Beauty and the Quest for
Objectivity
By Robin Phillips
June, 2005
I wrote a paper once where I
made the contrast between Michelangelo’s sculpture La Pietà and Carl
Andre’s Equivalent VIII. (For those who don’t know, the later work
consists in a rectangular collection of unworked fire bricks, worth £30,000
when it was first exhibited at the Tate in 1972.) I had many interesting
responses to my paper, one being from a man who wrote to say that whether the
Michelangelo sculpture is better than Andre’s bricks is largely a subjective
and personal opinion.
Just a personal opinion that
a Michelangelo sculpture is more beautiful than a rectangular collection of
unworked fire bricks?
What is so shocking is not
so much that someone could make a statement like that, but that it reflects a
widely held sentiment. In fact, the subjectivity of beauty has become such a
truism now that few people actually think otherwise. However, the assumptions
on which this truism is based go back to some very questionable ideas that
arose at the time of the Enlightenment. The most important of these ideas was
the philosophy of empiricism.
Empiricism
In my essay The Enlightenment & The Disenchantment of Sex I tried to show how questions about gender and sexuality hinged on how mankind viewed the external landscape of our world and, as a consequence, how mankind views himself. These were the central questions that, we saw, found outworking in our response to what it means to be sexual. If, on the other hand, we turn to consider what post-Enlightenment man makes of beauty, we find it is not so much the questions about our external environment that come into play, but questions relating to the internal landscape of our minds. What is it possible for our minds to know? Is there such a thing as real objective truth,? Is truth something we create or discover? What are the criteria by which we can know anything?
How do we come to
know?
Every human being whose mind is developed and functional
will know things. Some people know more than others, while some people seem not
to know very much, but we all have at least a little knowledge. Most of the
time we take our knowledge for granted. We don’t tend to ask ourselves how we
come to know things, or whether there are any overarching principles that
govern the acquisition of knowledge. Yet these are precisely the questions that
philosophers must ask, and though such questions may seem obtuse and
irrelevant, a host of practical implications follow from our answers. One
wouldn’t think that these rather abstract questions about knowledge could have
any baring on, for example, how a painter chooses to paint, or what a gallery
chooses to display on its walls, yet these are just some of the areas effected
by one’s theory of knowledge.
If we were to
pose my earlier question (“how do we come to know things”) to the Enlightenment
philosophers, their answer would have been unanimous. According to nearly all the main thinkers of the Enlightenment, the
answer to this question is that the only legitimate means for acquiring
knowledge is through the five senses.
At
first this doesn’t seem such a very strange thing to say. After all, it is
difficult to imagine what we could know if we were deprived of our sense of
smell, touch, taste, and most importantly, our sense of sight and hearing. But,
of course, nobody would deny that the five senses play a crucial part in
bringing knowledge to our minds. That is not the issue. The issue is that, at
the Enlightenment, we were told that it is only through the senses that
we may ever know anything. This view was known as empiricism and was in contradistinction to the model which
affirmed there are certain forms of knowledge that are innate or inbuilt.
According to the later position, such things as our sense of right and wrong,
our awareness of beauty, rational intuition[1],
and so on, are not derived from sense observation but are ingrained in our very
make-up as human beings. To be sure, experience and training is needed to
awaken these innate ideas, even to refine and cultivate them, but the ideas
themselves are not actually derived from the senses. Another way of referring
to these innate ideas is to use the term a priori which literally means
‘prior to experience.’
To
demonstrate how an a prior idea functions in practice, let’s consider
the case of beauty, since that is the subject of this essay. As children we may
hear the word ‘beauty’ used to describe various things, say a flower, a sunset
and a painting. Now each of these things – flowers, sunsets and paintings - are
quite unique from each other and yet they may share this common element of
beauty. Now beauty is different to other properties that flowers, sunsets and
paintings may share in common. For example, suppose the flower, sunset or
painting all happen to be orange coloured. In that case, they share two things
in common: beauty and orange-ness. But notice how different these two
properties are. Our awareness of the beauty cannot be reduced to the physical
particulars involved while our awareness of the orange-ness can. This is
because, though the beauty may arise from or out of the sum total of physical
particulars, it is itself not one of those particulars. This is different from
saying that the existence of physical particulars may be a necessary condition
before beauty can exist, in the same way that the presence of at least two
beings is a necessary condition before love can exist; yet the beauty itself,
like the love itself, seems to transcend the particulars out of which it
arises.
