishly sacrifice themselves to this higher good, but do not disdain beauty on that higher level.
Scarry caps her argument with a thought experiment modeled on Rawl's veil of ignorance in which people are asked to judge about the aesthetic constitution of the world that best serves their self-interest given that they do not know what their aesthetic sensitivities or opportunities will be. She believes that if rational they will opt for both commonly available beauties (sky, landscapes, etc.) and ones they may turn out never to have access to. "People seem to wish there to be beauty even when their own self-interest is not served by it [as things turn out]."
For criticisms of this part of Scarry's argument, see the review given below and the two available on the web. Also consult the relevant parts of Lecture #9 outline.
Reviews or discussions of Elaine Scarry
a. David Bowman interviews the author at: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/11/09/scarry. Page 3 is relevant.
b. Todd Gitlin's review in American Prospect: to bring it up Google:
Elaine Scarry On Beauty and Being Just Gitlin, and click on the first entry.
c. Peter Benson review:
Beauty, taken from Philosophy Now:
On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
In 1998, Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, was invited to give the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values. (Previous lecturers have included Michel Foucault and John Rawls.) This short, incisive, intelligent book is based on her lectures.
She chose as her topic beauty, well aware that it is an unfashionable subject to discuss. "Over the last several decades," she notes, "many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful objects such as paintings and poems." These remarks apply particularly to the world of American academia in which she works, but the situation in Britain is not greatly different.
Recently, the Tate Gallery in London held an exhibition of Victorian paintings of the nude. Both the catalogue for the exhibition, and the explanatory captions in the gallery, discussed in great detail the moral views of the Victorians towards the depiction of naked figures. These comments undoubtedly provided an interesting sociological survey of Victorian attitudes towards sexuality, and towards women, but there was almost no reference to the aesthetic quality of the exhibits, which ranged from the superb (exquisite paintings by Burne-Jones) to the trivial (pornographic postcards displayed for our curiosity in glass cases). Academic discussion of art today seems reluctant to venture any opinion at all about the beauty of the works on display, even when the creation of beauty was clearly the artist's primary intention.
As this example shows, and as Scarry is aware, much of this suspicion of beauty has resulted from feminist analyses, troubled by the social implications of the male gaze at female loveliness. These feminist theories were first developed in detail through analysing films. The representative example of the 'male gaze' was taken to be Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho , peering through a spy-hole at Janet Leigh in the shower, shortly before murdering her.
Elaine Scarry intervenes into this field of discussion to suggest that we attend, instead, to an equally emblematic scene: the poet Dante gazing at his beloved Beatrice, and the way he describes this experience in La Vita Nuova . The effect of her beauty is to render the poet stunned, incapacitated by love, humbled and joyful. If this gaze of his is a relation of power, then it is surely Dante who is subservient and Beatrice who is exalted.
Dante is an extreme case, but, Scarry suggests, his eloquent words are an accurate acknowledgement of the power and effect that beauty can have; not just the beauty of women, but of paintings, poems, pebbles, skies and mountains. Beauty makes us pause and catch our breath in a moment of suspended delight. It causes, in Scarry's words, a 'radical decentring'. We no longer feel that we ourselves are at the centre of the world, "we willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us."
When evoking these effects of beauty, whether in the natural world or in the paintings of Matisse, Scarry's prose, always precise, is often poetic. She describes, for example, how "a willow tree, unleafed by winter, becomes electric". It is rare to find such good writing in a book of philosophy, and yet philosophy's need for precision is close to that attentiveness to the particularity of things which is a necessary part of literary beauty. It would certainly be impossible for the beauty of Scarry's prose to detract from its philosophical significance.
Similarly, she argues, beauty cannot possibly lessen our awareness of philosophical and moral questions. Hence she convincingly debunks the view that "beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements". This political (and 'politically correct') view is the second source, alongside the feminist arguments, for the neglect of beauty in academic discourse today. The focus of contemporary discussion is instead on the social, historical and economic contexts of artistic production. The result of this has been a massive impoverishment of language and response. These approaches to the arts, communicated to a whole generation of students, have saddened Scarry when she reads their dispiriting effect in the essays of her own students.
In my view, she is wholly successful in her aim of absolving beauty from blame, in freeing it from the moral condemnation it has received, and restoring it to philosophical attention. In the course of this process she engages eloquently with earlier thinkers, suggesting ways their views could be modified for our own more sceptical age. Plato, for example, describes in his Symposium how the perception of physical beauty provokes a yearning for higher forms of moral beauty until, step by step, the devotee is led to an awareness of beauty in itself, freed from all contingency.
Few of us today would confidently believe in such a metaphysical entity as 'beauty in itself'. Nevertheless, Scarry takes up the Platonic thesis that perceiving an object of beauty leads us to seek out other beautiful things and also to create new beautiful objects (by painting or writing poems about the beauty of the world). In this way beauty replicates itself, with our help, somewhat in the same fashion as Richard Dawkins' 'memes'. The Platonic hierarchy of levels of the Beautiful can be replaced by a network of equal, particular, instances of beauty, calling to each other, leading us from each to each.
This displacement of a hierarchical view by an emphasis on equality (the equal worth of each beautiful thing) becomes important in the second half of Scarry's book. Here, she is not content solely to secure a moral neutrality for beauty; instead, she wishes to argue that beauty has a positive moral value and that it actually intensifies our desire to repair injustice wherever we find it. Here her arguments are much less convincing. Indeed, she is performing the same process as the writers and academics she has criticized, for she, too, is judging beauty on moral grounds, and therefore implicitly placing moral values higher than aesthetic values.
I am not suggesting that this hierarchy should be reversed and that the realm of aesthetics should be considered more important than that of morality. I'm suggesting rather that the two sets of values are strictly incomparable, and occupy separate spheres. To affirm the importance of beauty is to declare beauty to be a value in itself and not in need of further validation by reference to some other value. It should not be considered of value because it leads to justice or goodness, for such an argument would already implicitly deny its status as a value in itself.
In his Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant suggested that beauty can be regarded as a symbol of the Good. But he is careful to emphasize that this analogy between the two realms must always remain aware of the aspects in which they differ, just as much as the aspects in which they reveal similarities. Scarry also discusses the relation between beauty and justice (the relation evoked in her book's title) as an analogy, but one which she thinks has the potential power to bring justice into the world following close on the footsteps of beauty. The notion of justice which she invokes, however, is that of a liberal academic in 21st century America, and is less universal than she imagines.
She claims, for example, that the experience of beauty inspires in people "the aspiration to political, social, and economic equality". She might, however, have considered once again the example of Dante, whom she so rightly praised for his responsiveness to beauty. In his political treatise, De Monarchia Dante gave a carefully reasoned argument against political equality, rejecting the very idea of democracy. It is true that he does not argue this on grounds drawn from aesthetics, but even in La Vita Nuova he is led progressively away from the idea of equality. Several of the early poems in this book complain that Beatrice, by ignoring him, is treating him unfairly and hence that her actions are morally wrong. Such lover's complaints were already a familiar theme in the poetry of his time. But Dante comes to realize that he should not write in this way. His role, as poet and lover, should be simply to praise Beatrice, and not to seek equality in their relationship. This recognition is one of the central moral turning points of his book (and of his life) and it also results in an increase in the aesthetic quality of his verse.
It is thus through his devotion to beauty that Dante is led away from any desire for equality.
Beauty is not democratic. It is distributed unequally among people. And those who can create it (in poems or paintings) are a valued minority; a favoured elite.
Scarry places emphasis on the symmetry often found in a beautiful face or piece of music, and seeks to connect this with John Rawls' definition of justice as "a symmetry of everyone's relations to each other". It would be equally possible to argue, following a different set of analogies, that beauty can teach us the value of hierarchy. For not only is there an evident hierarchy among beautiful things, but the organization of material in a well-constructed painting or novel is hierarchical (central subject, subsidiary elements, framing structure).
Arguments from analogy always allow this leeway. They are dependent on the specific features chosen, the particular connections made. Over time the moral and political aspirations of society change. Our own notions of justice today differ from those of Dante. (Who today could feel complaisant satisfaction at the punishments meted out in his Inferno ?)
Though his poetry does not express our beliefs, its beauty (of language and imagery) remains available to us. Beauty endures, though moral values change. Art and the practice of aesthetic appreciation allow the temporary suspension of moral judgement, and the consequent ability to give beauty its due regard. The politicization of discussions about art in recent years has made this process increasingly difficult. Standing before a painting today, students are encouraged to consider the economic conditions that allowed the patron to commission it, and the psychological conflicts which the painter may have embodied in it. Such topics are easy to assimilate to a view of teaching as the communication of facts, but the painting should also communicate something quite different: an alive responsiveness to the world, a delight in light and in the quick flicker of leaves on the trees – a cleansing of vision which allows the world outside the gallery to be seen more clearly.
Scarry hopes to revive our sense of the importance of this experience. However, by choosing to defend beauty on moral grounds she returns us to those same embroiled political arguments which have for so long distracted us from beauty's brightness. One could easily disagree with her Rawlsian view of justice without disputing her perceptive aesthetic judgements on Matisse. There is no necessary connection between the two, or between beauty and justice. She has, however, revived a debate (with Plato, Dante, Kant and others) whichhas remained silent far too long. The place of beauty in our lives, and hence the future course of our civilization, will depend on the answers we collectively reach to the questions raised in this important book.
© PETER BENSON 2004
Peter Benson lives in London, where he ponders the problems of philosophy and visits the rich range of art exhibitions on view, from Titian to Tracey Emin.
5. The golden section properties within the mystic pentagram
Responding to the question in class about the golden section aspects of the Pythagoreans' famous emblem, I first present the thing itself, big enough to be seen easily, using the illustration from H. E. Huntley, The Divine Proportion: a study in mathematical beauty, New York: Dover Publications, 1970, with some supplementary lettering and lines:
Notice that the additional Greek letters Ø are justified by the relations of the segments to the sides of the pentagon. By the same token the red lines SP and QT cut each other at a golden section cut just as the one mentioned in Huntley's passage does. Similar additions can be made to a number of other relations Huntley mentions. Here is the substance of his list. Note that bold face numerals will have to do for superscripts, which don't copy through from Wordperfect to Dreamweaver.
Let PT = 1. Then PQ, QR, RS, and ST = 1.
Then A'P = Ø, OA/OS = Ø/2, OA'/OS = Ø2, OA'/OA = 2Ø.
