Some of the principal Enlightenment thinkers who regarded beauty as subjective took this very fact to be a reason for applauding the human mind, on the ground that it is praiseworthy and admirable to impute beauty to things. Hume held such a view, and it was central to Francis Hutcheson's aesthetic theory. They thus made taste a key concept in aesthetics, and incidentally found themselves agreeing with St Thomas Aquinas, another subjectivist, who identified beauty as a form of pleasure.
St Augustine had long before argued that beauty is the cause of pleasure, not identical with it; he and Aquinas therefore mark out between them the traditional space of the aesthetical objectivist-subjectivist divide. Augustine had august antecedents for his objectivist stance. There had been a degree of consensus among the ancients that beauty consists in harmony, which the Pythagoreans attributed to underlying mathematical relations, as found—for a chief example—in the "golden section," observed in a line segment apportioned into two unequal lengths such that the ratio of the shorter to the longer length is equal to the ratio of the longer to the whole. Leibniz, a near-contemporary of Hume and Hutcheson, took the same view, with the added tweak that he thought most observers are unconscious of the proportions that underlie beauty. Recent psychoneurological studies of the effect of baroque music on the human mind seem to bear out his view.
But suppose that these objectivists are wrong. First, one has to note a prejudice in the view that what exists independently of thought or emotional response somehow has greater existential importance than what is "only" or "merely" in the mind. Pain and suffering are "only" in the mind too, yet they are highly significant (and very real) both to those experiencing them and to others whose sympathies are invited by the fact of them.
If judgements of beauty are in effect projections from subjective states of pleasure and admiration for something, why should that be less important than if intrinsic and independent features of that something existed and coerced all observers into the identical aesthetic response? Hume and others are surely right to say that the human capacity for finding things beautiful does honour to humanity, not least in cases when someone finds (say) someone else beautiful whom no objectivist could ever agree is so.
Kant's irenic suggestion—that beauty consists in a disinterested non-conceptual pleasure that one is convinced everyone else would share if similarly placed—was meant to bridge the earlier division. But he may as well have said that some things are objectively beautiful, perhaps because of their harmony, while other judgements of beauty are subjective, because they have other (and sometimes themselves beautiful) motivations. Such is the view I favour. Either way, beauty is never an unimportant quality.
Sent in by Steven Rhodes, Truro.
Send your philosophical queries and dilemmas to AC Grayling at question@prospect-magazine.co.uk
