The Eye of the Beholder, Kantian Aesthetics
April 12, 2023
Imagine you are in New York, and you and your friend decide to see the famous sites of the city. You grab a couple of bagels and walk toward the central park. Your friend, seeing the park for the first time, exclaims “Wow that is beautiful!” You don't see the appeal, but really you are looking down at your phone, preoccupied with Tinder. As a stunning guy pops up, who looks strikingly like Hugh Jackman, you show him to your friend “Now he is beautiful.” You swipe right.
If you were to ask most people what qualifies something to be beautiful, they likely will respond with “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” In most cases, ancient philosophers couldn’t disagree more. In ancient Greece, beauty was said to be a fact of nature. Beauty could be defined with perfect symmetry and exact proportions. Modern takes are far more similar to an absurdist view of beauty: what matters is only what matters to you, and so indeed beauty is subjective. This is more satisfying, but it fails to capture any real definition of beauty. A bite of a burger is satisfying, but I'd hardly call it beautiful. The absurdist view does make much effort to ponder this distinction. Take the Rite of Spring, for example. The orchestral work/ballet by Stravinsky stomps and thuds with dissonant chords and holds any form of melody in healthy disregard. Today, this musical piece is widely considered to be one of Stravisky’s masterpieces. Indeed it has inspired many film scores, most notably John Williams's Tatooine theme. At the time, however, (1913) the ballet ignored every rule of what music was meant to be, even causing a riot on its debut. The perception of the piece has changed over time, however not many would call it beautiful. Immanuel Kant, one of history's most famous philosophers, may be able to describe why.
In “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” Kant attempts to define what qualifies something as beautiful. The work is broken into four “moments, " each providing rules under Kant’s definition.
The first moment makes the distinction between the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful. Kant says “The agreeable is what gratifies a man; the beautiful what simply pleases him; the good what is esteemed (that on which he places objective worth)” So, my burger from above is agreeable as it gratifies some desire (hunger and taste), and what is good relates to a moral judgment whether it be an action or a person. What is beautiful, however, in Kant's view, is separate from both of these judgments. He says that we must be (emotionally) disinterested in the object itself. This is arguably the most important and the most controversial of Kant's four moments. If we must be disinterested in the object, what is now able to be beautiful? Certainly, the beauty I see in certain music is BECAUSE of the emotion I feel when I listen to it. Neitchtze has a very famous critique of Kant’s perspective. He says,
“When our aestheticians are never weary of maintaining, in favor of Kant, that under the spell of beauty, one can view even undraped female statues “without interest”, we may laugh a little at their expense.”
The second moment is slightly more complex. He claims that beauty is (confusingly) subjectively universal. This does not necessarily mean what is beautiful to you may be beautiful to me, but rather that when you see something you feel is beautiful, it should be natural that you assume everyone must feel the same way. When we exclaim “This is beautiful,” Kant says, we mean far more than saying “This is beautiful only to me” Kant says we have an understanding, almost an insistence, that others would agree with us in this claim. In this moment Kant also says that beauty is separated from logical interest. This may explain why we do not see the Rite of Spring as beautiful despite its clear appeal- there is a clear intellectual aspect to the piece's contribution to modern music. Kant says it is not possible for me to convince you (or even myself) that something is beautiful, it simply must be understood. Here again, Kant reinforces the idea that we must be fully disinterested in beauty.
The third moment says that beauty is “the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.” This essentially means that something is only beautiful in its entirety. A mountain cannot be beautiful because of its substantial height, it must also be due to the way it slopes, its trees, and all of its ridges. Additionally, Kant says that something’s beauty must be separate from its perceived purpose. This is another extremely controversial viewpoint. In claiming this Kant says that a car cannot be beautiful for the way it drives, or a swimmer for the way she swims, only who or what they are at a subjective (yet universal) surface level.
The fourth moment deals with the concept of necessity. Kant says that esthetic judgments must pass the test of being “necessary.” By this Kant means that beauty must be according to principle, or essentially based in judgment. This universal judgment according to Kant should be grounded in “common sense.” Common sense, as Kant describes it, is an incredibly loaded definition, much too complex to go into here, however in short Kant believes that aesthetic judgment should be obvious, not intellectual.
Aesthetic judgment is (in my opinion) a rather underrated facet of philosophical inquiry.. While Kant’s arguments on aesthetic judgments are far from irrefutable, they do hold merit. Kant would likely say that beauty is in the mind (and not in the eye) of the (sensible) beholder. He would certainly reject that it is anything near objective. His principles, at the very least, allow for a thorough discussion of beauty where other analyses fail. These moments can further be applied to more specific questions in the same realm, like “what can be considered art”, but that is a discussion for another time.