Further: QS, QT, RT, RP, SP, ST, = Ø;
And where X (Z, etc.) is the intersection of two diagonals, the segments are in the ratio of Ø -- note the additional intersections supplied by the diagonals in red.
In addition: SQ extended to V produces the following instances of Ø: B'V/VA', B'Q/QP, B'X/XT, B'S/SD'; parallel instances are produced by extension of the other diagonals (SP et al)
If that weren't enough, the lengths of B'D',B'S, B'R, RS, RX and XZ are in geometric progression:
B'D' = Ø3, B'S = Ø2, B'R = Ø, RS = 1, RX = Ø-1, XZ Ø-2
Is that enough? Huntley's list goes on for quite a bit.
6. Facial beauty and the golden section
A student in spring 2004 referred the class to a website concerning facial beauty. It has a lot of fascinating illustrations, so I added it to the course material. Just how much it proves about the golden section is another matter which we will discuss in due course. But visit the site and familiarize yourselves with its content. Explore the more relevant of the links (e.g. eternal beauty).The address is:
http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/humanface/articles/mask.html
Observations on the Marquardt beauty-mask.
The points for which I would argue in making a case against the validity of the beauty-mask are these:
An objection to the last point might be this: the beauty of the face (or building, or whatever) might perhaps consist in its coming close to the ideal. Now if I am right, coming close can't make the thing mathematically beautiful, any more than coming close to the right note makes a beautiful chord or melody (instead it makes it discordant -- sour, flat, sharp). Still I acknowledge that there may be some other connection. The great popularity of the mathematical connection throughout the ages supports this idea. The best hypothesis I can suggest is that the face or building is taken to symbolize the mathematical beauty. Thus it could be expressive of that beauty, which doesn't require that it actually possess it. If this hypothesis is right, then over the ages expressiveness has been confused with possession. The mathematical beauty of buildings, faces and physiques has been a myth, but an attractive myth.
7. Polykleitos's "canon" of beauty: golden section analysis
Two art historians, D.E. Gordon and F. deL. Cunningham, have constructed an elaborate analysis of a presumably accurate copy of Polykleitos's famous sculpture called the Diadoumenos, hoping to show how the artist may have conceived his otherwise mysterious rule for achieving beauty in the human figure. Their article appeared in The Art Quarterly 25 (1962): 128-42 under the title "Polykleitos' Diadoumenos -- Measurement and Animation."
How does one test their conjecture? As philosophers routinely do, by trying to construct a counter-example. This proves easy to do, as in the following construction of a face that cannot possibly be super-beautiful if Polykleitos's face is the acme of beauty.
It seems obvious that the authors never thought of this obvious point, as searchers for golden section instantiations in art and nature have seldom if ever done. In this they go one step beyond the method of religious folk who "prove" the benificence of a creator god by citing all the favorable signs and consigning all the unfavorable ones to the maker's inscrutability. The art historians don't even recognize the problem (the problem of aesthetic evil, we might call it).
8. Faces made symmetrical
Here is the Marquardt website's African beauty (version 2) made symmetrical. Study the images to see which is which and then to judge which is more beautiful, and why.
And here is the other version:
(Note that the transformation by flipping over the one side of the face and superimposing it on the other has produced changes in the width of the nose. The problem is that the axis of the face is slightly tilted and it's hard to align the flipped half with its original. Also, light and shade have been made inconsistent.)
9. Sexual attractiveness and beauty
Much has been made of the connection between aesthetic preferences in the case of potential sexual partners and sexual allure. There is no reasonable doubt that beauty of appearance and behavior may enhance sexual attraction. However, it is not plausible to think that all sexual attraction is aesthetic (let alone that all aesthetic attraction is sexual). I want to suggest a criterion which distinguishes sexual and aesthetic attraction. It may not succeed but at least it should focus your minds on the issue.
The idea is simple. Any genuinely aesthetic attraction that contributes to sexual attractiveness must continue to be attractive when the sexual component is absent. That is, when sexual desire is not a factor. What does that amount to? Since sexual attraction is definable in terms of the effect of the thing in question on the erogenous zones, since they are the locus of sexual desire, the attraction will be aesthetic only if it persists when the erogenous zones are not stirred by contemplating the object, the face or figure that is at issue. But, you may say, how can we test that if our erogenous zones are always stirred? Perhaps you can't, if that's true of you. You have to wait a while, maybe a long while! Or you have to look to persons of a different sexual orientation to see whether the features that allure you allure them without awakening sexual desire.
But perhaps there is another way. Do the kind of analysis of the relations of lines and forms within the face or figure that explain its beauty. Then compare these reasons with ones that apply to sexually neutral beauties. If the reasons turn out to be much the same, then isn't there good reason that the face and figure you find beautiful would continue to seem beautiful and would continue to give aesthetic pleasure even though the sexual connection lapsed?
If that is generally the case, then isn't aesthetic attractiveness in and of itself distinct from sexual attractiveness and the relation between them one of causality and not identity (in whole or in part)? In that case we could say that a thing may be sexually attractive because it's beautiful but it can't be beautiful merely because it's sexually attractive. Note that mate preference is not the same as sexual attraction because the latter isn't the only factor in selecting a mate, is it?
10. Comment on the peculiar case of green polar bears.
Perhaps it will help straighten out some of the confusion in discussions of unbeautiful animal color if we distinguish different sorts of beauty. One is decorative beauty of the bear independent of habitat. Is algae-green, splotchy or uniform, a decorative asset, compared with the algae-free norm? Does anyone want to say it is, that is, that it makes the polar bear more handsome, more elegant, more pleasantly eye-catching on a permanent basis (as opposed to the initial eye-shock of the unexpected color)?
Another is the decorative beauty of the bear in its natural habitat. Would anyone want to say the green is more harmonious with the arctic scenery (including wildlife) than the bear's natural color (I'll call it color even if the individual hairs are clear)?
A third is the functional beauty of the bear relative to its habitat. Its natural color is indisputably better adapted to the bear's environment than algae-green would be -- or for that matter any robustly pigmented or darkly toned color.
I'm sure there's much more to this topic. There seems to be something inherently garish in animal fur that is blue, green, purple or pink (especially bright-hued ones). Can this just be because of unfamiliarity with it? If we had grown up in a world of horses, dogs, cats, cows, deer, bear, moose of these rainbow colors, would we find their coloration as unobjectionable as we do the the soberer colors of our actual animal kingdom? If the impracticality of such colors in the actual contest for survival confuses the issue, imagine a peaceable kingdom where all are well provided for and blood-lust has been drained away. Are the colors OK in that context? Or are they still somewhat grotesque?
11. Thoughts about criteria of beauty of animals
For purposes of discussion I propose several criteria for a beauty scorecard for animal. The card calls for:
2 is meant to offset somewhat the structural ugliness of (say) bottom-dwelling fish with both eyes on one side. Should the fact that the adaptation is successful ("ingenious," perhaps) balance out some of the beauty-deficit of the structure? Or should the adaptation-value be kept separate from beauty -- that is, not be regarded as a kind of beauty at all?
3 is inspired by the thought that the credit allowed in 2 shouldn't entirely balance the structural deficit because confinement to a small niche is itself an adaptation deficit compared with confinement to a wider niche. So a creature is more beautifully adapted if (other things being equal) it can cope with a wider range of environments. I think we tend to think of adaptation that way. But is it right? I invite your thoughts.
4 is meant to help explain why we regard dogs or horses as more beautiful overall than, say, fish. Fish aren't as intelligent-looking, proud-looking, loving-looking as mammals -- or the mentioned mammals, at least. Of course monkeys and apes would score higher than horses in this category, and that might make us uneasy, since we don't usually regard them as outranking cats and horses overall. But remember that the overall rankings come from combining all the points in the different categories, so our personal favorites might still come out ahead. (See Beauty-adds #10 and items ##12-13 below for contributions on this subject from Jonathan Swift's Gullivers' Travels.)
Again, I invite your thoughts about all of this. The animal world is not an easy domain in which to judge things for overall beauty! (think how hard judgment is regarding insects.)
Some images relevant to differential animal beauty: bats as a premier example of unlovely creatures to look at (formally unbeautiful creatures) regardless of how beautifully functional they may be in their ecological niche.
Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Nature's art forms), 1904.
Big Horn and domestic sheep compared: Is one better than the other on updated Aristotelian principles?
12. Jonathan Swift on the Laputans' obsession with mathematically regular forms, from Gulliver's Travels, 1729.
Here we have a description of the imaginary Laputan culture, in which things like Marquardt's beauty-mask might be highly prized -- one that is not put off by the conflict between natural and geometrical forms that I complained of in class. Music is associated with mathematics because of the mathematical ratios exemplified by the harmonies within the overtone scale. (The shape of musical instruments, however, is only loosely associated with those properties.)
[The Laputans'] Ideas are perpetually conversant in Lines and Figures. If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other Geometrical Terms, or else by Words or Art drawn from Musick, needless here to repeat...
They also apply geometry to the carving of meat and other dishes that lent themselves to being shaped: "In the first Course, there was a Shoulder of Mutton, cut into an AEquilateral Triangle; a Piece of Beef into a Rhomboides; and a Pudding into a Cycloid. The second Course was two Ducks, trussed up into the Form of Fiddles; Sausages and Puddings resembling Flutes and Hautboys, and a Breast of Veal in the Shape of a Harp. (1) The Servants cut our Bread into Cones, Cylinders, Parallelograms, and several other Mathematical Figures."
[1. This symbolism is only loosely or indirectly associated with the mathematics, of course.]
13. How beautiful are humans compared with other species? Gulliver's issue addressed, Pt. 1. Refer back to Beauty-additions #10.
Gulliver developed an acute inferiority complex from his experience in the country of the Houyhnhnms. That leads to the question of how we humans compare humans with horses and other nonhuman species in beauty? First consider bodily appearance alone. A moment's reflection will convince us that the question is answerable only if we specify the conditions of the contest. Are we to take humans without clothes? What about grooming, especially the cutting or shaving of hair, of nails or hooves? Are we to judge humans at all ages compared with horses at all ages, or each at its peak of physical beauty? It seems clear that the competitive situation will change radically depending on such choices.
