Kantian and Contextual Beauty

Abstract

Two conflicting but strongly entrenched intuitions about beauty hold sway in the hearts and minds of many. On the one hand, many people believe that attributions of beauty to objects or events are unmediated-that all that matters is one's direct, personal response. If something is beautiful, one just sees it; cognitive or ethical concerns matter little. On the other hand, many people are drawn to the view that the beautiful is not independent of other human values and attitudes-that our attributions of beauty are related to beliefs or moral judgments. At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant represented the former view with such cleverness that his arguments continue to disturb even those who remain unconvinced by them. At the end of the nineteenth century, partly as a result of the influence of Kant's theory of beauty, Leo Tolstoy felt forced to downplay the importance of beauty's role in explaining the value of art-a trend that continued for several decades. At the end of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of aesthetic theorists and practitioners are persuaded that beauty does matter in art, and although many, including me, believe that beauty is a contextual property deeply connected to factual beliefs and moral attitudes, the tug of Kant's arguments remains strong. I stand near the edge of one of Minneapolis's many urban lakes. A tall purple flower brightens the marshy shore. I recognize that it is purple loose strife, an exotic plant species imported several years ago. I know that it tends to overtake areas where it takes root-that if left alone it will rapidly destroy the delicate ecosystem so important for water purification and for supporting a wide range of plant and wildlife. I know that this is a dangerous, even evil, plant. A friend of mine who is a landscape designer has a poster on her office door urging us to wipe it out. She tells me she finds it ugly-even repulsive. But as I stand near the lake, looking at the purple blossoms that stand out so vibrantly against the more or less uniformly colored background of the swamp, I cannot prevent myself from finding the plant quite beautiful. This is anything but an isolated example of conflicting perceptions of beauty. From admiring wispy female actors who we are certain must be suffering from bulimia to glorying in ancient temples whose construction we have learned resulted in the deaths of hundreds of oppressed slaves, we often find that we cannot help ourselves-that Kant seems to be right to have insisted that where beauty is concerned, what we know and what we morally approve or disapprove seems irrelevant. But then I think again of my ecologist friend. Does she not see what I see when she looks at the wetland? Is she truly unseduced by the lush color? How, if Kant is right, does she see ugliness where I see beauty? And how, if Kant is right, do changes in my beliefs or moral assessments sometimes produce a change in my aesthetic views? Kant argued that several features characterize a judgment that something is beautiful (Critique of Judgment, 1790). On occasion our imaginations take a holiday, as it were. In apprehending the form of some objects or events, we feel pleasure in the purposive way the properties relate, and realize that our pleasure is in no way dependent upon a particular interest, purpose, or concept. Because our pleasure is not in any way tied essentially to who we are as individuals, we expect that every other human being necessarily ought to feel pleasure as well upon apprehending this thing. We do not care what the object is (or even that it is-i.e., if we feel pleasure we do not really care whether the apparent cause of the pleasure actually exists), we do not have to know what it is, we do not care whether it is moral or immoral, we do not care who made it, or why. Judgments that something is ugly (not beautiful) will be like this, too-the only difference will be that we feel displeasure instead of pleasure. Tolstoy believed that pleasure alone cannot account for the tremendous value that art has. Pleasure-based theories like Kant's led him to dismiss beauty as central to art. Just as one may forget, as one eats with pleasure, that the real value of food is bodily nutrition and not the enjoyment one derives, so one may be misled into thinking that the value of art is pleasure and not, as it were, the nutrition of the soul of an individual and of a community. For Tolstoy the source of value of art is spiritual rather than hedonic, and thus any theory of art with a pleasure-based theory of beauty will be inadequate (What is Art? 1896).'