At
least, that is the idea that goes back to Plato and many Christian thinkers (as
well as being implicit in many thinkers who did not directly articulate it) but
was challenged at the time of the Enlightenment. The belief in innate ideas had
been part of a general Christian worldview which understood that man was
different to the animals in more than merely his degree of sophistication. Since
mankind was created in God’s image, there was no difficulty in believing God
had implanted within man an innate awareness of such things as right and wrong,
beauty, truth and even an innate awareness of His own existence.
When
the thinkers of the Enlightenment started to doubt the relevance of God in our
lives, they understood that it was important to give alternative explanations
for these areas of knowledge. It would no longer do to say, for example, that
the reason we had a sense of right and wrong was because the Almighty had
implanted that knowledge within us. Even before the Enlightenment, thinkers
such as Bacon and Locke had begun laying the foundations for this
epistemological revolution. John Locke had put forward the idea that every
person enters the world tabula rasa – a blank slate. Or again, quoting
from Locke, “there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the
senses.” It followed for Locke that all the ideas in our mind are either the
products of direct sense-impressions (as a photographic film responds to light)
or else the result of the mind reflecting on the data presented to the senses.
The mind does not bring to such reflection anything that is innate or is not
derivative from sense/empirical observation.
Materialism and
Empiricism
This theory of
knowledge must be seen in the context of the other philosophical developments
we have touched upon, particularly materialism. Empiricism is the natural
result of materialism. In a world where the only reality is that of material
forces, our knowledge must come through the purely physical means of sense
observation. Innate awareness is an impossible concept to the materialist since
anything that is trans-physical cannot have actual existence. When human kind
is reduced to material forces then, of course, there can be nothing in the
intellect that was not previously in the senses.
Yet
just as empiricism was the logical consequence of materialism, so the reverse
is also true: materialism logically follows from empiricism.[2]
If the only kind of knowledge is that which we can attain through physical
observation, then that which is beyond the scope of the physical world can
never come under the rubric of knowledge. Therefore, since belief in such
non-physical entities as the human soul, God, angels, heaven and hell, cannot
be the subject of empirical knowledge, they must have arisen instead out of
superstition, ignorance and lack of true knowledge. The common people who
believed in things that could not be verified through sense observation were
frequently derided throughout the empiricist’s writings.
Empiricism annulled more
than just innate ideas; it negated any form of knowledge that came through extra-sensory
means. This included knowledge derived from the Bible, from metaphysical
reasoning and from religious tradition.
Carried to its logical
consequence, empiricism not only made it impossible to have any objective
knowledge about such things as God, angels, heaven and hell and the existence
of spirits, but it was not even possible to have objective knowledge about the
existence of the self. Few Enlightenment empiricists carried their beliefs this
far (though, as inevitably happens, you can be sure that the philosophers of
later generations would). David Hume, however, is one philosopher who at least
tried to be more consistent. Hume argued that we cannot have objective knowledge of the
self since it eludes direct sensory input. What we describe as our ‘self' is
merely a bundle of “different perceptions which succeed one another with
inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Furthermore,
according to Hume, we can have no knowledge of causal laws (the law of
causality refers to the law that all effects must have causes). Hume argued
that all we observe is one particular event followed by another particular
event – such as a person throwing the ball and then the ball flying through the
air – but we do not actually observe the abstract law of causality.
Because Hume was a person
and not an animal he realized that he could not live by the conclusions of this
radical empiricism. Thus, he escaped from the dilemma of total scepticism by
saying that he still believed in the self and the law of causality even
though he couldn’t establish such things objectively.