If it is strictly bodily beauty we are judging, clothes would seem inappropriate. So let us suppose we require entire nakedness. That will increase the impact of our choices in the next two variables. Suppose we allow brushing, binding, or braiding of the hair on the head but exclude shaving or removal of hair on other body parts? We also allow nail-paring but no painting or glossing. These stipulations would be matched by limitations on the nonhuman animals in the contest, where applicable. The third question is the most momentous of all. Human bodily beauty, male and female, declines with the middle and elder years more than that of most species. If the beauty of our champions has to be their net beauty over a long life it seems certain that the leading animal species will come out more beautiful overall. It's embarrassing even to dwell on the outcome. Gulliver would be right to feel inferior on this basis.
But there are other, more human-friendly competitions that deserve to be considered. One confines judgment to several beauty peaks, one in childhood, one in adolescence and one in young adulthood. Under these more human-favorable conditions how will our species fare? We cannot draw on the views of the experts because so far as I know no expert literature exists. So I offer you my intuitions, to get the discussion going.
1. Highly beautiful human children of, say, 4 to 9 years, compete evenly with
highly beautiful kittens and win the competition with foals (cute, but very
awkward).
2. Highly beautiful adolescent females compete evenly with highly beautiful
adolescent cats and colts/fillies. The three are all pretty much on a par, I
think.
3. Highly beautiful adolescent males begin to have a problem because of the
growth of their genitalia, which are silly becoming grotesque compared with
the more inboard male genitalia of the other two species.
4. This disadvantage increases markedly in the young adult male human. The penis
is exceptionally large for the size of the body. This may have all sorts of
good effects on culture (see the excerpt on mate selection, Beauty Add-ons #9)
but it does not improve the outward appearance of the male human. Also the growth
of body hair is a considerable beauty deficit, especially in the more hirsute
human ethnicities, as is evident from the pains taken to control or hide it.
5. Young adult females also suffer from body hair, which is not distributed
in a very attractive way, but the most beautiful females outscore the most beautiful
males in this department, and do so also by a wider margin in respect to genitalia
(not because the female pudenda are more beautiful, but only because they are not
so conspicuous).
Overall, my conclusion is that Gulliver should not be so appalled at the likely outcome of this second competition as at that of the first. Do you agree with that, and with the assessments that went into it? Keep in mind that these are just two of a large number of competitions. It says nothing about the comparative beauty of human movement or emotional responsiveness, or comparative beauty in clothes or other forms of decoration. But it strongly suggests that our claim to beauty does not rest on our merely natural bodily appearance at rest. If we come out ahead overall, it must be because we gain through these other beauty competitions.
14. Gulliver's problem, Pt. 2.
Suppose now that we consider the beauty of humans in respect of mental and emotional responsiveness, which was also a major concern of Gulliver's. What rough sketch will result? Clearly humans are wonderfully responsive in these ways, compared with horses, cats and other animals. They excel in diversity and subtlety. Consider their moral life. It is vastly more sophisticated than that of animals. So the most moral human is more beautifully moral than the most moral animal. However, Gulliver is tortured by the depths of depravity which are an inevitable by-product of the human moral endowment. No animal comes close to humans in the capacity or reality of wickedness. So the outcome of a contest will be very different if we pick our moral champion than if we judge humans at large compared with animals at large, or moral potentiality compared with moral attainment.
Gulliver's depression was much affected by the endless depravities of people in his home culture (18th century England) compared with the perfectly socialized houyhnhnms. Those horses lived a considerably less complexly cultured life than Europeans did. They lacked the competitiveness for wealth, power and sexual extravagance that are so much a feature of high cultures in our world. Lacking religious feelings they were free of doctrinal and sectarian rancor and violence. Lacking romantic passions they were affectionate to their kind without being desolated by loss. Needless to say this is an idealized picture of horses (even without considering the superior rationality Swift confers on them). So the proper comparison for us to consider is not humans versus houyhnhnms but humans versus horses as they actually are. Even on this basis humans at large come off with a mixed rating, pluses to be sure but also a lot of demerits, whereas horses have a somewhat narrower range of both (little if anything deserving to be called crime in equine culture, for instance).
Having said this much, I leave the rest of the topic to you. Obviously I have only scratched a tip or two of a very large iceberg.
15. Beauty and goodness
I think there is much to be said for the idea that any sort of goodness at a high enough level should count as beautiful. Admittedly this is a minority view within the community of philosophical aestheticians today. Still, I think it deserves a fair hearing. On the one hand we want to draw distinctions and keep separate things separate. On the other hand we want those distinctions not to obscure real connections. So each distinction needs careful consideration. Consider the case of the moral and the beautiful. How separate are they?
The examples of moral goodness that seem most natural to call beautiful are those that are of unusual moral excellence, such as extraordinary courage under fire, extraordinary dedication to good causes, extraordinary fairness in dealing with friends and adversaries alike, extraordinary kindness to those who deserve it even when it they are unlikeable, and so forth. People who are beautifully moral are those who act above and beyond the call of (ordinary) duty – the term for this is "supererogation." Add to that the excellence of the moral inclinations being so well ingrained as to come naturally, and don't you have a picture of a beautifully moral person? This idea has been put forward by Guy Sircello in A New Theory of Beauty (1975) and I think it has a lot of plausibility. My own further thought about it is that our experience of contemplating such a person (as of acts which flow naturally from such a person) is not ultimately distinguishable from paradigm cases of aesthetic admiration, such as admiring the beautiful faces we have been studying. Both kinds of case involve conspicuous harmonies. Dwelling on them brings us joy if we are not turned off by something like envy or small-mindedness. Think of the pleasure we get from fictional portrayals of authentic supererogation. By "authentic" I mean to exclude the stereotypical cases where the personality is a caricature, not a possible reality.
Just how far this connection goes is a big, big question. The most serious apparent discrepancy between the morally good and the beautiful (or the aesthetic in general) is the rule-governed character of morality. Typically morality aims at compliance with good rules of conduct. Aesthetic goodness, on the other hand, does not seem typically to be a matter of compliance with rules. On the other side, pleasure seems to be more determinative of aesthetic excellence than it is of moral excellence. I do not think we can hope to solve this problem in this course.
16. The Neoplatonic impulse to ascend to Beauty Itself as inherent to aesthetic experience and Kirwan's phenomenological version of this. (Refer also to Beauty Additions #3)
Plotinus takes over Plato's notion of the great chain of beauty, as it might be called, the ranking of realities from the least to the greatest in beauty, culminating in Beauty Itself. As has already been pointed out, there are terrific difficulties in working out the details of such a picture. It's hard enough to imagine ranking everything in relation to everything else even within particular domains, the animal kingdom, for instance, let alone nature as a whole, let alone nature as opposed to culture, etc. But it seems clear that Plato and Plotinus were not all that interested in the details. Their eye was mainly fixed on the transcendent, off-the-scale destination – as well as on a few big steps, such as from individuals to properties, from physical beauties to intellectual beauties. With this orientation, the lofty end-state of contemplating Beauty Itself (in Plotinus the "One") trumps any experience, however impressive, of the myriad details like the ones we have been sampling. And Plotinus makes the process of rising up to that level sound quite wonderful, doesn't he? If only we believed in ourselves, in our capacity to prune away the squalor and triviality in our souls, his account of lifting ourselves up to grasp the unspeakable brilliance of Pure Beauty would be enthralling, wouldn't it? Like the religious mystic's account of seeing, or dwelling within the presence of, the unspeakable majesty of God.
Actually, the accounts of experiencing the primal realities (God, Beauty Itself) are conspicuously spare, uninformative. Most of the descriptive content concerns the object, the remainder being how wonderful, blissful, rewarding, breath-taking the experience is. There's nothing specific about what that experience is like, nothing sensory or conceptual. A common theme in all the accounts is the ineffability of the experience, which means the impossibility of putting it in words. In this respect the mystical experiences are quite unique. Other things called inexpressible are not really inexpressible: love, sexual ecstasy, beauty-rapture, drug highs, and their negative counterparts, and so forth. They just take analytic effort, sustained noticing of features, and then semantic invention to find descriptions that fit.
Informative or not, the Neoplatonists' accounts are apt to seem somehow right, at least in pointing toward an ideal. They have seemed so to countless people over the ages, so we should try to understand their appeal. Let's see what momentum the great chain of beauty generates and how that might lead us on to the apex. The key attribute of the top level is that it is abstract. So if we can understand the appeal of the abstract we will make progress. Since the process of abstraction begins at the second level of the chain, let's concentrate on that. As we move from the beauty of particulars to the beauty of properties, what happens? The object of the experience changes. It was a particular face (or a particular sounding of a chord, or a particular rose). Then it is a face-plan, a schema, a type, an arrangement of features, something abstract in that many particulars can share it. What is involved in experiencing the beauty of this abstract thing? It's not all that easy to say. One thing we can say it must involve is finding each fully compliant instance beautiful, that is, each face that complies with the face-plan. Like admiring slim legs or a slender but curvaceous silhouette wherever it appears. Strictly this is admiring a class of instances as opposed to a single one. To admire a class is to admire each and every member of that class as it comes into view in the flesh or in memory. But what is it like to admire the very idea of that sort of face or figure? This is like relishing the thought of that face-plan without reference to any full-fledged particulars. It's abstract in that the mental envisagement of the plan lacks the sensory clarity and detail of any particular face. It's an idea, not a concrete image. Platonists say that it is purer because of its abstractness. What can this mean? Do your ideas seem purer than your visual, that is, your perceptual images? In a way they do. One's ideas come without any of the complications of a perceptual image. That is, the perceptual image is of things that look different when you come up close, whereas your ideas finesse all of that. They don't contain the possibility of closer inspection. So it's as if all the close-up grotesqueness is purged away, the sticky ridges on the lips, the pores and hairs and jelly in the corners of the eyes just don't exist in the idea. The skin and everything else seems immaculate just because all those things are lost in the abstraction.
(Yet if the face-plan is going to be highly, richly beautiful it's going to have to be highly specific, not just a schema for placing the main features. All the contours must be included, so the idea is a quite complicated one. It won't be easy to think the thought of all those being just so. This is why designers have to depend so heavily on drawings, that is, on their visual perception, in order to create a beautiful face-plan. A consequence of this is that it's not easy to conjure up a really beautiful abstraction of something as complex as a human face. More on this in a moment in connection with Cicero's statement about the artist's idea.)
Another way in which abstractions seem purer is when they concern only a few features, as when the law of gravity applies to everything that has mass but only specifies it in respect of its weight and what follows from that, given its other characteristics. So the law seems purer than the phenomena it governs. Does this kind of comparative purity, which boils down to simplicity, make the law more beautiful than its instances?
