PHIL 332 Philosophy of Beauty -- Fall 2009 -- Materials -- Methods - Lecture Outlines (as of August 30, 2009)

Instructor: John H. Brown Office: Skinner 1118B. Tel. 301-405-5702. Email: jhbrown@umd.edu. Office Hours: TTh 2:30-3:30 and by appointment. Classroom: Skinner 1115. Class meetings: TTH 12:30-1:45.

Books

1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 1999. (to be purchased)
2. John H. Brown, Theories of Beauty from Plato to the Present, in reduced form, referred to simply as Beauty hereafter. Free on the web. Go to instructor's home page at www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/jhbrown and click on the relevant items: Beauty (PHIL 332) Intro/Part II, Part III, etc. I recommend that you print out the main materials. You may find using legal size paper is an advantage in doing this.
3. Eddy Zemach, Real Beauty, 1997. (to be purchased)

Supplementary Materials (some items will have to be posted under restricted-use conditions as they become relevant)

1. In Beauty Additions (see table of contents in this file)

2. In Beauty Notes (See table of contents in this file)

3. In Class discussion folder. (See section on class discussion below)

Character of the course

1. Presuppositions

Some basic familiarity with aesthetic criticism in some cultural domain (art, music, literature, etc.) and in life at large.
Interest in discovering a theoretical basis for aesthetic criticism
Interest in historical and contemporary theories of beauty and other aesthetic values.

2. Basic problems of the course in a few nutshells

a. Is beauty (and aesthetic value in general) an objective reality, or is it merely "in the eye of the beholder"?
Common formulations of the negative answer to this question:
- Everyone has his own idea of beauty.
- Beauty is entirely a personal (or individual) matter.
- Beauty is entirely a matter of feeling.
- Judgments of beauty are entirely subjective.

b. If beauty is an objective reality, what sort of reality is it, and how can it be known? In particular how is its existence related to the aesthetic pleasure felt by those who appreciate it?

c. If beauty is not an objective reality, is there any rational basis for our aesthetic preferences?

3. Ways of addressing the problems

a. Collecting the bits of knowledge we have of the concept of beauty and of its most compelling instances, positive
and negative. Fashioning a coherent account of the basic "logic" of beauty.
b. Studying the attempts by philosophers past and present to produce a credible theory of beauty.
c. Working out what conditions beauty would have to satisfy in order to be a genuine reality.
d. Reviewing what is known about the world to see whether those conditions are in fact satisfied.
e. Exploring ways in which even a subjective beauty might be more or less rational.

4. Course requirements

a. Mid-term test on the reading material and lectures. 25 %
b. Final exam primarily on the theoretical material. 35%
c. Paper ca. 5-7 pages on a topic within the scope of the description immediately following. 25%
d. Class participation and perhaps a quiz or two. 15% (See explanation under that title below)

Paper Assignment

1. Subject: Find something you regard as really very beautiful and believe that fair judges of beauty would admire too, given conditions like Hume's (see the reading on this subject in the core text, part III). Then set to work detailing what is beautiful about it, saying what beautiful properties it has. To be convincing your description will have to aesthetically sensitive, not just a factual account of color, form, etc. Also it must not be just a rave, but be genuinely informative of the aesthetic merits of the thing. Cover all the aspects relevant to the high rating you give it. Acknowledge any downside, that is, any properties it has that are unbeautiful (less than beautiful, not necessarily ugly) and explain why they don't interfere with your appreciation and shouldn't interfere with that of anyone else who meets Hume's conditions.

The point is for you to show what you can do on the level of practical criticism, which is an important function for any aspiring philosopher of beauty.

I strongly advise you to pick an example for which you can find a good critical appreciation, and that you cite the critic's observations and comment upon them. That gives you a valuable head start without limiting your initiative. Also, review the material on aesthetic properties as a guide to the types of properties that are relevant to aesthetic value.

It's essential that your choice be something that can be displayed so I can see (or hear or read, etc.) what you are experiencing as you write about it. Aesthetic descriptions are far more enlightening when the thing described is present to the reader.

2. Length: Not less than 5 pages, preferably not more than 8.

3. Due date: Tuesday, Dec.1.

Class attendance at and attention to lectures and discussions

No laptops, no text messaging. Along with many of my colleagues I am adopting a policy forbidding operating laptops, messaging on cell phones, and in general the use of other such gear once the class has begun. The same goes for doing crosswords or reading printed materials instead of attending to the class presentation. This leaves note taking, listening to the lecture and other students' comments, and entering into discussion as the only forms of allowable intellectual behavior. We shouldn't have to lay down these rules but enough students have become accustomed to violating them that it is necessary to do so if the classes are going to be fruitful.

Class participation via written comments

Because of the size of the class and the limited class time, it just isn't possible for everyone to participate enough in class or for their participation to be properly evaluated on the basis of that real-time participation. Often a person isn't satisfied that his or her point has been fully appreciated in the time given to it in class. Or a good idea may come to mind only after a class is over. Some students are diffident about speaking up in class at all, though they have perfectly good ideas. Since there is significant class participation component in the course, some way is needed to ensure against loss from any of these circumstances.

The sensible remedy is written comments, observations, criticisms, interpretations, and questions submitted throughout the semester. The vehicle is a combination of email and web posting. Students email such items to me (jhbrown@umd.edu) and I post them in the web folder with the title 332Discussions. Often I edit them a bit and I always respond to them in writing. Students have the option of responding to my response. That's philosophy! The outcome is a fund of comments shared with the whole class, achieving more personal participation and more recognition of each by all.

There is no statute of limitations on topics to discuss. The truisms in Beauty I or the material in Scarry, for example, can be discussed as late in the course as you like. All topics are on the table at all times, as they should be, since later stages may prompt thoughts about earlier subjects. Of course many early topics are pretty well used up after a while, and mere repetition doesn't earn you any points. Some new angle is needed but often there is one to be found if one looks -- and thinks -- hard.

Written discussion items are especially important for those who don't speak up much in class. But even those who do are expected to contribute to the discussion file. The minimum participation over the course of the semester for each student will be five items. More are encouraged, especially for those who are mainly silent observers in class.

In the past there was a strong tendency for students to wait until the eleventh hour before posting their discussion items. That loses a lot of the value. Hence the following additional distribution rule: At least one written comment is due from each student in the first three weeks and another before the mid-semester test.

5. Weekly assignments

Aug. 31: Beauty: Introduction and Part I

Sept. 7: Scarry, On Beauty, Part One, "On beauty and being wrong".

Sept. 14: Beauty: Part II, through "Plato's theory...selected topics"

Sept. 21: Beauty: Part II, "Applications" and Scarry, On Beauty, Part Two: "On beauty and being fair."

Sept. 28: Beauty: Part II, remainder (from"Plato's theory of beauty in historical context) and excerpt from Kirwan, Beauty, Ch. 2, "Beauty/God." (In Add-ons)

Oct. 5: Continuation of the preceding, plus the various materials in Beauty-Add-ons, Beauty Notes and 332 Discussions.

Oct. 12: Continuation of the preceding, plus the various materials in Beauty-Add-ons, Beauty Notes and 332 Discussions.

Oct. 19: Review and Mid-term Test, Thursday, Oct. 22.

Oct. 26: Beauty: Part III, Preface through discussion of color.

Nov. 2: Beauty: Part III, Hutcheson's Theory and Hume's criteria.

Nov. 9: Real Beauty, Ch. 2, "Subjectivist Aesthetics."

Nov. 16: Real Beauty, Ch. 3, "Aesthetic Realism."

Nov. 23: Real Beauty, Ch. 4, "Taste and Time."

Nov. 30: Real Beauty, Ch. 5, "The Ontology of Aesthetic Properties." Term paper due, Tuesday, Dec. 1.

Dec. 7: Real Beauty catch-up and review.

Final Examination: Friday, Dec. 19, 1:30-3:30 p.m. in the classroom.

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Lecture Outlines (to be revised a week before they apply)

Lecture 1

Prima facie reasons for doubting the reality of beauty

Long history of disagreement about beauty, individual and cultural.
Conspicuous differences of aesthetic taste.
Difficulty of making another agree (or enabling another to see) that something is/is not beautiful.