What Hume seemed to have
realized better than his successors, is that empiricism is a philosophy at odds
with life. In ordinary life, one just cannot keep one’s mind twisted into the
peculiar shape demanded by this philosophy. Hume even went so far as to
acknowledge that after “relaxing the bent of mind”, whether through dining,
playing a game of backgammon or having three or four hours amusement with
friends, when he would “return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and
strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any
further.”[3]
Consistent as he tried to
be, even Hume never carried empiricism through to it’s complete logical
extension. If the application of empiricism were total, then empiricism itself
would be the chief casualty. This is because the theory of empiricism does not
conform to it’s own criteria for knowledge. Remember, according to empiricism,
the only possible knowledge is that which comes through observation or through
the mind reflecting on observation. But one cannot observe, through purely
empirical means, that this idea is correct. Hence, empiricism is rather like
cutting off the branch of the tree you are sitting on – in order for it to be
true, it must be false! Thus, Kreeft and Tacelli write that
Empiricism as a theory of
truth seems designed a priori, from the beginning, rather than empirically and
from experience, to eliminate soul, spirit, God, heaven and objective moral law
from the realm of objective truths. …it is a rationalistic, a priori
ideological doctrine. Empiricism is not empirical enough.[4]
One could go on
pointing out the logical fallacies inherent to empiricism. Also, in all
fairness, my truncated discussion has not done sufficient justice to the
philosophical complexities of the theory. Nevertheless, I hope this
introduction to empiricism will have provided a sufficient foundation for
exploring the effect these ideas began to have on how
people approached the question of beauty in particular and art in general.
The Innate Sense of Beauty
Once it is conceded that the only reality we can ever know is that which
is susceptible to sense observation, problems arise in a number of practical areas,
not least of which is what to do with our concept of beauty. However, before we
can consider the problems empiricism raised in the area of beauty, we need to
spend some time reflecting on just what beauty is and where our awareness of it
is derived from.
Beauty-Vision
I shall be
argueing that beauty is an objective quality in things and that our awareness
of it is innate.
We
have already briefly touched on the subject of beauty during the discussion of
innate ideas earlier. I mentioned that the existence of particulars are a
necessary condition before there can be beauty. A moment’s reflection will show
this to be true, for you cannot have the beauty of a sunset without the
physical sun, nor can you have the beauty of a poem without particular words.
So a precondition for the existence of beauty is that there first be external
things, in a similar way to the fact that there must be particular things in
order for colours to exist. But although this is the case, it does not mean
that beauty can be explained purely in terms of the particulars out of which it
arises. This will become evident as we consider the way we experience beauty.
As
children we hear the word ‘beauty’ predicated of various things from sonatas to
sunsets, from poems to paintings, from faces to flowers. Eventually, we build
up a mental profile of what beauty means, similar to the way a child, after
hearing the colour green predicated to various objects, he will soon learn to
pick out and recognize green, unless, of course, he is colour blind. Now just
as people are born with colour vision, so people are also possessed of a
beauty-vision which allows them to recognize beauty in things. As with colour
vision, which must be awakened through experience, so beauty-vision must also
be brought to life through experience. Yet such experience is only possible
because something within each of has been ‘programmed’, if you will, to
recognize (re-cognate) what beauty is, for if this were not the case, one would
no more be able to grasp the common quality all the diverse beautiful
particulars share in common than a person who is born without colour vision
could ever be expected to grasp the common quality that all blue things have in
common.
As
with most things, people will try to reduce our awareness of beauty to a matter
of language. To be sure, they may object, a child learns what the word beauty
means just as he will learn the meaning of any word, but that in no way proves
that we have an innate awareness of it. If the person offering this objection
has done his homework, he may even go so far as to argue that because the word
“beauty” does not have an equivalent in many of the world’s other languages,
the concept cannot be innate but is merely a result of language convention.
Now
certainly, the word beauty does not appear in many of the world’s other
languages, even the languages where we would most expect it, such as classical
Greek. The ancient Greeks, for all their preoccupation with aesthetic matters,
did not have a word comparable to beauty. Yet surely, if anything, this proves
that the concept of beauty is not reducible to language, for there can
be no denying that the Greeks certainly had a concept of beauty even if they
didn’t know they did. One has only to look at Greek architecture and sculpture
to see that! [5]
Again,
the parallel with colours is helpful, for one would hardly dare suppose that we
only see blue because we have a word for blue. On the contrary, the word is
posterior to the thing itself. One can imagine a culture without any colour
language, just as our own culture does not have a very sophisticated language
for describing smells, but that does not mean that people without colour
language do not see colours or that we can only smell the smells we have named.
Similarly, it certainly does not follow that a culture without a conscious
concept and word for beauty cannot have an innate beauty-vision.