This is not an easy question, since the phenomena are much more complex but perhaps have more beauty-dimensions than the law has. The answer seemed obvious to Plato, but then he had a strong bias in favor of the abstract. If we give the perceptible world its due, it isn't at all clear that the enormous variety and vivacity of sensory beauties fails to match, in overall beauty, the sparer beauties of things abstract, such as mathematical and physical laws. And if the phenomena turn out to be as beautiful as the laws, then we are left not with an ascent toward Beauty Itself but to a much more level field of beauty. There would still be rankings within categories, but not a "segmented" ranking in which physical things occupy the lower and abstract things the upper rank. And if that's right then the drive toward the unattainable loftiness of Beauty Itself seems to rest on a misunderstanding.
Kirwan (see Beauty-Additions #3) might reply to these criticisms in either of two ways: (1) He might say that the impulse toward better and better beauty isn't denied by what was just said. The answer, however, is that this impulse may be as well satisfied by ascending to higher beauty within each category: more beautiful music, gardens, theories, and so forth. There can still be plenty of impossible dreams of super-beauties of all these kinds, as well as of superabundant cumulative beauty. Beauty Itself need not be involved at all.
(2) Or he might say that the allure of the abstract persists, whatever may be said about the equal beauty of particulars. People want to get away from particulars. They want to lose the sense of time, to come to a state of fulfillment so encompassing that neither future nor past matters. That state of timelessness can only be accomplished by focusing on something as abstract as hyperkalon, Beauty Itself. Since this is the completest fulfillment we can imagine, it must also be the most beautiful. (Mystical religions have called it Nirvana.) And, he might conclude, our thirst for beauty contains the seed of it from the start, a yearning for a beauty "that no object could satisfy." Such may be his final defense of our "unappeasable yearning" for beauty.
So who's right ? [to be continued]
17. Cicero's notion of the idea in the artist's mind
Ask yourself to imagine the most beautiful face or horse or anything else. Specifically ask yourself to imagine one more beautiful than any actual instance you have ever seen. Can you do it? Cicero thinks you can and that artists commonly do just that when they are trying to sculpt or paint a perfect paragon of humanity, say. Supposedly they form that idea and paint using it as a guide. I am suspicious of this claim. I think it harbors a conceptual confusion. Of course when we say we have imagined our ideal person we have done something, but is it really to have imagined a person whose face, as imagined, is more beautiful than any we have seen -- even for ourselves? What do you think? It's a topic we must discuss in class.
18. How does the material all relate?
Here's a diagram that relates the material we will discuss concerning beauty. Of course it doesn't answer the hard questions concerning beauty. It only aims to organize the sprawling domain of beauty.
No diagram can contain all aspects of what we have discussed without all sorts of overlays, which would be too confusing. But you should note in the margins the important things not mentioned above. For instance the difference between the beauty of things and actions, and between outer things and our experiences. I think it will be useful to come back to the diagram from time to time to fit in the things we have been dealing with.
19. The Midterm test.
The following are the questions for the midterm test. Write an essay on two of them. Choose ones you find plenty to say about, both on the basis of the course material and on your own reflections. Examples may come from the ones on my website or elsewhere if you supply the relevant URL. (Or you may print out a visual image and turn it in with the test booklet.)
The questions are given in advance so you can develop interesting, well informed and well thought out essays. It is probably wise to write out your essays before coming into the class for the exam itself. You may bring a 50 word outline of each essay with you, which is to be turned in with the exam booklet. (Don't exceed the limit, since points will be taken off for that.) The final essays are written in class using only the outlines (and images printed out and turned in with the test booklet if you wish).
1. Plato and others have reservations about the beauty of concrete particulars and especially about sensory appearances being called beautiful or even worse, as highly beautiful. What are these reservations and how fair are they? Disentangle the insights from the overkill.
2. Justice as conceived by Rawls (as fairness) has been put forward as a possible candidate for a beautiful abstraction. Working with the account given by Scarry and the lecturer, develop the case for this idea. Why is justice more promising a candidate than beauty?
3. How might the Aristotelian idea of the beauty of organism being a matter of the development of the potentiality of its kind, that is, of its species, be worked out in practice? Choose two interestingly different species and show how it could lead to reasonable aesthetic judgments of the beauty of a specimen within a species and of one species as opposed to another.
4. Why is it so difficult to make precise overall beauty judgments, compared with the task of judging the beauty of a given aspect? Illustrate with examples.
5. People often think that when we appreciate a beautiful thing we compare it with an ideal of perfect beauty. That makes sense only if we can form a clear idea of perfect beauty of the type to which the thing in question belongs. Is forming such an idea a real possibility and is it necessary for true appreciation? Consider the question in terms of an example.
6. What justification, if any, is there for the common belief that visual and sonic beauty is superior to beauty of taste and smell? Review the reasons that have been offered and inquire into their validity as thoroughly and fairly as you can.
7. The instructor claims that there are a good number of basic truths about beauty that no reasonable person can deny. These he calls ‘truisms.' They play a role in our understanding of the concept of beauty and of the companion concept of beauty-appreciation. Pick out several that you consider interesting and explain them. Are you satisfied that they are true? Why do people sometimes deny or overlook them?
8. Is the idea of pure beauty applicable to anything? Or is it a myth? Consider the best candidates for pure beauty and whether they stand up under examination as being indeed completely pure? Also, if pure, is a beauty supremely beautiful?
9. Kirwan claims that all our experiences of beauty involve a deep-seated craving for a transcendent ‘beauty beyond beauty.' Do you find this in your experience? Would your experience be better (more intense, deeper, more rewarding) if it did involve such a yearning even when your life was well supplied with aesthetic enjoyment?
10. Intellectual beauty is much favored by Plato and his followers, Plotinus, for instance. How does intellectual beauty differ from physical beauty or beauty of sights and sounds? How does the experience of it differ from the experience of the other sorts?
11. When we speak of a beautiful person, what dimensions of beauty ought we to include? What would Plato regard as a truly beautiful person? How would our celebrity beauties fare measured against his criteria? Would any actual person come close?
12. In class I played a few snatches of a performance by Led Zeppelin to illustrate a Dionysian mode of music. What reasons might be given by someone who claimed that this was highly beautifu?. What beautiful properties can be reasonably ascribed to it and are they enough to substantiate the claim? When we judge such a work, should we compare it with works like Beethoven's Ode to Joy ?
13. Many of the things we admire in art and life are ‘adversive' beauties in the sense of beauties that presuppose adversity. The beauty comes from the way a person responds to the adversity or shows us how we may or should respond to it. Explain this species of beauty, using a variety of examples. How does it compare in beauty to non-adversive beauty?
22. The instructor's thoughts about various topics on the midterm test after reading the Spring 04 test essays. (I keep them in the file to help Spring 08 students prepare their essays.)
A. More about supervenience and perfect oaks
1. Beauty is supervenient on base properties. That's clear. But there are some complications that came to light in the test essays. The properties on which overall beauty is supervenient will include (of course!) value-properties, beauty-properties. For instance, if an essay is coherent, well expressed and logically well ordered, it will be (to some extent) beautifully composed. Those three beauty-making properties are themselves beautiful. So while they are base properties they are not value-neutral. But they in turn are supervenient on base properties that are value-neutral, consisting of word order and meaning properties. How else could the essay be coherent and well expressed? Change the word order and meaning relations in the essay and you make a difference in those literary value-properties, and thus in its overall literary beauty. Thus at the lowest level the base properties are value-neutral but at upper levels, both intermediate and high, the properties are value-loaded.
2. Oak tree beauty. When we call an oak tree beautiful we generally mean that it is an excellent specimen of its kind. It has to a high degree the properties associated with the flourishing of its kind, maintaining itself in full, healthy development and engendering healthy seeds. Its capillaries carry up the nutrients, its flowers, leaves and seeds are abundant and disease-free, its form unstunted and undistorted, and its woody parts strong, undamaged, etc. (I can't give a complete listing of the component properties, but you see what I mean.). No doubt actual oak trees fail to be flawless in each and every respect, so are not perfect. Does that mean that if there were an absolutely perfect specimen, it would be what Plato means by the Form of oakness?
The answer is no, a perfect specimen is still a concrete individual. But the idea of all those ideal properties forming an ideal oak-ensemble – that is a (fairly specific) Form. It wouldn't be perfectly specific as to size or precise shape of leaf because there's no size that is fully ideal and no single, precise, perfectly ideal leaf-shape. Quite a bit of variation wouldn't seem to make any difference plus or minus. So the Form of Ideal Oakness would be somewhat vague, and it's interesting to inquire into what does and doesn't make a marginal overall improvement. How uniform do its leaves need to be? Its bark is irregularly textured. Does the degree of irregularity (plus-minus) matter? But it's as ideal as we can conceive of.
Further, we must remember that many lesser grades of oak would be full instances of the kind, even though they weren't ideal ones. Their being full instances would require that they fully comply with a lesser Form, that of Oak-tree, as opposed to that of Ideal Oak-tree. Plato probably wouldn't like this, but I don't see how he could justify opposing it.
B. The beauty of abstracts and concrete particulars again
A plausible case can be made that the beauty of any face plan (an abstract) depends on its features being fully determinate in shape, size, location and whatever other qualities would make a concrete particular face beautiful. So if we try to improve the beauty by making the plan less specific, we always fail. This poses a problem for the idea of Plato's and Kirwan's hierarchy of beauty which leads to the highly abstract being more beautiful than the less highly abstract, other things being equal. Abstracts vary in how abstract they are by their degree of determinateness. So beauty itself is more abstract than facial beauty or any other particular species of beauty, just as animality is more abstract than humanity and plane figure (-hood) is more abstract than pentagon (-hood). A relatively abstract face plan would be one which specified, for example, only that the face be symmetrical. It is indeed hard to see how this face plan could be more beautiful than one that specified more beauty-making properties – or even as beautiful as such a one. Similarly for a face plan that specified only that the eyes be a certain size and shape and left the other features unspecified.
Grasping this point should make us suspicious of the idea that highly abstract Forms are the most beautiful Forms. What follows about the relation between highly determinate Forms and concrete particulars? Insofar as the particulars exactly comply with a beautiful face plan, they can't lose out. Only insofar as they have unbeautiful aspects, either of structure or appearance (under unfavorable conditions, say), will it be reasonable to say they are less beautiful overall.
23. Final Exam (in the classroom, Thursday, May 15, 8-10 a.m.
Note that this is subject to change. The following are a previous semester's questions, still relevant but not necessarily this semester's final exam.