Prima facie reasons for believing in the reality of beauty

Obvious cases of beauty/ugliness exist, even if many cases are disputable.
Aesthetic education seems to improve taste by broadening it and sharpening it.
Panels of expert judges are commonly used where aesthetic decisions are needed.

Bad reasons for espousing aesthetic subjectivism

The following are common reasons (sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not) for the popularity of subjectivism. In each case a little thought should convince you that the reason has no logical force. That is, even if the facts alleged are as claimed, they provide no evidence that subjectivism is true.

1. Diplomacy (tact, kindness, gentility; desire for public harmony)

2. Pedagogical benefit (overlaps with diplomacy)

3. Aesthetic inertia

4. Aesthetic loyalty

5. Aesthetic freedom (resistance to aesthetic dictation)

6. The demands of creativity (finding one's own beauty)

7. The irreducibility of beauty to a set of rules

8. The unattainability of absolute certainty regarding beauty

What would be good reasons for aesthetic subjectivism? (subjectivism as a last resort)

Lesson: the enormous complexity of issues about beauty.

Truisms about Beauty

1. Beauty-ascriptions are seriously commendatory.

2. Beauty is an aesthetic value among other aesthetic values.

3. Dependence (supervenience) of beauty-ascriptions
Beauty depends on beautiful properties

4. Some beauty-ascriptions are aspect specific.

5. Some beauty-ascriptions are overall or all things considered.

6. All beauty-ascriptions carry an implied relativity to a standard.

7. Some beauty-ascriptions are relative to a limited domain; others are not.

8. Differences of threshold for ascribing beauty are ultimately inessential. (All genuine questions about beauty can be answered without reference to them.)

9. Beauty is an ideal (Note here the ambiguity of "absolute beauty.")

Consequences:
a. beauty judgments are, in a sense, always (at bottom) comparative.
b. Beauty-values (+/-) lie on a continuum (rank-order) of beauty-to-ugliness

Contested truisms: points of contention

10. (obj.) Things are more or less beautiful without respect to variable human views, i.e., are or are not worthy of of admiring contemplation. "Beautiful to me (you, them)" is always reducible to "believed to be beautiful by me (you, them).

10. (subj.) Things are more or less beautiful only relatively to human views -- only beautiful to this or that person. All beauty claims carry an implicit "to me (you, them)" that is not reducible to "believed to be..." No basis exists for rational decision applying to all persons.

What is a theory of beauty? What must such a theory do ?

- define beauty and other sorts of aesthetic value, or provide a way to convey the idea.

- set forth normative criteria of beauty.

- set forth epistemic criteria of judgments of beauty.

- thereby facilitate aesthetic recognitions & judgments and the understanding of aesthetic experience & reality.

How does one get started in building a theory?

a) Gather obvious truths about beauty-ascriptions (truisms)

b) Sketch the general conceptual landscape surrounding beauty: 

- relate beauty to aesthetic and artistic value

- distinguish beauty from ethical and practical value

- distinguish aesthetic questions from psychological/sociological ones

- relate aesthetic theory to aesthetic judgments 

Consider historical attempts to produce a theory of beauty.

- study key texts that set forth theory

- learn the philosophical system presupposed by these texts.

- investigate ways of perfecting the theories .

Course Material Website:

http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/jhbrown  

Lecture 2

http://www.casa-in-italia.com/artpx/moma/moma.htm

Introduction to Plato's theory of beauty

Radical realism about beauty

Beauty as a Platonic "Form" or "Idea"

-----Particulars and their properties

-----Abstracts and their properties

Abstractness and existence (real although abstract)

-----Being real = being the subject of affirmative truths

-----Abstracts as timeless & not strictly in space

Result: a two-world conception

----Particulars, with their properties and relations

----Forms with their properties and relations

Abstracts and knowability

----Clearly conceiving as a kind of knowledge

----As in geometry and mathematics

Instantiation or exemplification

---- The key relation between Forms and particulars

----Forms as “participating” in their instances

Hierarchy of generality

----More and less general Forms: e.g., genera and species

----High generality no barrier to full reality

Concrete particulars

----Completely specific properties

----Location and history included

----Concreteness the opposite of abstractness

Hierarchy of beauty

----In general the more general the more beautiful

The beauty of Forms

----Purity, changelessness, knowability (lucidity)

Full vs. perfect instances of Forms

----Plato's tendency to confuse these two

----A clear instance of humanity vs. a perfect human

Many questions remain!

Lecture 3: Scarry on general aspects of beauty

1. Beauty and begetting, replication in diverse modalities

----Cp. examples from Rushdie and Dubuffet, B'ty-Adds #1

----Extraordinary diversity of "replications" of beauty

Which are basic, which derivative?

----Extraordinary diversity of beauties bound up with the replications

2. Truisms about the experience of beauty, extracted from Scarry's Part I

1. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire for more...

2. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire to celebrate... and to share...

3. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire to set off the beauty as effectively as possible...

4. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire to preserve and replicate and....

5. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire to know the beauty more intimately...

6. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire to make oneself beautiful...

7. The pleasure of beauty produces the desire to discover even greater beauties.

These are both psychological tendencies and rational desires.
Questions: are the opposite desires ever rational?

3. Scarry on errors about beauty

A theoretical error: interpreting replication as "mere" (i.e. defective) imitation

Practical errors about beauty.

A. Underestimations of beauty – in the extreme, false negatives
The palm tree case (stage one)

B. Overestimations of beauty – in the extreme, false positives:
"Lilies that fester" case

Odysseus on Nausicaa's uniqueness

C. Corrections in beauty-perception
The palm tree case (stage two)

4. Connection of errors with the previous truisms about the beauty-experience

Beauty-pleasures and desires creating illusions of beauty
a. Exaggerating beautiful aspects
b. Overlooking unbeautiful aspects
c. Imagining unexamined aspects to be beautiful
d. Exaggerating overall beauty

Ugliness-experiences and aversions creating illusions of unbeauty
(counterparts of a-d)

Blandness-experiences and indifference creating illusions of absence of both B'ty and un-B'ty.
Failure to perceive the properties that are b'ful or unb'ful

Scarry on beauty and particularity (individuality) p. 18

----Tradition of this beginning with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Partial validity of the claim:

-------no general rules guarantee beauty

-------beauty-making properties are partly non-conceptual

Proust's particular book vs. a composite idea of a good book

Scarry's particular palm vs. a composite idea of a palm

What is wrong with the composite idea?

----Can't be seen (heard, smelled, tasted, touched)

----Specific properties are lost

----Context is lost

Limitations of the saying about beauty and particularity

----rules and concepts may guarantee good-lookingness

----sensory presence, not just particularity, is a key factor

----beauty of abstract things must not be ruled out

Lecture 4

Odysseus and Nausicaa again

----Beauty as sacred

----Beauty as unprecedented

----Beauty as life-saving

----Beauty as inciting deliberation and second thoughts (the generative power of beauty)

Scarry on Matisse's palm trees

----Abstracting palm-frond patterns (arcs, radials, stripes)

----Associating qualities of palm scenes with them: esp. lighting effects

-------striped light, light-shimmer, light-shimmy

----Searching Matisse's paintings for similar patterns even if not explicitly palm-connected

----Associating these patterns with palms & palmy images

-------Even across big discrepancies

How valid is Scarry's method?

----Why always palms instead of lattices?

----Or decorative designs?

----How solid is the evidence that palms are the source, i.e., are implicitly referred to?

----Should works of 1940s be used to interpret works of 1920s?

----Is Scarry forcing more unity on the works than they have?

Further fancies

----Palm-tree as the painter's brush

----Violin bow as painter's brush

----Inner life of the mind gambit

----The metaphysical, other-world "gravity" of beauty

Plasticity, elasticity, volatility, openness, limitlessness of beauty/aesthetic pleasure

----Is this universal, or is it Scarry's special fancy? Is our experience so uniform?

----Is the pleasure taken in beauty really inexhaustible or limitless?

----Is our response to beauty always changing?

Beauty and truth

How is the pleasure of beauty connected with love of truth?

-------What sense of "true" is in play here?

------- How scrupulous are we about truth when we are bent on aesthetic enjoyment?

How selective?

How honest?