A more common objection to
the idea of an innate sense of beauty is the fact that people often disagree
about what is and what is not beautiful. To me, my wife looks beautiful, but to
my neighbour she looks plain. To me Beethoven is beautiful and the Beetles are
not, while another finds Beethoven simply boring. Surely this proves that we
cannot have an innate sense of beauty, for if we did, we would expect to be
able to always reach concensus. So beauty cannot be an objective quality, like
the colour green, but must instead be relative to the beholder.
The answer to this
objection lies in my earlier suggestion that our sense of beauty is a kind of
perception, which I have compared to our perception of colours. Now certainly,
what one person perceives as beautiful another person may not perceive as
beautiful. However, we do not normally consider that disagreement about
perception, even when widespread, makes everything subjective or relative. For
example, consider the sense of taste. Suppose I give each of my dinner guests
two glasses of wine, each from a different vintage, asking each to guess which
wine is from which vintage. Suppose further that there is widespread
disagreement amongst my guests– they argue and argue but cannot agree which
wine is which. Now such disagreement does not mean that the case ceases to have
any objective baring. Even if none of the guests are able to make the correct
perceptual discriminations, there would still be a correct answer. Similarly,
with the sense of beauty, it is not sufficient to use the fact of widespread
disagreement to undermine the objectivity of beauty. If a thing is truly
beautiful, that is a fact as solid as the fact that the world is round. Now
just as the world would still be round even if there is no one to recognize it
(and even if everyone thought it was flat), so a beautiful sunset would still
be beautiful even if there is no one there to see and affirm the beauty. Beauty
does not exist merely in the eye of the beholder but is an actual quality of
the real world.
It may be
objected that in my example about the wine it would have been possible to
verify which wine was which - after all, just look at the label on the bottle –
whereas with beauty such verification is impossible. Since there is no external
standard that would allow us to establish what is and what is not beautiful,
some people think it follows that beauty cannot be an objective quality in the
real world. But this does not follow at all. In my example about the wine, the
only way to verify the identity of the wine would be to use one’s sense of
sight to read the label on the bottle. Now just as you have to see the
label to know the objective truth about the wine, so you have to see a
thing’s beauty to know the objective truth about it. Now if someone has an
impediment on his sense of sight and cannot read the wine label, this does not
imply that the label isn’t objectively there any more than a person who has an
impediment on his sense of beauty would imply that beauty is not really there.
It is often
falsely assumed that to talk about beauty being objective implies that there
must be an external yardstick by which we can prove or deduce something’s
beauty. But you cannot prove or deduce the presence of beauty in
a thing any more than you can deductively prove that the traffic light is
green: you have to perceive it. Just as one’s physical vision can be obscured
by many factors, so one’s beauty-vision can be obscured by many factors. There
is not space to develop the point, but I firmly believe there are many
influences in today’s society that actively obscure our beauty-vision. But this
does not mean that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. It may be that
one day our society will have become so decadent that only a few people are
able to appreciate true beauty any more. If that does happen (heaven help us),
it would be like the current situation with wine tasting, where there are only
a small minority of experts who can make subtle perceptual discriminations.
As soon as you
begin talking about an innate sense of beauty, people assume this means
something that is automatic. There is certainly nothing automatic about how our
beauty-vision functions, any more than our sense of taste. Just as one’s sense
of taste needs to be nurtured before it can function properly, so the sense of
beauty also needs careful nurturing. A man who has grown up all his life eating
food from MacDonalds is not going to suddenly know how to distinguish and enjoy
various herbs or the subtle flavours in different varieties of oranges, just as
someone who has grown up on U2 and DC Talk will require quite a lot of training
and nurture before he will be able to distinguish and enjoy the difference
between Bach and Handel or between Mozart and Haydn. So the argument that we
have an innate sense of beauty is in no way opposed to the role that experience
and nurture plays in this process.
A similar
example is the innate sense of right and wrong, otherwise known as the
conscience. We all know what happens when an individual, or even a whole
culture group, constantly denies the inclinations of the conscience: it ceases
to function, or at least ceases to function very well. The sense of beauty can
also cease to function when our minds are constantly bombarded with trash,
ugliness and decadence.
On
the other hand, the way to nurture a child’s innate beauty-vision is not to
say, “this or that is beauty and ought to be enjoyed.” That is the way to turn
a child off beauty! Rather, you cultivate a love of beauty in children by
saturating their environment in truly beautiful things, whether it be good
literature, music, art, etc. (at the same time, obviously, excluding what is
ugly, banal and of poor quality). Then all you need to do is to stand back and
let the beauty do its work in awakening the child’s inner sense. So here again,
knowledge that is a priori (innate) and knowledge that is a
postoriori (derived from experience) goes hand in hand. The one cannot
exist without the other, for without innate awareness, experience would be
unintelligible, and without experience, what is innate could never be awakened.
