ART AND BEAUTY

Gordon Graham
 INTRODUCTION

• To have reached this point is not necessarily to have put the concept
of pleasure behind us, because some philosophers have thought that
what is special about art is a distinctive kind of pleasure –
‘aesthetic pleasure’.
• The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, for instance, urges us to
recognize that aesthetic pleasures ‘have a special character of their
own and exist in a different manner from the pleasures deriving from
a good meal or fresh air or a good bath’ (Ingarden 1972: 43).
• What could this pleasure be? One obvious
answer is – the pleasure that accompanies
beauty.
• Colour words are like this.
• Whereas we can apply colour words like red
and green without committing ourselves to a
favourable estimation of the things we apply
them to, we automatically praise something
when we call it beautiful, and criticize it when
we describe it as ugly.
• What is the connection between a purely
descriptive term like ‘red’ or ‘green’ and the
evaluative term ‘beautiful’?
• There are two possibilities that philosophers have discussed at great
length. The first is that the connection is purely subjective.
• The term ‘beautiful’ says something about the person who uses it. This is
the view embodied in the familiar saying that “Beauty lies in the eye of
the beholder,” which is where Hume started his argument
• two principal objections to such a view:
1. If saying ‘This is a beautiful red apple’ means ‘I
like/love/value/prefer this red apple’, why don’t I just say that? Why
cast my opinion in such a misleadingly objective form, as though it
were about the apple, when in fact it is about me, and my feelings
towards it?
2. If judgments of beauty are purely subjective, why does anyone
bother to argue about them?
KANT ON BEAUTY
 • Between subjectivist and objectivist accounts
of beauty there is a stand-off.
• Some aspects of the way we talk and act
support a subjectivist interpretation, and
others support an objectivist interpretation.
• How then are we to judge between them?
• This was the motivation behind most of
Kant’s philosophy—to resolve certain
fundamental antinomies about art.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

 ex: human beings = have free will and can choose but
they are physical objects subject to deterministic laws
of nature.
 By focusing on the first we can prove that the second
cannot be true; but by focusing on the second we
equally prove that the first cannot be true. How is such
an antinomy to be resolved?

The stand-off with respect to the nature of beauty can be interpreted as an

antinomy of sorts.
It seems that the ascription of beauty can equally well be interpreted as
an exercise of rational judgement and as an expression of personal
sentiment or feeling. But both cannot be true and so we seem to have a
philosophical impasse.
 Kant: The Critique of Judgement
 Kant draws a sharp distinction between feeling and reason , and on the face of it,
experience of pleasure cannot be rational or irrational, any more than a pain can be
rational or irrational, because it is part of our sensitive rather than our intellectual
nature; either things give us pleasure or they don’t.

 But Kant came to the view that the aesthetic is a special kind of pleasure precisely
because it in some sense transcends mere individual preference.
 Aesthetic pleasure, or pleasure in the beautiful, is something we can expect others to
experience at the same time as ourselves.
 It means that pleasure in the beautiful is a pleasure it is proper to commend to
others.
Kant’s Critique:
1. The Critique of Pure Reason, is concerned with how
human minds can have knowledge of the world outside
them, how science is possible if you like.
2. Critique of Practical Reason, is an attempt to
discern the principles that make action rational
and morality possible.
3. The Critique of Judgement accounts for the aesthetic
by locating it in relation to these other two.

He places aesthetic judgement= between the logically

necessary (mathematical theorems for example) and the
purely subjective (expressions of personal taste).
 ex. proposition ‘this is beautiful’
 does indeed have the appearance of a cognitive judgement(how things are) --- Kant
agrees with Hume that expressing such a judgement ‘cannot be other than subjective’;
that is, arising from a feeling of approval
 But in contrast to Hume, he rejects the view that the experience of beauty is merely
subjective.
 This is because, although Hume thinks that the attribution of ‘beauty’ to an object
reflects a sentiment or feeling within us, Kant is aware that this is not how it seems to
us.
 while it is true that beauty needs to be appreciated subjectively, when we see beautiful
things we are aware that the pleasure we derive from them is not a function of
something peculiar to us.
• Beauty is subjective, but it is not merely personal , as the expression of
a preference is when we refer to something of which we happen to be
especially fond
in declaring an object to be beautiful, we think we have a ‘reason for
demanding a similar delight from everyone’.
the distinguishing characteristic of the aesthetic must lie in this: it is free
but not purely fanciful.
In Kant’s terminology an aesthetic judgement is ‘disinterestedly free’.
It has, in one of his most famous expressions, ‘purposefulness without
purpose’ (§10). When I find something beautiful, it is purposeful, but it
does not have some specific purpose that might make it useful to me.
• Aesthetic judgement is thus to be distinguished:
1. from a judgement of fact because it is subjective,
2. from the merely subjective because it commands the assent of others,
3. from a judgement grounded in practical rationality because the
beautiful has no practical purpose, and
4. from the merely fanciful or superficially attractive because it has the
mark of purposefulness.

