"On Those Who Are Sublime" Nietzsche and his critique of Kant's aesthetics

Zarathustra saw a solemn person who was sublime, "an ascetic of the spirit" at whom he laughed because of his ugliness.  This chapter of TSZ deals with Nietzsche's critique of Kant (and possibly Hegel as well) on the sublime and the beautiful.  His main point is that the beautiful is more important than the sublime, although that idea only gets substance when played out in terms of the ideas of the overman and will to power.  Kant's notion of the sublime is rather odd in that, for him, when we appreciate the sublime (what he calls the dynamic sublime) we are really appreciating our own power as humans, we are appreciating the ways in which we transcend even the most terrifying aspects of nature: [from his Critique of Judgment]  "we willingly call these objects [bold, overhanging, and...threatening rocks...[etc.] sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of quite a different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature" and, further, "nature is not judged to be sublime ...in so far as it excites fear, but because it calls up that power in us...of regarding as small the things about which we are solicitous [health, money, etc.]...and of regarding its might ...as nevertheless without any dominion over us..." ["even if the volcano destroys my home, I can rise above that":  a kind of Stoic philosophy]

This is what N. means when he speaks of the sublime person as having a "swelled chest" and being decked out with "ugly truths." The so-called "truth" of Kant's sublime man is really just a rather ugly anthropocentrism based on belief in a totally free and transcendent self or soul.  Moreover, beauty is somehow lost in all of this.  

Kant says that there are two main positive aesthetic qualities, the beautiful and the sublime, but for N., they are in dialectical competition...and the winner is not the sublime but beauty.  You would think that N., with all of his talk of the overman, would be more positive about the sublime.  Who more sublime than Nietzsche?  So the victory of beauty comes as a surprise.  But maybe that is because we usually misread Nietzsche, i.e. by way of Hitler.

Of Kant, then, Nietzsche would say:  "as yet he has not learned laughter and beauty."  That is, he takes himself too seriously.  And "out of his seriousness there also peers a savage beast - one not overcome." The sublime person is also in the act of withdrawing from the earth, which, Z. observes ironically, is not to his "taste."  

It is funny to see a reference to taste here.  Of course Kant discusses taste in a different place than he does the sublime, and he only advocates the idea that "there is no disputing about taste" with regards to that which is merely agreeable, not with regards to beauty.  It seems that N. has just misread Kant. Yet, although N. and K. agree that we may dispute about taste, K. may not be serious about that (and N. may see this.)  K. does not bother to set up or describe any disputes over taste, and one wonders what such a dispute would look like for K.  If someone says X is not beautiful and you disagree, you are free to show him (I suppose Kant thinks) that he has failed to be disinterested or to have focused on the look of purpose in the object, or has not allowed his imagination and understanding to go into free play. After all, when you say something is beautiful you are setting it up on a pedestal and expect, nay demand, that others agree. None of this seems to be much like a dispute in which people offer reasons. Instead, it all seems pretty ad hominem and detached from actually talking about the art object or other object of beauty itself.  

N.s comeback is simply: "But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting."  (I love it that he added "and tasting" since this is very body-oriented and brings taste back from something purely mental where it seems to reside for most philosophers even today.)  The idea that all of life is a dispute over taste may be the same as the idea that whatever we are doing we are setting up values in opposition to the values of others.  We dispute, we argue, and that is what life is about, and this is true even with regards to morality. 

The claim extends aesthetics to all of life:  quite a radical claim. (So much for philosophy's relegation of aesthetics to backwaters.) To make it, N. must expand his notion of taste.  He does this when he says it is "at the same time weight and scales and weigher." These are the things we dispute over.  Moreover life is worthless (or at least not quite human) if we try to live without disputing over these things, over how valuable something is, over what scales to use in measuring value, and over the value of the person who does the weighing of value.  

So, for Z., the sublime person only becomes beautiful or obtains beauty when he gets tired of the anthropocentrism of his take on the sublime.  That sort of person would then be "tasteful" to Z.  That is, such a person has to turn "away from himself" and, of course, following Zs line, he must "jump over his shadow - ...into his sun." That is, he must overcome that miniscule thing which he considers his ego and find his true essence, which what would illuminate: essence can be seen as the overman, but not that it is individualize: his sun.  Z. does not want followers, or rather he only wants followers who follow their suns.