The two work together.
This
brings us back to the empiricism of the Enlightenment, which split apart these
two facets of knowledge and then said that innate ideas do not exist. This
created an earthquake where beauty was concerned, as we shall see in the
following section.
Empiricism Equals Relativism
If,
as the empiricists taught, we enter the world tubula rasa (a blank
slate), then obviously the account of beauty that I have given in the last
section must be radically false. If all knowledge is relative to the
sense-perception of man, then judgements of beauty cannot be said to be true of
external reality but only true of the perceiver’s individual framework.
This
is, of course, a problem that empiricism presented to any area of knowledge,
not least to beauty. As Kreeft and Tacelli write that
Not
all empiricists are subjectivists and relativists, but they should be; for if
truth is empirical, and what is empirical is determined by my subjective
experience, then truth is subjective and relative.[6]
Condillac realized the relativistic
consequences of empiricism when, writing in the mid 18th century, he
noted that
Ideas
in no way allow us to know beings as they actually are; they merely depict them
in terms of their relationship with us, and this alone is enough to prove the
vanity of the efforts of those philosophers who pretend to penetrate into the
nature of things.[7]
Even
Locke himself had struggled over such difficulties, recognizing that his theory
of knowledge left
no
guarantee that all human ideas of things genuinely resembled the external
objects they were supposed to represent…. Outside man’s perception is simply a
world of substances in motion; the various impressions of the external world
that man experiences in cognition cannot be absolutely confirmed as belonging
to the world itself.[8]
Locke attempted
a partial solution to this problem, but was soon followed by Berkeley who
pushed the idea one stage further, and then by Hume in which this line of
thought was pushed to its final consistency of complete scepticism. What had
begun with Hume’s attempt to apply the ‘experimental’ principles of Newtonian
investigation to the study of man, ended up throwing into doubt the possibility
of any objective knowledge. After all, “If all human knowledge is based on
empiricism, yet induction cannot be logically justified [by the criteria of
empiricism], then man can have no certain knowledge.”[9]
While
this is a problem that the empiricists faced in every area of knowledge, there
are reasons why these problems were more than normally acute in the area of
beauty.
The Reduction of
Beauty
This is why
beauty was particularly problematic for the empiricists. If all knowledge is derived
from experience, then beauty must be explained exclusively in terms of the
things we experience without reference to any prior conceptual apparatus. But
this is more easily said than done! As we saw earlier, it is only because of an
innate awareness of beauty that we are able to find the common quality that
beautiful things have in common, a quality that arises out of the physical
particulars but is not reducible to them. Since empiricism denied innate ideas,
it follows that beauty must be reducible to empirical particulars, just as
materialism demanded that the human being be reducible to physical forces. But
can one treat beauty like that?
There have been certain schools of thought
that have tried to explain beauty, as well as other aesthetic features,
exclusively in terms of particulars. One thinks of the Russian Formalists in
the early part of last century who thought they could adequately understand and
explain the meaning of any artwork in purely scientific terms. For example,
they believed it was possible to deduce the value of any poem by counting the
distinctive word patterns, measuring the sounds, analysing the rhythms, etc..
Most art critics now accept that, while an analytic approach to art may assist
in our appreciation, there is more to any poem, painting, piece of music (or to
any Gothic cathedral, for that matter) than merely the constituent parts out of
which it is made.
Likewise with beauty. Just as there is more
to a poem than the sum total of nouns, verbs and adjectives, so a thing’s
beauty involves more than merely the particulars out of which the beauty
arises. However, such a statement is nonsense in the context of empiricism.
When articulating his radical empiricism, John Locke wrote “all things that
exist are only particulars” and that “general and universal belong
not to the real existence of things…”[10]
This means that when I look at a rose and reflect on its beauty, the beauty of
the rose does not really exist – what exists are merely a number of petals,
leaves and a stem. Beauty is not a quality that belongs “to the real existence
of things.” The real existence of things only includes a lot of different
particulars, and there can be no general or universal principle of beauty that
certain particulars possess or participate in.