Same format as for the mid-term, only longer essays which reflect the greater time allowance (one hour for each).
Write essays on two of the following topics. You may use a short outline of 75 words for each essay. Submit the outline with the exam booklet.
1. What similarities and what differences are there between the accurate perception of color or other sensory properties and the accurate perception of beauty, according to the sense of beauty theory, interpreted as the instructor interprets it in the course material (that is, the improved sense of beauty theory, not Hutcheson's or Hume's simply)? Note that this theory incorporates the understanding of aesthetic properties as beauty-data, so it is necessary to bring in the discussion of aesthetic properties and the criterion of nondefective ideal enjoyment explained late in the course.
2. What arguments does Zemach offer against relativism and how successful are they? If they don't convince you, formulate a case against them. Keep in mind that part of his argument against relativism is his argument for realism.
3. Explain Zemach's theory of time-sensitive aesthetic properties, working out as fully as you can the applications of that theory to the different perceptions and judgments of viewers at different times or in different cultural contexts regarding works of different sorts. Cite specific examples and make clear the consequences as to what property the things have at this or that time.
4. Zemach offers a theory of aesthetic properties as tertiary properties, which are secondary properties "tinged with desire." The instructor offers a competing theory, though in some respects the two theories overlap. Discuss these two, bringing out both how they apply to the various properties and what questions arise concerning their plausibility. Choose at least three aesthetic properties for detailed discussion, including one descriptive and one purely evaluative one. Pay close attention to the epistemic criteria applicable to these properties.
Note: the reading assignment in Zemach runs from Chapter 2 to Chapter 5 but only through 5.4. You are not responsible for, and are not advised to spend any time on, the last three sections of Ch. 5.
Note: the material for the exam includes all the supplementary material developed over the course of the semester, particularly the instructor's responses to the discussion items.
Note: the course evaluation questionnaire is handed out at the last class meeting. Please fill it out and bring it to the final exam, where an envelope will be available to receive it. The envelope will be taken by the last student to leave the exam to the Philosophy secretary for safe keeping until the instructor has turned in the final grades.
24. Passing references in lectures or class discussions, Spring 2008.
1. John Wilkes. I mentioned John Wilkes as an example of an ugly person who succeeded in spite of his face. Wilkes was a notorious 18th century politician who thumbed his nose at the crown and at propriety generally. He attracted a huge and unruly mob following whose slogan was Wilkes and liberty and spent time in and out of Parliament and jail. Here is what H.W. Brands says about him in his biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First American (2000), p. 342.
John Wilkes was a well-educated, uncommonly ugly man with a frightful squint who nonetheless, through wicked wit and ribald humor, managed to charm persons of both sexes. He himself liked to say it took him half an hour to "talk away his face" with any woman, but then she was his. He may have overstated his persuasiveness, but on the the evidence of his conquests, not excessively. Among his male acquaintances Edward Gibbon declared that Wilkes has "inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge." Samuel Johnson said, "Jack has a great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, Jack is a gentleman." Johnson's biographer, James Boswell, asserted that Wilkes had "an elasticity of mind that nothing can crush."
Here is a picture of Wilkes and a cartoon of him with a more animated expression. Notice particularly his least attractive feature, the extreme cross-eyed "squint," as it was called. Otherwise he does not seem to me outstandingly ugly, though he is no beauty either. Hogarth makes him look slightly diabolic, as if he's just let fly some wicked witticism. His wig accentuates the devilment in his expression.
2. Images discussed in class
a. Mars surface cracks partially filled with frost.
Do you find any beauty in this image? If so, can you cite any property it has that is plausibly regarded as beautiful? Since everything that seems beautiful must seem to have a beauty-making property (even if it's hard to identify) any positive response should be coonnected with such a property. If you can't find any beauty in it, what do you think would make it seem beautiful -- or if not beautiful then at least better looking?
Images re. Apollonian vs. Dionysian
Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night: Questions to pose in order to bring out the aesthetic character of the painting.
How many of the
following terms apply?
Some of the forms in the painting are:
1. Writhe manically____ Remain at rest___________
2. Writhe joyously_____ Writhe in distress_________
3. Move majestically___ Move nervously__________
4. Heave like waves___ Shoot like lightning________
5. Quiver/tremble_____ Jerk/jump/zigzag__________
6. Flicker___________ Glow/ burn______________
The painting as a whole is:
7. Exultant___________ Depressed_____________
8. Ecstatic___________ Meditative______________
9. Impulsive_________ Measured______________
10. Balanced________ Tottering, insecure_______
The brush strokes are mostly:
11. Sinuous, graceful___ Stubby, awkward_______
12. Careful__________ Hasty, urgent__________
Left. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Lady. Right. Alberto Giacometti, Portrait of a Man
Uniformity and variety applied to dachshunds. Original and transform.
Which is better proportioned (has the better U&V of proportion)?
Earlier style dachshund, not so radically bred for narrow tunnels.
Above. Giotto, Flight into Egypt. c. 1305
Vittore Carpaccio. Flight into Egypt. 1500.
Domenico Feti, Flight into Egypt, 1621-23.
Norman Rockwell, Swimming Hole, 1943.
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Flight into Egypt, 1308-11.
Raphael, The School of Athens, 1512. Questions to pose about this painting in order to bring out its aesthetic character.
As an elementary test of aesthetic perceptiveness, which of the following paired
terms applies?
The composition as a whole is:
1. Agitated__________ Calm_______________
2. Confident__________ Uncertain____________
3. Weak_____________ Strong______________
4. Balanced__________ Insecure_____________
5. Clearly ordered_____ Confused____________
The figures in particular are:
6. Robust____________ Frail________________
7. Purposeful_________ Hesitant_____________
8. Affected___________ Natural______________
The architecture (see the whole painting) is
9. Apollonian_________ Dionysian____________
10. Pompous_________ Modest___________
The colors (in the detail) are:
11. Bold____ Tame____
12.
Harmonious___Gaudy_____
Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1516.
Leonardo and Verroccio, Baptism of Christ, c. 1470.
25. Notes on topics in Zemach
1. Distancing, underdistancing, and experiencing aesthetically (Bullough: refer to section 12 of Beauty-Additions)
Bullough's idea is that we need some practical stimulus to engage our faculties at all, some sense of danger or opportunity. If that is absent we are dull, unengaged. So in the fog at sea we have reason to be anxious. The risk is noteworthy. So we have a reason to observe intently. Observing is typically a coping mechanism under stress. It arms us for action. So our observation of the fog at sea typically ties in with thoughts of disaster or survival. These latter thoughts, and the risk factor in general, needs to suppressed if we are to experience the fog aesthetically. What that really means is experiencing the look (the milky semi-transparency, our silent movement through it, the emergence of the water as we pass through it, the sense of things coming out of nothingness, etc.) as being of interest in itself. A residual anxiety maintains the sense of urgency to experience the fog. The relative relief from anxiety has opened us to the peculiar attraction of the unrolling scene. We become alive to the aesthetic properties (descriptive and evaluative) because of adrenaline released to serve the now quieted anxiety. Here is a diagram which shows clearly the separation of the two dimensions involved in psychical distance.
On the left Bullough's conception is shown. On the right is the more complex diagram for aesthetic experience involving aesthetic property discrimination, which needs be added if a full account of the factors in aesthetic experience are to be accommodated.
The above two-dimensional model fits drama too, since we vicariously participate in the enacted action, and find ourselves responding to the stresses and allurements within it. Our attention is engaged with the patterns of interaction partly because of this vicarious practical interest. We back off from that considerably, but not wholly, when our focus becomes aesthetic.
It is not so easy to apply the model to visual art, in which we usually do not engage so intensely. We are detached viewers from the outset. We are denied hope or fear of what may come because all that there is stands before us (together with the implications as to its context). We can only exult or repine for what there is. We can wish for what is not there. We can wish the artist had done something more or less than she did. (But perhaps we can hope Watson will escape the shark.)
Keats experienced the happy figures on the Greek vase as forever happy, although there was an unseen army threatening them!
Much instrumental music entertains without arousing much vicarious engagement. But there is provocation in the performers' exertions, especially if we fear they may stumble, swerve, or subside into limpness. And even in the composer's invention we may find a subject of hope or fear. Will it carry through to a rousing finale or turn bombastic?
None of this invalidates Zemach's criticism that psychical distance is actually just selective attention to certain properties rather than to others. In my view the crucial thing is to incorporate descriptive (DAPs) and mixed (MAPs) aesthetic properties into the picture.
2. The intrinsic-instrumental distinction (Zemach, 39-41)
There is some confusion here in Zemach's presentation, I think. He claims that apple tree's property of growing apples is both an intrinsic and a utilitarian property (apples are good for humans to eat). But a tree's growing apples is not a utilitarian property of the tree. Apple trees' growing fruit useful as human food is a relation of the tree to humans. And in general no property is both intrinsic and utilitarian with respect to the same subject. So there's no incoherence in Racy's distinction. But questions arise concerning his use of the distinction between intrinsic and relational properties to identify the aesthetically relevant properties from others. Surely a tree's being in a meadow where it shows to good advantage must count as an aesthetically positive property. But that is not an intrinsic property of the tree. The natural response to this case is to say that it is not just the tree we are judging but the tree-in-the-context. The tree-in-context is a different object than the tree solo, and what is beautiful about it is an intrinsic property of the context. But if that is so, the same point will apply to utilitarian properties. A tree's production of a nourishing fruit may make it beautifully suitable for human cultivation. Utility is suitability, and where the suitability is eminent, it is plausibly a beautiful relationship. In short we have a context in which the tree functions beautifully. So utilitarian properties are just as proper objects of aesthetic appreciation as intrinsic ones because they are intrinsic to contexts. Every relational property is an intrinsic property of some context, so the intrinsic-relational distinction cannot determine what is and what is not aesthetically assessable (experienceable, enjoyable).
In this section Zemach stretches plausibility in calling the timber trade delicate, but it may indeed have aesthetic properties (good ones and bad ones).
A footnote about “practical.” Philosophers talking about a practical interest have been influenced, I think, by the fact that the term “practical” suggests (without requiring) a narrow and less than stratospheric standard of goodness. A sou'wester is practical in keeping one dry in the hardest storm. But it's stiff, uncomfortable, sweaty and not good to look at. A chronometer, in contrast, is thought of as not just practical but as beautifully effective in keeping time, a marvel of machinery. But for ordinary practice nothing so eminent is needed. An ordinary watch will do. If it can be shown that a thing meets not just routine requirements but a complicated set of specifications to a very high degree it will not be thought of as merely being practical but as beautifully tailored to the function. Merely practical things are suitable enough. They do the job well enough when that's all one needs – when one doesn't need an exquisitely engineered device.
