Enjoyment,

Beauty,

and Art

by Richard Warner,

Steven J. Wagner,

& Sean C. Stidd

Sumdam University Press, 2011


Introduction.

Beauty is powerful. It compels attention and appreciation, unites in shared visions and divides with different ones. Our goal is to describe beauty in a way that illuminates its power. The description consists of arguments for three claims. First, one enjoys the items one judges to be beautiful. Second, the enjoyment is a special kind; one does not enjoy in that way items one does not find beautiful. Third, to believe that something is beautiful is to believe, on the basis of the special kind of enjoyment, that others will, other things being equal, enjoy the item in that special way. The arguments for the second characterize beauty’s power to compel attention and appreciation; the arguments for the third claim address its power to unite and divide. The first claim is an essential preliminary. The inspiration for our approach is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in which Kant (arguably) advances all three claims. Our concern, however, is with the truth of the claims, not with Kantian exegesis, and our arguments will not, for the most part, be the same as Kant’s. Chapter I offers a definition of enjoyment; chapter II defines a sub-variety of enjoyment, of which the enjoyment of beauty is a special case. Chapter III defines that special case, and Chapter IV provides the account of the judgment of beauty. Chapter V gives an account of art.

Our definitions consist in the completion of the following biconditionals:

A person enjoys something if and only if . . .

A person judges that something is beautiful if and only if . . .

Something is a work of art if and only if . . .

This looks like old-fashioned conceptual analysis, and it is—in the sense that philosophers have offered necessary and sufficient conditions of various sorts for centuries. We assume that one’s thought and action occur in a conceptual framework (or a language, if one prefers), and we regard some connections among concepts in this network (some assertions in that language) as necessarily true. We do not, however, think these necessities are “true by virtue of meaning alone,” where that is understood to impose inviolable limits on what one can discover in the future. We mean only that it is not possible at present tell a coherent story about how they could be false. We cannot, for example, now coherently explain how it could be false that 2 + 2 ≠ 4, that green is not a color, or that triangles do not have three sides.

In these examples, we cannot even begin to sketch a scenario in which we might discover that the claim is false. Other examples are not so clear. Consider “Nothing can be white and transparent.” Can we imagine something white but transparent? It certainly seems not. Compare being blue and transparent. Imagine that you place a cube of transparent blue plastic on top of a penny; after observing the penny through the cube, you replace the blue cube with a white one, one uniformly milk-white over its entire surface. You note that you cannot see the penny thereby demonstrating that the white cube is not transparent. You knew, prior to the experiment, that nothing can be white and transparent. If the white cube were transparent, the penny could appear through it, and were the penny to so appear, it would look a certain way. For example, when the penny appears through the blue transparent cube, it takes on a bluish look, and, in general, an object seen through a transparent object, takes on a look determined in part by the color of the transparent object. This is part of what it means to be a transparent colored object. So, what look would the brown penny have when seen through the white cube? It is crucial not to imagine seeing the penny through a translucent white cube; a penny so seen appears with a diaphanous, translucently white overlay. What we want to know is how the penny appears—what look does it take on—when seen through the uniformly and non-diaphanously milk-white cube. It would have to take on a non-diaphanous, non-translucent, uniformly milk-white look. But, for the penny to so “appear” is for it to disappear in unbroken milk-white expanse of the cube. There simply is no “look” that things take when one looks through—or, more properly, tries unsuccessfully to look through--the white cube. White is not a look an object can take on in the way a brown penny takes on a bluish look when seen through a blue transparent cube. This shows that we cannot imagine the penny taking on a whitish look, but does it show that we cannot imagine a white transparent cube?

