Three Problems in Aesthetics
My first philosophy post. Let’s see how it goes.
The first step in any discussion of aesthetics is to clear away the intellectual rubble of subjectivist. I am not sure what I could say in rebuttal to someone who thinks that Lucien Freud and nursery school drawings are fundamentally the same and that only our arbitrary tastes distinguish them. So, instead I’ll just point out the craziness of that conclusion and given an alternative account of Beauty, better fitting our intuition that good art has a genuine value that toddler scribbles lack. Beauty is the quality of meriting attention. I think that explains why not just art but also soccer games, mathematical proofs, and human faces can fairly carry the description.
(Side note for people who are interested: For Kantians, this definition can also explain why all rational creatures would make aesthetic judgements. In some footnote, I can no longer find, I think Korsgaard remarks that the quality of focus would have to be common to all purposive creatures.)
But for aesthetic realist, there are at least three compelling complications. (For my purposes here, I’ll define aesthetic realism as the belief that aesthetic judgements are subject to reason, not simply matters of taste or opinion.)
Aesthetic Reasons are Non-Public (or The Paradox of Paraphrase):
In the great movie Metropolitan (1990), a spunky, teenage pseudo-intellectual tells a girl he is trying to impress, “I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking.” It’s a funny movie (check it out) . Clearly . However, a strong version of aesthetic realism would have nothing to laugh at. If you think there are reasons for a work’s beauty, whats wrong with simply explaining those reasons and expecting the assent of someone who has never seen the work. That’s how our other two forms of reasoning work. For a scientific paper, if I could paraphrase the author’s argument sufficiently well, you would have good reason to believe the conclusion, without reading the paper or conducting the experiments. In moral philosophy, I could explain a hypothetical situation and reason about the correct course of action without actually ever reenacting it. Both speculative reasoning (thinking about whats true about the world) and practical reasoning (moral philosophy) seem public to people without direct experience of them. However, direct experience of beauty is needed
But, aesthetic reasons can also be opaque to the people experiencing them. Anscombe has great example of someone placing all the green books in their library on the roof of their house. When pressed for a reason, they simply shrug and say “no reason.” That person is crazy. However, if that disruptive neighbor said that she was doing so as performance art, it would make sense as a practical reason. If you then asked her what she found beautiful about this art and she responded “no particular reason,” you could not conclude insanity. She is simply displaying negative capability. From Keats: “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This comfort with confusion is not a virtue in scientists or moral philosophers (although perhaps it is in particularly ethical people).
We are forced to conclude being provided with aesthetic reasons is not sufficient to reach a judgement of Beauty. You must experience the object for themselves. Furthermore, consciously understanding the aesthetic reasons justifying a work of art can seem to interfere with its creation. I have an intuition that these two problems are connected.
These next two complications don’t undermine aesthetic realism, but they suggest that aesthetic reasons will be very hard to identify.
Meaninglessness in Music:
The great head of the National Endowment of the Arts National, Dana Gioia, said that anytime he encounters a new piece of art he asks three questions: What is it about?, How important is that subject?, and How effectively does the piece convey that message? This seems like a pretty sensible procedure to me, but music seems uniquely immune to its analysis. Often the explicit message of a song’s lyrics can be directly contradicted by the feeling it evokes, without much diminishment of its enjoyment. Famously, Born in the USA is enjoyed by patriotic Americans every Fourth of July without consternation, because the score and title evoke the feelings of a national anthem, even as the lyrics undermine them. In the Republic, Plato has the city’s leader trained in music so that they can recognize its power and resist sonic ensorcellments of their emotions. Tolstoy makes the same case. Here’s Pozdnyshev in the run up to his uxoricide (Kreutzer Sonata Ch. 23):
“A terrible thing is music in general. What is it? Why does it do what it does? They say that music stirs the soul. Stupidity! A lie! It acts, it acts frightfully (I speak for myself), but not in an ennobling way. It acts neither in an ennobling nor a debasing way, but in an irritating way. How shall I say it? Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. I become confounded with his soul, and with him I pass from one condition to another. But why that? I know nothing about it? But he who wrote Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ knew well why he found himself in a certain condition. That condition led him to certain actions, and for that reason to him had a meaning, but to me none, none whatever. And that is why music provokes an excitement which it does not bring to a conclusion. For instance, a military march is played; the soldier passes to the sound of this march, and the music is finished. A dance is played; I have finished dancing, and the music is finished. A mass is sung; I receive the sacrament, and again the music is finished. But any other music provokes an excitement, and this excitement is not accompanied by the thing that needs properly to be done, and that is why music is so dangerous, and sometimes acts so frightfully.”
It seems that music, even when set to lyrics, produces an amazing sympathetic response in the listeners, totally unrelated to the peices meaning. In one of his documentaries, Zizek lists all the political movements Communist to Liberal to Fascist who all claimed the Ode to Joy as their own. In every other field of aesthetics (architecture, painting, movies), these regimes produced remarkably different styles and forms.
Someone might object that I’m looking for my aesthetic reasons in all the wrong place. Instead of examining a song’s message, pieces should be appraised as beautiful on the level of music theory. This misses the point. There is beauty in intricately constructed songs. I remember being total transfixed at realizing Clem Snide’s rendition of Beautiful gives the second chord in the progression a flat fifth to preserve most of the notes they are playing in between the chord change even as they shift the root. However, this kind of enjoyment is akin to finding a mathematical proof beautiful. Music theory can never explain people’s sympathetic reaction to music, which is how they primarily enjoy it. It seems we are at a loss for what reasons could justify musical beauty.
The Varied Nature of Visual Judgements
From faces to buildings, symmetry tends to please the eye. Almost every human artifact will display at least some symmetry. However, we generally expect no such order in natural beauty. A craggy peaks that slouches into smooth curves on the other face can captivate us, even when a similar variegated work of art might well seemed mismatched. Now, imagine the distribution of trees on hill side. There will be very little order to their locations on the slope. No architect could disburse features over a building’s exterior in so causal a manor.
These very separate standards for aesthetic judgement pose a problem for the naive forms of visual aesthetic realism. To my very shaky recollection, Kant thought that certain ways of perceiving the world (like a sense of 3 dimensions) would necessary faculties in all rational creatures. (I’m sure someone actually familiar with Kant would tell me that I am misusing “perceptions” and “faculties”, but oh well.) From these necessary features, certain forms of order would emerge and a mind-dependent objective aesthetic judgements could be grounded.
However, the very different standards that we use to assess nature and art, or even different styles of art, suggests there is no universal ground of aesthetic judgement in the way a simple interpretation of Kant would want.
All of these objections seem genuinely hard to me. Potential solutions coming soon…
This piece was inspired by reading Rodger Scruton’s Oxford Short Introduction on Beauty. I had assumed that Scruton was just a professionally cranky person: disliking any music composed after his birth, saying rude things about Feminist, etc. All the hits. I was pleasantly surprised. Smart guy.