Nietzsche reiterates: "his [the so called sublime person's] happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth."  Kant would have us praise our transcendent souls in the experience of the sublime, but this is not to say "yes" to the earth, which, as we know, is the main message of Z.  Of Kant, and similar philosophers, like Hegel:   "He subdued monsters and riddles:  but he must still redeem his own monsters and riddles, changing them into heavenly children."  All virtues come from what was previously considered vice.  Further:  "As yet his knowledge has not learned to smile and to be without jealousy; as yet, his torrential passion has not become still in beauty."  Beauty will come when the passion of the hero philosopher is transformed into a serenity in which a smile is possible.  He must transform that which within himself would normally be called "evil."  And of course he must overcome, or transform, revenge [the greatest evil]...such an important move for Nietzsche. 

So desire is submerged not in satiety but in beauty, and the graciousness of the great-souled person is suffused with grace. Kant encourages us to be heroes, but the most difficult thing for the hero is to achieve the beautiful:  "No violent will can attain the beautiful by exertion."  Beauty is a matter of subtlety.  

One often associates Nietzsche with the Dionysian alone, but here is a call to the Apollonian as well.  One even imagines the traditional notion of Greek beauty that N. had overcome in his first book coming back in a way.  In Birth of Tragedy we learn that the Apollonian alone is not enough for great art.  But here we find that the sublime have to: "stand with relaxed muscles and unharnessed will" like a statue of Apollo, and that this is their most difficult task.  If you think you are sublime, you are caught up in ego, but to respond to this would be to unharness your will and relax your heroic muscles.  

Now we are prepared for a definition of beauty:  "When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible - such descent I call beauty."  Plato had seen beauty as a matter of ascent:  ascent to the Form of beauty.  N. gives primacy to will to power.  Will to power is not always cruel: sometimes, at its best, it is gracious, gift-giving, and this involves a descent from heights into the realm of the visible.  Beauty then is concentrated visible power found in the gift. The source of the gift determines the power of the beauty.  Thus "there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful," to which he adds that the kindness of the powerful should be their final "self-conquest."  (There is no separation of ethics and aesthetics here!)  Grace, graciousness, the creatively powerful individual, the hero of will-lessness, that which conquers itself:  these things form the new conceptual nexus of beauty.  We haven't seen a vision of beauty like this before, or since.  

The powerful (i.e. the powerful in creative action) are capable of "all evil" but then it follows that they should give forth good, a good that is quite different from that which comes out of people who are weak in creative power, and who think they are good just because they have no claws.  The gracious hero is then compared to a column which grows "more beautiful and gentle" and also internally harder and "more enduring" as it ascends.  

So, in conclusion, the sublime person (he who has accepted and lives by Kant's notion of the sublime) only can hope to "become beautiful one day" and thus have "godlike desires."  Although he  would then be vain,  he would would be suitable for adoration. The soul's secret is that only when she has been abandoned by the hero can she be approached by the "overhero."  The chapter ends here.

