2.2 Beauty innate

Is beauty a real property of objects, or is it simply “in the eye of the beholder”?

            I think that most people generally accept that beauty is not an objective quality of a thing but is, instead, a subjective kind of experience or judgment that can (but does not have to) differ from person to person. People rationally know that what they take to be “beautiful” might not be beautiful to someone else. But then why do we, as Kant points out, assert that others ought to agree with us, find it shocking when they don’t, and care enough to try to argue and defend our own aesthetic judgments? Kant says that each person regards his or her own aesthetic judgment of something “as resting on what he [or she] may also presuppose in every other person; and therefore he [or she] must believe that he [or she] has reason for demanding a similar delight from everyone” (134).We even talk about beauty like it is held in the object, despite “knowing” that it is a personal experience to find something beautiful. This is a kind of paradox which I am still not resolved about.

I think that beauty as it is recognized in art requires two things: (1) a disinterested (and therefore unexpected) appreciation for a physical manifestation which (2) leaves an impression in the sense that this appreciation causes us to feel invested in it because of the intensity of the appreciation or its personal implication. This first requirement takes beauty to be as Kant describes it: as a kind of singular experience of something that one seems to have no real explanation for. The second requirement mentioned has to do with having a strong conviction that others would most likely (and should) have a similar experience if presented with the same physical manifestation. I think this second requirement speaks to another point about beauty (and art): that experiencing “the beautiful” is a private phenomenon of public and social creatures.

What I mean by this is that our strong convictions about beauty—our need to defend our aesthetic judgments—stem from our identifying with other people. We generally expect the people around us to approach things with a similar mindset to ours, and so we assume (often correctly, but not always) that they will find beautiful what we find beautiful. Devereaux adds this important underlying social aspect as well, and her writing has persuaded me that even our subconscious reasons for finding beauty in a particular manifestation are not socially neutral. Artworks especially are created and viewed from a kind of gendered (and classed, and raced, and generally socially informed) perspective that we as individuals can never quite shed. I even think that seemingly “naturally” beautiful spectacles, like a sunset, could also be socially informed. Maybe it is still true that every single individual would find a sunset beautiful, but would not think so wholly independently of their social upbringing. This is a rather strange, extreme example, but if we imagine a feral child viewing a sunset, that person might perhaps feel some sort of inexplicable awe but would (perhaps) have no conviction about it. The person would not identify with other people in order to expect them to make the same judgment, and so might not even recognize him or herself as a judgment-maker in the first place. Perhaps such an example is far-fetched, but it seems to me that whenever we make an aesthetic judgment, it is coupled with thoughts about “if others could see this” and with ideas about connection to all humanity through this particular experience of beauty.

Beauty, I think, is similar to Locke’s “secondary qualities” in that it is an experience of a physical manifestation which is not measurable or necessarily explainable but very real. Perhaps beauty is a kind of all-inclusive secondary quality in the sense that it is experienced through all (or many of) the primary qualities combined. Beauty seems to be unlike Wollheim’s description of an emotion expressed through an artwork which represents neither the emotion of the artist while creating nor the viewer while observing. Beauty, instead, seems to be found in the raw experience of something, not in the thing’s way of expression itself. Something expressing sadness could very well evoke sadness in the viewer or not, but such discrepancy does not really weigh on whether or not that person experiences it as beautiful.