Lecture 5: A Classical Theory of Beauty

Plato's core ideas about beauty reviewed

Plato's myth (in the Phaedrus) of disembodied souls seeing the Forms, including that of Beauty Itself

Lecture 6

I. Old business: the aesthetic potential of sensory modes

a. What distinguishes sight and hearing from the other sensory modes?

b. What relevance has that to beauty?

Kinds of beauty (beautiful properties)

Levels of beauty (very tricky)

C. What relevance has that to art?

Joris Huysmans' "evidence" - how convincing is it?

Actual artworld differences - are they arbitrary?

II. Plato's Symposium and the Ascent of the Soul to Beauty Itself

What categories of beauty has Diotima omitted?

What sort of "love" is it that Plato is advocating?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyOf_L4cNHc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReW9uUYm-DA

Lecture 7

1. A few notes re. scent

1. Scent-perception's temporal dimension: a "top note" comes across early, a "middle note" after a moment and a "dry-out" note last, like an aftertaste.

2. Sample descriptions of scents, showing their compound character: B'tyNotes #8

Ambergris: various nuances of woody, dry balsamic, somewhat tobacco-like notes.
Angelic root oil: earthy, somewhat musk-like, peppery, aromatic odor with a green, spicy top note.
Anise oil: very powerful, sweet, herbaceous and lively.
Artemisia oil: very bright, lively, somewhat herbaceous, spicy odor.
Asafoetida resinoid: very intense onion, garlic-like odor.
Basil oil: very bright, lively, somewhat herbaceous, spicy odor.

2. Scarry on beauty and being fair (1)

1. Scarry against beauty's critics - how much truth is there in the two sides of the controversy?

A1. Looking at beauty can be injurious. i. distracting, ii. demeaning, 'reifying'
A2. Looking at beauty can be benign or even constructive: often has no effect; often leads to protection, preservation
B1. Even pure aesthetic admiration can be injurious to beautiful persons-- and to unbeautiful persons.
B2. Emphasis on beauty can lead to recognition of other beauties, e.g. of personality or character.
C1. Cultivating b'ty often upstages more important values: can lead to neglect of health, skill, etc.
C2. Cultivating b'ty tends to encourage cultivating other values - moral, intellectual, bodily.
D1. Emphasis on super-beauty leads to a star-system in which everyone else is a failure; unearned beauty deserves no credit; only accomplishments deserve credit.
D2. B'ful persons are as worthy of being valued for their beauty as intelligent persons are for their intelligence.
D2.1 Many human beauties are the result of human effort, hence are accomplishments.

Granted, there are abuses in aesthetic behavior. But that is true of all types of behavior: intellectual, religious, athletic, artistic...

Logical note: Is Scarry right to say that beauty's critics get caught in contradictions?

Or do they only deliver half-truths?

3. Selected topics in Plato's theory

Lecture 8: Plato's normative aesthetics

General constrast between "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" values (some examples)

Lecture 9: Scarry on beauty and being fair (2) -- Beauty and justice (86ff.)

a. Pursuing truth, goodness, justice... and beauty are all unself-interested endeavors.
(How true is this?)
b. Conceiving something to be true, good, b'ful is conceiving it to be impersonally true, good, b'ful.
(Is this a truism?)
c. Appreciating beauty is to see the b'ful thing as "alive" (vital, energetic) and to feel oneself vitalized, made more alive, by it.
(How many different relations does Scarry include in this?
d. Appreciating justice is similar to appreciating beauty in this respect.
How exactly does justice involve vitality? Is an unjust power relation any less "alive" than a just one?
Is vitality being mistaken for mutual respect and mutual regard?
Does the etymology of "fair" establish a conceptual relation?
e. Beauty and justice are similarly "symmetrical"
Apparent counter-examples for beauty
Diversity of types of "symmetry"
Can consistency be substituted for symmetry?
Apparent counter-examples for justice
Danger of cherry-picking analogies to suit one's preferred political system

f. Scarry's example of the Athenian trireme: 'justice made perceptible.'

How applicable is this? What aspects are just, which are problematic?
Is the trireme a better embodiment of justice than the phalanx or cavalry?
Do the beauties Scarry cites prove anything?

g. Does the pervasiveness and accessibility of natural beauty tend to promote social equality in societies or egalitarianism as a political ideal?

The I got plenty of nothin' line.

h. Radical decentering: experiencing beauty enables us to transcend self-interest (see a and b above).

How radical a decentering is involved?

i. Opiated adjacency: Does this assure that the pleasure is proportional to the actual beauty?

 
Does it assure that the pleasure is not pathological?

j. Are there aesthetic analogues of perfect, imperfect and procedural justice? If so, do they support the idea that dedication to beauty makes people more dedicated to social justice?

k. Rationally self-regarding choice behind the veil of ignorance favors equal access to beauty; does this imply anything about choice of what natural beauty there should be?

l. Is it irrational not to care whether future generations enjoy beautiful things? Or is it merely unsociable?

m. Ditto for caring whether nature is beautiful when there is no one to enjoy it?

Overall conclusion: Scarry's logic is affected by her desire to persuade us to dedicate ourselves to both beauty and social justice. That's a laudable aim, but the two values cannot be reduced to one.

Lecture 10: Plato's theory of Forms confronted: How to make it credible? How to apply it to beauty?

Questions about Plato's basic ontology

Questions about the ontology of beauty (assuming it is supervenient and admits of degrees) 

Questions about Plato's basic epistemology

Questions about knowledge of beauty

Major questions about Plato's normative theory of beauty

Master Question for Platonists: Is there a property that meets all of Plato's conditions for Beauty Itself?

Lecture 11. The Post-Platonic heritage: Aristotle

Aristotle's leading ideas

a. Universals (essences) do not exist apart from instances.

b. Deep acquaintance with particulars more instructive than very abstract thought.

c. The chief forms of beauty are order, symmetry, organic unity, and full realization of potentiality of a species or type.

d. Levels of potentiality and actuality.

e. Beauty associated with the fullest, clearest, and most pleasant sensory or intellectual cognition of the worthiest objects.

f. Lesser precision of ethical and aesthetic values than mathematical or scientific values.

g. More specific value-principles better known than general value-principles.

h. "Good" has different senses when applied to different categories.

Questions for Aristotelians

  1. Is beauty an intrinsic or a response-dependent property?
  2. Are order, symmetry and definiteness beauty-defining or only beauty-making?
  3. Is the pleasure of the best-conditioned eye (ear, mind) in contemplating a thing either beauty-making or beauty-defining? Or is it only there only a contingent connection?
  4. How is beauty related to the good (not just good conduct): do the two coincide, or only overlap?
  5. Is beauty strictly unitary? Or self-exemplifying?

Application of Aristotelian ideas of the animal kingdom

Beauty within a given species = actualization of essential potentiality of that species

Beauty of species A among other species is determined by A's level of potentiality relative to the others.

This seems consistent with evolution, though Aristotle didn't think species evolved.

A proposed set of criteria for beauty of species (Beauty-Notes #11)

Points given on an animal's scorecard

  1. Points for structural beauty and beauty of action
  2. Points for adaptation to difficult conditions
  3. Points for adaptation to a wide range of conditions (versatility)
  4. Points for structural features suggestive of higher cognition and feelings

Extreme complexity of the beauty of animals compared with works of art or artifacts of any kind.

Examples of arguably superior and inferior animals

Horses (Judith Forbis) and sheep (B'ty Notes) as examples

Great complications, obviously!! See B'ty Notes ##10-14.

Aristotle's rebuttal of Plato re. the beauty of representations or "copies": Poetics

Beautiful form, beautiful content are both possibilities.

Lecture 12. Plotinus on Beauty Itself

1. The elusiveness of Beauty: the need for a "remoter principle"

  1. Beauty not reducible to symmetry and charm of colors (sounds, textures, etc.)
  2. The beauty of (certain) "simple" things
  3. The beauty of moral and intellectual actions or productions
  4. Symmetry can be ugly (dull? or worse?)
  5. The beauty of the "One" (the Intellectual Principle, the Ultimate Reality)
  6. Beauty as unity (where some Ideal-Form is present):
    1. of things with parts,
    2. of things unified by a unifying quality (a stone, a color, fire, light)
  7. The "One" as the source of all being and beauty
  8. The great chain of being

2. The beauty of abstract or mental things

The idea in the mind of the artist is more beautiful than the art work itself

3. How to experience the higher beauties

  1. Develop intellect, moral virtue, spiritual purity
  2. Study higher beauties intently
  3. Cultivate appreciation of their beauty

4. What reasons can be found for ranking abstract things above concrete particulars in regard to beauty? (Interpreting neoplatonism)

The appeal of the abstract. The dream of bodiless purity

5. The difficulty of justifying the greater beauty of types, including laws, as opposed to instances: questioning neoplatonism

Lecture 13: Neoplatonism (cont.)

