Aesthetics and Material Beauty

Aesthetics Naturalized

Jennifer A. McMahon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415874250
• eBook ISBN: 9781135195632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In Aesthetics and Material Beauty, Jennifer A. McMahon develops a new aesthetic theory she terms Critical Aesthetic Realism - taking Kantian aesthetics as a starting point and drawing upon contemporary theories of mind from philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The creative process does not proceed by a set of rules. Yet the fact that its objects can be understood or appreciated by others suggests that the creative process is constrained by principles to which others have access. According to her update of Kantian aesthetics, beauty is grounded in indeterminate yet systematic principles of perception and cognition. However, Kant's aesthetic theory rested on a notion of indeterminacy whose consequences for understanding the nature of art were implausible.

McMahon conceptualizes "indeterminacy" in terms of contemporary philosophical, psychological, and computational theories of mind. In doing so, she develops an aesthetic theory that reconciles the apparent dichotomies which stem from the tension between the determinacy of communication and the indeterminacy of creativity. Dichotomies such as universality and subjectivity, objectivity and autonomy, cognitivism and non-cognitivism, and truth and beauty are revealed as complementary features of an aesthetic judgment.

1 Introduction: Formalism, and the Problem of Beauty

In this chapter I will attempt to motivate your interest in the problem of beauty. I am relying rather heavily on the challenge presented by the objective– subjective paradox that beauty presents. There is a surface layer of idiosyncrasy and variability to aesthetic judgments. Everyone finds beauty somewhere but where they find it can vary considerably. However, when it comes to a favored kind of object about which you may be knowledgeable, you would dismiss someone’s aesthetic judgment that you considered reflected a lack of appreciation of the object and its relevant features. In short, when an aesthetic judgment is made about the kind of object you care about, you feel that there is an objective layer to the judgment about which the novice is ignorant. It is as if feeling can be informed, through experience, by this objective layer.

The other aspect of beauty that presents a challenge to our reason is that the experience of beauty seems to exhibit certain universal features. People talk about being moved by a scene, artwork, event or object. When this is explored they come up with explanations that reflect larger world views. These might be spiritual, religious, scientific or existential, but what these explanations have in common is a reference to the meaning of existence in relation to a larger context. In addition, people usually feel strongly that the beautiful object somehow expresses the ideas evoked in their experience of it. Yet how could the perception of landscape and absolute music (music without words), in particular, evoke such a contentful response? Accounting for the phenomenology of beauty in a way that is compatible with the features that result from a conceptual analysis of beauty is the problem that I address in this book.

1 Background

There is a paradox in our understanding of beauty, which I will introduce here according to a traditional analytical approach to aesthetic judgment. According to this approach, the problem of beauty is that it is objective and subjective, as if factual while expressing a value. The solution to this problem involves finding an intersubjective basis for beauty so that identifying an object as beautiful would involve a subjective response but one which we would expect in everyone. In order to present some background to the problem of beauty, I will describe the objective–subjective tension and how it implicates the fact–value dichotomy before suggesting the kind of approach which might open the way to a solution. I present Immanuel Kant’s antinomy of taste as a way of summarizing the problem of beauty.

Objective, subjective

The central philosophical problem of beauty lies in the fact that we can be wrong about it, even though beauty is a feeling rather than the result of reasoning. This is paradoxical. Feelings are the irreducible aspects of experience. We have privileged access to how we feel. They may be inappropriate to their object¹ relative to social norms but only I know if I have a particular feeling. If beauty is felt then either I feel it or I do not. I cannot be wrong about it. Yet, as mentioned above we have all known cases where we have felt a person’s aesthetic estimation of an object has been inept or simply wrong.² On occasion we can look back at our own earlier aesthetic judgments and see now that they were wrong. If I can be wrong about an object’s beauty, this suggests there is a fact of the matter. Only statements of fact can be true or false. But this possibility raises another problem. If beauty is a fact then my finding pleasure in beauty is contingent, not necessary. Yet, this cannot be right because beauty is like an exclamation of approval even when we are inclined to defend our aesthetic judgments as if they involved an identification of an objective property.

Why don’t we just dismiss any suggestion that beauty tells us something objectively true about an object? Instead, an experience of beauty would only reveal our response to an object. This position has been called expressivism regarding beauty.³ The advantage of expressivism is that it captures the privileged access we all feel we have to beauty. However, one of the reasons we find the experience of beauty so affecting is that it points us in the direction of the beautiful object and what we think the object represents or expresses. We feel that through beauty something worthwhile has been revealed to us which is not just a figment of our imaginations. Even if this were an illusion, it would be an illusion in need of an explanation. Expressivism falls short.

We feel we are entitled, in finding something beautiful, to expect others to find it beautiful also. This is not an empirical claim. It simply explains what the term “beauty” means for us. If beauty does not tell us something objectively true about an object, it must tell us something objectively true about how we, with our particular perceptual and cognitive dispositions, respond to certain objects. In this way, the expressivist core to aesthetic judgment might be consistent with the objectivity of beauty. However, we simply do not all find the same objects beautiful. If beauty were a response to objective properties in the object, grounded in a species-specific feature of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus, then in practice we should all find beauty in the same objects.

