Conception Of Beauty In Our Society

[Doretta Castoe]

Thisarticle will begin with a sketch of the debate over whetherbeauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the singlemost-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to setout some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developedwithin Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in themind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a differentbeauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another issensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his ownsentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757,136)

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and isconsequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand thatwhose determining ground can be no other than subjective.Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may beobjective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empiricalrepresentation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasureand pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but throughwhich there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by therepresentation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion inIdeal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form,as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from thatvery isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly:an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered bypattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points andin all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered,it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was tobecome a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it hasmade the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity andwhat it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may.(Plotinus, 22 [Ennead I, 6])

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kantperceived that something important was lost when beauty was treatedmerely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, thatcontroversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, suchas works of art and literature, and that in such controversies,reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing.They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individualexperiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizableas a value at all across persons or societies.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that tasteor the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentallysubjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that theCanon was held to be, that if people did not experiencecertain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledgethat reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better thanothers. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neitherprecisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as wemight put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and culturalaspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim tovalidity.

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess thosequalities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run,which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the worksof Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdictsof the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objectivestandard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective,and though certain contemporary works or objects may appearirremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who arein a good position to judge functions analogously to an objectivestandard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could beidentified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty thatsets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to bebeautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or atasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is thepractical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgmentsabout beauty.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition ofwhich we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, bymeans of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that isabsolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in therepresentation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by nogrounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics canreason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. Theycannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived]from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of thesubject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790,section 34)

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty(2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor tothe object, but to the relation between them, and even more widelyalso to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded.He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, forinstance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state ofpleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we arecelebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were noperceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be nobeauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject andobject are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007),characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a waythat things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. Thebeautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it alsorequires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded asan instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, likeHume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have anirreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, orsomething we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty areparticularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience ofbeauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, butconnects observers and objects such as works of art and literature incommunities of appreciation.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classicalconception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, bothin its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlyingunity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is calledtaxis, and arrangement, which the Greeks namediathesis, and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor andDistribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia.

Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display ofdetails in their context. This is attained when the details of thework are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitableto their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetricalcorrespondence.

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to theidea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions betweenparts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burkein A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of theBeautiful and the Sublime:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to berewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of thebody. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, hewill fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that hispassion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider hownearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of anyother, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to lovelinessof form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and everybody is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to bethe lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one intodue proportion by deeming it of little or no importance.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty withformedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things,and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what wehave called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each otherand towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour,constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things,as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentiallysymmetrical, patterned.

Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; andonly a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves,but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in anaggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out ofugliness; its law must run throughout.

All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, beingdevoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out ofthe realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? Andlightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair?

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of Godthat, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aestheticasceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion thatfinally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century,Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation asyearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of Godas beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29).Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of theimmense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Ecoquotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing arichly-appointed church:

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its truenature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled withinitself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and theempirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with realparticularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

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