• What sort of judgement is it that falls between these

alternatives?
Kant’s answer is – a judgement arising from the ‘free
play of the imagination’ or subjective universality.
The crucial point is that while the play of the
imagination has to be free, it must also be able to
command universal assent just as a claim to knowledge
or usefulness does.

To explain this curious double nature, Kant postulates a

sensus communis (or ‘common sensitive nature’) among
humans that is invoked and appealed to when a judgement
of taste is made.
 This shared sense is not the same as
shared knowledge about the objective
properties of classes of things, like the
knowledge that aspirin relieves pain.
Aesthetic judgements are not about
classes of things at all, but about
individual objects.

 In Kant’s language, judgements of taste must be ‘invariably laid down as a singular

judgement upon the Object’. So, when I declare something to be beautiful, I am not
placing it within a general category of ‘beautiful things’ as I place ‘aspirin’ within
the category ‘painkiller’.
 ‘Delight’ in the beautiful is fixed upon an object. Instead of an intellectual
classification, it consists in contemplation of the object itself.
 THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE AND
THE SUBLIME
 The Critique of Judgement Kant is also concerned with ‘the sublime’.
 The sublime is found most obviously in nature. So too are beautiful things, of course.
 A flower vs Niagara Falls
 Tudor cottage vs Caernarfon castle in Wales
 Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto vs Tchaikovsky
 they can also be construed as having something in common – namely the kind of
attitude they invite, an attitude whose key element is a feature identified by Kant –
disinterestedness.
http://webneel.com/wallpaper/sites/default/files/images/01-2014/2-flower-wallpaper.jpg
 Niagara Falls

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Caernarfon Castle, Wales

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 1969 Liberace Show plaing Tchaikovsky

Julian Bliss plays Mozart clarinet concerto (Adagio)

 • When we look at the Oriel
window from an aesthetic point
of view (it is said) we are not
concerned with its functionality
the extent to which it lets in
enough light for reading by, or
is difficult to clean.
• Such practical concerns are set
aside.

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• So too, when we stand beneath the
raging cataract, we set aside any
question of how we are to
negotiate a crossing or harness its
power for the purpose of
generating electricity.
• But more importantly from the
point of view of appreciating its
sublimity, we also detach ourselves
from it emotionally.
We apprehend its fearfulness,
certainly, but without actually
feeling the sort of fear that would
make us run away; we savour its
power without any anxiety that we
might be swept away.
• It is the sort of apprehension brilliantly expressed in
William Blake’s famous poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
• To describe the tiger’s ‘fearful symmetry’ as beautiful
seems inadequate.
• This is because, while the tiger does indeed have
beautiful fur and is superbly proportioned, much more
impressive is the ferocity of the creature as it suddenly
appears at night in the forest.
• If we are to experience this awesomeness, or sublimity,
we need both to be able to distance ourselves from any
fear we might feel, and at the same time contemplate its
fearfulness.

• ‘the aesthetic attitude’ = ‘contemplation’

