The analysis of beauty furnished by the modern philosophers of taste shifts the basis for objective judgments of beauty. Such judgements/experiences are now attributed to an alleged “faculty” or “faculties” with which individuals react to certain features of the objective world. These theories of Beauty both reflected and were influenced by the intellectual trends of this period. See Enlightenment and Locke’s Theory of Perception. In brief, Locke and those followed him in his empiricists commitments suggested that the only real objective properties of the world were what he called primary properties. These are essentially the kinds of properties that physicists and chemists can study. They are quantifiable. If a property is not primary it is said to be secondary. But this is a little misleading. Secondary properties are not truly properties of objects at all. They are merely properties of our perception of objects. For instance if I find the soup very salty, the salty taste is a quality of my perception of the soup, but the salty taste does not reside in the soup in any way. Note further that you may taste the soup and not find it too salty at all. But there is absolutely no point in us trying to establish who is objectively right or wrong here. Neither one of us is making an objective claim about the soup when we say it is too salty or not salty enough. Rather we are reporting our subjective reactions to the soup and that is all. Now with respect to salty taste, we have come to realize that it is a formal structure in the world, specifically the molecular structure of sodium chloride, which interacts with our perceiving organs and causes in us a salty perception. But the shape of the sodium chloride molecule is one thing and the salty taste is something else again. The shape is primary while the salty taste is secondary. Theorists of this era attempt to understand beauty experience in similar ways. Note what is attempted here is a purely scientific explanation of a category of human experiences with no trace of metaphysical speculations.

Three Main Types of Theories of Taste:

1. The apparatus of taste is conceived of by some of them to be a special single faculty (the sense of beauty).

2. The apparatus of taste is composed of several special faculties (the sense of beauty, the sense of the sublime, and so on).

3. The apparatus of taste is simply the ordinary cognitive and affective faculties functioning in unusual or unique ways.

Reasons for decline of Beauty: (Preview of coming attractions)

Three main reasons

The Evolution to Association of Ideas Theories to explain Beauty Experience made judgements of beauty less and less informative.[3]
Objective features which account for beauty experience are elusive.
Close attention to “Beauty” splinters it into many “aesthetic” qualities.[4]

1. There was a drift away from theories that conceive of the apparatus of taste as a single sense, or a set of special senses specifically related to certain kinds of objects. Associationist theories began to appear in which the ordinary cognitive and affective faculties plus the mental mechanism of the association of ideas constitute the apparatus of taste. (Thus more economical), When only the ordinary faculties are involved in a theory of taste, the mechanism of the association of ideas is sometimes seen as operating in an essential way with these faculties in the experience of beauty. Still this gives us no information about the objective order and is thus non-informing cognitive process. It tells us nothing or next to nothing about the object being perceived but only about the associations that the perceiver is bringing to the object. These associationist theories propose that it is possible for almost anything to be beautiful, given the appropriate associations of ideas.

Part of a larger philosophical movement (Locke et alia)

2. Theorists of taste also attempted to specify the objective features that evoke the experience of beauty. But neither a reliable nor comprehensive list of features could be specified, nor a reliable formula could be found (such as unity in variety, etc.) In associationist theories, Beauty becomes an exceedingly diffuse concept and thus does not distinguish one object/ set of formal features from another. The mechanism of the association of the ideas provides a means for indefinitely extending the range of things that can be judged beautiful. Thus the traditional way of defining (i.e., by looking at all the things denoted by the term and then finding something common to all) becomes impossible in the case of beauty since anything, or nearly so, could be a member of the set. This situation is similar to that of the present‑day aesthetic‑attitude theories that maintain that anything can be aesthetic if only it is experienced while in the aesthetic attitude. The Classical alternative view, that “beauty” names an indefinable and transcendental concept or form, was unacceptable to the British philosophers of the era who were committed to a Locke-style reductive empiricism.

3. During this period, in an attempt to be more precise, other notions (sublime, dainty, picturesque for example) are distinguished from beauty, strictly speaking. Thus “the aesthetic” becomes richer but more complicated.[5] This caused a “disunity,” the fragmentation of beauty with the introduction of notions such as sublimity, novelty, etc. The tension that was resolved initially by subsuming all such notions under the central concept of taste and later the concept of the “aesthetic.”

"aesthetic theory" = that which makes the concept of the aesthetic basic and defines other concepts of the theory in terms of the aesthetic.

