Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Thoughts on the Reader

posted by Ken Taylor 

Thanks to everybody who made our  First Annual Dionysus Awards Show  such a success.  It was a lot of fun.  We got lots of  great input from our listeners.   If you haven't heard the show, be sure to check it out.  We're trying to get it picked up as pre-Oscar special by stations throughout the public radio system.  Wish us luck with that.   

Anyway,  I thought I'd follow up a bit on the discussion of one movie in particular -- The Reader.   David Thomson -- who was originally scheduled to be our guest but had to cancel at the last minute  -  had suggested to us in our preparation for the show that we  think about spending the entire hour talking about just this one film  --- I guess because he thinks that no other film from 2008 comes close the Reader in its depth and complexity.   I'm not sure I agree with that and we didn't accept the suggestion, in any case.   But I did find the movie profoundly interesting and profoundly challenging.   So I thought I'd ruminate about it a bit more in this blog entry as a follow up to our episode.  

I know that some people seem to find this film  morally reprehensible.    Manhola Dargis, writing about the Reader for the New York Times,  concludes his review with  the following:

Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

My reactions to this movie are completely at odds with this.   In my view,   the movie raises a number of profound moral questions and though it doesn't decisively answer those questions  -- what movie could -- it does explore -- in a way movies seldom do (though novels more often do) --  the space of possible answers to the questions it raises.  Let me explain what I mean.   Obviously  Hanna, aka,  Kate Winslett,  is the moral center of this movie. By the way, about Hanna,  Dargis says the following:

In the novel and the film — which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments — Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor. Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism.

Dargis is surely right that both Michael and Hanna are represented as victims   -- he of her;  and she of something more diffuse and less pointed.   I suppose she is partly represented as a "victim"  of the German attempt to understand and come to grips with the past.   She is also, I suppose,  partly represented as the "victim"  of the Nazi system in which she was a participant.   But I don't think it's at all right  to say that the film  "excuses" Hanna's participation in the barbarism of the Holocaust because of her illiteracy.  The movie does nothing of the sort.  It is true that the movie doesn't take the morally "easy" way out of simply condemning Hanna's act. Certainly,   that would be the more superficially morally  satisfying thing to do -- to offer  (again) the simple, unambiguous, untroubled judgment that the Nazi's, and all who aided them,  were purely and simply evil barbarians.

Why would that be the  "easy"  way out, you ask?   Well,  my answer  goes back to a claim made a few years ago, on a show we did about evil,  by our guest, Peter Van Inwagen.  He argued, as I recall,  that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us, that true evil is  alien and "other."   I think something like that thought lies behind Dargis's reaction to this movie.  I say that because if you think that the Nazi's were purely and simply evil barbarians, there is nothing much  to be said or done about them except to note and condemn their barbarism. Certainly,  no "explaining" or "excusing"  is necessary.   If we are in a position to unambiguously condemn, then there's not much self-reflection called for in thinking about the Nazi's.   They were evil.  We are not.  They performed acts of unspeakable barbarism. We did not.   That was them.  This is us.   We are different. 

But I think the movie rejects this simple-minded picture and is  trying to make the point on behalf of Germans who came of age after the war  that such a proffered neat moral separation between those who lived through the war, and took part in the Nazi's atrocities and those who came of age only after the war, and therefore had no  part in those atrocities, is an illusion.   The movie makes that point in several ways.   First and foremost,  there is the somewhat opaque, but in many ways ordinary inner psyche of Hanna.  The remarkable thing about Hanna is that she is in almost every way unremarkable.  In particular,  she isn't Van Inwagen's alien other,  peculiarly capable of unspeakable acts that those her came after are incapable of.      No doubt,   Hanna is  a troubled and  wounded person, with things to hide.  But she's more than that too.   She is capable of joy and passion and a kind of love. 

