Valerie asked:

What makes something beautiful?

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There is no scientific account of what makes something beautiful. For something to have beauty,
more is required than mere sense experience of shapes and colours. So an account of what makes
something beautiful must be stated in terms of our response, and this must distinguish the beautiful
from the merely pleasant and attractive. Theories of art which describe works of art as giving rise to
pleasure (Mill) or producing emotional responses (Collingwood) fail to make any determinate
statement about beauty.

R Caillois in Generalised Aestheticsstated that "Natural structures constitute both the initial and the
final reference point of all imaginable beauty, although beauty is humanappreciation. . . It does not
follow from this that nature is the model of art, but rather that art constitutes a particular instance of
nature." This view allows both natural and created objects to be beautiful, whilst acknowledging the
necessity of man's attitude of appreciation. On such a view, what makessomething beautiful is not a
matter of artistic technique since a flower can be beautiful. If there is one thing determining beauty,
therefore, it should not refer to the nature of the object but to the response to which the object gives
rise.

And so to Kant (Critique of Judgment), who thought that on judging something as beautiful we do not
bring the object under a concept, e.g. that this is 'a flower'. If a flower is thought to be beautiful this
not a pure beauty since it is part of our judgement that it isa flower, i.e. part of the miraculousness of
nature that it should be so well coloured and formed, and in thinking of it as beautiful we are thinking
of own interests, our luck in living in such a world. For something to be purely beautiful it should be
designed in such a way that cognition gives way to imagination.

I find it difficult to describe what Kant means when he says that a beautiful work of art should produce
"aesthetic ideas". An aesthetic idea is "a representation of the imagination which occasions much
thought, without however any definite thought, i.e. any concept, being capable of being adequate to
it." It is essentially pleasurable and also general in nature, in that it gives rise to thought. It might be
understood as a theme. I prefer #151; not being a visual sort of person — to think of listening to
classical music. This is an easy example because we don't think in conceptual terms, we do
experience pleasure and we do feel the imagination is involved. But this may be too unintellectual.
The notion of a theme at least involves thought.

Rachel Browne