Is the whole of reality less inspiring if the great chain of beauty is given up?

Kirwan's idea of a Neoplatonic yearning lying within our experience of beauty: Neoplatonism psychologized (See Beauty Adds #3)

Traditional metaphysical idea of beauty is of something divine, like a force, emanation, source, inner nature:

Kirwan keeps only the psychological aspect of this. Beauty Itself is resolved into:

1. A sense of earthly beauty being a distant sign of utter or absolute perfection.

2. A sense of Beauty Itself being incomparably more beautiful than sensible beauty of any sort, of Beauty Itself and only Beauty Itself being purely beautiful.

3. A sense of Beauty itself being far more beautiful than any invisible beauty that we can conceive of, as in mathematics or other abstract domains of knowledge.

4. An emotional tone of distress or melancholy at the vast distance between the beauties we can conceive of and Beauty itself.

5. A yearning to transcend the limitations of our natures

Kirwan's Claim: even in our ordinary experience of the beauty of a person or flower or theorem, lying at a deep level, is a sense of an unattainable, ungraspable beauty which the beautiful particular only dimly reflects.

Quotes from Kirwan:

Are Plotinus and Kirwan right about our experience of beauty? (See Beauty Notes #16)

Empirically we know that we can never achieve all of this optimality.

Perhaps we cannot form a clear conception of what such an optimal life would be like?

But would we not be abundantly fulfilled by a life that falls far short of perfect optimality?

If so, can it be reasonable to regret not attaining more? Is that not a form of irrational obsession?

Isn't the demand for transcendence a perverse ambition?

 

Lecture 14: Questions for the midterm test, with additional suggestions of relevant things to consider

1. Plato has reservations about the beauty of concrete particulars and especially about sensory appearances being called beautiful. What are these reservations and how fair are they? Disentangle the insights from the overkill.

Things to think of. Illusions (unreliability), perspectivity, transience, peripheral blurring/loss of hue, depth-blurring/doubling, hyper-particularity. But also think of our many ways of transcending these limitations by careful use of our cognitive abilities. We do need to accept the fact of residual illusions. But what follows from this fact about the beauty of perceptible things as opposed to abstractions? Does it mean appearances are not beautiful? (Show microphotos)

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=27

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? Will this case survive the objections in the references given in Beauty Notes #4?

Things to think of. Candidate beauties: the clarity of the basic criterion of fairness, its applicability to a wide range of examples; the central role of rationality to the choice from the original position. Scarry thinks it has an analogue in beauty, that beauty is “fair.” Part of this is more plausible than the rest. Consider Gitlin's or BENSON's objections at the end of Beauty Notes #4.

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.

Things to think of. Unquestionably each species has a genetic endowment and an environmental niche. Potentiality in itself is value neutral but the relevant potentialities in the present context are ones that contribute to flourishing in the strong sense of being constituents of it, that is, as being beautiful properties. Such properties are the capabilities of efficacious movement, digestion, perception, problem-solving and the like that are found in mature specimens of a species. Realization of these potentialities will depend not just on endowment but nurture and circumstances.

4. Why is it often so difficult to make precise overall beauty judgments, compared with the task of judging the beauty of a given aspect of a thing? Illustrate with examples that show both the difficulties and the possibilities of judgments of overall beauty.

Things to think of. Leave room for rough comparative beauty judgments across categories. Consider also the judgments and the point system proposed by the lecturer in Beauty Notes 10-11 and 13. See also disc. item #43.

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 (or two or more).

Things to think of. If the more perfect idea is more substantive than the general idea of something or other better than what is before one, is it more than the fuzzy recollection of a better example once experienced? Also, if the artist really had a super-perfect definite idea in her head, would she need to experiment as much as artists typically do?

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.

Things to think of. Consider the nearest thing we have to “arts” in these sensory modalities and assess their claims to high-grade beauty. Also, consider whether the pleasure we get from the “higher” arts is typically greater than what we get from those of taste and smell.

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?

Things to think of. Note that the truisms relevant to the essay include not only those in the Introduction but also the ones relating to Scarry in Beauty Notes #1.

8. Is the idea of strictly 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, is a pure beauty supremely beautiful? Is a purer beauty always a greater beauty.

Things to think of. Consider the claims for abstract beauties but also for sensory ones. For example pure tones or the extraordinary purity of the color of the sky (remember Plotinus!). Show NASA space photos.

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?

Things to think of. Religious traditions often portray such yearning as deeply spiritual, so it's worth taking seriously. At the same time the yearning for union with the divine may be dependent on the wear and tear of life on our spirit – that is, on the innumerable disappointments and frustrations that happier circumstances would have avoided.

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? Which is easier for you to appreciate? Why is this?

Things to think of. Include both things that appeal to the intellect and the intellectual experiences we have. Many games are prized for the intellectual joy we derive from problem-solving. So do activities involving the use of skills of any sort, since our minds are involved in skills, even athletic or manual ones. Also see disc. item 42.

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? How would Einstein or Socrates? Would any actual person come close to being beautiful in all dimensions?

Things to think of. Granted, people don't commonly think of all possible dimensions when they think of a beautiful person. They generally give priority to beautiful appearances. Is there any good reason for this favoritism?

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 beautiful. 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 ?

Things to think of. If Led Zeppelin doesn't rate highly with you, what example would you cite as beautifully Dionysian, and why? Also, keep in mind that to have a beautiful property (e.g., beautifully passionate intensity) the property mustn't be a defect. Note discussion items ##39-40.

13. Many of the things we admire in art and life are ‘adversive' beauties in the sense of beauties that presuppose adversity (such as tragic nobility). 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.

Things to think of. Is it possible for adversive beauties to be more beautiful than ones that involve no adversity? Or, quite opposite to this, is their beauty always shadowed by the fact that they presuppose negativity? Does our high admiration for them come more from moral respect or sheer wonder than from their beauty?

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Lecture 15: The Sense of Beauty Theory

1. The model of the external senses: sight, hearing, etc.

2. Elements required in a truly inner sense of beauty:

A faculty of knowledge about beauty, the proximal stimulus of which is internal , not external, the effect of which stimulus is a distinctive "sensation", which sensation is aesthetically revealing about the distal object, and which functions by regular physiological mechanisms.

3. Relation of the sense of beauty to the beauty of things: two possibilities:

4. Problems of interpreting/reconstructing the theories of beauty suggested by the texts, e.g.

Result: substantial additions and alterations required; scholarly constraints must be relaxed to produce a theory worth serious study.

The spirit of the theories seems best fulfilled by a conception of beauty as:

5. The model for the reconstruction: sensory colors

The commonsense concept of the surface color of an object, as understood by an educated layman, which

(A similar analysis applies to radiant colors, diffraction colors, interference colors, etc.)

6. Unbreakable ontological illusions involved in empirical color:

7. Further explanation of the components of sensory properties

a. The psychological (phenomenal) component: the ‘given' or immediately presented,' 'sense-data,' ‘qualia'

b. The physical components:

c. The dispositional connection: causal relationships in the stages from stimuli to final output (including testing for accuracy)

Thus: sensory color is a dispositional property -- a complex 'hypothetical' state of affairs in contrast with an occurrent or manifest property or state of affairs.

The normal expression of such states of affairs is by counterfactual conditionals: If X were to obtain, then Y would obtain.

In practice the credibility of such counterfactuals rests on a combination of:

Special truth conditions of sensory property counterfactuals such as sensory color:

The empirical testing of sensory property dispositions

Suppose these tests failed: would sensory color be an "objective" fact?

Lecture 16

Guest lecture by Niranjan Ramachandran on beauty in mathematics

Testimonials to beauty in mathematics found at

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/manifesto/beauty.shtml

Is Mathematics Beautiful?

1.  Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Autobiography , George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1967, v1, p158

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect but true.

2. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), The Study of Mathematics

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

3. Aristotle (384 B.C.-322 B.C.), Poetics

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry.

4. J.H.Poincare (1854-1912), (cited in H.E.Huntley, The Divine Proportion , Dover , 1970)

The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful.

5. J.Bronowski, Science and Human Values , Pelican, 1964.

Mathematics in this sense is a form of poetry, which has the same relation to the prose of practical mathematics as poetry has to prose in any other language. The element of poetry, the delight of exploring the medium for its own sake, is an essential ingredient in the creative process.

6. J.W.N.Sullivan (1886-1937), Aspects of Science , 1925.

Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of Mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.

7. G. H. Hardy (1877 - 1947), A Mathematician's Apology , Cambridge University Press, 1994.

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.

8. Lawrence University catalog, Cited in Essays in Humanistic Mathematics, Alvin White, ed, MAA, 1993

Born of man's primitive urge to seek order in his world, mathematics is an ever-evolving language for the study of structure and pattern. Grounded in and renewed by physical reality, mathematics rises through sheer intellectual curiosity to levels of abstraction and generality where unexpected, beautiful, and often extremely useful connections and patterns emerge. Mathematics is the natural home of both abstract thought and the laws of nature. It is at once pure logic and creative art.

9. I.Newton, Letter to H.Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, October 24, 1676, in A Source Book in Mathematics , D. J. Struik, ed, Princeton University Press, 1990

I can hardly tell with what pleasure I have read the letters of those very distinguished men Leibniz and Tschirnhaus. Leibniz's method for obtaining convergent series is certainly very elegant...

10. Jane Muir, Of Men & Numbers , Dover , 1996.

Gauss: You have no idea how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

11. F.Dyson, in Nature , March 10, 1956

Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half-joking, "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful." (Herman Weyl (1885-1955))

12. O. Spengler, in J. Newman, The World of Mathematics , Simon & Schuster, 1956

To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: "the mathematician is only complete in so far as he feels within himself the beauty of the true."

13. O. Spengler, in J. Newman, The World of Mathematics , Simon & Schuster, 1956

"A mathematician," said old Weierstrass, "who is not at the same time a bit of a poet will never be a full mathematician."

14. Jakob Bernoulli, Tractatus de Seriebus Infinitis , 1689 (quoted in From Five Fingers to Infinity , F.J.Swetz (ed), Open Court , 1996)

So the soul of immensity dwells in minutia.
And in narrowest limits no limits inhere.
What joy to discern the minute in infinity!
The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity!

15. S.Lang, The Beauty of Doing Mathematics , Springer-Verlag, 1985

Last time, I asked: "What does mathematics mean to you?" And some people answered: "The manipulation of numbers, the manipulation of structures." And if I had asked what music means to you, would you have answered: "The manipulation of notes?"

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Lecture 17: Sense of Beauty theory 2

Ontology and epistemology of sensory properties: points needing special emphasis

1. Structure of the causal interaction
See powerpoint diagram of sensing beauty.

2. Physical basis of the sensory property: e.g. physical red

3. Phenomenal quality of the sensory property, e.g. phenomenal red

4. Sensory property of red (sensory red): this is applicable to physical objects but not reducible to a physical property

5. Criteria of accuracy of sensory experience of physical objects (epistemic conditions)

http://rotorbrain.com/foote/interactive/hacks/colorinteraction1.html

http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/illusions.htm

Outcome: sensory red is an epistemically conditioned, psychophysical dispositional property of a real state of affairs.

6. Presumption of consensus of all maximal discriminators under optimal conditions

7. Variable accuracy/inaccuracy of perception under less than optimal conditions or by less than maximal discriminators.

8. The "existence" of sensory color when the disposition is not activated:

Application of this model to the case of beauty

Beauty as an internal sensory property (the sensory property accessible by an inner sense)

Hutcheson's sense of beauty theory

Hutcheson's almost full-scale application of the color model to beauty (ontologically as well as epistemologically)

1. Hutcheson's basic argument-schema to prove we have a sense of beauty:

i. Aesthetic pleasure is distinct from "rational" pleasure, because not based on belief.

ii. Aesthetic pleasure/displeasure can vary without a difference of outer data.

iii. Aesthetic pleasure/displeasure can vary independently of extraneous influences.

<> iv. Some of the variation can only result from a difference of inner data.

v. Inner data can only come from an inner sense.

<> vi. Some of the hedonic variation must result from the operation of an inner sense, which we may call the sense of beauty.

2. Filling in the argument (justifying the premises and the conclusion) -- a sketch of tasks and proposals:

3. The resulting ontological interpretation of beauty:

Beauty = the disposition to elicit a beauty-response from a sense of beauty in such a way that the accuracy of the response can (in principle) be intersubjectively validated.

4. Hutcheson's beauty criterion: uniformity amidst variety

Uniformity -- sameness/similarity of certain properties or relations holding within an object or scene or event.
Variety -- number of elements (or complexity?) in an object or scene or event.

A better idea: Variety as number of uniformities

But the variety of kinds of uniformity creates obvious doubts as to how to score overall beauty. Are all of equal importance?

Ptolemaic vs. Keplerian planetary systems

Another of Hutcheson's examples: flora and fauna

Uniformity of structure amid multiplicity of parts having that structure, esp. amid diversity of parts (branches, roots, fruit, flowers)

Thus, (a) uniform and abundant foliage is more beautiful than variegated and sparse foliage. And (b) more parts of the plant (branches, roots, fruit, flowers) having analogous structures makes the plant more beautiful than when fewer parts do.

Approximate overall geometrical regularity in plants (under optimal growth conditions): this is uniformity (symmetry). It is not clear how multiplicity can figure in this.

To say the least, there are MANY problems of application.

Selected problems: the hammerhead shark, various waterfowl. (on powerpoint sequence)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWehW4tlyeI hammerhead shark

http://www.savethemuteswans.com/tech.htm mute swan

Points brought out in dealing with these cases:

 

Lecture 18

Another case: the miniature (short legged) dachshund

The beauty of the dachshund, continued

Hutcheson's criterion, even as amended, must be supplemented to cover functional beauty.

Another refinement of the criterion

A further look at the beauty datum

Descriptive aesthetic properties are powers in things to elicit a paradoxical impression which is nonetheless valid for optimal respondents.

The capacity in viewers to form such impressions conforms to the basic idea of an inner "sense."

Under certain conditions such impressions explain viewers' aesthetic pleasure.

The beauty-pleasure: disinterested satisfaction

Hume's criteria of reliable pleasure-discrimination

Art works are reliably judged by the pleasure received under optimum conditions.

Hume's conditions of accurate sensing of beauty in general:

  1. Delicacy
  2. Facility (quickness)
  3. Exactness
  4. Completeness

The conditions that conduce to these cognitive values:

1. Optimal exterior conditions (lighting, distance, point of view, etc.)

2. Optimal neurophysiological conditions: "sound state of the organism"

3. Optimal deployment of faculties:

4. Optimal outcome:

Our master question: will this theory work?

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Lecture 20 Beyond history: A short trip through contemporary theories of beauty via Eddy Zemach, Real Beauty.

Getting started in Zemach

Why we can skip Chapter 1 (noncognitivism)

Terminology. PAS (defined p. 5) = pure aesthetic sentence = a sentence which simply evaluates its subject without describing it. For instance, "This flower is beautiful"
PAP (defined p. 5) = pure aesthetic predicate = a predicate which evaluates without describing its subject. For instance, "beautiful," "sublime," "gaudy"

Zemach on varieties of subjectivism: Ch. 2

[Note that noncognitivism is generally regarded as a form of subjectivism, since it holds that "X is b'ful" expresses a feeling or attitude rather than asserting a proposition. But Zemach reserves "subjectivism" for cognitivist theories.]

Subjectivism: "X is b'ful" asserts a proposition (is true/false) but does not attribute to X an intrinsic property, but rather a relation between the object and a percipient (typically, that X causes the percipient to have an aesthetic experience).