You could,  I suppose,  look upon her as a sexual predator.     If Michael were a Michelle and Hanna a Hermann, we'd no doubt  see Hermann as a child molester.  Curiously,   I find that I am not quite prepared to say that Hanna  molests the young Michael -- who is, after all,   only 14, if I've got my math right -- when they begin their affair.  But it's very clear that the affair with her leaves a scar on his psyche. 

The fact that Hanna is in many ways an unremarkable person --  neither heroic, nor particularly virtuous,  but also not possessed with  an utterly alien and incomprehensible psyche of the sort that Van Inwagen suggested is the hallmark of true evil   -- is by my lights what gives the movie true moral force.  Hanna was put to a certain moral test.   She failed because she lacked whatever inner psychic resources it would have required to pass the moral test.  But I think that one of the deepest points made by the movie is that  many of who were fortunate enough not to be put the test differed from Hanna in no morally significant respect.  She and many in her generation were put to a moral test to which those in the succeeding generation were not subject.  

That doesn't mean that Hanna gets a free pass.  She is not excused. Her atrocities are not explained away -- despite what Dargis says.   I think the movie makes that point forcefully and clearly.     But at the same time, in recognizing that Hanna is just an ordinary person with an unremarkable psyche,  the movie  also raises a very deep puzzle about what exactly we are condemning when we condemn her.    Of course, we condemn her acts.  But we'd like to condemn more than her acts.   We'd like also to condemn the inner psyche that produced the acts.   That's why the judge tries to discern whether Hanna  "willingly"  joined the SS.   But if it turns out that Hanna's psyche is not so unlike our own, is not so alien and other,  what then?  How are we really to distinguish ourselves from Hanna?   

This  has to do with the problem of what  philosophers call moral luck.  Hanna was unlucky in her circumstances  -- or in the combination of her circumstances and her character.   Suppose that she had been born in Britain rather than in Germany.  In such circumstances,  the very traits that made her a willing SS guard, might have led her to willingly enlist in the British Red Cross.   And then we might have praised rather than blamed not just her acts but the inner character that led to those acts.    But the point is that it's the very same inner character in the two cases.  So on what basis do we condemn its expression through acts here, while praising its expressions through acts there?

I said earlier that the movie explores the space of possible answers to the moral questions that it raises.  I'm thinking of a couple of different things.   First, recall the scene near the end when Michael goes to New York to meet the jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz.   She is stern and steadfast in her refusal to grant any absolution to Hanna.   And I do not think that the movie represents her as being somehow wrong in doing so.   Rather,  the movie takes note of and accepts that attitude as one entirely legitimate attitude among others that we might adopt.  Michael,  recall, makes no attempt to change her attitude toward Hanna.  Indeed, he seems rather  silenced in the face of such moral certainty.  Just as the court offers no answer to Hanna's biting question  "What would you have done,"  Michael has no response to the survivors refusal to offer any kind of absolution to Hanna.  

Though the movie takes note of the fact of felt moral certainty and does nothing to challenge it,  it also doesn't rest with moral certainty as the final and sole legitimate response.  Exhibit A for the movie's refusal to rest with moral certainty is the complexity of  Michael's own attitudes towards Hanna.  His welter of attitudes are as complex as could be.   I'm not sure that I can even fully describe the totality of his attitudes.    On the one hand, there is his  deeply passionate affair with her, that both opened up a certain realm of human experience to him and left him  scarred. The Hanna of his youth haunts his memory.    On the other hand, there is his subsequent encounter with her and his startling realization that she took part, willingly, it seems, in the atrocities of the past.  To the very end,  he wishes to be assured that she has "learned something from the past."  This bespeaks a kind of enduring condemnation.     But there is also more.  There is, of course,  Hanna's  refusal, driven by I am not quite sure what --  a kind of shame, I suppose --  to reveal that she is illiterate even when it might have saved her from years in prison and his silence in the face of that refusal.  He cannot even bring himself to see her to speak to her about what he knows and she knows.  And then there is the mercy he offers her years later,  through his subsequent act of recording books for her again.    Or is this a way of seeking absolution for himself?   You could see his failure to come to her aid as a kind of moral cowardice, driven by revulsion and shame, perhaps.  But if it is a kind of cowardice, it is the kind that disguises itself as "respect."    