De Sousa on two stances in philosophy

I have been reading The Philosophy of Poetry edited by John Gibson (Oxford, 2015).  Sometimes it is not the main point of an article that gets one thinking but something said almost as an aside. In "The Dense and the Transparent" Ronald de Sousa says that how reasonable it is to assume that philosophy must do things in language depends on one's stance on a "bifurcation in philosophy."  "On the one hand, the philosophical tradition has been associated with wisdom, and with the pursuit of insight into the nature of the human condition.  On the other hand, it has been associated with a method which puts argument at the centre of its pursuit of truth.  In this patter perspective, the central enterprise is the pursuit of truth, and philosophical truth is pretty much defined as what can be made, from raw material of experience, by reason and argument. We can't argue without language.  Philosophy remains essentially tied to language, at least in its 'analytic' incarnation."  (41)  Well, how much of this is true? Can't we have both, for example by eliminating certain features?   I would favor both wisdom and truth but not the view that philosophy is essentially tied to language if that means always or necessarily.  I get the feeling that de Sousa favors the analytic incarnation described but wishes to take the other version seriously.  I would reverse that myself, and in this I would be following Plato.  Sure, argument is at the center of philosophy, but argument only helps one move up "the line," get out of the cave, and up the ladder of love.  But this is only half the story of philosophy.  The point of philosophy for Plato, and I suppose for me in this instance, is in grasping the essences, and particularly in grasping Beauty itself which he also describes as the Good itself.  One uses arguments to refute hypotheses, but each of these refutations is just another step up the ladder.  Grasping Beauty or the Good itself is enlightenment:  this is a matter of having a method for grasping essence and for seeing the good or beauty in things, even in very particular things.  (Philosophical insight often involves argument as part of the process, often this argument taking the form of multiple arguments in back and forth debate, but then it can also come from repeated observation and description...an inductive form of philosophy.)  Grasping essences intuitively is not a matter of argument (or is only so to the extent that the articulation and actualization of the grasping takes the form of writing in which reasons are given).  Argument is only a preliminary or ancillary to moral and aesthetic taste, taste with respect to the good, i.e. that which is valuable, or the value-dimension of existence.  This is what Plato means, or should mean, when he says that truth and being emanate from the Good much like light and nourishment emanating from the sun.  To put this in a different way, the business of philosophy is to arrive at powerful metaphors of the sort that Morris Weitz in his discussion of the role of theory in aesthetics called honorific definitions, which themselves are ways of understanding, not "real definitions."  These live metaphors manifest the capacity, at that moment, to perceive things in their essential nature (as this evolves), but they are not, and this is the great mistake even of some Platonists, to be considered eternal and unchangingly correct definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.  Unfortunately, Plato himself appears to have lost this insight when he came, in the Sophist, to see the path downwards in terms of mere categorization and sub-categorization.  He was seduced by his Pythagorean friends and lost sight of the pragmatism contained in the idea that only the user of a bridle (thus, not the god) knows its essential nature.  The great thing about the philosopher king/queen is that he/she, once she gets the hang of the world of the cave upon return, will be able to discern not the details of the shadows themselves, but their inner nature, the extent to which they participate in the good/beautiful. Since taste (the capacity to perceive beauty in particulars) is the dominant mode of the philosopher king/queen and taste has to do with particulars not universals (once the Good or Beauty itself is grasped, the Forms are only hypotheses which may be discarded or seen as merely heuristic ideals) the mature philosopher King-Queen is more like a poet than like an analytic philosopher, i.e. with regards to his/her approach to language and truth.  It is also ironic and interesting that whereas transparency may be a virtue in the upward path, it is density of language and experience that plays the predominant role in the downward path.  But de Sousa talks about clarity as though it were solely the domain of analytic philosophy with its high regard for the forms of formal logic and definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.  There are other kinds of clarity:  the clarity of choosing exactly the right word for the context, for example, but then this is a clarity more evidence in poetry.  Also, formal logic is based on modus ponens which itself begs the question in a formal way since the whole idea of validity is to make a nice neat transition from A (the reason) to B (the thing supported) by way of introducing an intervening premise, if A then B, except that you cannot support the move from A to B just by repeating it!  We give reasons in support of conclusions and if others accept them it is not because of artificial question-begging intervening premises previously accept but because we just think A is sufficient reason for B.  But as de Sousa himself observes in the same article people are seldom convinced of anything by arguments, i.e. by being presented with a valid deductive argument for the touted conclusion (except in mathematics, I suppose.) --- nor should they be.  Arguments in this sense of the word "argument" are just window dressing, or at best, moves in the language game of back and forth argument, a much more complex and interesting human activity.   

Hume's Standard of Taste: the problem of the true judge consensus

Malcolm Budd speaks of Hume's "blithe optimism about the uniformity of response of his true judges of artistic value." (Values of Art:  Pictures, Poetry, and Music, 1995) and thinks "there is no reason that someone who satisfies the conditions Hume imposes on the true judge is likely to feel the same sentiment as any other true judge toward the same work."  James Shelley replies to this and similar objections to Hume in "Hume and the Joint Verdict of True Judges,"  The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (2013) 145-153.  I think that Shelley's response is basically right, although he does take a rather extreme position when he says that "true judges will never disagree" (146).  He also reads the passage on innocent disagreements as implying that although the younger man will be sensibly touched by Ovid than the older man, both will agree that Ovid is good.  The problem is that Hume does not indicate that both do judge Ovid as good. His final position is more nuanced.  He is on more solid ground in insisting that, although someone might fit all the criteria of a good judge, she still may judge a work differently than other good judges, and that Hume would insist that we would quite properly judge by asking "whether their sentiments are more responsive than hers to the anthropocentric values of beauty."  On this view, beauty just is that which gives rise to the sentiment of beauty in the majority of those humans "whose faculty of taste is sound."  The notion of soundness that Shelley references is illuminated well by the following paragraph from Hume, which is further support for Shelley's position, but which also poses problems of its own:  

