Beauty

Judging Beauty

Beauty is not a simple property but involves a distinctive form of judgment that seeks meaning in objects for their own sake, requiring contemplative attention rather than utilitarian calculation.

• Beauty appears across all categories of existence - objects, people, ideas, actions - yet cannot be a simple physical property since it spans such diverse types of things and involves metaphorical connections created by our associative powers
  • We describe songs, landscapes, moods, scents as blue through metaphor requiring imaginative leaps
  • Beautiful applies to concrete objects, abstract ideas, works of nature and art, animals, people, qualities and actions
• Beauty’s status as an ultimate value comparable to truth and goodness is questionable because beauty can conflict with both truth and goodness, as when myths seduce us from reality or attractive people lead us to condone their vices
  • “Beauty, which gives the myths acceptance, renders the incredible credible” —Pindar
  • From Kierkegaard to Wilde the ‘aesthetic’ way of life has been opposed to the life of virtue
  • Flaubert, Baudelaire, Wagner and Canova have been accused of painting wickedness in alluring colours
• Six platitudes define beauty: it pleases us, admits degrees, provides reasons for attention, involves judgment about the object not the subject, requires first-hand experience, yet creates a paradox where aesthetic reasons support conclusions without compelling them
  • There are no second-hand judgements of beauty - you cannot become an expert simply by studying others’ opinions
  • Comedy arises when Jane Fairfax describes Mr Dixon as plain based on others’ opinions rather than her own experience
  • The judgement of beauty makes a claim about its object and can be supported by reasons, but these reasons do not compel the judgement
• Kant’s theory of disinterested interest explains aesthetic judgment as contemplation focused on an object for its own sake, where we suspend practical concerns and attend to how things appear, creating a ‘disinterested pleasure’ that seeks universal agreement
  • When I ask myself what I ought to do, I stand back from myself and put myself in the position of an impartial judge
  • “In the judgement of taste, I am ‘a suitor for agreement’, expressing my judgement as a binding verdict” —Kant
  • “The beautiful is that which pleases immediately, and without concepts” —Kant
• Beauty involves wanting an individual object for its own sake rather than as a means to an end, creating desires without goals that cannot be satisfied by substitutes, as when someone wants ’that particular peach’ for its beauty
  • Wanting something for its beauty is wanting it, not wanting to do something with it
  • If Rachel wants the fruit for its beauty, then there is nothing that would count as fulfilment
  • Wittgenstein example: replacing Mozart with Haydn shows failure to understand aesthetic interest

Human Beauty

Human beauty uniquely prompts both contemplation and desire, revealing the embodied rational soul rather than mere physical form, and connects aesthetic experience with the sacred and moral dimensions of human life.

• Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain beauty through reproductive advantage fail to capture beauty’s specific intentionality as rational judgment, whether through group cohesion theories or sexual selection theories that reduce aesthetic interest to genetic strategy
  • Ellen Dissanayake argues art enhances group cohesion through ‘making special’
  • Geoffrey Miller and Steven Pinker argue beauty emerged through sexual selection like peacock displays
  • These theories cannot infer beauty was necessary for sexual selection, only sufficient
• Plato’s theory of eros as both sexual desire and contemplative love of beauty creates a paradox where the individual object both prompts desire yet disappears as either physical urge seeks any suitable body or spiritual love transcends the particular person
  • Beauty, in a person, prompts desire
  • Eros is a form of love which seeks to unite with its object, and to make copies of it
  • The love of beauty signals to free ourselves from sensory attachment and ascend toward eternal truths
• Sexual desire differs from ordinary appetites because it targets specific individuals as irreplaceable subjects rather than interchangeable objects, creating a ‘singling out’ that elevates animal drives into rational projects focused on free persons
  • People are not interchangeable as objects of desire, even if they are equally attractive
  • “Just in the raging foam of full desire… they only cruise about the coast, for bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost” —Lucretius
  • Sexual desire is not a drive but a singling out, a prolonged stare from I to I
• Human beauty resides in embodiment rather than mere physical form, appearing most clearly in features like face, eyes, and hands that reveal the soul, while beauty is destroyed when the person is eclipsed by viewing the body as mere object
  • The mouth is not an aperture but a speaking thing, continuous with the ‘I’ whose voice it is
  • To kiss that mouth is to touch the other person in his very self
  • We feel queasy when we suddenly see a body part where an embodied person had been standing
• The experience of human beauty connects to the sacred through the recognition of transcendent subjectivity, creating prohibitions around childhood beauty and virginity that protect the realm where beauty exists beyond desire as a symbol of redemption
  • Human beauty places the transcendental subject before our eyes and within our grasp
  • The Virgin Mary represents idealized love between embodied people that is both human and divine
  • Beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but also a call to renounce it