But it would seem this was only to paper over the real problem. Without a precisely delineated domain of phenomena to be explained, it is unlikely that any satisfying scientific explanation is in the offing.

Francis Hutcheson (1694‑1746)

· Best representative of the eighteenth‑century British theorists of taste.

· There is no trace of Platonism;

· Theory focuses squarely on the phenomena of sense.

· Theory contains an account of the faculty of taste and the pleasure of taste.

· Disinterestedness is worked into his conception of sense.

· The word "beauty" does not name any object that is seen, heard, or touched.

· "Beauty," he says, names an "idea rais'd in us” An object in the private consciousness of a subject (a person). (Note the similarity to Locke’ Secondary Property)

(Note: There is some question as to whether to best understand Hutchenson as a subjectivist or not. I do.)

Does believe that the idea (sensation) that is aroused is pleasure and it is regularly aroused by the perception of certain kinds of external objects. Thus these experiences serve to connect us to and can inform us about perceptual objects in the world. We can know that they have the formal objective properties required to provide these subjective responses. (Just as the salty taste can inform us of the presence of sodium chloride.)

Therefore, an inquiry can be made as to whether there are any features of the objects of perception that regularly trigger the experience of beauty.

(Note: Still objective characteristics may so happen to cause the beauty response, but the are NOT what we mean by beauty nor, when we attribute beauty to an object, are we predicating formal objective qualities to the object. This is an empirical correlation, not an analytic association.)

Hutcheson's answer/suggestion is a formula: Unity in Variety

Uniformity in variety is the objective cause of our subjective experience of beauty.

Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671‑1713)

Diffuse and unsystematic views

(Curiously) Holds a Platonic theory of beauty.

· Note: This is not logically inconsistent. However, few if any of these empirically inclined thinkers accepted the Platonic doctrine of the Forms.

The object of a judgment of beauty is the Platonic Form of Beauty.

· Propounds theory of a single “faculty of taste.”

This faculty can function either:

1. as a moral sense for making moral judgments or

2. as a sense of beauty.

The sense of beauty has a cognitive function. It is a mode of coming to know something.

This contrasts with Francis Hutcheson, et alia, who claim that the faculty of taste, and thus the sense of beauty. is a non-cognitive, reactive faculty that produces the feeling of pleasure.

Shaftesbury does not deny that feeling plays a role.
Focuses attention on the sublime, his second influential contribution to the theory of taste.
This was related to his conception of the world as the creation of God;

The vastness and incomprehensibility of that creation could only be described as sublime. (overwhelming in a way that a charming/beauty is not).

Tried to maintain a unified theory by classifying the sublime as one kind of beauty.

Shaftesbury Introduced the notion of disinterestedness

This later becomes integral first to the concept of taste and later to the concept of the aesthetic.

Insists on the significance of disinterestedness for morality. In order for an action to have moral merit (not simply good consequences), the person acting must be disinterested, that is, must not be motivated solely by selfish motives.

Shaftesbury was reacting to the views Thomas Hobbes[6]

Additionally, Shaftesbury contrasts the contemplation of beautiful things in the world of sense with the desire to possess them. The contemplation of beautiful things and the desire to possess them are distinct (though perhaps not incompatible).

David Hume (1711 – 1776)

“Though it be certain, that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, I are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings.”[7]

Beauty (as it’s opposite, deformity) is not in objects, but are feelings linked by the nature of our human constitution to "certain qualities in objects."

Note: Like Hutcheson and other faculty of taste theorists, he blends subjective and objective elements to account for judgements of beauty.

Objective judgements about what is and is not beautiful are possible. These are judgements about what is “such as to elicit universal agreement among normal competent subjects under ideal conditions of perception. These are stable and predictable because they are based on certain alleged stabilities in human nature.

Note: Because he relativizes judgements to “Ideal Judges,” he moves his theory away from subjectivism (beauty judgement = a subjective report) towards something more objective (beauty judgement is an empirical prediction about the responses of normal perceivers under ideal conditions).

Hume mentions "certain qualities in objects" that cause pleasure.

Note: Unlike Hutcheson, he does not try to reduce them to a formula (i.e. uniformity in variety).

Note: Unlike Edmund Burke, he does not try to specify a complete, short list of beauty-making qualities.

