Ramblings on beauty
Philosophy is notorious for raising more questions than it answers: if this is held to be true, it is perhaps more true of aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that examines all that which humans hold to have aesthetic value.
Every form of expression possesses in virtue of its capacity to elicit pleasure when experienced. The quantity qualifying this — more precisely, the quantity qualifying the ability to make valid judgments about an object's aesthetic value — can be naively thought of as taste. First commanding philosophical attention in the 18th Century, the concept of taste labored to correct the school of rationalism, which held the position that beauty is determined by reason. The aesthetic rationalism view was largely championed by Les Géomètres, a group of theorists who aimed to bring to literary criticism the mathematical rigor that Descartes had brought to physics. It was against this that alternative theories of taste were developed. These antitheses find their fountainhead in the idea that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not canonically) mediated by inferences from principles or applications of reason, but rather have all the immediacy of straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather "sense" that they are — that one's cognitive ability is not responsible for the recognition of beauty. The wise and foolish man will have similar accounts on the aesthetic value of some expression. Kant expands on this in his Critique of the Power of Judgment.
If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful… . I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false … than allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste and not of the understanding of reason. — (Kant 1790, 165)
In other words, we never conform to reason in discerning whether a Caesar salad is good or bad. We don't need to define the qualities of each ingredient, we don't then need the salad to settle into the reasonable principles of taste, and we certainly don't need to examine the proportions of its mixture in order to decide whether it's good or bad. This is never practiced. We have a sense given to us by nature to distinguish whether something has been created in accordance to the principles of its art. Even those unacquainted with the rules of the salad will be able to tell whether it's good or not. Dubos, in his Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, echoes a similar sentiment, proposing that the same immediacy thesis may be applied to human productions.
But aesthetics would not have reigned over much of the eighteen century, nor would it continue to now be a studied field, if it lacked resources to counter an obvious rationalist objection. There is a wide difference — so goes the objection — between judging the excellence of a Caesar salad and that of a poem. More often than not, poems and plays — and whatever such productions of the human mind may be called — admit a degree of complexity. In assessing and comprehending such complexities, one requires substantial cognitive work. The examined literary work, as some would contest, is far more profound in its beauty than the unexamined. Judging the aesthetic value of poems and plays, then, is evidently not immediate and so not a matter of taste.
We now meet a paradoxical understanding. The chief way of meeting this objection was first to distinguish between the act of grasping the object preparatory to judging it and the act of judging the object once grasped, and then to allow the former, but not the latter, to be as concept- and inference-mediated as any rationalist might wish. This is fairly convoluted but Hume expresses this idea with his characteristic clarity as follows.
[I]n order to pave the way for [a judgment of taste], and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained. Some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their first appearance command our affection and approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment. But in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751, Section I)
Alternatively, one could contest that maybe, as Plato suggests, beauty is tantalizingly obvious; we're all drawn to it, and we all recognize it when we're confronted with it. Like the Sirens themselves, beauty calls out to us. Now, obviously, there will exist art that looks like it was scribbled by a five-year old but still enjoys a privileged place in the confines of a reclusive billionaire's room. But these fringe cases are constructed for the exact purpose of challenging our intuition of what we think beauty is. We use our capacity to recognize beauty, even though we can't recognize it perfectly. In this view, we are forced to believe that the subjectivity of beauty is an illusion.
Alternatively, when people look at beautiful statues, explore drop-dead gorgeous gardens, or listen breathtaking music, they enjoy all these things for their intrinsic virtue and not for their incidental capacity to bring forth associations. As Aristotle mentions in Nicomachean Ethics III, a lion can enjoy seeing a gazelle only as a potential meal and never for its beauty. Aristotle's ideas point to what we today call aesthetic disinterestedness, a brainchild of Kant. The word disinterested should not be perceived to mean a lack of interest exhibited by being indifferent. Instead, its focus is on the artwork itself, which speaks to finding satisfaction in the way the work of art appears; for its own sake. When individuals find satisfaction of an aesthetic nature in an object of art using disinterestedness, they are essentially seeing the object in or for itself; the enjoyment is being extracted from the object in its own right as opposed to what the purpose of that project is. And in another passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle clearly implies this:
A virtuous person, as a virtuous person, takes pleasure in [others'] actions that express moral virtues, and is upset by actions caused by moral vices, just as a musician enjoys beautiful songs but finds bad ones painful.
(Nicomachean Ethics IX)
When we take to the evolutionary approach, as the world has post-Darwin, we recognize that much of the physical beauty we're drawn to serves some sort of evolutionary advantage. Why do we think bi-lateral symmetry is more beautiful than radial? What if your face possessed rotational uniformity? Historically, the point, although fairly hand-wavy, is there seems to be some sort of advantage to beauty. If that's true, then we'd all agree largely on what is beautiful — which we seem to. It's the same reason we prefer pesto over soap and salads over dirt. We've evolved to appreciate some things a lot more than others — Monet over a stick figure, Van Gogh over me, and Shakespeare over your English teacher. On this view it's the objectivity of beauty that's an illusion — beauty is completely subjective, it just happens that our respective subjectivities happen to coincide as a consequence of evolution.
Of course, beauty meets the same problem as morality. We, more often than not, know what is right and what isn't — when faced with having to exercise our morality and duty, we usually know what to do even if we don't do it. Similarly, beauty can be recognized viscerally and we know what it is even if we can't define it. You can exercise your judgement on something you cannot fully comprehend. But without a concrete definition, it's hard to say whether it's an objective or subjective concept. Maybe certain things that we create, or certain features of the world, are in some sense objectively beautiful, and some other things we call beautiful are subjectively so because they appear to mimic those objective things to some people. I'm just rambling here, because I don't have a conclusive definition of "beauty" and I've seen enough failed attempts to put me off trying.
I hope I've shed some light on the field of aesthetics here, though this is hardly a conclusive answer. Beauty appears, at times, objective and subjective, because we all recognize it but none of us can exhaustively describe it. As always, thank you for reading!