Natural Beauty

Natural beauty provides a universal human experience of feeling at home in the world, though it differs from art in being freely given rather than intentionally crafted, and encompasses both beautiful organisms and sublime landscapes.

• Kant argued natural beauty is universal to rational beings because it has no history and offers the same beauties to every culture, making aesthetic judgment potentially common to all humans rather than culturally specific
  • Nature, unlike art, has no history, and its beauties are available to every culture and at every time
  • A faculty directed towards natural beauty has a real chance of being common to all human beings
  • Taste is common to all human beings, a faculty rooted in reasoning capacity
• Natural beauty divides between individual organisms that frame themselves like artworks and landscapes that are infinitely porous and contextually dependent, with organisms offering concentrated perfection while landscapes provide world-like expansiveness
  • Birds, bees and flowers have boundaries - they are framed by their own nature
  • Landscapes leak out in every direction with uncertain criteria of identity
  • The invisible suburbs affect the appearance of fields, causing us to see as enclosed what might otherwise delight as open vista
• The Marxist critique dismisses aesthetic disinterest as bourgeois ideology that mystifies economic relations, but this fails because aesthetic distinctions appear universally across cultures and serve rational interests that transcend particular social orders
  • The ‘disinterested’ perception renders things permanent and ineluctable, inscribing bourgeois relations into nature
  • Chinese tapestry, Japanese woodcuts, and poems of Confucians show aesthetic interest across non-bourgeois cultures
  • If you want to dismiss aesthetic interest as bourgeois ideology, describe the non-bourgeois alternative where beauty would be redundant
• Natural beauty provides metaphysical reassurance by making consciousness feel at home in the world, transforming outer reality into inner meaning through contemplation that suggests purposiveness without definite purpose
  • “To see a world in a grain of sand and a Heaven in a wild flower” —Blake
  • A world that makes room for such things makes room for you
  • The earth finds its fulfilment when dissolved in consciousness, achieving inwardness that redeems both itself and the observer
• Burke’s distinction between the sublime and beautiful divides aesthetic experience into attraction to harmony and serenity versus awe before nature’s vastness and power, with beauty offering comfort while the sublime challenges us with infinity
  • When attracted by harmony and serenity we speak of beauty; when experiencing vastness and threatening majesty we speak of the sublime
  • In the sublime we sense our ability as free beings to measure up to natural power and reaffirm moral law
  • Both responses lift us out of ordinary utilitarian thoughts into disinterested contemplation

Everyday Beauty

Aesthetic judgment is integral to practical reasoning, helping us choose between functionally equivalent alternatives by seeking visual rightness and social harmony in everything from door frames to table settings.

• Gardens exemplify the universal human attempt to create surrounding spaces that mediate between built environment and nature, achieving a ‘between-ness’ that makes human habitation feel at home in the natural world
  • A tree in a garden enters into relation with people who walk there, belonging with them in conversation
  • There is a phenomenological ‘between-ness’ that infects all our ways of enjoying a garden
  • Garden art is the art of being neither art nor nature, but both folded over each other
• Aesthetic judgment closes practical redundancies by focusing on how things look right, as when a carpenter chooses among functionally equivalent door frames based on visual appropriateness rather than mere utility
  • You will step back and ask: does that look right? This cannot be answered in functional terms
  • Current building code makes it impossible to design a front door that looks right like Georgian pattern-book doors
  • Rational beings don’t just hit on alternatives but seek reasons for choices, whether before or after the event
• Aesthetic choices accumulate social meaning through coordination problems, as people seek agreement on shared environments, leading to vocabularies of forms and styles that enable rational discourse about public spaces
  • Others will look at the doorframe and be pleased or displeased - this creates a coordination problem
  • Great innovators like Palladio suggest forms that elicit spontaneous approval while ordinary builders adapt through trial and error
  • A rational discourse emerges to build a shared environment where we can all be at home
• Style emerges when people consciously exploit aesthetic norms to communicate specific meanings, as when a hostess chooses an earthenware wine jug to allude to Mediterranean ease rather than formal dining
  • The jug alludes to Mediterranean life where rough wine is in frictionless relation to work and play
  • Style involves conscious exploitation of socially engendered norms
  • Aesthetic choices form part of the outward projection of the self and self-certainty
• Fashion arises through imitation to guarantee that aesthetic choices will gain social endorsement, allowing people to send recognizable messages and belong in a community of appearances while expressing individuality within conventions
  • Fashion offers guarantee that others will endorse aesthetic choices
  • Folk costumes arise by invisible hand as people avoid useless offence and appear as ones who belong
  • Leadership can set fashion as when Beau Brummel influenced Regency England or Beatles changed their generation

