This essay was written for Aesthetics (PHI 233), taken with Nalini Bhushan in the Fall 2022 semester. Our assignment was to address the central question in aesthetics: Is there any one artwork that is objectively better than another? Broadly, we were to assess the term “objective” in this question using the arguments of David Hume and Emmanuel Kant that the existence of an independent property of beauty is neither available nor necessary for “objectivity” in art. We compared and evaluated selected artworks in the Smith College Museum of Art across and within genres. Reflecting on our comparative judgments of the artworks, we translated our subjective experience into a philosophical argument for why we deemed certain artworks “better” than others. I selected the landscape works on paper for my essay:
William Baxter Palmer Closson, After the Storm, n.d.
Joel Meyerowitz, Bay with Sun, 1977
Auguste François Ravier, Landscape (view of la Levaz), n.d. Dieter Roth, Sunset, 1968
Bob Schnepf; Family Dog Productions, Lothar and the Hand People, The Doors, 1967
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Beauty in the Supersensible Realm
The Oxford English Dictionary defines beauty in the abstract sense as “that quality of a physical object or animal which is highly pleasing to the sight; perceived physical perfection; exceptional harmony of form or colour.” A student of Kant’s “Third Critique”, in which he engages with the question of how aesthetic judgments are possible, will recognize that this definition of beauty fails to account for the element of subjectivity which Kant takes to be part and parcel of aesthetic judgment.
Judgments of beauty must be fundamentally disinterested, non-conceptual, universally valid, and necessary (Bhushan). Kant defines four moments of beauty as an analytical tool to assist him in showing that aesthetic judgments are neither purely subjective nor purely objective. In the first moment, the subject judges an object’s beauty based on the delight it engenders independent of any personal interest. In the second, the subject judges an object’s beauty as universally valid and independent of any inherent characteristic of the object. In the third moment, the subject evaluates the object’s beauty as a formal subjective finality, independent of any concept of objective perfection. Having established its disinterested, non-conceptual, and universally valid aspects, in the fourth moment, beauty is shown to be the cause of a necessary delight. By showing that aesthetic judgments are subjective and yet have an objective valence due to their universal validity, Kant skirts the boundary between a subjectivist and objectivist view of aesthetic judgment to show that feelings of beauty are articulations of noumena, both subjectively and universally valid.
In contrast, Hume’s empiricist view of aesthetic judgment has more of an objectivist slant. Predicated upon his prioritization of the senses over the transcendental, he posits that we
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subjects base our judgments of beauty on something to which our sense organs are tuned in the objects around us, independent of the judging subject. Any disagreement among subjects about the aesthetic value of art is due to a correctable deficiency in individual taste.
For example, after learning in detail from a museum curator how Dieter Roth’s Sunset (1968) was created, my judgment of its beauty completely changed. Hume might say that the curator’s imparting her deeper understanding of the work’s formal reality had a corrective force on my uninformed perspective and that my transformed judgment of the work proves his view that there is an inherent and detectable quality in an object that gives it beauty. In this view, I only came to notice this quality once my “deficient sense organ” was ameliorated with the assistance of an expert. However, because Hume limits his discussion of quality to concepts and fails to account for how aesthetic judgments can be shared by subjects, I find Kant’s account far more compelling, as he shows that an untaught faculty shared by all human beings enables us to judge an artwork as a manifold entity beneath the level of concept.
Because we subjects share this faculty, our judgments of beauty are grounded in a universal validity, even though the contents of our aesthetic judgments may differ. Thus, Kant manages to account for the widespread agreement on quality that objectivists necessitate and the widespread disagreement on quality that subjectivists necessitate. That my aesthetic judgment of Sunset changed after gaining more knowledge about the artwork’s formal reality is not evidence of a deficiency in my “sense organ”, but proof that my untransformed judgment of the artwork was not of beauty, but of the agreeable and good. The curator’s expertise freed me from trying to assimilate the work under the concept of “sunset” and allowed me to judge the work’s beauty independent of representation, replacing logic with feeling.