So beyond practicality lies the exquisitely efficient. To be sure, where only the exquisitely engineered will do the job, only that is practical, given that the job has to be done. Super-colliders are exquisitely engineered because they have to be. (Can we factor in expense as increasing the suitability of an artifact for a function? Is this another basis for aesthetic appreciation of a differently calculated suitability?)
3. Standard observation conditions (SOCs)
A. Various matters of detail in Zemach's discussion deserve to be contested, I think. Im particular, his claim that maximal discrimination is not an essential feature in determining the SOC of a term like “red.” He cites Smart as advocating a notion of “normalcy” relying on maximal discrimination. I don't see how hyper-sensitivity to color could be called normal, or why any theoretician would wish it could be. Zemach imagines someone making all sorts of superfine color discriminations without their being supported by a correlation with a physical basis. I think that if someone claimed to do this, we would rightly suspect a fraud – either the person is lying or the distinctions are hallucinatory. But before reaching a conclusion, we would have to determine what the person was responding to, if the usual physical basis showed no difference of wavelength. Perhaps there is difference of texture or temperature rather than color. Wavelengths, notice, are finely enough differentiated to admit as many discriminations as anyone possibly could claim. Only if the wavelengths remained absolutely unchanging while the super-discriminator claimed to detect phenomenal changes would we even begin to have a problem. And if that happened, we would rightly suspect some central (brain) source of disturbance rather than a genuine color perception, or else some non-color stimulus producing a phenomenal datum that the subject confused with a color-quale.
Putting it this way implies that I agree with Zemach that the SOC necessarily also involves a theoretical basis. But that shouldn't be news to anyone in the class.
B. Another point of interest is Zemach's observation that people may understand a sensory predicate such as “red” without knowing the SOCs for it. I think this is partly true but only with a serious qualification. If one doesn't know the SOCs one doesn't fully understand the predicate. Zemach responds: that would imply people didn't understand “red” before science taught us about the nature of color. I reply: exactly so. They did not fully understand it. It is perfectly allowable to say that they had a different (cruder) concept of sensory red. I don't care which option a person takes. But I prefer the first because I think our concepts have implications beyond what we currently understand. Yet I agree wholeheartedly that a pre-scientific use of “red” is correct when the correct SOCs are in fact present even if the user has no idea of what they are.
5. Some points of difference between JB and Zemach on SOCs
A. Incidentally, but importantly, on my view of the matter the definition of the sensory property is not circular, contrary to Zemach's view. But as said above I agree that our understanding of terms is dependent on the interplay of observation and theory. As Zemach says, “Attributing an observational property (be it Red or Gaudy) is therefore a theoretical verdict; it is based on observation, but is not exclusively decided by it.” (55)
B. A particularly important point about SOCs in relation to aesthetics is that our sensory experience is demonstrably mistaken in various ways. Colors in patterns appear different from the way they appear when isolated, and it is the latter that is the SOC. But the SOC for the aesthetic color properties (harmony, liveliness, etc.) is the color in the patterns. So what we appreciate is to that extent an illusion. Since the illusion is unbreakable, given our visual system, it can satisfy the requirement of universality under optimal viewing conditions. Essentially the same point applies to other sensory qualities, including spatial relations. Objects in the distance look larger or smaller depending on the rest of the visual context. The moon famously looks larger on the horizon than at the zenith. What counts aesthetically is the optimized appearance, not the reality. Yet it is still true, in my view, that the pattern is beautifully harmonious, since it has the disposition to appear harmonious under optimal conditions to optimal (human) color-percipients. This does imply that visual beauty, harmony, etc. are relativized to types of visual systems. Those properties are beauty (etc.) to visual systems of the human sort . They need not be so to other visual systems. However, it is a tricky matter to say what sorts of alternative visual systems would see them as beautiful, harmonious (etc.) without illusion . We have no way of experiencing the harmony of adjacent true colors, and it would only be on the basis of first-hand experience that we could appreciate any aesthetic property.
Note that this thought is mine, not Zemach's. I cannot tell whether he would find any way of fitting it into his theory. On its face it poses a difficulty for his theory.
6. The a priori principle re. veridicality of phenomenal experiences: Zemach's vs. JB's understanding of this. On p. 62 Zemach states a rock-bottom epistemic principle he says dates back to Aristotle: the experience of sensing F-ly is an observation of an object X that is F. This is to be understood as a prima facie rule. Unless there is reason against it, our sensory experience is true of the real world. Though Zemach doesn't pause to elaborate, the principle does need further explanation. How does it play out for the phenomenal property Red? We have a red sense-quale (Zemach says, we sense F-ly). The principle says, prima facie we observe something that has that property. And indeed we all do assume naively that an object or a beam of light or whatever has that very quality. How do we get from this prima facie belief to a more securely founded scientific belief? First we learn about some of the variations in our color experience depending on the conditions of observation. Gradually we work out the SOCs. So our color claims are now far more cautious. We count on the surface or the light having the phenomenal quality only if the SOCs are met.
However, in the course of developing a truly scientific account of color we also discover that the phenomenal quale is only part of the story. The scientific account does not ascribe that occurrent property to the surface at all. It only ascribes physical properties (wavelength, reflectance, lattice structure, etc.) to the surface (or light), neural properties to the percipient, and causal relations connecting them. What is left of the property we know as sensory red? It can't be an occurrent property of the surface (or light). It can only be a dispositional property of stimulus and neural response which is manifested as a psychological experience of the phenomenal quality. This is something of a shock to commonsense. It is hard for commonsense to swallow the idea that that quality does not exist as an intrinsic property of the physical world, neither of surfaces nor of light.
JB thinks Locke's distinction of primary and secondary qualities is relevant here, even if Zemach doesn't accept it. Shape qualia turn out to have SOCs that leave shape an intrinsic property of physical things. When our shape experiences satisfy shape-SOCs the shape qualia are matched by shape properties in objects. Of course those objects also have the disposition to cause shape qualia in us. But the qualia are shaped in the same sense that the physical surface is. If this were not so we would not have any idea of what physical objects are really like. Physics would be impossible if there were not this much identity between the qualia and physical properties. I mention shape because it is the simplest case, but the point applies, with complications, to other physical properties as well: mass, density, velocity, size, etc.
The outcome is that the principle (appearance is prima facie evidence of reality) applies in a straightforward way to primary properties: to sense Squarely (as Zemach puts it) is prima facie to observe an X that is square. But the principle applies only in a manner of speaking to secondary properties where sensing Red-ly is prima facie to observe an X that is dispositionally-red. Zemach's account is, in JB's view, to that extent misleading.
However, that need not undermine his argument that PAPs such as beauty are real properties of the world. More of this later.
7. How pure aesthetic properties explain things, according to Zemach. How do they explain aesthetic preferences? First, they define aesthetic preference: aesthetic preference (or liking, or enjoyment) is only definable as preference for things on the basis of their presumed aesthetic goodness, i.e., their presumed beauty, cuteness, elegance, etc. Second, the tendency of people's preferences under Humean conditions to converge is explained by the supposition that what they converge on is genuinely beautiful (cute, elegant, etc.).
The first, definitional, point may encounter the following objection: how can this be true of people who never think one way or another about whether beauty is a real property? And even worse, how can it be true of relativists who deny the very existence of any real PAPs? In answer I would say: (1) Ordinary folk who never seriously consider what beauty is do assume unthinkingly that beauty is a real property. They presuppose that their preference for this face over that one is a matter of seeing that the first is more beautiful. They don't have to have a developed idea of what sort of property beauty is. (2) Relativists, in contrast, deny the reality of beauty – on the level of theory – and they play the games covered in Lecture 1 as bad reasons for subjectivism: diplomacy, self-protection, kindness, etc. But they still assume that they can sort their preferences into aesthetic vs. other. How can they do this unless they presume the first are for aesthetic goodness/badness? Zemach has presented reasons why all the attempts to define aesthetic experience (aesthetic attention, aesthetic pleasure) without reference to presumptions of real aesthetic value fail. Unless his reasons are refuted, relativists stand under the suspicion of violating their own theory. If his reasons are sound, relativists are in the awkward position of not being able to make sense of the very idea of aesthetic likings as opposed to other sorts and therefore cannot make sense of their own position. That is a lot more radical a position than relativists want to adopt.
8. Why couldn't sensory color be an intrinsic property of physical objects? I think it's likely that some of you resist the idea that the red of the wagon can't be an intrinsic property of surfaces or of light. True, physics doesn't assign any causal role to such a property. But does that strictly entail there it doesn't exist? Can't we at least conceive of it being an intrinsic property? That is, can't we conceive of the very same quality as we experience (what I called the quale or phenomenal red), just as we find ourselves thinking of it as being? Does anything make such a thought incoherent? If primary qualities can also be physical, as in the case of shape, why not color qualities also? To use the distinction Zemach adopts, why couldn't they be noumenal properties as well as phenomenal (response-dependent) ones?
What would it take for Red to be an occurrent property of physical objects? In particular, what would it take for it to be a property of surfaces? It would have to be as physical as roughness or smoothness yet identical to the color quale. Is such a thing coherent? Note that if the color belonged to the surface, it couldn't have any necessary dependence on interaction with light. But then how could we conceivably discover what physical color a surface had? All we could see would necessarily be how reflected light makes a surface look, and that definitely (and necessarily) changes with the quality of the incident light. To see that would be to see sensory color, which is definitely a dispositional property, not an occurrent, intrinsic, physical one. None of the known physical, intrinsic properties, like the lattice structure of the molecules, can be identical with the color of the quale. So we come up with a complete blank when we try to say what this supposed intrinsic color property could be.
But even if the red quality of the quale can't be an intrinsic property of a physical surface, perhaps it could be an intrinsic property of light whether radiant or reflected from a surface. Unfortunately there seem to be insuperable problems with this too. If it were an intrinsic physical property of light, the color would have to be the property of some aspect of light, of waves or quantum packets or something. And there is nothing in the physical conception of light that offers itself as a plausible bearer of anything like the Red of a red quale (or of seeing Red-ly).
If these reflections are correct, the commonsense assumption that the Red of a quale is identical, or at least similar, to an occurrent, intrinsic, physical property of its ostensible object (a wagon, a light beam) is incoherent. It can't be true in any possible world.