Hume mentions in passing some twenty or so beauty-making qualities (e.g. uniformity, variety, luster of color, clearness of expression, exactness of imitation[8]).

Hume does allow for variations of taste. But since they are due to age and temperament rather then aberrations in the nature of the perceiver, no standard of taste exists to rate one preference as better than the other. Hence there is an irreducible relativism to Hume’s realism.

(Young men prefer "amorous and tender images," but older men prefer "wise philosophical reflections." Etc.)

Alexander Baumgarten (1714‑1762)

· Coined the term "aesthetics,"

· Baumgarten tries to work aesthetics into a scheme of this type by conceiving of it as the science of sensory cognition.

· Exploited the medieval tradition of explaining behavior and mental phenomena by attributing each kind of phenomenon to a distinct faculty of the mind.[9]

· He thinks of art appreciation (beauty experience) as a low‑level means of cognition, a sensuous kind of knowing.

· Under the domain of both the sensory faculty and the intellectual faculty as a mode of inferior cognition.

Note: This contrasts with British philosophers who subsume the experience of beauty under the sensory faculty alone‑ non‑cognitive.

· Has the notion of an internal, reactive “sense” of beauty (or something similar) that supposedly produces pleasure in response to the perception by the external senses of certain features of the external world. (Relational property‑ Secondary Quality- not unlike the idea that a salty taste experience is triggered by certain objective conditions.)

Edmund Burke (1728‑1797)

· published 1757.

· First to give a full‑scale theory of the sublime.

· Treats the sublime as a category separate from and opposed to beauty.

(Placed a strain on the unity of the “aesthetic.”)

· Rejects the theory of special internal senses

· Tries to make the ordinary affective phenomena of pleasure and pain the basis for beauty and the sublime.

· Distinguishes between:

positive pleasure (Love) and
relative pleasure (Delight).

Love and Beauty:

The pleasure taken in beauty is love (positive pleasure), related to the passions useful for the preservation of society. (i.e. SEX… well sex and love, After all, sex will produce kids, but only love will see that they are raised to adulthood.)

"By beauty I mean, that quality, or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it."

But he defines "love" "that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful." (So… defines beauty in terms of love and define love in terms of beauty… so.)

However, he specifies those qualities of bodies that trigger love (Contra Hutcheson), claiming that there are a number of beauty‑making properties and sublimity‑making properties.

Offers a "short‑list" theory rather a single‑formula.

Delight and the Sublime:

Delights results from the removal of pain or the removal of the anticipation of pain. Related to the passions useful for the individual's preservation. These are operating in the experience of the sublime.

The sublime is whatever excites delight. Objects which ordinarily threaten and terrorize us contemplated from a position of security. (Consider the delight of listening to a raging thunder storm from the safety of your warm house.)

Disinterestedness

For Burke, it plays a role which he illustrates with an example of male love and desire:

“beauty, and the passion caused by beauty, which I call love, is different from desire, though desire may sometimes operate along with it”

Again, while beauty is distinct, it is not incompatible with ‘interested” viewing.

Archibald Alison (1757-1839)

Alison Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste published 1790.[10]
Proposes a Faculty of Taste (sort of).
Abandons the idea of special internal senses of beauty and the sublime.
Claims that ordinary cognitive and affective faculties (like Burke) and the psychological mechanism of the association of ideas (unlike Burke) account for aesthetic experiences.
Contra Hutcheson, claims that the association of ideas (hence cognitive dimension) is an essential aspect of the faculty of taste.

Faculty of Taste

"that ... by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is Beautiful or Sublime in the works of Nature or Art."[11]

By "perceive" Alison means “awareness” (thus, he could speak of perceiving (feeling) pain), not a cognitive perception.

Association of Ideas

Taste is composed of sensibility (emotional response) and imagination (the association of ideas).
Human cognition is so constituted that certain features of the material world cause them to experience what he calls the "emotion of taste.”

There is an Objective Condition:

It must be a sign of or expressive of a quality of mind. (That of an artist's or pf the Divine mind). Thus his psychological theory presupposes a theological commitment to explain the beauty we find in nature. Our observation of beauty in nature itself is evidence of the “mind” of nature’s Creator. This commitment can be avoided if one says that the emotion of taste is evoked when a natural object is taken to be sign of the Divine Artist rather than is de re an object of produce by a divine mind.[12]

Association of Ideas (crucial) An aspect of the material world is expressive of or a sign of “mind” because it has become associated in some way with that quality, the association supplying the basis for the expressiveness.