Artistic Beauty

Art creates meaning through style and form that transcends mere entertainment or propaganda, offering imaginary worlds for contemplative exploration rather than fantasy fulfilment or direct emotional manipulation.

• Duchamp’s urinal joke precipitated an intellectual industry asking ‘What is art?’ but this misses the point that art, like jokes, functions to fulfill aesthetic interest and can be judged as successful, offensive, or failed
  • All those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, TV soaps are ‘as good as’ Shakespeare
  • Anything is a joke if somebody says so - a joke may fail to perform its function or perform it offensively
  • Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was a joke - quite good first time, corny by Warhol’s time, downright stupid today
• True art differs from entertainment by creating distance between viewer and subject that enables disinterested sympathy, as Bergman’s Wild Strawberries demonstrates through composed cinematography that serves dramatic purpose rather than mere effect
  • You could frame a still from a Bergman film and it would sit on your wall like an engraving, resonant and composed
  • Bergman chose black and white to minimize distraction and ensure everything contributes to the drama
  • The camera stalks the story like a hunter, pressing past into present through creating identities
• Imagination differs from fantasy in that imagination creates represented worlds for contemplative exploration while fantasy seeks surrogate fulfillment through perfect unrealities that replace rather than represent experience
  • Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out
  • Fantasy seeks simulacra - images from which all veils of hesitation have been torn away
  • Convention and framing are integral to the imaginative process but impede fantasy
• Artistic style enables artists to control audience response by turning shared cultural vocabularies in personal directions, as Picasso controlled eroticism through cubism or Pope controlled misanthropy through heroic couplets
  • True artists control their subject-matter so our response should be their doing, not ours
  • “le style c’est l’homme même” —Buffon
  • Style enables allusion to unstated things, summoning comparisons not explicitly made
• The form-content problem in art reveals that meaning resides not in separable content but in the inseparable unity of what is said and how it is said, as demonstrated by poetry’s polysemy and untranslatability
  • The meaning does not reside in content that could be identified just anyhow but in particular content as presented
  • bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang describes both autumn trees and ruined monasteries simultaneously
  • How could you render in English the melancholy of ‘Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne’?
• Musical meaning emerges through metaphorical connections between sound patterns and human experience, as demonstrated by Barber’s Adagio for Strings, whose noble solemnity links musical structure to moral life through expressive understanding
  • Musical understanding is not self-centred reverie but appreciation of movements in the musical surface
  • Nothing actually moves in music, and most movement occurs when there is nothing to be heard
  • We praise the Barber Adagio for its noble solemnity - the metaphor makes connection with moral life

Taste and Order

Aesthetic disagreements reflect deeper concerns about moral identity and social community, leading to inevitable disputes over public taste while revealing that good taste connects to virtuous character through the search for shared values.