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I will map Kant’s notion of the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful onto the reasoning behind my evaluation of Dieter Roth’s Sunset (1968) among three other landscape paintings. Using this framework, I will outline how Kant would understand the transformation which led to an aesthetic experience of the artwork Sunset. My ultimate goal is to clarify his definition of beauty.
I initially gave Sunset the lowest rating among the four landscapes. I looked at the artwork and saw that the artist’s technique was far more crude than in the other three paintings, rendering it, in my eyes, inferior. Roth’s handiwork appeared unrefined and careless, and his technique was glaringly obvious, indicating an indifference toward concealing his craft. I didn’t like that. Here, I have made a judgment of the agreeable, based on my bare perceptual experience of the work and irreducibly personal reaction to it. Since my ability to make judgments of agreeableness is not limited to works of art, this is not necessarily an aesthetic judgment, but one “pathologically conditioned (by stimuli)” (Cahn et al., 133). I have not yet judged the artwork for its beauty, since personal inclination and conditioning still motivates my judgment.
Due to its abstract style, it wasn’t immediately evident to me that Sunset was a representation of an actual sunset. Once I read the title and understood that the work is supposed to represent a sunset, I made a cognitive judgment of how accurately it represented my concept of sunset. I found that its lack of dimension and vividness conflicted with my mental image of a sunset and consequently lowered its objective worth, leading me to judge it as lacking goodness. Furthermore, since I was evaluating the Roth against the other landscape paintings, their representations of the concept of sunset served as another determining ground for my evaluation. Thus, I judged the goodness of the Roth based on both my concept of sunset and the other artists’ representations of sunsets. In both cases, Roth earned little merit, leading me to give his work the
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lowest rating. At this point, I have at best judged the work for its representational accuracy, but, because of my failure to liberate my judgment of the work from the realm of personal interest and concepts, I have yet to make a judgment of its beauty.
Then something radical happened. The curator explained to us that Roth created the work by sandwiching a slice of salami between two sheets of paper and covering the whole thing with plastic. The oils from the salami had gradually seeped into the paper and created a halo around the perimeter of the meat. Roth had used commonplace items, the salami’s organic processes, and the passage of time to create Sunset. With this new knowledge informing my judgment, I began to see the work as not an attempt to represent an objective quantity, but a meditation on decay, ephemerality, disgust, nature, and artistic agency. The work no longer occurred to me as a sunset; instead, I experienced it as a completely non-conceptual entity, liberated from the concept of perfection and personal inclination.
As I felt my analytical mind begin to soften, the work ceased to occur as a distinct object and began to take on a deeply contemplative quality, as if I were looking into a mirror which reflected all of the past experience, memory, imagination, reason, and conditioning that had informed my previous judgments. Stripped of my conceptual armor, I was left with only my subjectivity. I experienced a wash of pure emotion as the bond between the artwork’s beauty and my concept of its representation dissolved. I have finally touched its beauty. I promptly reversed my rating of Sunset from lowest to highest. Here, I have experienced the fourth moment of beauty. I have presupposed that the subjective grounds for my delight are shared by my peers and that my rating indicates that we ought to view this work as the most beautiful.1 Thus, I have
1 “...the universal capacity for being communicated incident to the mental state in the given representation, which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must be fundamental, with the pleasure in the object as its consequent” (Section 9, p.137).
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ascribed to the artwork a necessary delight, finally fulfilling the four requirements Kant places on judgments of beauty.
I have shown that the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful represent different relations to feelings of pleasure or displeasure in which we either distinguish different objects or modes of representation (134). Using the model of my aesthetic experience with Dieter Roth’s Sunset (1968), I have animated the four moments of beauty through which one comes to make an aesthetic judgment. Kant frames the act of making an aesthetic judgment as a process of freeing beauty from the realm of concept while showing that such judgment still maintains a sense of pseudo-objectivity, thus creating the possibility that Baumgarten’s aspiration to create a “science of sensitive knowing” may yet be attainable.
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References
"beauty, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/16688. Accessed 17 October 2022.
Cahn, Steven M., et al. “Critique of Judgement.” Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2020, pp. 131–160.
Nalini Bhushan, “Quality”, (Aesthetics, Smith College, Northampton, MA, October 5, 2022)