Process Functioning of the Faculty of Taste (A Complicated Story)

1. An object of taste is perceived

2. A simple emotion (e.g. cheerfulness), is produced in the mind.

3. The simple emotion produces a thought (typically an image) in the imagination.

4. This first thought produces a second thought in the imagination and it a third, etc. leading to a whole unified train of images.

5. Each image in the train of associated thoughts also produces a simple emotion, thus there is produced a set of simple emotions, unified by their relation to the coherent train of thought.

6. This set of simple emotions produces the emotion of taste, (which is a complex emotion).

7. Each simple emotion and the functioning of the imagination is accompanied by a simple pleasure.

8. This set constitutes the complex pleasure that accompanies the emotion of taste ("delight").

Whew!

Immanuel Kant (1724—1804)

Critique of Judgment (1790—the same year Alison's book appeared)

· Theory of Beauty only. I am omitting here his theory of the sublime.

· He is within the tradition of the philosophy of taste, but differs radically from that of the British Empiricists

kRejected Empiricist Tenants

1. That knowledge derives wholly from sense experience.

2. Hume’s contention that knowledge of scientific laws and causes operating in the universe was impossible.

Kant develops a system of the relation of mind to experience which would show how it is possible for us to have some knowledge that is certain, that is, a priori knowledge that does not derive from experience (an would justify universal causality).

Kant’s Insights: (See Note on Kant’s Metaphysics/Epistemology for more details.)

Mind itself contributes the general structure to our experience- (3 dimensional space- unidirectional, sequential time). –Think my “computer program template” here.
For this reason we can have certain (a priori) universal knowledge. (e.g. we know, independently of any particular experience, that every event will have a cause.)

I can know without even looking what the form of my 100 records will be, since the structure is furnished by the program itself, though of course, I cannot know the content of the record a priori.

Our knowledge is limited to the domain of (our own human) experience.
Moral experience gives us the assurance that nature is God's teleological (purposive) system. (God's "unfathomably great art.")[13]

Kant’s Aesthetic Theory:

Claims that natural beauty is "the form of purpose."
Kant accepts as given that "beauty" is not a concept. Rather, it refers in some way to pleasure but not to something objective.

For Kant there are only two kinds of judgments:

1. Ordinary judgments (apply a known concept to something in the world).

“That is a rose.: (Rose is that.)

Reflective judgments (try to find a concept to apply to something in the world.)

What is that? … What is it that all and only those things have in common?

Since beauty is not a concept, a judgment of beauty (“That is beautiful.”) cannot be an ordinary judgment.

Therefore a judgment of beauty must be a reflective judgment, a judgment in search of a concept. But, since beauty is NOT a concept, a judgment of beauty is a reflective judgment looking for a nonexistent concept.

He uses "Aesthetic" in a very broad sense to include judgments about pleasure in general. For Kant, all aesthetic judgments focus on pleasure, which is a property of the experiencing subject rather than of the objective world (subjective).

Therefore:

1. Judgments of beauty are subjective.

2. Yet, they are stable and universal in a way that other pleasures are not. The pleasure felt with beauty is felt to be universal and necessary.

How do we explain this?

Theory of beauty (4 parts)

(1) disinterestedness

(2) universality

(3) necessity

(4) the form of purpose.

“A judgment of beauty is a disinterested, universal, and necessary judgment concerning the pleasure that everyone ought to derive from the experience of a form of purpose”.

Disinterestedness:

He claims (characterization unique to him) to view something with an interest is to have a desire that that thing actually exist,[14] but to view something with disinterest is to be indifferent to its existence.

If I'm looking at a bowl of fruit as a possible snack, this would be an interesting viewing. I am practically engaged with the bowl of fruit. But in that case, I'm very concerned whether what I'm looking at is a real bowl of fruit, an optical illusion, a hologram, wax fruit etc. However, if I'm looking at the bowl of fruit disinterestedly, then I'm simply attending to the shape, the colors, the textures, the arrangements etc. And what the ontological source of these perceptual qualities are is itself irrelevant.

Note: Though the person may not be, in fact, indifferent to the existence of the object, the judgement of beauty is made without regard to the actual existence of the object. (Bowl of fruit example).