"But though all the general rules of art are founded only on experience and on the observation of the common sentiments of human nature, we must not imagine, that, on every occasion the feelings of men will be conformable to these rules. Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness, according to their general and established principles. The least exterior hindrance to such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion, and confounds the operation of the whole machine. When we would make an experiment of this nature, and would try the force of any beauty or deformity, we must choose with care a proper time and place, and bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty. The relation, which nature has placed between the form and the sentiment will at least be more obscure; and it will require greater accuracy to trace and discern it. We shall be able to ascertain its influence not so much from the operation of each particular beauty, as from the durable admiration, which attends those works, that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy."  David Hume  "Of the Standard of Taste"

There is much that we have to go through first to find this convincing.  To contemporary eyes it looks like the set-up for an experiment:  we find the necessary conditions for a correct reading that would find "catholic and universal," i.e. objective, beauty. Yet what may seem peculiar to contemporary readers is it understands the workings of taste in terms of the workings of a watch with "small springs" that are easily disturbed whether internally or externally, and of a very young plant with a "tender and delicate nature."  All of this, of course, would explain why the feelings of men are often not conformable to the rules of beauty:  something has gone wrong with the small springs of the delicate watch, or with the tender plant.  Of course the good judges, few as they are, would have nothing wrong with the small springs of their internal watches.  So, we cannot explain the aberrant good judges by way of such problems.  If there is a problem with her watch then she will not be considered among the good judges.  This is the motivation behind Shelley saying that all good judges are going to agree insofar as they are good judges.    Perhaps the problem exists in the notion that the aberrant judge "possesses all five characteristics of the true judge":  perhaps more characteristics are needed, or some elaboration of the five characteristics in terms of the above-mentioned conditions of the good aesthetic experiment.  The good judge must, one might say, have an additional characteristic:  he or she must not have her internal springs (whatever that ultimately means in non-metaphorical terms we will leave open) disturbed. That is the value of the judge is also tested by whether he or she will still disagree with others when the conditions of the experiment are met.  Perfect serenity of mind, recollection of thought, a due attention to the object are required as much as lack of prejudice, strong sense and delicacy of sentiment.  If the aberrant critic is lacking in these then it would be false that "her sentiments track the value they track as well as the sentiments" the majority of good judges track the value they track.  Shelley asks whether the sentiments are "more responsive than here to the anthropocentric value of beauty."  Of course the core problem of Budd's objection remains.  We can't resolve the issue in any a priori way, and since there is no clear way to cash out the metaphor of the internal delicate watch mechanism by which we could have good experimental results that fit contemporary scientific standards, we do not really have a way to tell which judges, among real living judges, fall into the category of the ideal judge and which do not.  It is true that most good judges in film for example agree on certain films, for example Citizen Kane, but there is nothing to keep an extremely good critic in film from thinking that Citizen Kane is a piece of melodramatic overblown kitsch unworthy of its accolades by the majority.  We cannot assume that she just watched it without perfect serenity of mind, especially given that, as a good judge, she would have seen several performances of that movie in several different circumstances, thus eliminating the problem of an troubled mind on one viewing.  

More on Bourdieu art and everyday aesthetics

Bourdieu's book Distinction provides an important source for everyday aesthetics.  I have already commented on it here.
But here is some more.  Sociology as Bourdieu understands it is a bit complicated...more like a combination of science and philosophy than science alone.  He insists that in order to truly understand the conditions of production and appreciation of objects of taste we need to bring culture in the normative sense back into culture in the anthropological sense.  On one level this would seem to be simply saying that we need to just give up on philosophy of art and do a kind of anthropology of taste.  But he sees this as reconnecting elaborated taste for refined objects with elementary tastes such as the taste for food flavors.  This sounds more like the kind of thing Dewey advocated:  i.e. a reformative approach not only to philosophy but also to social practices.  This appears to also be part of what Bourdieu means by "sociology."  I suppose that this is obvious to people in Sociology or at least to followers of Bourdieu.  So, sorry if I am stating the obvious.  

Bourdieu makes an interesting distinction between two ways of acquiring culture, one being in terms of educational level and one in terms of social origin:  the scholastic vs. the domestic.  And yet, he observes, the classroom also favors "those who have had early access to legitimate culture, in a cultured household, outside of scholastic disciplines."  He even notes that within the classroom there is a certain devaluing of "scholarly knowledge and interpretation" as scholastic.  Privileged, rather, is "direct experience and simple delight" which, presumably, comes to those who are cultured at home.  