• Private taste becomes public concern when aesthetic choices affect shared environments, leading to planning disputes over houses and gardens that reveal our implicit desire for aesthetic consensus in social spaces
  • Your neighbour fills her garden with kitsch mermaids, polluting the view from your window
  • We argue that her house clashes with classical facades, appealing to Georgian serenity
  • Planning laws have controlled building heights, materials, and styles to protect shared aesthetic inheritance
• Aesthetic reasoning aims at changed perception rather than logical compulsion, as when critical arguments about Brahms’s Fourth Symphony or Whistler’s Nocturnes provide new ways of experiencing artworks through attention to structure and meaning
  • You show me how themes unfold from the same melodic cells, and suddenly the heaviness vanishes
  • The painting’s shadowy quality indicates how people have darkened the world through industry
  • Such criticism wants you to experience the work differently, not discard it for a translation
• Cultural variation in taste does not eliminate cross-cultural aesthetic universals like symmetry, proportion, and harmony, while aesthetic objectivity seeks valid human experience rather than universally compelling logical results
  • Symmetry, order, proportion, closure, convention, harmony, novelty and excitement have permanent hold on human psyche
  • Early medievals regarded the fourth as harmonious, the third as dissonant - for us it’s reversed
  • Aesthetic objectivity seeks heightened forms of human experience where life can flower according to inner need
• Rules cannot guarantee beauty because aesthetic success requires creative transcendence of rules, as Bach’s fugues demonstrate rule-following creatively while Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library achieves beauty through rule defiance
  • Bach’s Forty-Eight illustrate fugal rules by using them as platform to rise to higher freedom
  • Merely obeying rules would be recipe for dullness, as in counterpoint exercises
  • Even rule-governed buildings like the Parthenon need that extra creative something
• Hume’s standard of taste locates aesthetic authority in the reliable critic’s character traits like delicacy and discernment, suggesting that judgments of beauty reflect the judge’s virtue and connect aesthetic taste to moral character
  • Beauty is what the reliable critic discerns, and the reliable critic is the one who discerns beauty
  • Let us concentrate on qualities we admire in a critic - delicacy and discernment
  • There is as much objectivity in judgements of beauty as in judgements of virtue and vice

Art and Erōs

Erotic art differs fundamentally from pornography by presenting embodied persons rather than objectified bodies, with true erotic art like Titian’s Venus maintaining the subject’s dignity while pornography reduces people to commodities.

• Human faces uniquely reveal individuality among animals through features that express freedom, character and judgment, making portraiture a distinctive art form that captures not momentary thoughts but long-term moral stance and self-conception
  • The mouth that speaks, eyes that gaze, skin that blushes give concrete expression to uniqueness of self
  • Great portraitists ensure high-points of expression reveal moral stance and self-conception
  • The reclining Venus shows the body not as statue to be worshipped but as woman to be desired
• Titian’s Venus maintains personal dignity by drawing eyes to her face, which declares the body belongs to a free subject, while Boucher’s nudes lack individual faces and present the body as universalized sexual appetite available to viewers
  • This body is on offer only to the lover who can honestly meet her gaze
  • Boucher’s nudes all have the same face - not a face at all but assemblage of facial parts
  • These bodies are unowned, dis-souled, containing universal template of human face voided of animating self
• The evolution from medieval to Renaissance art shows the shift from Platonic etherealization of desire to earthly embodied love, as Botticelli’s heavenly Venus gives way to Titian’s domestic Venus and Milton’s Paradise
  • Botticelli’s Venus moves in heavenly spheres, outside reach of mortal longings
  • Milton portrays ‘rites mysterious of connubial love’ where body is physical presence of rational soul
  • “smiles from Reason flow, and are of love the food” —Milton
  • Modern mind sees object of desire as both rational and mortal with poignant helplessness
• Pornography destroys beauty by treating subjects as objects and bodies as commodities, while erotic art like Titian preserves the subjectivity that makes sexual interest personal rather than merely physical appetite
  • Normal desire is inter-personal emotion seeking free mutual surrender through bodies, not merely as bodies
  • Pornography, like slavery, is denial of the human subject, negating the moral demand to treat others as ends
  • The pornographic image is like magic wand that turns subjects into objects, people into things
• The body-soul relationship involves incarnation rather than property ownership, meaning damage to the body affects the whole person and those who love them, explaining traditional moral condemnations of prostitution and pornography
  • My body is not my property but my incarnation - I don’t own it any more than I own myself
  • What is done to my body is done to me, and can cause me to lose moral sense
  • By selling the body you harden the soul - true of prostitution and pornography
• Boucher’s Blonde Odalisque illustrates soft pornography by presenting a woman in purely sexual pose with no narrative justification, inviting viewers to fill the absent lover’s place while avoiding the reality of actual persons found in page three photography
  • This woman has adopted a pose she could never adopt when dressed, looking vacantly away
  • The place of the lover is absent and waiting to be filled - you are invited to fill it
  • No-one is degraded by Boucher’s painting since no-one real occurs in it

The Flight from Beauty

Contemporary art increasingly rejects beauty in favor of transgression and desecration, reflecting a loveless culture that fears beauty’s moral demands and seeks to destroy rather than create meaning through aesthetic experience.