and ‘distance’
 The fact is that some practical interests do indeed distract us from focusing on works
of art as art – wondering about the investment value of a painting for example – it
does not follow that we can avoid distraction only by having no purpose at all.
 On the contrary, certain purposes will cause us to concentrate on the work more
intently – a playwright watching a rehearsal with a view to rewriting the script is
one of the examples he gives.
 In short, Dickie presents a convincing case against the idea of a distinctive state of
mind that we could call ‘the aesthetic attitude’ and which constitutes the heart of
aesthetic experience.
 ART AND THE AESTHETIC
 A second objection to the concept of the aesthetic attitude is this:
 If aesthetic experience is the application of a distinctive attitude to an object, then the
aesthetic has no necessary connection with art. Suppose (to return to Kant) that a
special delight arises from ‘the free play of the imagination on an object’.
 This object could be a picture, a statue, a poem or a piece of music, but it could
equally well be a sunset, a mountainside or a rose (an example Kant several times
considers). All that the Kantian aesthetic requires is that judgments of taste, beauty,
sublimity and so on express themselves as singular judgments upon an object.
• What then is the connection between art and
the aesthetic?
• Kant addresses this point (to a degree) when he says
‘nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art
can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as
art while yet it looks like nature’ (§45).
Though this goes some way to explaining why aesthetic judgement is
appropriate to both nature and art, it still confines us to the point of view of
someone looking at beautiful things.
It identifies the essence of the aesthetic with a consciousness of the
appearance of objects, which is to say, art appreciation.
But what about art making?
 Artistic production, according to Kant, also arises from a free act of the
imagination. Here again, he attempts to bring out the distinctive character
of creative activity by contrasting it with other mental operations.
Art is different to science, the acquisition of knowledge, because it requires
practical skill. But though it is practical, we can differentiate it from craft or
design because the nature of the things it produces is not determined by a
functional concept.
The structure of a piece of furniture or a piece of machinery, say, is determined by
the function it has to serve.
Since artworks have no such function, they are not ‘determined’ in this way.
Artistic ‘genius’ (to use Kant’s term) has to be free. At the same time it is
constrained by the need for its productions to look ‘natural’, or uncontrived.
 So far so good, but we are still left with this question: what is the
connection between the artist’s creative act of imagination and the
contemplative act of aesthetic judgement?
 Aesthetic judgement, according to Kant, is merely a critical, not a
productive faculty. While ‘a natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artistic
beauty is a beautiful representation of a thing’.
What this tells us is that both nature and art can engage aesthetic
judgement, since both can be beautiful.
But it is the special task of art to engage the aesthetic attitude by producing
representations of things.
One question is whether this does not confine art too narrowly to figurative
painting. Lyric poetry is often beautiful, but surely it is expressive rather
than representative?
Kant does extend his account of art beyond figurative painting with the
concept of ‘aesthetical ideas’ (§49). These are non-visual representations of
non-physical things such as love, or death or envy, which it seems clear the
literary arts can embody, including, even, lyric poetry.
Perhaps a more difficult case is music. Music can be beautiful, but can it be
the representation of anything? And surely architecture is functional rather
than representative?  
While this seems a plausible way to distinguish natural
beauty and artistic beauty, it does not explain the special
value of art.
In the spirit of Kant we can agree that beauty is to be
valued for its own sake and not to be reduced to or
explained in terms of something else – knowledge or
practical usefulness, for example – but we still have to
bridge the gap between the value of beauty and the value
of art.
Since the world contains beauty without any creative activity on the part of
human beings, what does art add?
If we already have beautiful things, why do we need beautiful
representations? Why is it not sufficient for us to uncover and conserve the
beauty that is to be found in the natural world?
The appeal to beauty, or even more broadly ‘the aesthetic’, leaves
unexplained the value, if any, in artistic creation. It also leaves unexplained
the multiplicity of art forms.
If we already have painting, why do we need poetry?
GADAMER AND ART AS PLAY
• Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘The Relevance of
the Beautiful’.

• Gadamer aims to explain the value of art

by building upon Kant’s conception of the
beautiful.
• By his estimation, Kant’s great advance was
to see…

1. first, that aesthetic taste is not a purely

subjective matter but something which
claims universal assent;
2. second, that it arises not from any
concept of the understanding but from
the free play of the imagination; and
3. third, that the ability to play freely is the
peculiarity of artistic ‘genius’.
• On the basis of these three propositions, Gadamer
forges a much closer connection between aesthetic
appreciation and art making
• As Kant explains it, the mark of genius lies in
activity that is productive, but not useful, and
which is not bound by any functional concept or
repeatable process of manufacture. Free creative
activity is not determined by rules, and even artists
cannot explain what makes their creations ‘right’.
 one consequence of this is that ‘the creation of genius
can never really be divorced from the con-geniality of
the one who experiences it’ (Gadamer 1986: 21).
 since imagination lies at the heart of art making, the
realization of the artwork requires an act of
imagination on the part of the observer as well as the
maker.
A work of art . . . demands to be constructed by
the viewer to whom it is presented. It is . . . not
something we can simply use for a particular
purpose, not a material thing from which we might
fabricate some other thing. On the contrary, it is
something that only manifests and displays itself
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when it is constituted by the viewer.
  Ex: Leonardo produced the Mona Lisa, but what exactly
did he produce?
 at one level, is a physical object made of wood, canvas
and pigments of various sorts, a unique object without
any function.
 But The work of art is not a physical object at all, but an
image – of a woman with a faint enigmatic smile.

 To appreciate this we have to see this image for

ourselves.
 Whereas aesthetic judgement can simply ‘play’ on the
beauty of natural objects, in order to play on beautiful
representations, it must first see them as representations.
This is why aesthetic judgement and artistic production
go hand in hand. The artist’s creativity needs its
audience for its very existence.