Universality:

Universality is to follow from disinterest and universal cognitive faculties of all humans. The pleasure is not in any sense personal and peculiar. It derives from what is common to all humanity. So all humans ought to experience the pleasure that arises from a disinterested viewing of the object. This is similar to the “faculty of taste” model, but not the “special-sense: versions.

In judgments of taste (reflective judgments looking for nonexistent concepts) the cognitive faculties of the understanding (the faculty of concepts) and the imagination engage in “free play”—an interaction in which no concept is or can be applied. This exercise demonstrates the harmonious relation of the cognitive faculties and results in the pleasure felt in judgments of taste. The harmony we feel between nature and our mental powers is a pleasure that occurs solely from the free play of our mental powers. There is a clear analogy, then, between these free reflective judgments and moral freedom. This is another source of the pleasure they give rise to.

Necessity:

The felt necessity is justified because the pleasure derives from faculties inherent in all people and in conditions accessible to all people. What gives one person beauty-pleasure must, of necessity, give any human beauty-pleasure (likewise constituted and situated). This is not to say I expect that everyone WILL agree with me (a la Hume); only that I know they should.)

Kant denies that we can derive general rules of beauty- Every judgment of taste is a singular judgment, and no general rule can be formulated from the whole set of judgments. If Kant's view is correct, it is easy enough to see why all people ought to agree, but it does not tell us how we can get such agreement.

Form of purpose:

This is a feature of the objective world (of human experience) that triggers that faculty. Like Hutcheson, Kant focuses on formal relations as the stimulus of the beauty experience. However Kant works the teleological notion of purpose into his theory.
This is NOT the recognition that something has a particular purpose (because that would involve applying a concept- i.e. an ordinary judgment)
It is recognition of the form of purpose (a “purposeless purposefulness”).

The form of purpose in a work of art—for example, the designed (“just right”) quality is the result of intelligent agency. The forms of nature have this same perceived quality. Taste focuses on these forms themselves (without reference to the actual purposes they realize).

Sadly this would rule out a color field as a possible beautiful object (which Kant would deem as not “beautiful.” but as merely “agreeable”)

Problems with Kant

1. Beauty is an object's form of purposiveness, but this seem entirely implausible because it captures many non-beautiful things (e.g. Vultures exhibit form purpose every bit as much as parrots.).

2. Beautiful admits of degree, (X is more beautiful than Y.) But Kant's theory has no way accounting for this.

3. Beauty is a threshold notion. (Most people are ordinary looking—that is, fall below the beauty threshold.) Kant's theory has no way of taking account, that is, it does not admit of degrees.

4. Finally, many experiences of beauty depend largely on color (simple and uncomplex) independently of any formal aspects. Kant's theory (like Hutcheson's) cannot take account of this because he makes form the whole story. Any theory that rules out color as a source of beauty has got to be defective.

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

A Neo-Kantian (sort-of)

Praises Kant’s focus on the subject side of aesthetic experience,

Like Kant, he held that the phenomenon of beauty would only be illuminated through a careful scrutiny of its effects on the subject, rather than by proceeding in the pre-Kantian objectivist fashion, searching out the properties of objects—such as smoothness, delicacy and smallness—which the earlier faculty of taste theorists suggested give rise to the feeling of the beautiful.

But unlike Kant, Schopenhauer does not believe that the aesthetician should start from the aesthetic judgment, but rather from immediate aesthetic experience, before the subject attempts to formulate judgments about that experience. His advocating this focus, rather than Kant's focus on judgments, has to do with the ways in which Schopenhauer departs from Kant's epistemology.

Very briefly, the key issue has to do with the status of non-conceptual knowledge. Kant famously held, “[t]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A50–51/B74–75). T Schopenhauer adheres to the first clause but holds that there is indeed what today philosophers might call “non-conceptual content,” and what he referred to variously as “intuitive cognition”, “knowledge of perception” or “feeling.”

This cognition allows us—and many non-human animals—to navigate and operate in the world to a great extent without concepts. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer, this is the kind of knowledge we gain, par excellence, through aesthetic experiences of nature and art. Nevertheless, this “knowledge” is not or at least not-yet conceptual, though it is a knowledge of the “Platonic Ideas” or essential features of the phenomenal world according to Schopenhauer.