Fact and value

Some philosophers interested in beauty have thought of it as the conduit whereby value is linked with the domain of reason. For Plato, beauty directed us to the good, which we could only apprehend through knowledge. Reason could not choose its objects without the direction provided by beauty.⁴ There are some traces of this view to be found in Kant’s theory of beauty.⁵ Through the experience of beauty, our rational self is oriented within a sensuous world.⁶ The notion is that knowledge alone would not equip us to survive. We are not driven by facts. We are driven by desire. Kant conceived of beauty as reinforcement through pleasure of certain ways of apprehending. We find pleasure in order, regularity and harmony, and consequently this is what we look for in nature. This deep-seated preference is species specific or, as Kant would characterize it, this preference is grounded in the supersensible substrate of humanity. These preferences underpin perception and cognition such that we might say our facts are beholden to preferences for certain ways of construing data. Francis Hutcheson,⁷ a precursor to Kant, explained the preference for forms that turn out to promote our survival, a sign of a benevolent God. We, on the other hand, can help ourselves to an evolutionary explanation for such preferences.

According to evolutionary psychology, all that we can know is constrained by what our distant ancestors needed to know in order for creatures like us to survive in the environment that they found themselves in. In this sense, then, knowledge is already linked to value. When we perceive the world, we take ourselves to perceive simply what is there. In fact, what we perceive, even before cultural interpretations are brought to bear, is already selected according to the way our species’ perceptual mechanisms evolved to satisfy our survival needs. One way to think about this is to posit perception as driven by underlying assumptions or preferences. This is the way psychologists of perception and vision scientists think about it.⁸

Kant seems to have thought that beauty was the faculty that connected our reason with desire through the pleasure we find in certain structures. The notion is that the experience of beauty is a corollary of this connection rather than a prompt. Our relation to nature is not one of absorbing facts that simply exist out there independently of mind. Rather it is a matter of finding satisfaction in certain structures which we are inclined to notice in nature because of this. Our satisfaction in certain structures, then, grounds the bodies of knowledge we construct.⁹ The same preferences or values are brought to bear upon experience generally. Culture might be understood as mimicking the structures found in nature by virtue of exercising the same values.

This construal of fact and value as overlapping did not sit well with traditional analytical philosophy, which adhered tenaciously to the clear distinction between fact and value. For example, George E. Moore considered attempts to naturalize moral properties misguided. He argued that if it is an open question whether some natural property is good or bad, then the natural property in question is a different kind of property to a moral property.¹⁰ The non-natural approach to moral properties was simply to stipulate that a moral property expresses a value that has normative force. Yet such a stipulation is unfounded. If a property has normative force then it must have a factual basis. Yet a value expresses an attitude. On what basis can we necessarily link a fact with a particular attitude? An aesthetic judgment expresses a value that has normative force. We need to find the basis of the necessary link between value and normativity in an aesthetic judgment.

The problem of beauty, as it was construed within the analytical tradition, became focussed upon how to reconcile fact and value in the way we make an aesthetic judgment. According to Mary Mothersill,¹¹ aesthetic theory needs to show how there can be genuine judgments of beauty (a fact of the matter) without there being principles of beauty (because beauty is, at least in part, a value). In other words, we need to ascertain how a rationally grounded judgment, presumably giving rise to a belief, could be one that necessarily involves a pleasing object. How could reason or belief be necessarily linked to pleasure? The latter as we know from experience cannot be the result of inference. We cannot be made to find something pleasing based on someone’s argument.

If beauty represents a property of objects, then we should be able to predict what will be beautiful. Artists should be able to study a system of aesthetic principles, like the logician studies a system of logic, and apply them to the making of beautiful objects.¹² We should be able to establish through argument which objects are beautiful. But, of course, beauty is not like this. That a particular object is beautiful depends on your finding it so. Claiming that an object is beautiful, without the characteristic response to the object, is nonsensical. Beauty is necessarily pleasing. Yet, within a cultural group, and to a lesser extent between cultural groups, there is something approaching a fact of the matter concerning beauty. However, even if we settle for an explanation based on cultural norms, we still need an explanation as to how these can be internalized given that there are no statable logical conditions for beauty.

Naturalized philosophy relies on underlying scientific explanations. If an explanation satisfies the criteria of a good explanation, then the phenomenon that it explains falls into the factual side of the fact–value distinction. A good explanation does not posit entities unrecognized by science. I would suggest that there is a good explanation available for beauty, and one that vindicates its objectivity, indeterminacy and normativity. Beauty is objective in the sense that its truth is independent of any individual or cultural belief. The concept of mind I present is a continuation of the principles instantiated in nature, where consciousness refers to particular structures brought to bear upon raw data. Any fact about the mind is a fact about the world. If beauty represents a value, then values are as much a part of the world as facts.¹³ The functional role revealed for beauty will reveal that, in the case of beauty at least, fact and value intersect.