The pedantic or scholarly approach, he argues, involves "mastery of a cipher or code" which gives us the "capacity to see."  That capacity is based on a certain kind of knowledge.  This is similar to Danto's theory of artistic identification where identifying something as a work of art requires an atmosphere of knowledge (but we will see later that the similarity is weak).  Here, it is perception that requires such knowledge.  Without knowledge of the code, the appreciator is lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms.  Instead, he only perceives "sensible properties," for example that this lace-work is delicate, and cannot move to the level of the "secondary meanings."  For that, he needs the appropriate concepts.  He would need such concepts, for example, to identify "the specifically stylistic properties of the work."  The encounter here is what Bourdieu calls an "act of empathy" based on cognition, i.e. decoding. 

This idea of culture, again, is in opposition to that which sees it as a matter of "insensible familiarization within the family circle," where the "enchanted experience of culture" forgets the process of concept acquisition.  Here, what is considered is "form rather than function."  It is accepted in this context, and by the formalist (whom, after all, is the referent here), that artistic seeing can be applied to anything.  In the practice of art, for example in Post-impressionism, this implies that the mode of representation is more important than its object. The distinction is virtually the same as that of Danto vs. Stolnitz, for example.  (But again, we will see that this is simplistic and that from Bourdieu's perspective Danto and Stolnitz are one.)

The artist who follows the second path intends to be autonomous, to be "master of his product."  Such an artist rejects both the a priori programs of scholars but also their a posteriori interpretations of his work.  The method is to proclaim that his work has many meanings, that it is open.  Again, what gets primacy is what the artist is master of:  form and style and not referent and function.  Necessity here is limited to the discipline itself:  there is a shift from that which imitates nature to that which imitates art, the history of art itself being the source of its experiments.

But, oddly and paradoxically, I now find Danto here!  "An art which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred...to the universe of past and present works of art."  Such historical perception refers to that which deviates from previous art and thus makes up a new style.  This is a mastery, Bourdieu insists, that comes through "implicit learning" i.e. from "contact with works of art."   One does not, for example, have to be able to explicitly distinguish the features that makes something original in order to make or appreciate art in this mode.  

The so-called "pure gaze" of the formalist then is really one based on historical knowledge.  Bourdieu identifies it with something in Ortega y Gassett, i.e. the idea that the human or that which is associated with the passions of ordinary lives is to be rejected by the modernist artists and appreciators.  It is the aesthetic, as opposed to the ordinary, attitude.  The ordinary attitude is associated with what is called "popular aesthetic" which affirms continuity between art and life and subordinates form to function. The "popular aesthetic" is that of the working class insofar as they reject formal experimentation and any the unconventional.  The popular aesthetic requires full identification between the spectators and the characters, as in Brecht's plays.  This, then, is contrasted against Kant's notion of disinterestedness (which is now associated with y Gassett).  Formal experimentalism rejects the vulgar enjoyments of the working class.  The aesthetic, or rather the ethos, of the working class is the opposite of Kant insofar as it does not separate what pleases from what gratifies or from "the interest of reason" or the Good.  Bourdieu seems to join them in this.  

So, popular taste reduces "things of art to the things of life."  Pure taste, by contrast, is opposed to the naïve and half playful relationship to the world characteristic of the working class approach to art.  

This leads Bourdieu to discuss what we would call aestheticization or even artification.  Even though art itself allows the greatest scope for purifying vision or "the aesthetic disposition," it is possible to stylize life anywhere, and in doing so we may "confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even 'common'." In doing this we are applying aesthetic principles to "everyday choices of everyday life," for example to cooking, clothing and decoration.

So, different ways of "relating to realities and fictions" is a matter of different positions in "social space" which is a matter of the habits of different classes:  "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier."  Thus the oppositions in cultural practices are also found in eating habits as much as in differences in appreciation of high art.  The taste of "liberty," as opposed to that of "necessity," favors the manner of presenting food over the practical value of food, thus denying function.

So we return to the issue of sociology and the surprising idea that "the science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression that is in no way aesthetic." In doing so, "it has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe" simply in order to find the unity of choices or preferences within certain classes.  For example, if one takes a distanced approach to music one will also do so for food.  Bourdieu recognizes how radical this is when he says that "this barbarous integration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption abolishes the opposition" which is the basis of Kant's aesthetics, i.e. between taste of sense and taste of reflection, the latter only representing, for Kant, the "moral excellence" and "capacity for sublimation" that makes us truly human.  What is opposed is this "magical division" which is "sacred" and a matter of "transubstantiation."  

Danto is defeated (if Bourdieu is right, anyway) and the aesthetics of everyday life is assimilated to the aesthetics of art.  This all explains why art (high art) legitimates social differences.

If Bourdieu is right then there is something problematic about having an aesthetics of the everyday.  What we should have instead is an aesthetics in which the distinction between the everyday and the refined dissolves and the distinctions so dear to Kant and his followers are set aside.