In order to preserve for ourselves or to communicate “intuitive knowledge” to others, we may try to show it or say it. If one is an artist, one might show such knowledge by attempting to embody it in a work of art. But for non-artists, trying to ‘say’ this knowledge means attempting to capture it propositionally, and in so doing, for Schopenhauer, we translate the intuitive into conceptual knowledge by a process of abstraction.

Unfortunately, something is inevitably lost in the translation. Thus, Schopenhauer concludes, Kant's starting point—the aesthetic judgment—is already once removed from true aesthetic experience. And since this remove is not innocuous, insofar as the judgment does not faithfully transmit the richness of the experience, the aesthetic judgment constitutes the wrong focus for aesthetic theorizing.

Romantic (Spooky) Metaphysics

Schopenhauer adopts the basic Kantian limit on metaphysics, but believes that we can surmise certain things about the Noumena (things in themselves). He maintains that the events we witness are an expression of a "Cosmic Will." All behavior, human, animal, even inanimate behavior, is an expression of "The Will."

This will is a turbulent struggle within itself. Desire, which each of us experience directly as the most immediate manifestation of our individual wills, is really the manifestation of the Cosmic dissatisfaction and struggle. Unaware of our real situation, we might imagine that we could satisfy our desire, but in reality, we are pawns of The Will (i.e. Our wills are not of our making, but the manifestation of something beyond our control.) and it will reassert its struggle through our desire almost immediately after any momentary satisfaction.

The only way out of the grip of The Will and the ceaseless pendulum swing between desire and boredom, is to renounce desires. Schopenhauer adopts the Buddhist belief that desire causes suffering and that the only way to eliminate suffering is to cease from desiring. He recommends acetic lifestyle).

However, he believed that aesthetic contemplation alone (due to its disinterested nature) permitted a temporary escape from the control of The Will. During aesthetic experience we are without motive or desire for the object we contemplate. We cease in our ordinary willing.

According to Schopenhauer, a thing is said to be beautiful because it is the subject of someone's aesthetic contemplation.

No objective criterion

"When we say that a thing is beautiful, we thereby assert that it is an object of our aesthetic contemplation...it means that the sight of the thing make us objective, that is to say, that in contemplating it we are no longer conscious of ourselves as individuals, but as pure will-less subjects of knowledge."[15]

But there are limits (obscene and nauseating)

Two Key Metaphysical Elements:

1. Reality is merely the manifestation of The Will.

2. Aesthetic consciousness must have as its object a Platonic Form

Note: No special faculties, rather our normal cognitive faculties are functioning is an unique way.

Ordinary consciousness is totally at the service of The Will.

Aesthetic Consciousness is different and rare. "Knowledge tears itself free from The Will."[16]

One does not look at the object in question in terms of its relations to other things (for that would serve the purpose of knowledge and thus The Will), but rather as a pure, relationless Platonic Idea.

"[T]he absolute silence of the will...[is]... required for the purely objective apprehension of the true nature of things...[Platonic Ideas]."[17]

There is an absolute antagonism between aesthetic consciousness and interest.

Problems with Schopenhauer

Seems bizarre on many levels.

Cognition

"beauty feeling," is a pleasure.

Shaftesbury holds that there is a single cognitive sense with several functions (moral and aesthetic) yielding knowledge of the external world.

By contrast…

Hutchenson believes there are a number of distinct internal senses with single functions and that they are affective and reactive in nature, that is, that they function to produce pleasure, not awareness. Their objects are internal to the mind.

Hutcheson's formula (Unity in Variety) excludes simple ideas/perceptions such as single colors as possible source of beauty pleasure. (I take this to be a problem for his theory. After all, simple colors or tones can be beautiful, right?)

Disinterestedness

Hutcheson also tries to refute Thomas Hobbes's psychological theory that all behavior is selfish.

Awareness of beauty (the beauty feeling) is immediate (unmediated by thought), like the taste of salt or sugar and thus free of thought and calculation. Therefore it cannot be selfish.

Further since reactive, beauty responses are not subject to rational deliberation or revision. (If I open my eyes and see a red pencil and I can’t think myself into seeing something else.)

However, some reprogramming of responses through an association of ideas (see below) is possible on his view.

Universal Subjective Judgments and Association of Ideas

Despite being subjective, judgments about beauty are universal in the sense that, tied as they are to inborn faculties of the human constitution and being as they are disinterested, taste is an objective aspect of human nature and is thus we should expect and, in fact, have, broad convergence of judgment with respect to beauty.

