On the Idea of Beauty

CONTENTS VOL. XII Summer 2005 No 1 ON THE IDEA OF BEAUTY Donald Merriell Mirabell: Nay, ‘tis true: You are no longer handsome when you’ve lost your lover; your beauty dies upon the instant: For beauty is the lover’s gift; ‘tis he bestows your charms. … Mrs. Millamant: O the vanity of these men!—Fainall, d’ye hear him? If they did not commend us, we were not handsome! Now you must know they could not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the lover’s gift!—Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? … One no more owes one’s beauty to a lover, than one’s wit to an echo. —William Congreve: The Way of the World 2 n this passage from William Congreve’s play we have a state- Iment of a dispute that for ages has accompanied man’s interest in beauty. It is a dispute concerning the determination of what is beautiful and the part which man’s appreciation of beauty plays in this determination. Mirabell suggests that it is the individual’s appreciation that determines what is beautiful. A woman is beautiful, he says, as long as she has a lover in whose eyes she is the vision of beauty, and she ceases to be beautiful when her lover no longer cares for her. The implication is that beauty is determined by the beholder who is able to judge of it simply by consulting his own feelings. He has no need to look beyond these, no reason to doubt his subjective response. Nor will he be surprised to find that beauty is one thing for him, another thing for someone else. He will rec- ognize that what is beautiful in one man’s eyes may be plain in another’s. Mrs. Millamant objects to Mirabell’s theory of beauty. Beauty in her view is not created by the individual; rather, a thing’s beauty must be determined before the individual can find cause to appreciate it. It follows that to appreciate beauty is simply to reflect it, and to judge it is to echo it with conscious affirmation of its exis- tence. Beauty is therefore in the eye of the beholder only as in the glass of a mirror: just as the mirror is not the source of its image, so the beholder’s eye does not determine beauty. In this view of the matter, beauty is one thing for all people, although many may fail to appreciate it—the mirror of the eye also has its faults, its coarseness, and its distortions. But failures on the part of the beholder do not lessen the beauty of the thing, they only diminish the beholder’s enjoyment of it. Appreciation varies from one man to the next, but beauty remains unaffected by these differences of taste. In dealing with the dispute to which these two views give rise, it will be best if we formulate the issue simply as whether aesthetic judgment is objective or not. To claim that aesthetic judgment is objective is, strictly speaking, to hold that it has universal validity. An aesthetic judgment is either right or wrong in such terms and its validity recognizes no distinction of persons, nations, or epochs. Thus, it cannot be right for one person alone; if it is right for one person, it is right for all. This does not mean that all people will immediately agree that such and such is truly beautiful; no more would all people readily grasp the truth of a complex theorem of mathematics. According to the objectivist position, however, if the judgment were correct, those who did not admit it would be in a state of ignorance or error. Against the objectivist position it is maintained that aesthetic judgment is subjective. A man may be considered eccentric or ab- 3 normal on account of his tastes, the subjectivist argument runs, but it is meaningless to call him mistaken. There is no basis for apply- ing the terms “right” and “wrong” to aesthetic judgment. There is no value that is not created by the individual, whether other individuals join him in affirming it or not. Therefore, no one is entitled to say that another’s judgment is wrong. Aesthetic judgment is fundamentally a private affair, say the subjectivists. It may happen that a group, even a majority of all men, finds a certain thing beautiful, but numbers do not give any greater authority to the taste of the group. Value remains the creation of individuals, even though they act in concert. Subjectivists maintain that there is no contradiction between a judgment that “X is beautiful,” and a judgment that “X is not beautiful”; objectivists maintain that such a situation involves both contradiction and error. In stating the issue with which we are concerned, we give the ad- jectives “objective” and “subjective” in their common meaning. An “objective” statement is one whose validity is independent of bias, idiosyncrasy, and capriciousness. To claim that aesthetic judgment is objective is not to say, of course, that every aesthetic judgment is in fact free of bias, idiosyncrasy, and capriciousness. It is to say that the validity of the aesthetic judgment is not affected by these factors. “Subjective” is used in the common sense of the opposite to “objective.” A person is said to be “subjective” when he makes bias, idiosyncrasy, or capriciousness the foundation of his judgment. If aesthetic judgment is subjective, the validity of the judgment is limited to the sphere of the individual and those who share his slant. It is important to have this clear, because in the language of philosophers today, “objective” and “subjective” have meanings which are derived from the division which they have made between object and subject. Philosophers distinguish two poles in the act of cognition: the subject, which knows, and the object, which is known. There has been debate in the field of aesthetics as to the location of beauty—whether it is in the object or in the subject—but that is not our issue; we are concerned with the judgment of beauty, and the sense of the controversy on this topic is captured by the more usual meaning of “objective” and “subjective.” There are many versions of the subjectivist position in our sense of the term and some share little common ground with others. Nev- ertheless, we can list four general points to which all who take this position subscribe. These are that: 1. Aesthetic judgment is not valid universally. A judgment holds for the speaker and may hold for others, but there is no contradiction if another person asserts the contrary. 4 2. Aesthetic judgment is relative to the individual’s response in an aesthetic situation. There is no basis for aesthetic judgment beyond the individual’s feelings and perceptions (although these feelings and perceptions may be shared by a group). 3. Aesthetic judgments are deceptive in their form—they have the appearance of objective statements. The predicative form suggests that there is some well-defined quality (designated by some name such as beauty) that is properly attributed to certain objects and wrongly attributed to others. It is impossible, however, to discover such a quality, because the aesthetic predicate is merely a name that covers a very diverse class of subjective responses. 4. Aesthetic judgments have no normative force. An aesthetic judgment may enjoy a widespread acceptance, but such acceptance does not indicate any special authority. Although almost all men may happen to agree with a certain judgment, the fact of these numbers is no proof that the few who have not voiced their opinion will agree or that the few who disagree ought to change their minds. An aesthetic standard has no compelling authority. It is simply a type of statistical average of the prefer- ences of a group. In these four points we have the minimal subjectivist position. Briefly, it says that beauty is basically in the eye of the beholder and that each person may call beautiful whatsoever he pleases. On the objectivist side there is also a great diversity of theories, although there is general agreement on four basic points that counter the subjectivist position. The points are that: 1. Aesthetic judgment is valid universally. It is either right or wrong. If disagreement arises, contradiction is real and cannot be accepted. 2. Aesthetic judgment is not relative to an individual’s response. A person’s feelings and perceptions may lead him to make an in- correct judgment, but as such it has no validity. The basis for aesthetic judgment is the same, whatever the differences between individuals or groups. 3. Aesthetic judgments are objective statements indicating a proper connection between subject and predicate. Agreement does not exist among the objectivists on the character of the predicate—some say it is a real property of objects, some say it is a particular state of consciousness—but it is agreed that the 5 predicate is definite, fixed. There are cases in which it is proper to attach the predicate to the subject and cases in which it is in- appropriate to do so. In either case the predicative form in the judgment is not misleading. 4. Aesthetic judgments have a normative force. They demand the assent of all men under the presumption of truth. If they are wrong, their demand is wrong; if they are right, their demand is right. Disagreement is a fact, but it is unacceptable. We are obliged to give reason for our difference of opinion, if we have one, which otherwise will be laid to ignorance.

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