Enjoyment,

Beauty,

and Art

by Richard Warner,

Steven J. Wagner,

& Sean C. Stidd

Sumdam University Press, 2011


Introduction. What do we think about enjoyment, beauty, and art? What should we think? We offer an answer to both questions by completing 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 indeed our method has much in common with those of classic analytic philosophy. Our approach is old-fashioned in the sense that philosophers have offered necessary and sufficient conditions of various sorts for centuries, and we intend the conditions we offer as conceptual analysis. 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 truth by virtue of meaning alone guarantees that such truths impose inviolable limits on what one can discover in the future. We think certain statements are necessarily true simply in the sense that we cannot at present tell a coherent story about how they could be false. We cannot, for example, now coherently claim to think that 2 + 2 ≠ 4, that green is not a color, or that triangles do not have three sides. We do not, however, contend that one’s current concepts must impose inviolable limits on what one can discover in the future; thus, we offer our completed bi-conditionals as characterizations of how we think now. Our goal is to provide an illuminating and informative description of the limits of our current thought, not lay down limits on all all future scientific discovery.

Furthermore, we also 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 have described an important family of conceptual connections between these terms and others, 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.

Within these limitations, however, we do maintain that we have provided separately necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the three concepts under investigation. This may seem implausible. Our conceptual scheme evolves as people, for a variety of reasons, bend it to serve a variety of purposes. 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? Our answer is that the task drives one toward a deeper, more thorough and illuminating description of how we think. In doing so, we do indeed sometimes by draw precise lines where our conceptual scheme contains only suggestive brush strokes. These precise pictures can provide an illuminating perspective not just on how we do think but how we should.

These remarks may suggest a rather free hand in framing our sort of account. This 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 certain points in our discussion description may give 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 that may still elicit the response, “That is what I think” – or the response, “That is what I ought to think.” 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.

Our recommendations rest on a widely shared conception of what it is to be a person. A central aspect of this conception is expressed in Heidegger’s cryptic observation that a person is “das Seiende, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht.” [1] Charles Taylor offers the following gloss: the “human subject is such that the question arises inescapably, which kind of being he is going to realize. A person is not just de facto a certain kind of being with certain desires, but it is somehow ‘up to’ him what kind of being he is going to be.”[2] We believe that the concepts of enjoyment, beauty, and art all speak directly to this aspect of the human condition, and hope that in what follows we can lay bare to our own and our readers’ satisfaction in what ways this is so.

January 2011

Boise/Champaign/Chicago/Detroit/Gdansk/Kharkiv/Lublin/Wroclaw/Ypsilanti

[1] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tubingen Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), p. 42.

[2] Charles Taylor, “Responsibility for Self,” in Rorty, The Identities of Persons, pp. 281 – 282.