 

The Pleasant in Kant's Account of Beauty

This little discussion of the pleasant will be based on the Bernard translation of Kant's Critique of Judgment   What Bernard translates as "pleasant" Meredith translates as "agreeable."  As becomes evidence in #3, where Kant makes much of the distinction between two sense of "sensation" ("of one's state"), the pleasant is to be distinguished from the beautiful.  If everything that pleases were pleasant we would not be able to distinguish between the pleasures that arise out of  1. "impressions of sense which determine the inclination" 2. "fundamental propositions of reason which determine the will" and 3. "mere reflective forms of intuition which determine the judgment," (i.e. between the pleasant, the moral and the beautiful) and we could only estimate the value of things in terms of the gratification they promise, thus allowing no distinction between indiscretion and wickedness.  (This intrusion of a seemingly irrelevant moral distinction takes the breath away.  However, as we shall see, it is the main basis for the overall rigid nature of the distinction between the pleasant and beautiful for Kant.)  So one sense of "sensation" refers to a "determination of the feeling of pleasure or pain" (which is subjective), whereas the other refers to a sensation as "representation of a thing" (which is objective.)  Kant decides to call the former "feeling."  For example, the pleasantness of a green color of a meadow is a subjective sensation, whereas the greenness itself is objective.  If it is pleasant it is an object of desire, the desire directed to "objects of that kind." Such a feeling, Kant believes, presupposes the relation of the existence of the object to my state of mind (presumably my feeling-state), which is what is meant by saying that it not only pleases but gratifies.  I am not merely judging it or assenting to it (as I would be for beauty):  rather, my "inclination is aroused by it."  Indeed, when it is "most lively" there is no judgment of the object at all.  Evidence of this is that people who love enjoyment would "dispense with all judgment."  

Again, as we discover in paragraph #4, the beautiful (the beauty of a flower, for example) does not depend on a definite concept (as would be the case in morality or when talking about something that is good because it is useful) and yet it does "depend on the reflection upon an object" i.e. in relation to an indefinite concept. (Does Kant ever give us an example of such an indefinite concept?)  This distinguishes it from pleasures of mere sensation (i.e. the pleasant.)  Kant admits that the pleasant often seems the same as the good, especially for hedonists, but he quickly rejects that idea, for the pleasant only represents objects in relation to sense and not under "principles of reason" which are required to call them good.  This entire discussion of the distinction between the pleasant and the good seems a bit of a red herring since the point at issue in this book is the distinction between the pleasant and the beautiful (the moral good being discussed at length in the Critique of Practical Reason), but the strategy generally is to show that the pleasant shares some things with the good and some quite different things with the beautiful, and is distinguishable from both.  In any case, it does have an interesting result, which is that Kant says the following:  "Even in common speech men distinguish the pleasant from the good.  Of a dish which stimulates the taste by spices and other condiments we say unhesitatingly that it is pleasant, though it is at the same time admitted not to be good; for though it immediately delights the senses, yet mediately, i.e. considered by reason which looks to the after results, it displeases."  Presumably, the thought is that Indian food might be pleasant, but we know we shouldn't enjoy it, and it displeases us intellectually, because it is unhealthy, according at least to the view held by Prussians of that time.  Think of it as being like a lot of wine drunk at once:  pleasant at first but unpleasant in the consequences, and unpleasant to reason even in the beginning because of this.  

In another attack on hedonism, which Kant seems to (quite extravagantly) hold is believed by everyone (including himself?), he says "in respect of happiness, everyone believes himself entitled to describe the greatest sum of pleasantness of life... as a true, even as the highest, good.  However, reason is opposed to this." (101)  That is, reason is opposed to a belief everyone has.  (This isn't totally absurd, since an evil man may assume that he is entitled to the greatest sum of pleasantness, but he is not so, because of the evil he has done.)   Again, Kant holds that if the pleasant were no different from pleasure based on the good there would be no reason to concern ourselves with the means by which we gained pleasure.  The distinction Kant makes here is between pleasures that are "obtained passively by the bounty of nature" and ones "by our own activity and work."  (101)  A hedonist, of course, would reply that both kinds of pleasures are equally good, and that when one cannot gain the first (which is quite common) one can resort to the second:  or perhaps the second is of higher quality in which case one goes for the second first, but then accepts the first happily when available.  The only reason one should be concerned about the means of obtaining a pleasure is if the means are immoral, i.e. in causing harm to others.  (This would be the position of someone we might call a moral hedonist:  i.e. a hedonist who follows, e.g., the golden rule, and conditions his or her actions thereby.)  In another attack on the hedonist Kant says that "reason can never be persuaded that the existence of a man who merely lives for enjoyment...has a worth in itself" even if he increases the quantity and quality of the enjoyment of others and even shares their enjoyment with them through "sympathy." (This may involve an attack on Hume.)  

