Beauty is not a property of objects

When I began this unit, I had a much simpler conception of my answer to the question of whether or not beauty is an objective property or in the eye of the beholder. Out of our three readings, Kant and Devereaux have particularly complicated my thinking. My first response was to assert that beauty could not exist without a subject—it was not objective, but purely a subjective thing. An experience, really, that was neither right, nor wrong, but rather depended on all the experiences and natural traits of a person up to the moment in time at which they would interact with any potentially ‘beautiful’ object. Keeping that in mind, I’d like to examine Kant’s ideas in the Critique of Judgment for a while. From Kant we learn that taste is “not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is aesthetic—which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective” (131). So far, so good—taste is about making a judgment concerning beauty, and it is subjective, not objective in nature. To discuss the varying kinds of responses we can have to objects, Kant proposes a tripartite scheme: objects we react to on a purely sensory level are merely “agreeable”; those which we react to in a primarily cognitive manner are “good”; and, those that are in between, and uniquely accessible to humans, are “beautiful” (134). He asserts that “agreeableness is a significant factor even with irrational animals” whereas beauty “has purport and significance only for human beings, i.e. for beings at once animal and rational” (134). Beauty is, therefore, a kind of thing that can be experienced only by humans, with our peculiar blend of rational and animal existence, and judgments of beauty are made “apart from any interest” (134) apart from any interest.

            I wonder about how one can make a judgment of beauty apart from interest. Not only that, but Kant claims that such judgments, though subjective, are universal: “a universality which does not rest upon concepts of the Object...is in no way logical, but aesthetic”; this universality “does not join the predicate of beauty to the concept of the Object taken in its entire logical sphere, and yet does extend this predicate over the whole sphere of judging subjects” (135). This seems to me to conflict with Deveraux’s explanation of how we interact with art, which I shall now examine.

            Devereaux focuses on the ‘male gaze,’ which is simply one of many lenses which we apply to the world. “No vision, not even artistic vision, is neutral vision,” writes Devereaux; “all vision is colored by the ‘spectacles’ through which we see the world” (651). Deveraux does not see any possibility for a separation between observation and interpretation; I am not clear at this point on whether or not Kant’s idea ‘beauty’ rests in a space amalgamating observation and interpretation, or free of both in some way (I take the latter possibility from the notion of ‘disinterested’ judgment). A judgment, after all, implies both examining the thing to be judged, and making a decision; so it is difficult for me to understand how Kant thinks one can make a judgment independent of background beliefs. Devereaux, it seems, disagrees: “Observation is always conditioned by perspective and expectation,” she says, arguing later that we must view artwork not as “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” but as part of “the everyday realm of social and political praxis” (651,59). Furthermore, and in direct contrast to Kant’s talk of “subjective universality,” Devereaux questions some ideas that I think Kant believes to hold. She questions whether or not there is a ‘pure’ aesthetic moment, or if art can speak to something universally apprehensible among human subjects (659). Perhaps most problematically for Kant’s schema, she denies that “reading or viewing” art can be “value-neutral,” or “neutral activities” (660). Both instances of the term ‘neutral’ in relation to art seem to me at least plausibly to represent that state of ‘disinterest’ that Kant thought must be reached to make a proper judgment of beauty, and Devereaux seems to reject its plausibility. I find myself aligning with Deveraux; making a judgment divorced from background beliefs is not something I see as possible. Nevertheless, my exploration of Kant has been very brief, and I may have misunderstood what he is getting at. At any rate, the two seem to agree on our question in its simplest form, and I take my cue from them: beauty is something subjective, being felt by the subject, and not an objective property of art, even if evoked by such objects.