In my initial response to the question of whether or not beauty is a property of objects or whether it is merely constituent of a subjective experience I leaned toward the later because of lack of evidence for the former. However, instances arose while reading the texts assigned within the last few weeks when the obviousness of this choice was clouded. Although some of the following theories may be far-fetched, I feel that investigation into the possibility of beauty being an objective matter is important because the discovery of such a fact would be widely beneficial. If beauty is in the object than a universal principle might be discoverable whereby beautiful things could proliferate and our lives would be much more enjoyable (and arguably more meaningful). This only serves as motivation to attempt to offer alternatives to accepted norms, however, not to ignore the voracity of those norms, in this case, beauty as subjective. Wollheim’s account of the nature of artworks serves as a good starting place.
Wollheim’s classification of art as not either particulars or general entities such as classes or universals but as types which are expressed through tokens brought up some interesting arguments in favor of beauty being more a property of the object than of the subject’s experience of an object. For example, considering that we only experience through our sensible faculties tokens of a particular artwork’s type, all of the properties of an artwork are not immediately available to us, as would be the case were we to adhere to most other aesthetic theories. If not all of the properties of an artwork were sensible to us, it could mean that beauty could be (in terms of a Lockeian primary/secondary distinction) a true property of an object. This confusing move requires the following elucidation: given that we experience beauty and the properties of an artwork may constitute more than the properties of that artwork’s tokens, if beauty were a property of the artwork, it would be a secondary property because it is something sensible to us that must be caused by a primary property insensible to us. Whether this property exists or not is currently beside the point, for all that matters is that Wollheim’s definition of art allows, contrary to most streams of modern aesthetic thought, that beauty could be a property of objects rather than merely subjective experience.
Whereas Wollheim’s account allowed for the possibility of objective beauty, Kant’s account outright precludes it. However, if one takes Devereaux’s indirect objection to Kant seriously, that aesthetic judgements are necessarily political and cannot be divorced from interest, then Kant’s categorization of pleasures could allow questions of taste to intermingle with questions of goodness, opinion to bridge over to logic, and aesthetic judgements to be rendered in accordance with objective principles. By accepting the feminist claim that art must be experienced through a political lens, we must collapse Kant’s category of taste-based pleasure. This does not mean that considerations of beauty disappear, but that they can be applied to considerations of good-based pleasure (accepting that ethical and political ideas correspond to considerations of the good). In this formulation of the schema, an artwork is beautiful partly in virtue of its adherence to our precognitive intuitions of what is good. This does not mean of course that all good things are beautiful, just that all beautiful things are good. In being good, they give themselves up to intellectual contemplation and through this (though perhaps no adequate process has yet been carried out in this manner) the reason for why something is beautiful, in as much as it is first good, could be found. In lieu of these theories being compelling though, there’s always the astounded appeal to our brute experience, which according to Kant “demands” that beauty (our subjective experience of beauty) be recognized as objectively beautiful, so without further ado, as evidence of the objectivity of beauty, the entirety of In Rainbows:
No comments:
Post a Comment