This whole notion of nature providing us with passive enjoyments is odd itself, since even enjoying a sunset "passively" usually requires the work that can provide oneself with the leisure and possibly the deck and glass of wine to fully do so.  Even odder is the idea that "only what he does, without reference to enjoyment, in full freedom and independently of what nature can procure for him passively, gives an absolute worth to his presence in the world as the existence of a person" as though it really makes sense to judge a person in terms of "absolute worth" or to do so in terms of what he does when he is not enjoying himself.  I know that the history of this is connected with Calvinism...but it just seems impossible to wrap one's mind around it now in the year 2014 even as an optional way of looking at things, and hence it makes the entire project of a radical separation between the pleasant and the beautiful, and even the distinction between three kinds of pleasure, pretty implausible.  At best we can say that some pleasures are prompted immediately by sensation, some mediated by reflection while using an indeterminate concept of some sort, and some by the thought that something is good, i.e. as useful or as morally good, for example the pleasure we take in admiring Martin Luther King's work for civil rights.  There is a distinction somewhere between the merely pleasant and the beautiful, but it is pretty subtle.  I wouldn't disagree, however, that happiness is far from an unconditioned good, as Kant puts it, for you would not think that the happiness of an evil person is an unconditioned good:  but happiness of a person who deserves to be happy is an unconditioned good, surely.

As I argued in my book, the distinction between these different kinds of pleasures is not a strong one:  the boundaries are soft.  The pleasant often does involve some reflection and some vague concepts, for example.  Kant insists that there is no disputing about taste with respect to the pleasant, but we do dispute about these things all the time:  we argue over how good Indian food is for example, or which Indian dish or restaurant is the best.  Kant says that "pleasantness concerns irrational animals also, but beauty only concerns men" which itself seems another pretty implausible idea, although it is understandable that if beauty requires at least an indistinct concept then the question remains whether other animals use anything like indistinct concepts (recent work with chimps, parrots, dogs, elephants, octopi, and porpoises, seems to so that they do.)  

Perhaps Kant's most compelling case for a real distinction between the pleasant and the beautiful is"  "As regards the interest of inclination in the case of the pleasant, everyone says that hunger is the best sauce, and everything that is eatable is relished by people with a healthy appetite, and thus satisfaction of this sort shows no choice directed by taste."  We are talking about food again, but as opposed to Indian food, where one can talk about subtle differences in spice, or wine, where one can talk about the subtle distinctions Sancho's cousins observe in Hume's essay (although Kant thinks that taste in Canary wine is just a matter of physical taste and hence the pleasant) we are now just talking about what happens when you have a healthy appetite:  then everything tastes good to you...and no judgment is really involved.  I don't think that is true either, although a healthy appetite can make what is tasty more tasty and what is less good somewhat better.  Even with a healthy appetite one can distinguish between finer and lesser cuisines.  It might just enhance one's eating experience without making everything pleasant relative. 
 

 

Do Aesthetic Attributions Require Taste?