Kant’s antinomy

Kant thought of beauty as reconciling the sensuous with the rational aspects of the human being. However, this rapprochement gave rise to an apparent contradiction. He represents this apparent contradiction in his antinomy of taste.¹⁴ His first thesis was that beauty is not based on concepts because if it were we could decide by proofs whether something is beautiful. His second thesis was that beauty is based on concepts because otherwise how could we maintain the claim on everyone’s assent. His solution was that “concept” was used differently in each thesis. In the first thesis “concept” refers to a determinate concept, while in the second thesis “concept” refers to an indeterminate concept.¹⁵

A determinate concept is the basis of the universality of cognitive judgments. When we make a cognitive judgment, such as an empirical or logical judgment, we assume everyone will agree with us because we have based our judgment on observation, induction, testimony or inference and the concepts we use are made communicable ostensibly through convention. That is, the concepts directly represent their objects and we learn which terms will represent which objects. In the case of beauty, however, we agree to the term, but the concept of beauty does not have a determinate object. We cannot simply point to beauty, or report it, or provide necessary or sufficient conditions for it. We learn about beauty through exclamations, “Oh, how beautiful!” and as such we first learn about beauty as representing a response rather than an object. Yet we also learn in time how fraught disagreements about beauty can be and how susceptible to learnt systems of style such judgments can be. Hence we conclude that the concept of beauty exhibits a rational structure, but it is indeterminate in that only by learning through experience can one acquaint oneself with the systems involved in aesthetic judgment.

The universal basis of beauty, according to Kant, is an indeterminate concept. My aim in this study is to suggest what the basis of such a concept might be in terms of contemporary theories of mind and to ascertain whether this construal in contemporary theory suggests further implications for understanding aesthetic judgment.

2 Formalism and cognitivism

To some extent beauty evades philosophical analysis within the analytical tradition. When one tries to clarify the features of aesthetic judgment and experience in such a way that they result in a coherent and consistent concept, seemingly intractable tensions and incompatible beliefs result as I have explained above. Two schools of thought have emerged in the analytical tradition in response to these tensions which correspond roughly to formalism and cognitivism.

Formalist sympathies are most coherent when understood as motivated by the need to explain the possibility of creativity. The problem for the formalist, I would suggest, is how to explain the possibility of creativity regarding objects and theories that are nonetheless communicable. If they are communicable, then they must have been constructed to some kind of principles, yet creativity would seem to be defined by going beyond established principles. How then does a creative person access the principles that allow them to construct something new yet meaningful to others? Creativity by definition is creating something that others understand. Making objects or theories in one’s own private world does not constitute creativity.

The formalist should address this problem by suggesting that the principles accessed by the creative person are principles that govern relations between the elements that make up perceptual and cognitive constructs. In this way they can explain why the principles involved in creativity are not accessible to language because they constitute the architecture of the mind. We recognize forms that economize these principles or epitomize them by virtue of finding the form beautiful. This approach is promising regarding the fact–value problem also. The difficulty, however, is in establishing the nature of these relations. I have described formalism in the only way that I consider it can be a coherent position and this is a non-cognitivist formalism. This does not rule out a cognitive engagement with the beautiful object. Object recognition and various associations and connotations feature in the object of beauty by providing the elements between which the relevant unity is apprehended in imagination. However, traditional formalism presents an incoherent position.

Traditional formalism attempts to explain the relevant relations not in terms of what the mind provides at a subpersonal level to our consciousness of an object but in terms of relations that exist in the world, as if independently of mind. Both traditional formalism and cognitivism rely on supervenience to explain the nature of the aesthetic.¹⁶ The only way they differ is that, while traditional formalism posits relations between elements as the basis upon which aesthetic properties supervene, cognitivism posits determinate properties as the supervening basis. For example, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson present their position as cognitivism about aesthetic properties. They argue that aesthetic properties supervene on significant cognitive non-formal properties.¹⁷ Significant properties, according to Parsons and Carlson, are properties that figure in the classifications employed in the natural sciences. Significant properties tell us something scientifically true and explanatorily powerful about the object. Consequently a property such as being taller than something else is not a significant property because tallness is not highly explanatory with respect to behavior or appearance and does not feature in scientific classifications.¹⁸ Parsons and Carlson argue that whatever properties are deemed to give the object its distinctive character are the very properties upon which the object’s aesthetic properties should supervene.¹⁹ They claim that formalism confines aesthetic appreciation to a superficial and inconsequential metaphysical ground and provides a passive and simplified model f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Formalism, and the Problem of Beauty
• 2. Universality and Subjectivity
• 3. Objectivity and Autonomy
• 4. Critical Aesthetic Realism
• 5. Beauty and Truth
• 6. Natural Generativity and Systematicity
• 7. The Ubiquity of Beauty
• 8. Ugliness
• 9. Conclusion: An Ontology of Art
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index