Beauty. Objectivism and subjectivism History of western philosophy Eurocentrism and beauty

Hedonism

A very common element in many conceptions of beauty is its relation to pleasure.^[11][5] Hedonism makes this relation part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure.^[12] This account is sometimes labeled as "aesthetic hedonism" in order to distinguish it from other forms of hedonism.^[17][18] An influential articulation of this position comes from Thomas Aquinas, who treats beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it".^[19] Immanuel Kant explains this pleasure through a harmonious interplay between the faculties of understanding and imagination.^[11] A further question for hedonists is how to explain the relation between beauty and pleasure. This problem is akin to the Euthyphro dilemma: is something beautiful because we enjoy it or do we enjoy it because it is beautiful?^[5] Identity theorists solve this problem by denying that there is a difference between beauty and pleasure: they identify beauty, or the appearance of it, with the experience of aesthetic pleasure.^[11]

Hedonists usually restrict and specify the notion of pleasure in various ways in order to avoid obvious counterexamples. One important distinction in this context is the difference between pure and mixed pleasure.^[11] Pure pleasure excludes any form of pain or unpleasant feeling while the experience of mixed pleasure can include unpleasant elements.^[20] But beauty can involve mixed pleasure, for example, in the case of a beautifully tragic story, which is why mixed pleasure is usually allowed in hedonist conceptions of beauty.^[11]

Another problem faced by hedonist theories is that we take pleasure from many things that are not beautiful. One way to address this issue is to associate beauty with a special type of pleasure: aesthetic or disinterested pleasure.^[3][4][7] A pleasure is disinterested if it is indifferent to the existence of the beautiful object or if it did not arise due to an antecedent desire through means-end reasoning.^[21][11] For example, the joy of looking at a beautiful landscape would still be valuable if it turned out that this experience was an illusion, which would not be true if this joy was due to seeing the landscape as a valuable real estate opportunity.^[3] Opponents of hedonism usually concede that many experiences of beauty are pleasurable but deny that this is true for all cases.^[12] For example, a cold jaded critic may still be a good judge of beauty due to her years of experience but lack the joy that initially accompanied her work.^[11] One way to avoid this objection is to allow responses to beautiful things to lack pleasure while insisting that all beautiful things merit pleasure, that aesthetic pleasure is the only appropriate response to them.^[12]

Others

Various other conceptions of beauty have been proposed. G. E. Moore explains beauty in regard to intrinsic value as "that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself".^[21][5] This definition connects beauty to experience while managing to avoid some of the problems usually associated with subjectivist positions since it allows that things may be beautiful even if they are never experienced.^[21] Another subjectivist theory of beauty comes from George Santayana, who suggests that we project pleasure onto the things we call "beautiful". So in a process akin to a category mistake, we treat our subjective pleasure as an objective property of the beautiful thing.^[11][3][5] Other conceptions include defining beauty in terms of a loving or longing attitude towards the beautiful object or in terms of its usefulness or function.^[3][22] Functionalists can follow Charles Darwin, for example, in explaining beauty according to its role in sexual selection.^[5]