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Josh asked:
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Hi, I need to know what a Philosopher thinks about beauty.
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You might want to read Kant's account of beauty in The Critique of Judgementwhich is excellent. I
have summarised it in these pages before so, briefly, Kant's view is that a judgement that something
is beautiful is a subjective response to the form of an object and this response is universalisable, not
in the sense that we think others would find the object beautiful, but that they ought to do so. The
response is to the form of an object rather than what it is: We do not respond to paint on canvas or
the subject matter of a picture, but to its form or "finality". When we respond to something we find
perfect and flawless we pay no attention to factual detail, or what something is, but we are thrown
back into the pleasure of our own response to the end-product which gives rise to imaginative
pleasure which cannot be accounted for merely by the facts about the painting. If our pleasure were
simply in something we have a taste for rather than something we find beautiful we might suppose
that others would find it pleasurable, but in the case of beauty it is implicit in the judgement that others
ought to find the object beautiful. To justify this, Kant needs to rely on an assumption that
appreciation of beauty is of moral or intellectual benefit. And you probably don't want to go that far
into it.
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Kant's was a theory of his time: His was an era of great art and the term "beautiful", appropriated by
aesthetic theory, was purged of connotations of mere sensory taste to lend this appreciative term
adequate value. Hume also thought that beauty referred to a subjective response and called it "taste"
but held that only an expert with refined taste and experience could truly determine what is beautiful.
Lessing thought that beauty was of such purity that a sculpture of the ugly face of a man in pain could
not be beautiful, even if it was great art. So these three thinkers found an essential purity in beauty.
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In latter times, the idea of beauty is even further purified to the extent that it is analysed in geometrical
or mathematical terms but this is to analyse artistic excellence without reference to imaginative
pleasure which Kant thought essential to a judgement of beauty.
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Rachel Browne
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