Arguably not. Imagine we discover that, in special experimental circumstances, light passes through white objects and affects the human visual system in a way that allows us to see objects through the white object. Perhaps the objects appear in some way we cannot yet conceive; or perhaps they appear as if seen through a translucent white cube; or, perhaps we see the objects in the way the Superman movies depict X-ray vision: the objects appear in their own unaltered colors and dimensions as if seen through a window suddenly opened in the intervening object. We can surely imagine such a discovery; furthermore, we might well announce the discovery by saying, “White things can be transparent.” The use would be well grounded in relevant analogies: the objects in question are white, at least they are outside the experimental situation, and they are like transparent objects in that one can see objects through them. The response, “But that is not what we mean by ‘white’ and ‘transparent’”, is ambiguous. If it means, “Our current meanings make that discovery impossible,” it is not a response we embrace; if it means, “Our current meanings are not consistent with calling such an object transparent (or white),” we find that unclear, and, in any case, the response would not preclude a process of discovery and linguistic transformation that would lead us to call the objects white and transparent.

What is the difference between the “2 + 2 = 4” cases, in which we cannot even begin to tell a coherent story about how the claim could be false, and the “Nothing can be white and transparent” cases, in which we can at least sketch such possibilities? Is the difference just a failure in our imaginative powers? We do not need to pursue the question. We take our definitions to be of the “white/transparent” type. We offer our completed bi-conditionals as merely as characterizations of how we must think now. Our goal is to provide an illuminating and informative description of the limits of our current thought. In tracing out those limits, we do not maintain that the necessary connections among concepts we uncover are the only ones which might be found. As everyone who has taught epistemology to undergraduates has surely observed, the English ‘know’ has multifaceted inflections of meaning, some of which line up with the epistemologist’s family of knowledge-concepts and some of which do not (“I knew it” said of a guess, “In the 12th century they knew that the world was round” – these are philosophically but not everyday-discursively infelicitous). So it is with ‘enjoys’, ‘is beautiful’, and ‘is a work of art’. We do maintain that we describe an important family of conceptual connections between these terms and others, connections which elucidate important aspects of actual usage and illuminate the relationships between the three. We do not however claim that in every case intelligent use of these terms must either line up with our own or be wrong, nor even that there might not be other illuminating connections to be found between them that go beyond what we set forth here.

Even with these qualifications, our goal of giving necessary and sufficient conditions may strike one as naïve. Our conceptual scheme evolves as people, for a variety of reasons, bend it to serve a variety of purposes. So, why assume that our conceptual scheme is so tidy that any important part of it can be characterized by sets of necessary and sufficient conditions? Isn’t it more realistic to expect our concepts to consist in more or less tightly organized fields of conditions for their application? Some of the conditions may necessary, but surely the evident flexibility and adaptability of our conceptual scheme makes it unlikely that neatly packed sets of necessary and sufficient conditions define conceptual domains. The subsequent chapters are our reply. It does appear possible to construct illuminating necessary and sufficient conditions associated with enjoyment, beauty, and art. We do often draw precise lines where our conceptual scheme contains only suggestive brush strokes, and this may suggest we have we have quite a free hand in framing our account. That is not our view of the matter. Our goal is to pay close attention to the ways we think, talk, and act. Our arguments and examples consist largely of careful characterizations of our thought, talk, and action, and we intend our definitions as description patterns discernible in our daily lives. The description is certainly an idealized one, and we by no means deny that at points description gives way to invention. It is nonetheless a constrained invention. Our interest is in our shared conceptual scheme, and the constraint is to keep invention and refinement to the minimum needed to achieve conditions at once necessary and sufficient, conditions will elicit, if not the response “That is what I think,” then the response “That is what I ought to think.” These precise pictures can provide an illuminating perspective not just on how we do think but how we should. We are recommending a way for one to think about oneself in regard to enjoyment, beauty, and art. Recommending a way one ought to think about such matters is surely not only something proper for philosophy to do, but also something one should demand of it.

An adequate answer is an essential for our account of beauty. We contend that to judge something is beautiful is to believe, on the basis of a special kind of enjoyment, that others will also enjoy the item in that way. Our explanation and defense of that claim rests on the account of enjoyment we give in the next chapter.

[Discussion of our free use of psychological concepts.]

March 2011

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