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Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty

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Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Moran, Richard. 2012. Kant, Proust, and the appeal of beauty. Critical Inquiry 38(2): 398-329. Published Version doi:10.1086/662744 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8920788 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty Richard Moran 1 A familiar feature of the history of modern aesthetics is the cycle of suspicion and defensiveness connected with the idea of beauty, as though its very appearance suggested something exaggerated, something requir- ing deflation, which then provokes a certain polemical stance on the part of both its defenders and detractors. People who would not be tempted by a reductive account of other concepts (for example, of thought, or desire, or action), may still feel that beauty has to be shown to be illusory or explained as a mere guise of some other force or quality altogether in the end. One might, for instance, have reasons to be suspicious of pleasure itself, its role in culture, or the exaggerated claims for it, or one may have metaphysical scruples deriving from the idea that beauty can be no prop- erty of things in themselves but can only be a projection of our own sen- sibilities upon the world. In different ways, then, there can seem to be a certain extravagance built into the notion of the beautiful itself, as though it were internal to its invocation that it claims more for itself than it can deliver on. Familiar as these thoughts are, however, their import is far from clear. The thought about projection, for instance, need not be any more skeptical than the parallel claims that are made about secondary qualities generally, the supervenience of which on our sensory dispositions is not I had the pleasure of presenting some of this material at a Warren Quinn Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I benefitted from comments by Franklin Bruno; at a Sawyer Seminar at the University of Chicago, hosted by David Wellbery and James Conant; in a series of seminars at Johns Hopkins University hosted by Michael Fried; at a workshop on philosophy and literature and film organized by Susan Wolf at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and at the New York University Conference on Modern Philosophy and Aesthetic Judgment, organized by Beatrice Longuenesse, John Richardson, and Don Garett, where I had helpful comments from Rebecca Kukla. The paper benefitted from all these occasions, particularly from the hosts in question, as well as from audiences at the University of Illinois, University of Chicago, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. For conversations either on those occasions or much earlier I am grateful to Stanley Cavell, Fred Neuhouser, Alexander Nehamas, Paul Guyer, Jonathan Lear, Lanier Anderson, Joshua Landy, Katalin Makkai, Meredith Williams, Robert Pippin, Wayne Martin, Brent Kalar, Michael Williams, Hannah Ginsborg, Katalin Makkai, Thomas Teufel, Melissa Merritt, Tim Scanlon, and David Sussman. At early stages of the project conversations with Martin Stone helped orient me in the topic, and toward the end of it conversations with Arata Hamawaki were crucial to giving shape to the story. The paper is dedicated to the memory of Mary Mothersill. Critical Inquiry 38 (Winter 2012) © 2012 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/12/3802-0010$10.00. All rights reserved. 298 Critical Inquiry / Winter 2012 299 usually taken to be equivalent to their being simply unreal or to be incom- patible with the idea that in calling the sky blue one is claiming something beyond one’s subjective experience.1 The idea of beauty, however, can lend itself to repudiation of an- other kind, as being a perfectly useless concept, the residue of pieties we can no longer take seriously. And in the life of an individual, something in the idea of beauty makes possible its characteristic forms of disillu- sion and not merely disappointment. One may be disappointed with one’s experience of ordinary pleasures, finding in them less than one hoped to find or even losing one’s taste altogether for certain of them. In relation to beauty, however, there is room for the possibility of not just disappointed expectations but disillusionment and, with that, re- pudiation of the very idea of beauty, as though the very idea were a form of mystification. What I take this to show is that the very possibility of such skepticism is testament to the fact that there is something addi- tional it would make sense to reject in the claim of beauty, something beyond the thought that something is a special source of pleasure. It is only against the background of something supposedly beyond ordinary pleasure and pain that there is the possibility of rejecting its claim, finding it perhaps quaint or hollow. With regard to beauty, there seems to be room for a different kind of rejection of its reality or genuineness 1. Consider this well-known passage: Attend to Palladio and Perrault, while they explain all the parts and proportions of a pillar. They talk of the cornice, and frieze, and base, and entablature, and shaft, and architrave; and give the description and position of each of these members. But should you ask the description and position of its beauty, they would readily reply, that the beauty is not in any of the parts or members of a pillar, but results from the whole, when that complicated fig- ure is presented to an intelligent mind, susceptible to those finer sensations. Till such a spectator appear, there is nothing but a figure of such particular dimensions and propor- tions: from his sentiments alone arise its elegance and beauty. [David Hume, An Inquiry into the Principles of Morals (Middlesex, 2006), p. 81] Here Hume seems to derive a claim about the subjectivity of beauty from the common fact of the constitution of one set of properties by another. Palladio could just as rightly say that the strength of the pillar is not in any of its parts or members, but it would hardly follow from this that its strength was somehow unreal or a mere projection of the sentiments. R ICHARD M ORAN is the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An essay on self- knowledge. He is completing Self-Expression and the Modes of Address, a book on intersubjectivity in the acts of speaking and telling. 300 Richard Moran / Beauty or the thought that it can’t be and never was all that it presents itself as being.2 There is, however, another related set of reasons why the concept of beauty is subject to forms of skepticism peculiar to it. Far more than most other concepts of philosophical interest the idea of beauty has a well- developed cultural mythology that is as much a part of it as are any theories of it that have been proposed. Indeed, the competing philosophical theo- ries themselves have little point taken in isolation from the various depic- tions of the encounter with beauty that make their appearance throughout the Western tradition, from Plato to the Christian era, through romanti- cism, modernism, and whatever comes after that. Part of what I mean by mythology is that these ideas are something like a common cultural re- source, that they inform our actual experience and thinking about the thing in question, and are for that reason to be seen as belonging to the concept itself, whether part of its literal or figurative content. There needn’t be anything elaborate in such depictions, so let me begin with some simple examples, neither original nor exhaustive. So, for instance, beauty is commonly associated with mystery, as something that beckons but also withdraws and withholds, something whose nature belongs with appearing but that also presents itself as containing in itself more than is apparent. While it belongs to the sensory, to the realm of feeling, and is in that sense fully present to experience, at the same time it partakes of con- cealment in ways not shared by the rest of sensory life. A familiar trope of beauty is that of something not just pointing beyond itself but as harboring a secret or posing a question to be answered. And this is itself one of the classic settings for the disappointment and disillusion associated with beauty. A running theme in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, for instance, is the repeated frustration of the narrator in his attempts to penetrate the secret that seems to be held by the scenes he finds most enthralling, which seem to pose a question that he cannot formulate, let alone answer.3 The beautiful not only beckons but also charms, enthralls, and other- 2. Or compare beauty with ordinary pleasure and pain with regard to the possibility of error. Given the appearance of pleasure or pain, it is hard to imagine a place for a further question about its genuineness or reality. Given the appearance of beauty, we may later come to question its genuineness or reality and perhaps come to the conclusion that the appearance of beauty here was a false one. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny; its promise was false or meretricious.
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