Special versions:
a. X is b'ful --> X causes ideal percipients to have an aesthetic experience.
b. X is b'ful --> what is b'ful is an experience of X, not X itself.

c. Where a work of art is said to be b'ful, the work of art is really an experience
d. X is b'ful concerns personal experience vs. typical experience vs. ideal experience

Note that Zemach bundles together:

He does this because he thinks all such theories share refutable common suppositions, esp. that there is a distinctive aesthetic experience. Two versions:

  1. AE is the experience of a distinctive aesthetic pleasure (a sensation or feeling)
  2. AE is the experience resulting from a distinctive aesthetic attitude.

1. Criticism of aesthetic experience of X as experiencing X along with a distinctive feeling of pleasure

Being pleased by (liking, enjoying) X is not a feeling or sensation but an attitude, as are wanting, believing, intending, etc.

2. Criticism of aesthetic experience as experience involving a distinctive type of attention
Beardsley: aesthetic experience is experience involving:

* object-focused rather than dreamy or drifting attention
* attention strong enough to resist distraction
* attention intent on finding coherent pattern
* attention successful enough for the experience to feel satisfyingly complete

Zemach: none of the above is distinctive to experience of beautiful things, or art works.

Hunting, carpentering, cooking, amorous and other experiences have comparable attention-properties

None of the above is universal to the experience of beautiful things.

Those properties are merely typical of our best experience of b'ful things.

3. Zemach against various theories of aesthetic experience

a. Against aesthetic experience defined as positive (pleasurable), as in Bell: such a view
* leaves no way to explain negative aesthetic experiences: different intensities don't suffice
* produces vicious circularity (petitio principii) when used to "naturalize" beauty -- to define b'ty naturalistically (as by Beardsley)
Thus if aesthetic experience is to function usefully in a theory it must be defined neutrally.

b. Against aesthetic experience defined via disinterestedness (Kant, Hutcheson et al)

(Covered under #4 below)

c. Against aesthetic experience defined as non-conceptualizing, particularizing (Kant)

* Bullough's "psychical distance" reducible to selective attention (see Beauty-adds, #12)
* aesthetic and nonaesthetic interests not necessarily incompatible
* aesthetic attention not necessarily non-conceptualizing
* aesthetic attention not necessarily totalizing or particularizing

d. Against aesthetic experience defined as producing a non-physical "aesthetic object"

* aesthetic properties though non-physical are possessed by physical objects. Hence no need to postulate non-physical aesthetic objects.
* Physical reality is often essential to the aesthetic character of objects.

Note that Zemach's arguments do not mean the term "aesthetic experience" has no application!

His saying (p. 30) that aesthetic experience is "impossible" is misleading.

4. Zemach against the aesthetic attitude (partly covered above)

a. Against the aesthetic attitude being "disinterested"

* a definitional sleight of hand is involved in the concept of a "disinterested interest"
* "interested" interest is equally involved in both aesthetic and nonaesthetic needs and satisfactions

Attending to things "for their own sake" as opposed for an ulterior purpose: what does that mean? Is it altruistic?

[Disinterestedness can be defined without committing the fallacy Zemach complains of; but it is not exclusive to aesthetic as opposed to moral or scientific pleasure.]

[Also Zemach is right that we have plenty of aesthetic ego-gratifications and there is nothing wrong with this fact.]

b. Against defining the aesthetic attitude as attention to and enjoyment of intrinsic rather than utilitarian properties (pp.39-41)

[Some confusion here, but it's cleared up by distinguishing properties of X from properties of contexts in which X occurs.]

* this line confuses a person's reason for looking with her way of looking and the kind of experience she gets.
* it also leads to an absurd consequence: no way to distinguish doing something for an aesthetic reason from doing it for no reason.

Lecture 21

5. Zemach against aesthetic relativism

Relativism: the view that since aesthetic disagreement is impossible in principle to remove by valid procedures, PASs do not ascribe aesthetic properties to anything; and hence aesthetic realism is false.

a. Against reduction of (e.g.) "X is gaudy" to "X seems gaudy to Y " (individualistic relativism)

Popular relativists inconsistently believe we use aesthetic terms correctly and yet that they refer to purely private sensations or feelings.

Note the frequent confusion of relativism with "opinionism" and the equally self-contradictory character of that.

Zemach's argument against relativism more fully stated

1. If relativism is true, then X is beautiful = X seems beautiful to Y (and similarly for X is graceful, lovely, animated, etc.). = X seems somehow to Y, and Y calls it beautiful on that basis.

2. Thus a person Y saying X is beautiful is referring to Y's way of experiencing X.

3. Thus all verbal agreements and disagreements about "X is beautiful" result from ways of experiencing X.

4. Individual ways of experiencing are in principle inaccessible to other persons. Hence we cannot tell what it is about Y's experience that leads Y to call X beautiful. No one can tell whether what leads her to call X beautiful is the same as what causes Y to do so.*

5. If 4 is true, then we cannot teach the meaning of "beautiful" by ostension, since we cannot exhibit X's way of experiencing to anyone else.

6. Yet "beautiful" is a phenomenal term (i.e., one that refers to a way of appearing)

7. Phenomenal terms can only be learned by ostension.

8. Hence if relativism is true, aesthetic predicates cannot be taught and no one knows whether his use matches that of anyone else.

9. Hence if relativism is true, neither agreement or disagreement about "X is beautiful" is detectable.

10. Hence, if relativism is true, aesthetic sentences are meaningless.

11. Hence, relativism is incoherent.

* Note that empirically identifiable differences in experiencing X (as in colorblindness) do not support relativism and therefore play no part in the argument.

Lecture 22: Zemach, Ch. 3: Aesthetic Realism

6. Observation conditions for aesthetic properties

a. Phenomenal properties in general have SOCs (standard observation conditions)
E.g. the SOCs for ‘red' (environmental and percipient-related)
If X appears red under the SOCs for surface color, then X is red.*

b. Aesthetic properties are phenomenal properties and necessarily have SOCs.
E.g., the SOCs for ‘gaudy' (environmental and percipient-related SOCs)
If X appears gaudy under the SOCs for aesthetic color properties, then X is gaudy.*

* The if-then connection need only be probabilistic.

Note that the commonsense SOCs for colors on K-pax are likely to be deficient. Only the scientifically sophisticated ones are correct.

I disagree with Zemach about SOCs' relation to maximal discrimination; he claims there is no necessary relation (51-2). I think there is. But I do not accept Smart's version of it.

c. Percipient-related SOCs for aesthetic properties:
- Basic perceptual acuity conditions
- Humean conditions
- Sensitivity to cross-categorial resemblances and differences

d. Re. Consensus of optimal discriminators

Zemach's rejection of maximal discrimination: is his reason adequate?

See argument in Beauty Notes #24.3.

e. Observation and theory
- Reasonable initial assumptions about the reliability of observation
- Discovery of SOCs
- Systematic refinement of observation
- Identification of experts
- Coherence of the whole system of knowledge the final criterion of probability/truth

Practical goal: to show that aesthetic predicates are just as valid as other phenomenal predicates.

Special complications of aesthetic predicates because of the ineliminability of perceptual illusions.

Open webfile showing interaction of colors. (Tip of the iceberg. See Beauty-Notes 24.5)

7. The explanatory force of aesthetic properties: what do they explain?

How do they explain these things?

However many details remain to be worked out and Zemach's view remains problematic. The subject is continued in Ch. 4.4f. re. The Keats principle.

8. The primacy of aesthetic properties

Hence, the credibility of science depends on the credibility of aesthetic judgments (about science itself).

Hence aesthetic judgments are credible (where the SOCs of the aesthetic properties in question are satisfied). (But see Beauty-Notes 24.9)

Lecture 23

9. Proofs for metaphysical realists

Positions regarding the nature of reality

Zemach's argument vs. metaphysical realism (the view that our aesthetic judgments may be totally wrong in relation to "noumenal" reality)

Two ways of being totally wrong: (1) missing the correct aesthetic properties, (2) reality itself having no aesthetic properties.

Zemach's argument: (68-70)

Is this valid? Reasons for doubting it. (Beauty-Notes, ##24.6 and 24.10)

Taste and Time (Ch. 4): How to explain changes of fashion

Are changes of fashion a proof of the instability of aesthetic judgment?

a. The subjectivist line: yes, and this is just what one expects given the subjectivity of those judgments.

b. The contextualist line: no, it merely reflects the difficulty of satisfying the proper SOCs for some aesthetic predicates when the historical context changes.

Note: time-sensitivity changes values when the property is embodied at different times.