9. Aesthetic properties as crucial to scientific credibility. Zemach claims that the credibility of scientific theories depends on the theories having positive aesthetic properties, specifically the property of fitting into a totality that is monumental, sublime, simple, austere, coolly elegant, powerful and dramatic. He takes that to prove that these properties really do belong to the theories. Suppose we accept this claim. Does that mean we have to assume aesthetic properties in general are real, in particular when they are ascribed to persons, to art works, to ecosystems and the like? Can a skeptic reasonably doubt that beauty is a real property of pictures or poems or sunsets if she admits it is a property of theories? Could beauty have an essential connection with cognition (Platonists would like that!) but not with any of the countless other sorts of things we care about aesthetically?
Such thoughts lead one to question the properties Zemach credits scientific theories with. The simplicity and power of a theory seem to come down to such matter of fact properties that we might wonder if they are really aesthetic properties at all. By dramatic Zemach means the theory's ability to make unexpected predictions, and one may wonder whether the unexpectedness of the predictions is a property of the theory or just a de facto relation to investigators. If it's the latter it doesn't seem like an aesthetic property at all. Elegance certainly sounds like an aesthetic property, as do sublimity and austerity, but perhaps these are just metaphorical window dressing for the more down-to-earth properties of simplicity and explanatory power. Reflections such as these make many philosophers dubious about Zemach's quick and easy proof of the reality of aesthetic properties.
10. Zemach's argument about aesthetic properties of noumena. On p. 70 Zemach appears to contend that though our judgments about the non-aesthetic properties of things-in-themselves (noumena) may be false, our judgments about their aesthetic properties must be mostly true. Trees may not be really (noumenally) green or made of tree-rings because those properties may not be real properties of things-in-themselves. But they must be beautiful or ugly since these pure aesthetic properties apply to any ensemble of properties they may have (as noumena).
So far the argument maintains that noumena must be beautiful or ugly even if they have none of the non-aesthetic properties we commonly attribute to things we can experience (phenomena). But Zemach wants more. He purports to show that our aesthetic judgments are true of them: that, for instance, whatever noumenon is connected with the tree in the quad is (probably) beautiful if the tree in the quad is judged beautiful under the appropriate SOCs. This singular judgment, however, does not seem established by the mere fact that it must be beautiful or ugly. My knowledge that noumena have to have pure aesthetic properties, plus the knowledge that my pure aesthetic judgments of phenomena are mostly correct when the appropriate SOCs are satisfied, does not prove that the noumena have the same pure aesthetic properties. For consider, the beauty of anything supervenes on the thing's non-aesthetic properties. So the beauty of noumena depends on their real properties, not on the properties whatever phenomenal appearances they may produce – for these latter may not be properties of the noumena at all. Hence, so far as I can tell, Zemach's argument fails.
11. Gaudiness as an aesthetic property. “Gaudy” is normally understood as offensively brightly colored. The offense comes from the brilliance being disharmonious with the context, hence garish. The term can also be used for conspicuous costliness when that is deemed socially inappropriate, but let us set that to one side. “Gaudy” as applied to color is a fine example of an aesthetic term with both a descriptive and an evaluative component.
But does it also have a cross-categorial (metaphorical) component, as I like to think all descriptive aesthetic terms do? We naturally refer to gaudy colors as loud rather than as quiet, as aggressive rather than as amiable, as hostile rather than as friendly, as arrogant or self-centered rather than as respectful of others. And the set of similarities to which these belong seems essential. There could be nothing properly described as gaudiness that is quiet, amiable, friendly or respectful. When bright colors are judged positively they are said to be festive, jolly, lively, exuberant, brave, innocently high-spirited and so forth. For these reasons I think the term does fit the terms of my analysis.
The SOCs for gaudiness will include the basic ones for discernment of color in the range of the sample under discussion; the ones that concern harmony and disharmony of colors in the sample; and the ones concerning sensitivity to the cross-categorial similarities and openness to imaginative impressions of the colors actually having the properties themselves (loudness, hostility, etc.).
12. Anachronistic interpretations – the case of Giotto. “Anachronistic interpretation” is the term Zemach uses for a viewer responding to works from a context alien to the works themselves and assessing them accordingly. The SOCs assumed by the viewer are those that apply to that alien historical context. Hence if we imagine Norman Rockwell as a contemporary of Giotto his paintings look amazingly creative, way beyond Giotto in point of representational verisimilitude. They make Giotto look crude, at least technically. Giotto's figures are stiff compared with Raphael's too. Yet Giotto's works were highly innovative in his day, a great advance of naturalism so far as pose, modeling and expression went. They were also unprecedented in the clarity and force of the narratives they presented. On the strength of these qualities Giotto was celebrated as a giant among painters by his contemporaries and is now recognized as a world-historical figure in the history of Western painting.
Unquestionably Giotto was superior to his contemporaries and to the next several generations of painters in this ensemble of properties. Just as certainly he was inferior to best exemplars of those properties in the following century, from Masaccio on. Why hasn't that second fact demoted him? Even though he merits an A+ for creativity, why isn't his work given a mediocre B- for its aesthetic value overall?
The answer seems to be that we find more value in Giotto's work than such a judgment implies. A common way of supporting this view is to distinguish between technical and artistic excellence and to pass off the defects of his works as technical crudities, which are certainly present. His works are not technically as accomplished as Carparccio's or Domenico Feti's (to name just two later artists whose works I will show in class). But this will help only if overall Giotto's best painting is not only superb for its time but superb for all time. And that requires that it have NT aesthetic excellences of other sorts. What sorts can these be?
Here is a suggestion. The crudity of Giotto's technique enables him to express a humanly important attitude (a world view, some say) with greater force than a more accomplished technique can just because it is so accomplished. Giotto expresses an early Renaissance ideal attitude of spiritual piety that is unpretentiously dignified and down-to-earth. There is a Roman gravity to his figures and to his compositions. Mysticism is left behind and the world is sufficiently acknowledged, yet without the depth of devotion being impaired. This particular ideal attitude has never been so well expressed in visual art, and it seems impossible to express it so well with accomplished technique. It is this that entitles his work to a place in the permanent stratosphere of art.
If this is correct then it is easy to understand why Giotto's best work is regarded as a world-beater. Its special expressive excellence is united with major historical significance. Giotto made it far easier for later artists to go beyond him in technical respects and by his example to express ideal attitudes distinctive to their own times and personalities. Masaccio, Raphael, Michelangelo and others are linked by a common inheritance from Giotto.
13. The third Keats Principle. This principle is strikingly different from those concerning non-aesthetic scientific matters. So it is appropriate to be skeptical about it until and unless one can find strong reason for accepting it. Why should we adopt SOCs for a type of art that maximize the aesthetic value of that type? The more basic question, of course, concerns the full meaning of the principle. What exactly is implied by adopting maximizing (as I can call it) SOCs? Consider Zemach's example of novels. Zemach lists some SOCs for them, which are basically high-brow ones. Will judging the totality of novels by these SOCs result in a higher rating for them than judging that totality by low-brow ones? It will only if there are enough high-brow novels to raise the overall score in spite of the low-brow novels receiving a low mark. But if there are vastly more low-brow novels than high-brow ones, the highest overall rating would be given by low-brow SOCs. It is therefore strange that Zemach is confident that the judgment will favor high-brow SOCs. Evidently he has something else in mind than the overall value of the type. Perhaps he assumes that high-brow SOCs will result in more value levels than low-brow ones will. Or perhaps he thinks that high-brow SOC users will find more value in low-brow novels than low-brow SOC users will in high-brow novels. If that were true then the total value of the type might be higher judged in terms of high-brow SOCs. But are either of these suppositions plausible? I am not at all sure.
In any case in the lecture I propose an alternative principle, which justifies high-brow SOCs on the strength of ‘consensus of maximal discriminators' principles. That runs the risk of not being applicable, in that the required consensus might not be achievable. But it has the advantage, in my mind, of making the choice of the right SOC depend on principles of rationality and not on aesthetic value judgments. Note that the SOCs I have in mind include one about the consensus of optimal pleasure-discriminators, so pleasure is a factor. But pleasure is a psychological property, not an aesthetic value one.
I recognize that it is reasonable to want our types of art to be as valuable as possible. That is not in dispute. But I don't see any validity in rigging our assessments to obtain that result.
14. More on Giotto's relation to his context. Besides the factors mentioned above, others are worth noticing. (1) The works of a time are typically more harmonious with the other things in their context than later works would be. Giotto's works fit into his artistic context better than Carpaccio's or Raphael's could have done. Raphael's High Renaissance classicism would certainly have created a sensation in 14 th century Italy . If he had painted a Flight into Egypt in the style of The School of Athens it would have utterly astonished people. But it is hard to imagine that it could have been as much at home in that cultural climate. It would have been inappropriately “modern,” too heroic, too presumptuous and proud, without the degree of humility needed for Giotto's time. At least that is a reasonable hypothesis about its probable reception. (2) Another disharmony would be that no one could see how anyone could possibly have conjured up that style from what had preceded. It would be as if a craftsman of the time had produced a working steam-powered carriage. Giotto's style, though advanced, had enough in common with that of the most advanced of his older contemporaries to make his achievement understandable – wondrous, an act of genius, but still understandable. A Raphaelesque Flight into Egypt in 1320 would be objectively anachronistic, which is to say that it would seriously conflict with our understanding of the psychology of creation. A student of Giotto, say, producing such a work in 1320 would throw into confusion our ideas of how people learn to do what they do, an understanding that underlies our notion of history. Such a serious anachronism would certainly not make beautiful history!
These two disharmonies are examples of an unbeautiful relationship the works have to the rest of their context – which is the same as saying the context is intrinsically disharmonious in two ways.
15. A correction re. TP and NTP. In class on Thursday, April 24 th , I fell into an error that I want to correct. At one point I referred to Giotto's expression of a distinctive ideal attitude as a non -time-sensitive property (NTP) because, I said, it wasn't a property the works always had, independently of their context. That was wrong. Time-sensitivity concerns only what is needed to perceive the property. TPs are those that require well-founded empathy to experience for what they are. The expressiveness itself isn't ontologically linked to its time. I didn't make that blunder in #12 above. There I correctly called it a TP.
