In the Eye of the Beholder

I have a small painting by a friend on my wall, which pictures a country stream. I think it is so pretty. I was showing it to another friend, who is also an artist, who asked me what I liked about it. She didn’t think it was so great, so I inferred that her intent was to explain to me why my reasons for liking it were not good ones. Perhaps I misread her, since, if that was her intent, she might more directly have told me what she didn’t like about it.

            In any event, I thought the question was an odd one. Why is an analysis necessary to account for my preference? Again, the only reason that occurred to me for her asking that kind of question was so that she could somehow counter my analysis; so if I said, “Well, I like the contrasting blue and green,” she might have replied, “But that is a very hackneyed way of depicting water and grass, which really don’t have solid colors like that.”

            Even more fundamentally, I wondered why the mere Gestalt of the painting in toto was not sufficient for my liking it. Why did it have to be a matter of components adding up to the final result?

            And perhaps even more fundamentally that that, I wondered if it made any sense to question a preference in the first place. I like what I like. Maybe she likes different things. If on the other hand her question had been aimed at the objective features of the painting that made it a good one – well, I’m not sure I even believe in such a notion. My assumption is that the only sense that could  be given to the concept of objective beauty or of the objective value of a work of art is that there is some kind of consensus among the populace at large or among a recognized set of experts. But I might like something at odds with a consensus.

            Indeed, so might my questioner. I have no doubt that if her own preference ever went counter to a consensus, she would dismiss the consensus. That would imply that her own conception of the quality in question was objective in the very strong sense of there being a truth of the matter, about which opinion, no matter how widespread or professional, could be mistaken (like what Galileo saw through his telescope).

            Backing up my sense of the way this friend values her own aesthetic opinions was another incident. We were driving down the highway when I noticed a water tower in the distance and pointed it out to her, remarking on how striking I thought the view. She reacted with instant disdain, as if I had asked her to admire dog shit in the gutter (think Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders).

            But maybe her question was just out of curiosity, or even an effort at self-edification, to learn about something she was missing.

            What is most interesting to me about all of this – aside from the exceeding interest of people’s psychology or psychologies – is the idea that whatever features of the painting do account for my liking it, or even everybody’s liking it, have aesthetic or, more broadly, axiological purchase only in interaction with a particular sensibility. Thus, a German might love Beethoven’s music, but a Japanese consider it gross; and both could be pointing to the identical features as the reason for their opposing preferences.

            This again is a reason for thinking my friend’s question futile, for any answer I might give could be saying more about our different sensibilities than about what makes the painting lovely.

            Another implication is that anything whatever could be beautiful (or ugly), i.e., to someone (this being the only way something could be beautiful or ugly).

            Yet another implication is that the number of possible values is without limit, governed only by how many kinds of sensibilities there are. For example, besides beauty there is funniness, which comes into being thanks to our having a sense of the humorous. We might even, as a thought experiment, try to construct a wholly novel sensibility. This would be analogous to having a novel sense; for example, perhaps bees not only perceive ultraviolet but also experience it as not a mere color but as a directionality. But a sense is essentially a perceiving mechanism (as the perception psychologist J. J. Gibson taught us), which presumes the existence of objective facts, whereas what I have been discussing in this essay is a valuational system, where there are no objective facts of the matter. So an example of a novel sensibility would be … well, here my imagination fails me, for it seems to me human beings already have every conceivable category of sensibility. But I’m sure Borges could have (and maybe did?) come up with something.

Popular posts from this blog

Closing the Gaps

There are a couple of gaps of reasoning in my general account of desirism, which I have just thought of a way of closing. First let me remind my reader that desirism takes two forms: There are a psychological claim and an ethical recommendation. Thus, what might be called psychological desirism is the claim that moral judgments are caused by desires; or I could put it the other way and say that desires give rise to moral claims. So for example if someone wants or likes world peace, then, I claim, they will be prone to judge as wrong the violation of peace and as bad the perpetrator of such a violation. And, in the same vein, if we judge something or someone wrong or bad, I would assume that the actual cause of the judgment is some desire, whether we know it or not.  The second form of desirism is ethical desirism, or desirism proper, which is the recommendation that we forgo making, or at least ignore, judgments of right and wrong and good and bad (etc.) and focus entirely on the...
Read more

Who Is more likely to be a psychopath: the rational moralist or the emotional amoralist?

  In the Afterword to the 2011 Edition of his book The Expanding Circle (Princeton University Press), Peter Singer makes the extraordinary admission that he has seen the light about the problematic nature of objective morality. Nevertheless he ends by cleaving to it, after providing an extremely weak argument, namely that even though a moral reason is not inherently motivating, we will nevertheless, at least in certain circumstance\s, find a moral reason to be compelling, that is, rational. To me this argument sounds almost (?) circular.  But what is even more salient for me is Singer’s conception of the rational as something that is quite distinct from what he calls the “emotional.” “[W]hether a belief gives us reasons to do something is a normative question, and whether it motivates us to do it is a psychological question.” “[I]f we can accept the idea of objective moral truths, we do have an alternative to reliance on everyday moral intuitions that, according to the bes...
Read more

Eating of the Tree: The phenomenology of the moral moment

I would like to compile a set of examples of experiences that convey the moral problem , by which I mean the irresistibility of believing in moral truth when (1) in fact there is no (such thing as) moral truth and (2) the belief that there is causes serious problems in human and group (on up to international) relations. These examples will also suggest an amoral solution to the moral problem.  Here is one such example:  The dogs are barking. Day in and day out, day and night, two white dogs owned by a neighbor down the street bark and bark and bark. All the rest of us on the block are annoyed, some seriously (especially on summer evenings when you are trying to get to sleep with the windows open), and several have asked that the dogs be kept indoors or else trained; but the neighbor has ignored us. Some of us have then complained to the dog warden, who has visited and even remonstrated with the neighbor more than once; but ultimately to no avail. I suppose the treatment of t...
Read more