Hume
seemed to have been conscious of some of these problems, for he went to lengths
to re-explain beauty in purely empirical terms. His first attempt to do this
appeared in the Treatise on Human Nature, published 1739-40. Here Hume
explains beauty as being the forms that give us pleasure because of the
harmonious relationship of the constituent parts. “Beauty”, he writes, “is
nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of
parts, which conveys pain.”[11]
“It is only the effect which that figure produces upon a mind…”[12]
This
could be called the “causal view of beauty” since there is a cause and effect
relationship between beauty/ugliness and pleasure/pain. This explanation avoids
subjectivism since it locates beauty in the object itself. Beauty is a
pleasure-producing feature that some forms possess and other forms do not.
This
account of beauty is compatible with empiricism since it does not try to
explain why the harmonious relationship of parts should give us pleasure,
but simply accepts that as a given. Hume himself would not face the question of
why certain aesthetic forms give human beings pleasure, but simply said this
comes about “either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by
caprice…”[13]
But
can beauty be explained wholly in terms of forms that arouse pleasure? If so,
it would seem that a thing is beautiful because we derive pleasure from
it, when in reality it is the other way round: we derive pleasure because a
thing is beautiful. However, pleasure is not always a necessary condition for a
thing to be beautiful. It is certainly possible to cognitively recognize that a
thing is beautiful without actually experiencing feelings of pleasure. For
example, suppose I am a composer attending an opera written by another composer
of whom I am madly jealous. I recognize the beauty of the composition but hate
the opera in direct proportion to its beauty. In that case, I would have
recognized the beauty without any corresponding feeling of delight.
Eleven
years later, when Hume wrote his Enquiries concerning Human Understanding
and concerning The Principles of Morals, his position shifted to a
subjective approach. While the Treatise had defined beauty as those
forms which arouse pleasure in the spectator, now Hume argues that beauty is
the feeling within the spectator. It exists only in the mind and feelings
of the spectator. “Till such a spectator appear,” Hume wrote
there
is nothing but a figure of such particular dimensions and proportions: from his
sentiments alone arise its elegance and beauty.[14]
In the 18th
century, the word “sentiment” refers to maters of sense perception. Therefore,
when Hume says that beauty arises only in the spectator’s sentiments, he means
that beauty exists only in perception. Take away the spectator and there is no
beauty, only “a figure of such particular dimensions and proportions…” On this
view it would be nonsense to refer, say, to the beauty of wild places existing
today which no one has ever visited. If Hume is correct, statements such as
these would be as contradictory as talking about pleasure existing in a world
where there were no beings capable of feeling plesaure.
This view was echoed in 1955
by Santayana who argued that it is just as contradictory to speak of a beauty
that is not perceived as to speak of a pleasure that is not felt.
Beauty…cannot be conceived as an independent existence… It exists in
perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty not perceived is a pleasure
not felt, and a contradiction.[15]
Of
course, now days there isn’t any problem here - it has become such a truism
that beauty doesn’t really exist in any objective sense. But the figures in the
Enlightenment hesitated from embracing such a radical position. They didn’t want
beauty to be reduced away or to become merely subjective, just as they
didn’t want morality to be a casualty of materialism.
One
of the reasons for this is because the philosophers of the Enlightenment, for
all their problems, did have a very strong sense of absolutes. This sense of
absolutes, which often kept them from being totally consistent with their
philosophy, is the chief difference between their ‘modernism’ and our
‘postmodernism.’
In
the area of beauty, the philosophers of the Enlightenment were particularly
keen to prevent relativism arising out of empiricism. In the wake of the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment was highly conscious of it’s Greek and Roman
heritage. The influence of classical culture thus gave those in the 18th
century a yardstick with which to measure their own achievements in many areas,
not least in the arts. This gave them a sense of absolutes, as well as making
it part of the culture and training of 18th century intellectuals to
be aware of the difference between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ and to prefer the
former. No one was ready to open the flood gates and say that the whole show
was just a matter of personal taste. They wanted to be able to say that beauty
was objective.
