Ameliorating a Culturally Based Conception of Beauty

In the initial inquiry into beauty as a property of objects, I proposed that beauty is a property of objects that is delivered only through a subject whom is bound in their own culturally-dependent schematization of what beauty is (where it can be considered to be found, etc).What I wish to develop further is the concept of a cultural schema-based system of identification of objects as beautiful in light of the Kantian understanding which seeks to describe the same phenomenon but more adeptly by also including natural objects (such as flowers, bird song, the Grand Canyon, etc.) which seem to defy a culture-based schema model given the universality of their qualification as beautiful.

Establishing again that beauty is said to be expressed in an object when the interaction of a subject with an object elicits from the subject the statement, “this is beautiful.” Despite the appearance of being an objective claim of some kind, this is firmly planted in the realm of the subjective and is better phrased as “this presents to me the qualitative aspect which I know to be beauty.” Though few, if anyone, utters such a sentence when they encounter a beautiful object this description serves as a representation of what could be said to occur cognitively when a subject encounters such an object.

            What is important here is that beauty, ergo, does not exist as a real property of the object but as a subjective claim about the object. However, claims about objects being beautiful are more than mere idiosyncratic propensities. There is an astounding amount of agreement among people that certain art objects are beautiful, and further, as Kant points out, there seems to be even more agreement regarding natural objects as beautiful. Something which my previous account of a culturally based schema does a poor job of explaining (there is no condition which explains how these objects maintain their appeal across disparate cultures), but Kant provides an answer for in his division of the kinds of pleasure we feel when we encounter such objects – agreeable, beautiful, and good.

            Ameliorating the culture-based model then with Kant’s own divisions does not require its abolishment, but, instead, with the division of pleasures laid bare, it is clear to see how the mechanism of such a schema acts upon the moment one encounters a beautiful object. Typically, the object would, if it were beautiful, elicit the pleasure of beauty in the subject – though it may elicit other pleasures as well. However, cultural conditioning can obscure this pleasure, causing objects that would otherwise be beautiful to be seen merely as agreeable or good, with no reverence or recognition for their beauty – even perhaps without eliciting the pleasure of beauty at all. An example of this would be the call to prayer in most Islamic traditions, and it, actually provides a special kind of example. To many western ears, this call to prayer can be quite beautiful with flowing, lyrical lines in foreign, enticing modes. However, there is a propensity in certain Islamic cultures to view this act as merely good because it agrees with their concept of praising Allah and aids them in their devotion to their faith, but they do not recognize the call to prayer outside of its functional purpose – it is placed into the category of being good when it additionally belongs to the category as beautiful as well. This particular example has it that those outside of the culture find something within the culture beautiful that those who constitute that culture do not, and the inversion of this, which is far more typical, is easy to see. In this ameliorated state, what we find is that culture provides propensities in its constituting subjects which cause them to place objects into one of the three categories of pleasure while at times ignoring its equal presence in another category (this is not to posit the metaphysical property of beauty as existing somewhere between subject and object, but, rather, culture conditions the subject to have certain biases which no occlude an object from a particular category except in their own perception of that object).

            However, even in this amended state, there still remains a noticeable concern which is in regard to what of those objects that do not seem to elicit either of the three pleasures. The initial response should be that these objects fail to elicit pleasure of any kind and there need be any more confusion than that. But specifically, I am thinking of those artistic enterprises which fail in their time to be appreciated – being neither good, agreeable, nor beautiful by the understanding of the time – but are then introduced into one of these categories retroactively. The distinction must be made whether the objects always had those properties or whether culture applied those diagnostic properties to the objects after the fact.

            The only real conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the objects always maintained the potential to elicit pleasure in one of these three kinds but that they were excluded from all three by a cultural bias which was later altered, allowing the objects to be reassessed without this occlusion and found to express these properties (a fantastic tale of art artifacts unearthed which were unappreciated in their time only to be adored later). The concerns this raises, however, is whether someone or thing so alien to our own culture were to discover us or remnants of us that they might find the most inane things beautiful and may even find what we consider beautiful to be dull. This does not mean the objects they found did not participate in eliciting other kinds of pleasure but merely that they continually undergo a sort of reassessment which may place them in either category at any time given a set of background beliefs, and though the object does not change – and arguably then its ability to elicit any of the three pleasures – the arbiter of these distinctions remains the subject with their cultural baggage.