• Modern art that once redeemed ugliness through beautiful treatment, like Baudelaire and Eliot, has given way to art that matches ugliness with its own ugliness, cultivating transgression rather than seeking transcendence through aesthetic form
  • Art in the tradition of Baudelaire floats like an angel above the world, inviting us to another place
  • “là tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté: Luxe, calme et volupté” —Baudelaire
  • Recent art cultivates transgression, matching ugliness with ugliness of its own
• The modernist revolution was actually recuperative rather than transgressive, with artists like Eliot, Matisse and Schoenberg seeking to protect aesthetic ideals from popular corruption and reunite art with spiritual meaning
  • The goal of modern artist is not break with tradition but recapturing tradition in new circumstances
  • There could be no truly modern art which was not a search for orthodoxy
  • Modernism was conceived as recuperation: arduous path back to hard-won inheritance of meaning
• Contemporary productions actively desecrate classical works, as in Bieito’s Berlin production of Mozart’s Die Entführung, which replaced the opera’s message of love and clemency with gratuitous violence and sexual degradation
  • Mozart’s opera expresses Enlightenment conviction that charity is universal virtue
  • Bieito set the opera in Berlin brothel with Selim as pimp and Konstanze as prostitute
  • Even during tender music, stage was littered with copulating couples and torture scenes
• Desecration represents defense against the sacred’s moral demands, attempting to destroy things that judge us, while the sacred experience universally startles humans out of mundane concerns into recognition of transcendent value
  • In presence of sacred things our lives are judged, and to escape we destroy the thing that accuses us
  • We are reluctant to touch the dead body; we see it as visitor from another sphere
  • The beloved looks from a point outside the flow of temporal things, demanding ritualistic reverence
• Idolatry profanes the sacred by introducing substitutes and currency into worship, while postmodern culture profanes sex and art by treating sacred objects as replaceable commodities rather than unique bearers of meaning
  • You can trade in idols, swap them around, try new versions - this profanes by admitting currency
  • Sacred object must be placed apart, in the world but not of it, as unique summary of life’s meanings
  • Pornography addiction wipes out the sexual bond from intrinsic values, replacing love with substitutes
• Kitsch represents the degradation of genuine spiritual content into sentimental stereotypes, transforming authentic belief into commodified emotion that avoids the cost of real feeling while enabling historical horrors
  • Kitsch is not artistic phenomenon but disease of faith that spreads to infect entire culture
  • Kitsch is heartless world where emotion is directed toward sugary stereotypes without trouble of feeling
  • Arrival of kitsch coincided with horrors of trench warfare, holocaust and Gulag

Concluding Thoughts

Rather than defining beauty as a property, the book reveals beauty as a rational experience that demands meaning-making, critical comparison, and moral examination, making it a fundamental aspect of right feeling and human flourishing.

• Traditional definitions of beauty like Alberti’s organic wholeness or Hutcheson’s unity-in-variety fail because they either prove circular when examined closely or use terms so vague they apply to everything from gardens to communication towers
  • “The beautiful is that from which nothing can be taken away and to which nothing can be added but for the worse” —Alberti
  • Ask ‘worse in what respect?’ and you will see the definition is circular
  • Terms ‘unity’ and ‘variety’ become so vague as to cover everything from messy gardens to hideous towers
• Beauty is not subjective preference but rationally founded experience that challenges us to find meaning, make critical comparisons, and examine our lives, requiring right feeling and right enjoyment just as much as right action
  • Everything about beauty implies that it is rationally founded
  • For a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action
  • The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it
• The aesthetic experience offers refreshment that never tires when placed at the center of life, expressing not mere preference but pleasure in what we value and taste for our true ideals
  • Art, nature and human form invite us to place aesthetic experience in centre of our lives
  • If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire
  • Beauty expresses pleasure in what we value and taste for our true ideals