Beauty

Beauty


I shall discuss several related issues about beauty. These are: (1) The place of beauty among other aesthetic properties. (2) The general principle of aesthetic supervenience. (3) The problem of aesthetic relevance. (4) The distinction between free and dependent beauty. (5) The primacy of our appreciation of free beauty over our appreciation of dependent beauty. (6) Personal beauty as a species of beauty. (7) The metaphysics of beauty.

§1. The Notion of the Aesthetic
In contemporary philosophy, beauty is often thought of as one among many other aesthetic properties, albeit it one with a special role. I think this is a useful way of thinking about beauty, so long as we don’t lose sight of the beauty’s specialness. For our thought about beauty is indeed closely connected with our thinking in more broadly aesthetic terms. Hence let us begin by looking at the category of the aesthetic and the place of beauty within it.
Which properties are aesthetic properties? Beauty and ugliness would be thought to be uncontroversial examples of aesthetic properties. They are paradigm cases. But what about daintiness, dumpiness and elegance? What about the sadness or vigour of music? What about representational properties, such as being of a cow or of London Bridge? What about being mostly yellow or in C minor? What about art-historical properties, such as being a Cubist painting? Is there a principle at work that allows us to classify some of these as aesthetic properties and others as nonaesthetic properties?
Someone might follow this question with this question: is such a distinction as it were built into the world? Is it just a fact  a metaphysical fact  that some properties are aesthetic and some are not? Or is it a distinction that we should draw only if we find it useful to do so? That is, is it more pragmatic than natural? Then again, perhaps this is a false dilemma. For it may be that the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction is in some sense natural, but our main evidence for thinking it so is that we find it useful to mark such a distinction.
However, some have argued that the distinction is in fact not useful. There has been a debate initiated by Frank Sibley, about whether aesthetic concepts can be distinguished from nonaesthetic concepts (Sibley 1959, 1965). Notable contributors to that debate were Ted Cohen and Peter Kivy (Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975). (This debate was about aesthetic concepts, but there is a similar debate about aesthetic properties.) Sibley thought that there was a significant distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic concepts. He thought that aesthetic concepts were those that required 'taste' or 'discernment' for their application. But these faculties were in turn characterised in aesthetic terms. His critics pointed out that this way of distinguishing aesthetic concepts from nonaesthetic concepts led to too tight a circle. The consensus among contemporary aestheticians is that the distinction is somewhat arbitrary and hard to make out.
My own view is that Sibley can be rescued (Zangwill 2001a, chapter 2). There is a principled way of distinguishing aesthetic from nonaesthetic concepts and properties. The distinction is useful, and it marks a real difference between different kinds of concepts and properties. The strategy is: (a) to see judgements of beauty as pre-eminent among other aesthetic concepts and properties; (b) to give a distinctive account of beauty and judgements of beauty; and (c) to locate a necessary link between judgements of beauty and the other aesthetic judgements, which does not obtain between judgements of beauty and nonaesthetic judgements.