It
is no doubt because of this that Hume was uncomfortable with the psychological
account of beauty he had presented in his Enquiries. Hume was no
exception to the European intelligentsia of the day, for he had a keen
affection for works of classical art. Hume wanted to find a way for affirming
that the beauty of classical art went beyond merely a psychological event in
our own minds. This brings us to Hume’s final work on this subject, an essay
written in 1757 titled ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’
The purpose of
“the Standard of Taste” is not so much to give a philosophical account of
beauty, but to address the practical problem of how to prevent total relativism
of artistic taste. How do you arbitrate between differing tastes? Hume’s answer
was quite convoluted, but essentially he modified his ‘beauty is a sentiment’
theory. At first Hume’s argument sounds like a return to the causal view, but
he is careful not to go back to the position that beauty consists in an
object’s properties. All he is saying now is that certain properties in art and
literature regularly cause certain reactions in us, and these regular
properties are to a large extent identifiable. The way Hume identifies the
pleasure-producing features of good art is to observe that when there is not
prejudice, impairment of organs, or lack of education, people tend to prefer
the same works of art. Such works of art must, therefore, be beautiful. Hume
could get away with this because he was addressing an audience that almost
entirely preferred the classical style.
Here again, Hume’s argument never
explains where our sense of beauty comes from, nor how it can be ontologically
justified by empiricist criteria. As with the beauty-is-a-sentiment theory, it
begs the question of why humans, alone among all the animals, are possessed
with the ability to feel this peculiar sentiment. One cannot help wondering if
the reason for this glaring omission is the fact that, according to the
materialistic Hume was espousing, there is really no essential difference
between man and the beasts.
We need to move on and ask
ourselves, where has all of this left us today?
Denying the Illusion of Beauty
The twentieth century
witnessed the creation of a corpus of works designed specifically to show that
beauty, if it exists at all, is completely relative to the framework of the
perceiver. Some art galleries intentionally juxtapose work from the great
artists of the Western tradition with nihilistic art, the message being
obvious: there is no essential difference between the two. As one artist was
quoted as saying, “You complain that my art is just bricks. Well, painting is
just paint.” Since beauty never did have any objective meaning – since
“painting is just paint” - it is
possible for contemporary artists to claim the great works of the past as their
pedigree. There is no essential difference between the works of Raphael and the
works of Francis Bacon.
It
is not merely coincidence that as society has progressively accepted the
philosophy that beauty is not an objective quality, that it has simultaneously
given rise to some of the most repulsive, anti-beautiful art ever produced on
this planet. Anecdotal evidence for the self-conscious pursuit of hideousness
in art is legion and hardly need be adduced. One need only reflect on the
Chapman brothers – that notorious dual who are rich enough to buy paintings of
great masters, and decadent enough to deface and then exhibit what is left of
the masterpiece. Granted that the Chapman brothers are extreme and, in some
respects, non-representative, the conceptual framework underpinning their
pursuits is typical. That conceptual framework is not that people have grown
tired of beauty and desire ugliness instead, but that the very concept of
beauty is itself without objective meaning. This is why Theodor Adorno praised
Schoenberg’s music. “All of its beauty,” wrote Adorno, “is in denying itself
the illusion of beauty…”[16]
A contemporary artist
recently told me that the new orthodoxy is to teach people to draw badly well.
I am not quite sure if I understand how someone can draw badly well any more
than I understand how a thing’s beauty can be it’s denial of beauty.
Nevertheless, what is perfectly understandable is that contemporary
artists are embarrassed, even ashamed, at the idea of beauty. In some circles,
such as the art schools, I am told that beauty has actually become somewhat of
a dirty word.[17]
It may seem that common people
represent a last refuge against total artistic decadence. These are the people
who still fail to see the point of security guards and animal sculptures crafted
from carpet fluff, nor can they even begin to fathom why The Tate would want to
spend £22,300 on one of Manzoni’s 90 tins of his own excrement. Yet still, the
“man on the street” (if I can use that term without being pejorative) usually
subscribes to the mindset that has legitimised such work, namely that beauty is
relative. All you have to do is observe the common reactions if you chance to
remark that the music someone prefers is not beautiful. Nine times out of ten,
the person will not actually tell you that they disagree, but will instead
question the meaningfulness of your assertion. Because taste in music and the
other arts is seen as being on the same level as taste in say, food, anyone who
makes a value judgement is vulnerable to the charge of arrogance or of ‘trying
to force your opinion on others.’ Yes, beauty has become relative for common
people as well as the intellectuals.