Frank N. Sibley's article "Aesthetic Concepts" (originally in The Philosophical Review 68:4 (1959) 421-450, but also widely anthologized) is so famous it almost counts as dogma, as though an appeal to Sibley would make it true.  But there is a something very peculiar in the essay at the very beginning.  Sibley just assumes that there is a list of things called aesthetic concepts and that in order to discern these one must have taste.  He says "we say a poem is tightly knit or deeply moving; that a picture lacks balance, or has a certain serenity and repose, or that the grouping of the figure sets up an exciting tension; that the characters in a novel never really come to life, or that a certain episode strikes a false note." He says that it is natural to say that making such judgments requires taste, although interestingly, he suggests some other things it might require (assuming, I suppose, that all of these are just different ways of saying "taste"), for example sensitivity and aesthetic discrimination.  He defines an aesthetic term or expression as one that requires taste for its application.  He also speaks of aesthetic or taste concepts (but these seem interchangeable with aesthetic terms).  He then goes on to list aesthetic terms:  they include unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless and serene, among others, as well as such more complex predicates as "sets up a tension." Yet it not at all clear why any of the comments in the first set of examples, or terms in the second set, require taste for their application.  You could use any of these terms without having any taste at all.  For the sake of argument let's just assume that taste is the capacity to make subtle distinctions in works of art and other aesthetic objects and to do this in such a way as to appropriately evaluate them.  The OED refers to "aesthetic discernment in art, literature, fashion, etc."  O.K.  that's something to work with.  But someone can say that something is unified or lifeless and make sense without having any particular aesthetic discernment.  That is, it is not required to be a good judge in art or some other aesthetic realm to use these terms.  One might argue of course that for the terms to be used correctly one needs to be a good judge, to have taste in that sense, to be able to discern the good from the bad.  Someone who says that a painting is balanced when it is not (as determined by a good judge in such paintings) is a person with no (or at least, not very good) taste. This is at least a plausible claim.  But to claim that in order to use a term aesthetically one must have taste is just to assume that in each case of aesthetic judgment there is an objectively right answer.  (Those who have taste can see it, and those who do not cannot.)  Sibley is clear that for him "taste"  is an ability to "notice or see or tell that things have certain qualities." Is the objectivity of aesthetic attributions really that secure?  Also, there is a kind of circularity, or at least a tautology, in Sibley's position:  one must have taste in order to correctly say "x is balanced" and in order to correctly say "x is balanced" one must have taste.  You wouldn't be able to determine that someone has taste independently of their being able to make correct aesthetic attributions. Let's say you do not know much about painting and are not able to judge in any knowledgeable way whether a particular painting or its parts or aspects is good (or better) and yet you say that this painting has a certain serenity.  On Sibley's view, you cannot then be using "serenity" in the aesthetic sense of the word.  But this seems absurd.  His position would make it impossible for the expert and the novice to disagree about a painting's serenity, since they would be talking about completely different things!

Things get worse when Sibley extends aesthetic terms to what he calls "everyday discourse."  He says, "we employ terms the use of which requires an exercise of taste not only when discussing the arts but quite liberally throughout discourse in everyday life" which is to say that one has to use such terms even in everyday life in the way a Humean good judge would when talking about an oration, i.e with delicacy of sentiment.  Sibley admits that many of the terms which are used with taste in critical discourse (with respect of art) are often used outside of the arts in a way not connected with taste.  However, at the same time, he believes that terms like graceful, delicate, dainty, and handsome are often used outside of the arts in ways that require taste, and then they are used aesthetically.  Let's take "handsome."  Imagine that a woman says that a man is handsome.  Is it required that she get this objectively right for her to have used the term aesthetically?  Is it required that she be able to make subtle discrimination between different features of handsomeness before she can say someone is handsome?   I think not.   This is an important issue since many who criticize everyday aesthetics argue that it trivializes aesthetics, perhaps for Sibleyan reasons.  They have no problem with application of terms like "serenity" in everyday contexts where this application is like that of a connoisseur in the arts.  They just have a problem with its application in an ordinary everyday way by ordinary people.  If an ordinary person says that a dell is serene that person cannot be using the term aesthetically since that person does not apply the term out of a capacity for subtle discrimination.

Sibley goes on to say, following Hume, that "Taste or sensitivity is somewhat more rare than certain other human capacities" although he thinks almost everyone is able to exercise taste in some area to some degree.  

Sibley also says that "man who failed to realize the nature of taste concepts, or someone who, knowing he lacked sensitivity in aesthetic matters, did not want to reveal this lack might by assiduous application and shrewd observation provide himself with some rules and generalizations; and by inductive procedures and intelligent guessing, he might frequently say the right things. But he could have no great confidence or certainty..."  This does not make any sense on Sibley's view.  If the man has no sensitivity then he couldn't possibly "say the right thing."  If he said that a painting was delicate, on Sibley's view he would not even be using "delicate" as a taste concept, since that would require taste, which he doesn't have.  So how would it be the right thing to say?  Sibley also interestingly thinks that "people often are exercising taste even when they say that glass is very delicate because it is so thin, and know that it would be less so if thicker and more so if thinner." although he thinks such cases are atypical.  Perhaps I am being unfair to Sibley and he simply means by a taste judgment one that cannot be applied by way of conditions or rules.  This is certainly a, or the major point of the paper.  Perhaps Sibley wasn't even thinking of subtle discernment or the Humean good judge at all. It is hard to say. 


I owe a lot to Sibley:  my project of exploring everyday life aesthetics could be seen as a development of his comments in this article about the everyday and of his notion that aesthetic terms (except for the famous ones, like beauty) have been largely neglected.  It is only recently that I have found his requirement that aesthetic terms be only used in connection with taste irritating.