Disagreements, according to Hutcheson result from either physical defect or the association of ideas.

For Hutcheson, the association of ideas is a psychological mechanism that can pervert taste from its natural objects.

Upshot of this Association of Ideas Theory

Any aspect of the material world may become associated with a quality of mind and evoke the simple emotion. Thus, any aspect of the material world can become beautiful (even ugly ones- Joke… sort of).

This is because it is not objects' perceptible qualities that cause them to be beautiful according to Alison, but their associations. [18]

Alison's theory appears to provide a cognitive basis for explaining the richness and complexity of the experience of art and nature. Alison's theory, however, claims that anything in the material world can be beautiful if it has the right associations.

Disinterestedness

While not indispensable, it is the state of mind "most favorable to the emotion of taste."

“attention is so little occupied by any private or particular object of thought, as to leave us open to all the impressions which the objects that are before us can produce.”[19]

but "most favorable” does not imply essential
Curiously, he concluded that (art) criticism destroys aesthetic appreciation because it considers art in relation to rules or compares it to other art.

kSummary of Modern Theories of Taste

Lost their “taste” for faculties of taste. (ha, ha)

Faculty of Taste Philosophies subjectivize beauty, but only partially. Each claimed that some specific feature of the objective world triggered the faculty of taste. These place the lion’s share or the responsibility of the beauty experience on the viewer.

[1] Don’t be fooled by the name. “Modern Philosophy starts in the 1600s. In the same way that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is considered the first “Modern Scientist,” René Descartes (1596–1650)is considered the first “Modern Philosopher. With the advent of the scientific revolution we see that both modern science and modern philosophy break with the Classical World View of Plato and Aristotle, reject their explanatory models and resources and adopt new ones. We also see a rejection of “direct realism” (AKA: naive realism) and the adoption of representation realism.

[2] Don’t be fooled by the name. “Modern Philosophy starts in the 1600s. In the same way that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is considered the first “Modern Scientist,” René Descartes (1596–1650)is considered the first “Modern Philosopher. With the advent of the scientific revolution we see that both modern science and modern philosophy break with the Classical World View of Plato and Aristotle, reject their explanatory models and resources and adopt new ones. We also see a rejection of “direct realism” (AKA: naive realism) and the adoption of representation realism.

[3] Note that if anything might taste salty given a certain association history, then the salty experience tells you nothing objective about the world.

[4] Given such a diverse domain, it is unlikely that any objective qualities could be found to explain them all.

[6] Hobbes was an Psychological Egoist who claimed that the only reason anyone does anything is because he or she believes it to be in his or her own best interest. Taking pleasure in something that provide us with no practical reward would suggest Hobbes’s view of human nature is too simplistic. Further, moral action has to be disinterested to indeed be meritorious (as opposed to merely prudent).

[7] David Hume, “One the Standard of Taste,” in Essays, Literary, Moral and Political (London 1870), pp. 139

[8] Preview of coming attractions; this seems to anticipate Zeki’s contention that the pleasure we take from great art arises largely from the ability of the artist to render our “archetypes” exactly.

[9] Faculty Doctrine

According to this medieval doctrine, there are:

1. The vegetative faculty (which explains nutrition and procreation)

2. The locomotive faculty (which explains movement)

3. The sensory faculties (which explain perception, imagination, and the like).

4. The rational faculty (which explains mental behavior),

[10] Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste selections reprinted in Alexander Sesonske, ed. What is Art? (New York: Oxford U.P., 1965), pp 182-195

[12] While one COULD remove the theological component, one could develop it as well as does Jacob Fries and Rudolph Otto. Perhaps transcendentalists as well. If the mind quality is only “taken as a sign,” then the experience ceases to be cognitive in the same way, that is, the awareness of beauty ceases to inform one of anything objective and collapses into a quality of the experience, something closer to a non-cognitive emotional response.

[13] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Judgement, trans. N.K. Smith (New York: St. Matain’s, 1965). pp. 334.

[14] This is misleading. Better to concentrate on the “what disinterested viewing is.

[15] Schopenhauer, Author. The World as Will and Idea p. 270

[18] Alison concludes that a blind person can have the same experience of beauty of color that sighted person can because both a blind person and a sighted person can form a the associations that color can acquire.