But time sensitivity cannot change the value of a particular work: if b'ful in its time it is always b'ful, even if it does not seem so when judged from other cultural contexts.

Hence later replicas of a b'ful work will not have the same value as originals; originals will not seem to retain their full original value.

Lecture 24: Time-sensitivity continued

The Keats principles: making aesthetic value an epistemic criterion of good theories and good judgments.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (From Ode on a Grecian Urn)

Two Keats principles for theories in general

A third Keats principle for theories of aesthetic value in particular

Ground rules for choosing SOCs:

Example of SOCs for literary works.

Suppose: the SOCs for novels include: read by a highly intelligent person with great sensitivity to nuances of language, subtle wit, extensive understanding of human nature and social life, robust imagination, emotional depth, moral understanding, familiarity with the literary tradition, etc. (High-brow SOCs)

Then the satisfying aesthetic properties yielded by serious novels will be far more numerous than are yielded by applying those SOCs to pot-boilers, harlequin novels, etc. (which will be judged crude, stereotypical, emotionally immature, although easy to read and well unified).

Suppose: the SOCs for novels include: read by a person of average intelligence with only commonplace sensitivity to language, wit, commonplace understanding of human nature, etc., etc. (Low-brow SOCs)

Then the satisying aesthetic properties yielded by pot-boilers, harlequin novels, etc. when observed under these SOCs will be more numerous than will those yielded by serious novels, which will be judged boring, pedantic, and pretentious.

So how does Zemach justify saying that high-brow SOCs will result in the ratings for novels being higher than will be the case with low-brow SOCs, and that this justifies regarding the high-grade SOCs as more indicative of real beauty?

Brown's suggestion. Why can't we justify choosing high-brow SOCs on the basis of their yielding more discriminations among the linguistic and semantic properties on which aesthetic properties supervene? Thus the high-brow SOCs will bring to light more aesthetic properties and more degrees of given aesthetic properties. Since aesthetic value is determined by aesthetic properties, then the greater discrimination is bound to produce a fairer judgment of aesthetic value. On this basis the best serious novels clearly have a lot more valuable aesthetic properties than the best harlequin novels do. Therefore the high-brow SOCs must result in a higher rating for the novel as a genre than the low-brow SOCs can.

Yet for the reader who can satisfy only the low-brow SOCs, reading the harlequin novel may be a more beautiful experience than reading a serious novel.

Examples of problematic "time-travel" cases: (p. 90f.)

1. Earlier works made to seem fresh under anachronistic critical interpretations. Don Quixote supplied with a contemporary context (Borges ex.).

2. Contemporary works viewed under anachronistic SOCs that make them seem better than they are. E.g. Norman Rockwell viewed under 17th Dutch SOCs; mediocre present day poetry viewed under medieval SOCs.

Zemach: 1 and 2 both violate Ground Rule 2 vs. special exceptions; and broadening the practice probably is impossible without contradictions. Thus the SOCs they use can't be correct.

Applications to "concrete models," i.e., to artistic production that is an "interpretation," therefore a "theory" according to Zemach

Different interpretations give different properties to the work, but retain enough of its properties for it to be the same work; this applies to much music and drama.

JB. It is better to take the cases under d as versions or variations upon the named work, not as the work simpliciter.

JB: How many of the above are genuine cases of interpretation (let alone theory)? Interpretation in what sense? Some are cases of co-creation of the work, or of a performance or production of the work.

Zemach's on literary or musicological interpretations (which are theories in a more straightforward sense)

JB: But is interpretive originality a valid criterion of the excellence of criticism? Wouldn't that require the critical interpretation to be a work of art?

Granted, some art works are ambiguous or cryptic or uncertain, and critics may appropriately propose "creative" meanings without any of these necessarily being a meaning of the work.

Lecture 25

Addendum re. Zemach on interpretation (from Ch. 6, esp. 136-9)

What about works ahead of their time? What are the proper SOCs for them, since the culture of their time rejects or denigrates them?

Zemach on aesthetic properties (Ch. 5)

List of candidate types of aesthetic properties - Alan Goldman's classification (Aesthetic Value, 1995)
1. General A-value properties (beautiful, ugly)
2. Specific A-value properties (graceful, elegant, witty)
3. Formal properties (balanced, unified)
4. Expressive properties (sad, joyful, angry)
5. Evocative properties (exciting, boring)
6. Behavioral or dynamic properties (sluggish, bouncy, swift)
7. Second-order perceptual properties (vivid, muted, steely)
8. Representational properties (realistic, distorted)

Note 1: These are proposed as aesthetic when they apply to works of art or...(hard to finish the condition) See ahead to anthropomorphism)

Note 2: Zemach is not committed to all of Goldman's types being aesthetic properties.

Zemach's two theses
1. A-properties supervene on non-A-properties.

2. A-properties are not secondary but tertiary properties "tinged by desire."

The first thesis developed and defended

1. A-properties supervene on a loose set of phenomenal non-A-properties.
Apparent counter-examples explained by different non-intrinsic (relational) base props.

A-properties are never identical with any set of non-A-properties, but
A-properties may have necessary and sufficient non-A-property conceptual conditions ("hot" pink <–> light, highly saturated, slightly bluish red)
(It is inconceivable that hot pink should be low in saturation or dark; also perhaps impossible for another hue to be as hot as reddish hues.)

Traditional elucidation of color-hotness: a color is hot if it seems cross-categorially similar to phenomenal hotness (as similar as a color can).

A-properties also have probabilistic relations to non-A-properties
E.g. overall likeness to Matisse's paintings –> sensuousness (in a painting)

2. Knowing that X has an A-property does not entail perceiving its A-property: Knowing that X is hot pink does not entail perceiving its hotness.
Well-informed observers may know without actually seeing.
Beginners often have to depend on the reports of those who can see.

Zemach's example of "coarse" in the sense of "crass," "gross," "crude" or "vulgar."

Contingency of nonaesthetic phenomenal properties vs. the necessity of aesthetic ones (101)

The second thesis developed and defended

1. Perceiving aesthetic properties is desire-modulated perceiving of phenomenal properties, where the desire seems perceivable.

Zemach's examples of links with desire: (some amended)

Lovely –> seen as loved and desired [seen as lovable and desirable] in some way.
Ominous –> seen as threatening some danger (as fearsome).
Tragic –> seen as frustrating noble desires.
Funny –> seen as fulfilling a just desire that another's desire be frustrated.
Malicious –> seen as fulfilling an unjust desire that another's desire be frustrated
Lyrical –> seen as [gracefully] expressing pure and noble desires
Vulgar –> seen as satisfying desires in a contemptible way
Cheap –> seen as satisfying desires in a dishonest or unworthy way
Ostentatious –> seen as satisfying desires for self-assertion/self-display
Sublime –> seen as too mighty to mold to our desires
Cute –> seen as satisfying our desire to protect and please without much effort.
Noble –> seen as worth sacrificing desires for.
Somber –> seen as expressive of anxiety about one's life (e.g. fear of death).
Ironic (turn of events) –> seen as frustrating desires counter to expectation or even belief.
Ridiculous (behavior) –> seen as oblivious to the likely frustration of desires.
Silly –> seen as not worth sacrificing anything for.
Graceful –> seen as satisfying desires by unusually slight (total) exertions.
Awkward –> seen as satisfying desires by inordinate effort.
Unified –> seen as satisfying our desire to understand things easily
Ugly –> seen as frustrating our desire to obtain cognitive satisfaction.
Beautiful –> seen as having an optimal balance of order and significant richness for cognitive satisfaction.

Questionable cases for Zemach: A-property perceptions not obviously involving desire:
hot/cool colors, soft colors, swift/slow lines, ascending, descending musical lines, etc.

Yet if they do involve desire, that would unify the class of A-properties.
Zemach's unified account is an interesting hypothesis.

Other aspects of Zemach's examples

a. Anthropomorphic character of aesthetic properties (104-105): inanimate things seen as if behaving, intending, feeling, thinking. This offers a way to distinguish aesthetic from nonaesthetic properties.

b. Presence of value-terms in some of the above: worthy, noble, discreditable, dishonest, unjust

c. This suggests that the link with desires in some cases presumes worthiness of the desire or else the reverse, unworthiness. In other cases no such presumption seems to exist. E.g., grace or awkwardness don't seem to depend on the desires being worthy or unworthy. Nor do irony and ridiculousness.

d. Many of the properties are also value-laden in another way: positively or negatively. But this value varies sharply with the context. A lyrical passage may be entirely out of place, hence discordant; a vivid color may be garish. The passage is too lyrical, the color too vivid to suit the other properties.