In fact, the demise of beauty is
only one of many consequences that the empiricist worldview has wrought upon
contemporary art. The purpose of the next essay will be to explore some of the
wider implications that the Enlightenment has had on the art world.
To go to the next essay, click here!
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[1] Rational intuition
refers to instinctive principles of logic or common sense. The principles of
rational intuition function like the axioms in geometry which cannot be deduced
from prior premises but have to be assumed before any organized thinking can
occur.
[2] There is a circularity here from which even the best of the Enlightenment philosophers could not escape. The challenge against materialism would be answered with an appeal to empiricism, while the challenge against empiricism would be answered with an appeal to materialism! Of course, things were expressed with a great deal more nuance than this, but the fact remains that it was a self-sustaining metaphysic/epistemology that could only work if one started with some of the conclusions as a given.
[3] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature Book One (Fontana/Collins, edited by D. G. C. Macnabb, 1962, originally published in 1739), p. 318.
[4] Peter Kreeft & Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove: ILL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), p. 365.
[5] The Greek word kolos, which is often translated “beautiful”, could equally be translated “fine, admirable, noble,” as it is rendered in one edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (McKeon, R. (ed.), Random House, 1941, p. 368. “To call a thing beautiful in Greek,” wrote Collingwood, “is simply to call it admirable or excellent or desirable. A poem or painting may certainly receive the epithet, but only by the same kind of right as a boot or any other simple artefact. The sandals of Hermes, for example, are regularly called beautiful by Homer, not because they are conceived as elegantly designed or decorated, but because they are conceived as jolly good sandals which enable him to fly as well as walk.” Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 38) Collingwood makes the non sequitur leap from this purely linguistic point to the ontological point that “if we go back to the Greek, we find that there is no connection at all between beauty and art” (ibid, p. 37). Collingwood thus fails to distinguish between beauty as a reality and beauty as a concept. Because the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of microorganisms, it does not follow that they did not experience, and indeed die from, microorganisms; neither does it follow that the Greeks did not experience and produce works of beauty from the fact that they did not have a concept or language of beauty.
[6] Kreeft and Tacelli, op. cit., p. 365.
[7] Traité des sensations, cited by Hampson, pp. 75-6.
[8] Tarnis, op. cit., p. 334-5.
[9] Ibid, p. 339.
[10] John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1690).
[11] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book II, (Glassgow: Fontana/Collins), p. 57, originally published in 1739.
[12] Hume, “The Sceptic” in Essays, Lenz, J. W. (ed.), (Bobs-Merrill, 1965), p. 125.
[13] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ibid.
[14] Hume, Enquiries
concerning Human Understanding and concerning The Principles of Morals,
(Selby-Bigge, L.A. (ed.), Oxford University Press), p. 292.
[15] G. Santayana, The
Sense of Beauty, (Dover, 1955) pp. 28-9.
[16] Adorno, Philosophy of modern music, (London: Sheed and Ward) 1973, p. 133.
[17] Among critics and philosophers of art, the term beauty has also tended to disappear but for different reasons. See Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 257-258. Mothersill argues that though the term “beautiful” does not figure prominently in the shop talk of art criticism, just as the term “legality” is probably rare in the shoptalk of lawyers, nevertheless “when a point about a poem or a musical performance is made, the concept of beauty is in the background.” Beauty is “like knowledge or action, a “standing” concept, that it is taken for granted in critical discussion of the arts, and that it is indispensable.” (Mothersill, op. cit., p. 257 & 247) As these comments presuppose, most professional philosophers of art and art critics have not accepted the total subjectivity of beauty. Though such professionals do not tend to speak in terms of beauty, but prefer the wider range of categories under the appellation “aesthetic judgements”, art critics have held some ground against total subjectivism. (See Ian Ground’s Art or Bunk?, London: Bristol Classical Press, 1989) Nor is this surprising, for it is hard to see how the world of art criticism could continue to have anything meaningful to say if it did come to accept that everything is just a matter of personal taste. While contemporary critics such as Frank Sibley have produced some good arguments to show how aesthetic judgements are objective (see Sibley’s ‘Aesthetic Concepts’ in Philosophical Review 58, 1959, and his ‘Objectivity and Aesthetics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume, 1978), too little attention has been given to the conceptual framework needed to sustain such an approach. In this regard, art critics are comparable to the politicians who discuss ethics without ever considering whether their worldview can sustain a meaningful theory of ethics.