16. Unscrambling Zemach on “interpretations.” I find Zemach's ideas about interpretations quite challenging. There are a number of different cases that he wants to fit into the same category. If he can succeed he scores a point, since he consolidates a variety of cases under one unified theory. But does he succeed? Here are the varieties.
a. A production or performance of a work of art of such a sort that divides creative responsibility between composer or author and the persons who perform the work. Plays and movies are an obvious case, as are musical compositions for human performers. The author or composer produces a script or score, sometimes with auxiliary indications of the desired staging or performance, and the performer further specifies the presentation. We attribute the work to, say, Beethoven but we also acknowledge the performer, including the conductor and orchestra. In movies the division is so radical that it is hard to know how many hands should be acknowledged as co-creators. Our habitual naming of the director as the creator is only for simplicity.
b. A painter, printmaker or sculptor may employ assistants to do some of the work on the original, including the printing of prints or making of multiples of the sculpture. Often the contribution of these assistants involves aesthetic discrimination. This is obviously true of an assistant painting the animals in Rubens' paintings. The master shows where the animal is supposed to be, the general pose, etc., very likely by way of a sketch, but in the end many aspects of the final image are invented by the assistant. The master approves the result, to be sure. Similarly with Rodin's assistants working on his sculpture (even aside from those making marble copies of bronzes). Skilled printers make a large creative contribution to elaborate contemporary prints (by Jasper Johns, for instance). The artist could not do so well himself.
c. A critic gives a modern interpretation of a work from another time, as in the case of the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet by Ernest Jones and others. This is not a requirement of production or performance or completion of the original. Rather it purports to be a deeper interpretation of the original, one that gets at a layer of hidden meaning not recognizable by either the playwright or the original audience.
d. A copyist may produce a copy of a painting or sculpture, intending either a perfect duplicate or a near approximation, in the latter case with or without a creative contribution.
In normal parlance the enterprises in a and c are referred to as interpretations, those in b and d are not. But Zemach is right at least to the extent that something fairly called interpretation is going on in b. The assistant normally tries to create within the limits of what the artist intended and what fits into the artistic context. So an interpretive element is there. But the specifics of the assistant's creation were never precisely envisaged by the artist, only accepted after the fact (not necessarily always happily!), so the creative part is not interpretation. The assistant need not suppose that she is doing what the master would have done, or even what the master would like best.
A good example of the independence assistants sometimes showed is Leonardo's angel in a painting by his master, Verrocchio. Art historians recognize this as Leonardo's work because it is such a departure from Verrocchio's. It is not all that discordant with the rest of the painting, but it betokens a different artistic personality. See the illustration above. His master was so impressed that reputedly he gave up painting and stuck to sculpture from that time on. If that's true, he evidently got more than he intended.
Another essential point is that although creative and critical interpretations are interpretations, they are clearly quite different sorts. The critic purports to give us truth about the work. His interpretation is supposed to state the real meaning and value of the work. A pianist's performance of a Beethoven sonata is supposed to display or present the sonata within the parameters of the score and the ongoing performance tradition. Within those parameters the performer displays her own musical personality. She strives for musical excellence in the aspects of performance that go beyond simple compliance with the score. Thereby she means to show Beethoven's work to good advantage and also own artistry. Her choices reflect aesthetic judgments, of course, but her playing does not state them or make any claims about how good her way of performing the work is compared to other performers' best efforts. That is not the sort of thing a performance could do.
In my view there is no reason to call the copies in d interpretations, whether they are intended as perfect duplicates or as near approximations, and even if one of the latter is a creative departure from the original. Of course like anything else, it could be an interpretation if the context were right, for instance, if the copyist meant to produce what the artist intended but failed to achieve. The copy could then be said to be an interpretation of the artist's intention. But that special case is not representative of the class.
17. Zemach vs. JB on aesthetic properties. Zemach's idea of desire-tinged properties is much more plausible for PAPs than for DAPs like hot pink or fast/slow lines. DAPs do not seem to be in and of themselves tinged with desire. We can recognize them without desire or aversion. Yet they seem not to be merely nonaesthetic empirical properties. Some other account of them is therefore needed.
I have proposed that we take part of their content to refer to a cross-categorial similarity in that the property itself consists of a disposition in the object to cause an impression of such a similarity under optimal conditions. (I need not spell these out yet again!) There is a peculiarity about the similarity, namely that no exact similarity is possible, due to the discrepancy of the categories in question. No color's warmth can be exactly similar to that of a radiator or day in July. The similarity is necessarily a rough or vague one. But impressions are that way.
But this is not all that figures in a DAP, in my view. When we see a color as warm the impression produced is of its being really warm, although not strictly, coherently calorific. We don't see the red leaves on Matisse's curtains as literally hot to touch. The color seems somehow impossibly, warm-energetic-seething without there being an coherent explanation of that appearance. There is something like dreamlike or paradoxical about the impression, as there is in strong metaphor.
Zemach's counterpart to this last is what he says about the “anthropomorphic” character of some aesthetic properties, pp. 104-5. We see things with certain such properties “as manifesting an attitude to a satisfaction or frustration of desire.” A line may be “seen as striving, ascending…becoming carefree..” and so forth. I agree that some imaginative ways of seeing are anthropomorphic. But not all are. I need not see swift lines as embodying desires to move swiftly. In fact I think we should restrain our imaginations from over-anthropomorphizing. A good indication of the anthropomorphic is when the term for the aesthetic property literally applies to distinctively human purposes, as in the case of “yearning,” which is often appropriate to romantic music. Vivid colors, on the other hand, are not properly anthropomorphized. It is enough that they seethe with unspecific energies. Wholly physical energies suffice.
Human actions and art works are replete with expressive properties which presuppose desires, of course. A pianist's delicate phrasing expresses the desire to turn the phrase delicately. A painter like Cezanne expresses various attitudes. We know a lot about what he prefers and detests from his work. These indications of the person's desires or aversions are not themselves aesthetic properties, however. They are straightforward empirical properties. The delicacy of the phrasing itself, on the other hand, is an aesthetic property but a sub-anthropomorphic one. The cross-categorial similiarities it evokes are those of a ripple of water, a spider's web, etc.
26. Plato's dialogue Hippias Major, which concerns the definition of beauty.
The one surviving Platonic dialogue that discusses the definition of beauty (or 'fineness') has been downplayed in TOB, relegated to a mere footnote. This is mainly because it is so inconclusive and also because it offers nothing that is not included in the dialogues. Still, if anyone is curious about it, I recommend that you go to the Wikipedia site for it where there is good summary.
27. Notes following Prof. Ramachandran's guest lecture on mathematical beauty.
a. Here is the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem regarded as particularly beautiful by Prof. R.
I have added the third diagram on the right to show how the right triangles can be swung up to make the equivalent of the mirror image of the first (left-hand) diagram. The proof by subtraction, as the first proof is called, becomes thereby the proof by rearrangement. Both are highly intuitive, hence may be called beautifully suitable to the untutored intellect.
b. Part of the appeal of mathematics seems to be that starting from something so basic and familiar as counting we are irresistably led on to more and more complexity. Counting leads to calculating, to adding, subtracting and dividing; the integers we use in simple calculations lead to an infinite set of integers, and also to fractions, which lead to irrationals and so on and on and on. The world of numbers is well-ordered and highly integrated -- algebra with geometry, for instance. And there are practical applications of advanced mathematics to the world, to science and technology. So it's terrifically potent.
A question of interest is whether anything in the world of mathematics is ugly. There seem to be plenty of things that are lackluster. That much seems entailed by praise for the special beauties, e.g., the golden section and all of its progeny. This is a point I'll be talking with Niranjan about. I'll report back.
**********************11/4/09
One of the references Prof. Ramachandran just sent me is to a film to be aired soon about the Mathematics Olympiad competitions over the past few years. Here is a quote from the many, many comments of the contestants. This is by a U.S. team member from Puerto Rico.
I like everything about mathematics. I appreciate the elegance of proofs, especially particularly elegant ones, but I also appreciate proofs that are not generally considered very elegant. Just to lay something out by brute force, I feel like just the sheer power of it is also really beautiful. — Sherry Gong
You can access a trailer of the film that gives a fine view of the world of these students and their mentors at:
http://www.hardproblemsmovie.com/
The film will be shown on WETADT 10 Nov at 8am, repeat at 5pm and on Nov 11 at 3am.
******************11/5/09
Another link Prof. Ramachandran recommended concerns the truly amazing origami that mathematic wizards are producing from a single sheet of paper. Here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z61VaUdk_Uo&feature=related
I'll show a snippet of it in class today and comment on my mixed view of the art works as a case of mathematical beauty.
28. Problems of applying U&V or other criteria to natural organisms.
Here are some comparisons that figured in our class discussions of criteria of beauty.
29. See the questions following the paintings mentioned in the table of contents in ##1 and 24.
30. Color temperature literal and aesthetic. Colors famously are seen as hot or cool and a number of other things. The first thing to be clear about in the aesthetic appearance of color is not to confuse it, say hotness of certain pinks, with actual temperature as measured scientifically. The real and the aesthetic hotness are in fact almost completely inverted. Here is the scientific story about color temperature. Go to the Wikipedia "color temperature" site for explanation.
Colors that are hot in aesthetic terms (hot-looking) are physically the coolest, and those that are coolest-looking are physically the hottest. So please, never, never confuse the aesthetic appearances with physical hotness. Yet the look of colors is virtually universal among fully color-sighted human percipients, so it counts as an intersubjectively valid aesthetic appearance. In the chart above the scale of physical temperature runs from 1000K to 10,000K in the arc across the colors.
Synesthesia. Another mistake to avoid is confusing aesthetic appearances, commonly called "crossmodal" perceptual effects, with synesthesia. Synesthesia is a deviant condition whereby subjects see things in one modality as having properties in another without there being any crossmodal resemblance between them. Synesthetic perceptual linkages are in that sense arbitrary. Synesthetes vary enormously as to the linkages they experience. Numbers are seen to be colored (often in "another space" and colors are experienced sonically as well as visually. Psychologists are busily investigating the neurological factors producing these illusions. Since they aren't based on crossmodal resemblance they do not play any role in the theory of beauty.
Color symbolism. A third caution about aesthetic properties is this. There are many entirely speculative claims about associations between colors and other properties that are culturally dependent, not stemming directly fromthe character of the properties themselves. For example a website on colors, gives out the following wisdom:
http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html
"Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven...In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity."
There is likely some faint and indirect connection of some of these symbolic meanings with aesthetic properties of the colors, but for the most part the symbolism is arbitrary and certainly not intersubjectively universal.
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