Taken out of context, by itself, however, calling the passage lyrical, or the color vivid is generally to praise it.

Arguably silliness, cheapness, etc. are always unbeautiful, apparent counter-examples turning out to be cases of representation-of-silliness (etc.)

e. What sort of worthiness/unworthiness is presumed?
Zemach doesn't say.
JHB's suggestion: worth in relation to human flourishing, as in a good human being living a good life.

Hence (perhaps) X is lovely –> X is worthy of being loved = loving X is a component in some possible good life = X is a creditable candidate for inclusion in any good life, space permitting.

Likewise, X is vulgar –> X is worthy of being disdained = disdaining X is a component in some possible good life = X is not a creditable candidate for inclusion in any good life except as a negative example.

X is graceful –> X is worthy of being prized because it is a necessary property in every possible good life.

X is beautiful –> X is worthy of being prized for those of its aesthetic properties that are necessary constituents of every possible good life.

3. What ontology is implied by this?

a. Zemach: aesthetic properties are "tertiary" properties, but some are also primary properties, Section 5.6). This is deeply problematic. Hence I propose we set it aside.

b. Zemach's reintroduction of the idea of aesthetic objects. What does this imply?

Lecture 26

Alternative brief elucidations of aesthetic terms on Zemach's list:

Lovely --> highly but unchallengingly beautiful, charming; narrower scope than beautiful, does not serve adverbially with other A-predicates as beautifully X does.

Tragic --> irreparably and severely harmful to worthy persons or purposes.

Malicious (humor) --> expressing and inviting enjoyment of unmerited loss, suffering or failure.

Malicious (writing) --> deliberately unjustly defamatory.

Lyrical --> musical (esp. songlike) +emotional, and as graceful as the occasion allows.

Sublime --> transcendently, encompassingly and challengingly beautiful.

Cute --> At least fairly pretty and lively or otherwise engaging in an unchallenging way, receptive to the good will and assistance of others.

Lecture 27

1. JB's alternative account of aesthetic properties

Division of A-properties re. descriptive and evaluative content
- purely descriptive (DAP)
- purely evaluative (PAP)
- mixed (MAP) Most aesthetic properties are mixed.

Descriptive aesthetic properties (and descriptive components of MAPs) are dispositions in objects or events

*maximal not only in basic sensory acuity and conceptual keenness but in imaginativeness

**not necessarily tinged with desire or aversion

Note: the optimal pleasure conditions require observers to be non-neurotic, non-psychotic and emotionally sound – to block perverse or otherwise defective pleasure/displeasure.

* Properties of qualitative degree are non-quantitative properties of degree (the idea is Guy Sircello's). This idea ensures that no value-relevant property is excluded.

Beauty on this theory is a complex, highly qualified disposition to produce non-defective, non-deficient pleasure taken in aesthetic and other properties of qualitative degree.

Unbeauty is a complex, highly qualified disposition to produce non-defective, non-deficient displeasure taken in aesthetic and other properties of qualitative degree.

X is beautiful =df. X has the disposition to cause non-defective, non-deficient pleasure taken in aesthetic properties and other properties of qualitative degree.

X is unbeautiful = df. X has the disposition to cause .... displeasure...

Beauty varies directly with the intensity of the foregoing pleasure.
Unbeauty varies directly with the intensity of the foregoing displeasure.

This gives intersubjectively valid beauty and unbeauty judgments – and a beauty and unbeauty which is to that extent "objective."

If Zemach's argument about beauty being a criterion of scientific truth is correct, then the case for beauty/unbeauty being objectively real is yet stronger.

Example illustrating effect of false belief on beauty.

When light seems more magical to a Neoplatonist who sees it as containing a divine radiance (not just electromagnetic radiance), it will seem more beautiful. I explain this in terms of two factors:

1. The Neoplatonist believes light really has spiritual potency. This property is a beautiful one: beautifully pure (beneficent, intelligent), beautifully creative and beautifully potent.

2. The Neoplatonist and I recognize an A-property in light: a disposition to cause an impression of living, creatively beneficent, mental energy. As hot pink is (as-if) hot, so the radiance of light is (as-if) divinely energetic, full of spiritual potency. This A-property is also beautiful.

Thus for the Neoplatonist light seems beautiful in both ways; for those of us who see it only as creating the (incoherent) impression of divine energy these properties it is beautiful in one of those ways. Of course it may also be beautiful in many other ways not connected with divine energy.

If there is no real divine energy in light, then the Neoplatonist is wrong about the first sort of beauty and right only about the second. Light only seems beautifully divinely radiant.

The Neoplatonist, believing what she does, has two sources of pleasure, but if the first depends on a false belief, the pleasure it gives is a defective pleasure and does not increase the real beauty of light.

2. Relation of JHB's conception of A-properties to Zemach's

Zemach's defintion of A-prop's as tertiary qualities involving desire or aversion (tainted with, filtered through) sweeps together my composite A-props plus any other good/bad (desirable/undesirable) property: intellectually good/bad, morally good/bad, practically good/bad (for good/bad ends).

But my theory accepts cases where no desire is involved.

Also my theory makes use of the concept of pleasure/displeasure and more specifically of defective/deficient pleasure. His does not in any systematic way (though it figures in some of his aesthetic properties).

My theory also accepts, as value-relevant, properties of qualitative degree not involving cross-categorial similarities.

In regard to beauty and ugliness I think Zemach is right to emphasize cognitive satisfaction -- I do much the same in stressing clarity (and seeming clarity) of apprehension, or its opposite in the case of the ugly.

My theory does not purport to prove that aesthetic properties really exist but at most to give reasons for thinking they may, on a basis much like the basis for thinking colors do.

Regarding "noumena," I reject the idea of strictly unknowable things in themselves (including properties). Physical properties belong to things-in-themselves, the evidence being sufficient to satisfy a rational mind. Those properties (shape properties, e.g.) have aesthetic properties of all three sorts.

Physical properties to which we have no sensory access can be appreciated by us only intellectually (infrared, ultraviolet compositions only as b'ful wave-length arrays)

At any given time there may be physical properties about which we know nothing. There may be some humans can never know. These will have unknown aesthetic value at the time or forever. No paradox here.

Suppose JB's consensus of maximal discriminators turns out not to be possible. Then what?

Bottom line: the field of aesthetic inquiry is endless and replete with potential human value.

Note: The final examination is posted in the Beauty Notes folder.

Lecture 28: Review

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; also the criterion of nondefective ideal enjoyment explained late in the course must be brought in.

a. Note the structure of the comparison. What additions are required to make it apply to beauty?

b. What beauty data are there? Distinguish these from hedonic data.

c. What sort of pleasure is relevant? Hume, JB

d. How are disagreements handled? Hume, JB

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.

a. The disagreement problem

b. The language-learning problem

c. How do we really learn aesthetic language?

d. What safeguards are available against aesthetic errors?

e. What role do aesthetic properties play in Zemach's argument against relativism?

f. What relation is there between observation and theory in relation to beauty?

g. If full aesthetic realism turns out to fail, what degree of relativism is probable?

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.

a. What is a time-sensitive aesthetic property? Give a sufficient range of examples. Which properties are NOT time-sensitive? Explain.

b. How is time-sensitivity consistency with aesthetic realism?

c. What basic principle applies to every period of taste?

d. What special SOCs apply? Be specific.

e. What complications, exceptions, etc. are involved? Why does immersion sometimes not work? Why is meaning often not = the meaning of the culture of origin?

f. Works ahead of their time: what are the real possibilities?

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. What ways are available for deciding whether a claimed property really exists?

a. Zemach's tinged with desire cases: several examples.

b. Cases doubtfully fitting his model.

c. Plain desire or justified desire?

d. Anthropomorphic ways of seeing -- where applicable, where not.

e. What SOCs apply? What sorts of mistakes can people make about aesthetic properties.

f. cross-categorial similarities and imaginative impressions.

g. How can these be real properties of things?