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In this way Gadamer forges a plausible connection between art and the
aesthetic.
Q: what special value attaches to art above natural beauty?
A: Gadamer’s answer is that the deliberate creations of the artist provide
‘the experiences that best fulfill the ideal of “free” and “disinterested”
delight’ (Gadamer 1986: 20). What is the mark of ‘best’ here? We must
look, he thinks, at ‘the anthropological basis of our experience of art’, the
way that art connects with our fundamental nature.
 This connection, it turns out, is to be found in
play.
By nature children engage in those activities
essential to physical survival . But they also play.
In thinking about play, we usually contrast it with
work and for this reason generally accept that
play can be characterized as activity without
purpose. But, as Gadamer points out, it is a deep
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mistake to suppose on the strength of this
characterization that play is trivial activity and
work is serious. This is a different contrast.
Play is not ‘mere diversion’ because activity
without a purpose need not be pointless.
Viewed extrinsically – from the outside – play amounts to nothing
of any consequence and has no value. This is the sense in which
the game is purposeless.
But viewed intrinsically, that is within the terms of the game itself,
the ball crossing the line is an achievement, namely a goal.
Within the game of soccer scoring
goals is what lends focus and
point to the rules of play and calls
for the skill that may be exhibited in
it.
Play can be serious, not in the sense
that it is professionalized, but in the
sense that it demands, solely for its
own purposes, the best
temperaments and the finest skills of
which human beings are capable.
Now Gadamer thinks that art is a kind of play, in which together artist
and audience join.
What is distinctive about great art is the challenge it presents to the
viewer to discern a meaning within it.
This is not a meaning that can be conceptualized or explicated in
language (to this extent Gadamer follows Kant closely) but is rather
symbolic. The challenge is to realize fully in our own imaginations
the constructs of the artist’s imagination and these constructs are
symbolic – the picture of happiness, for example, rather than a
photographic record of a happy occasion.
The artist’s task is to engage the audience in a creative free play of
images whereby symbolic representation is realized
• the symbolic IS central to art
• Gadamer :the realization of symbol is a communal activity . It requires
cooperative activity, and this activity – of play – is something in which all and any may
engage. (This is Gadamer’s interpretation of Kant’s sensus communis.)
 But why should we value this special kind of play? His explanation is novel and
interesting.
 We discover in art the same kind of universality we discover in festivals, and the important
thing about festivals, according to Gadamer, is that they punctuate the flow of time.

 We do not describe a festival as a recurring one because we can assign a specific

place in time to it, but rather the reverse: the time in which it occurs only arises
through the recurrence of the festival itself.
• Gadamer thinks that we have two fundamental ways of experiencing time.
1. One is ‘the abstract calculation of temporal duration’
2. The other is ‘festival’ time. In festival time we get, as it were, a taste of eternity. In an
elegant summary he says this:

 [I]n the experience of art we must learn how to dwell

upon the work in a specific way.
 there is no tedium involved, for the longer we allow
ourselves, the more it displays its manifold riches to us.
 The essence of our temporal experience is learning how
to tarry in this way. And perhaps it is the only way that is
granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call
eternity.
 SUMMARY
 The commonplace view that the value of art lies in the pleasure we get from it has
been found to be deficient on a number of grounds.
1. First, it is not clear that what is commonly regarded as the finest in art is, except
for those ‘laboriously trained to enjoy it’, a real source of amusement.
2. Second, if art’s value is pleasure, this makes it nearly impossible to explain the
various discriminations that are made within and between forms and works of art.
3. Third, it is hard to see how the pleasure theory could sustain the sorts of
evaluative distinctions that are made between art and non-art in the cultural and
educational institutions of our society.
 A further manoeuvre is to try to isolate a distinctive ‘aesthetic pleasure’, the pleasure we
derive from beauty.
 Following Kant, we can see how focusing on beauty can provide us with a middle
position between mere personal pleasure on the one hand and a scientific description of
fact on the other. Furthermore it is an analysis that can be extended to include the sublime
as well as the beautiful.
 Yet in the end, the Kantian aesthetic lays all the emphasis on the mental state of the
observer whose imagination may as freely play on nature as on art, leaving obscure the
connection between art appreciation and art making. And in any case, there are serious
doubts (famously articulated by George Dickie) as to whether the concept of ‘aesthetic
attitude’ inspired by Kant is not a myth.
 Gadamer, building upon Kant’s aesthetic, offers us a more sophisticated version of a
similar theory – art as play.
 Play is not mere diversion but is (or can be) a serious and important part of human life. In
Gadamer’s analysis it may even be shown to have a semi-religious significance, while by
Walton’s account it is a game which has the benefits of experience without the usual
costs. To identify art as a kind of play, therefore, is to attribute a high value to it.
 Yet if art is nothing more than play, this means that we cannot, as we customarily do,
draw a distinction between the importance of art and the importance of sport.
 Sport can be no less ‘serious’ than art in Gadamer’s theory. In itself, of course, this is no
refutation. However, combined with the further observation that art, unlike sport, can
communicate something, that it can mean something, there does seem to be reason to
look further and to ask whether this element of communication might not justify the
attribution of greater value to art.

 One familiar suggestion is that art communicates emotion, and this is the idea we
examine next.