So how, ultimately,  should we understand  the moral relationship between  Michael - who I suppose is some sort of stand in for the generation whose moral task it was to narrate the history of Nazi Germany as somehow both a chapter in its  own history  and a chapter from which it is determined to make  a decisive break  --  and Hanna -- who I suppose is a stand in,  not for the main movers and shakers of the Nazi era, but for the millions of ordinary Germans, inwardly indistinguishable from the average run of humanity, without whose cooperation the Nazi's could not have carried off their barbarism?   How are we to understand that moral relationship?  

The movie doesn't really tell us, I think,   because it doesn't really know.   It leaves us with no simple answers.  But I do think it leaves us with a profound question.   Again,  as a protective impulse, we may tell ourselves that  evil is other,  alien and distant.  But the reality is that it lives just around the corner in the souls of people little different from ourselves.   Only if we come to grips with that fact,  I think the movie is trying to say,  can we really come to grips with the past. 

Music, Meaning, and Emotion

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about the philosophy of music. Our guest will be Peter Kivy, a leading philosopher of music and a former colleague of mine from Rutgers University.

I fancy myself a pretty accomplished philosopher. I've been at this philosophy thing for about 25 years now. I also consider myself a decent musician. In my youth I played a lot of music -- trombone, violin, piano. Plus I sang in various choirs. I don't perform much anymore, but I still consume music of all sorts.

But I have to admit that although I'm not bad at philosophy and pretty good at music, I've never given music a great deal of philosophical attention. That's one reason I'm so looking forward to our conversation with Peter later today. He has given a very great deal of philosophical thought to music. I think he's written something on the order of five or six books specifically about the philosophy of music. So I expect to learn a lot from him.

Just to get the juices flowing, I thought I'd ruminate in my elementary, not yet completely well work-out sort of way on some things that I personally find philosophically puzzling about music. Here goes.

First worry. What distinguishes music from non-music? The world is replete with sound -- both man made sounds and the sounds of nature. Many of these sounds are quite beautiful -- the cries of various animals, the sound of the ocean, the whistling wind, the human voice, the majestic boom of the space shuttle as it rockets into space. But only a few of the sounds with which the world is replete count as music. Is there anything deep to say about what distinguishes music from non-music?

I'm not sure. One initially tempting thought is that music can be demarcated from non-music by its structure and organization. Music comes with a key signature, with meter, with melody, harmony and all that. Certainly a lot of music is organized and structured in this way. Almost all music that I enjoy listening to, for example, has some or all of these features. But there are probably instances of music that have none or few of these features -- late twentieth century and early 21st century "classical" music comes quickly to mind. That suggests that there may not be any necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as music rather than non-music. It probably doesn't matter that there aren't such conditions. Most of us certainly know music when we hear it, even if we couldn't define it.

Second Worry. Music is often quite emotionally gripping. By turns, it can make us feel sad or elated, It can convey a sense of unfulfilled longing, of awe and wonder. It can make us laugh or cry. Music may even convey anger or regret.

It's not, I think, hard to come up with a first pass explanation of how music with lyrics or that accompanies other contentful representations might convey such emotion. When we set words to music, the words retain at least the expressive and representational powers that they have all on their own. But even here there are some complexities, I think. Music may certainly enhance the expressive power of the words, images, or scenes it accompanies. Imagine a scene in a scary movie. First imagine it without any music. Then imagine it with a subtle but creepy melody rising slowly. Which is more effective? It will depend, of course, on the details. But we've all seen movies in which the music greatly enhances the sense of doom lurking around the corner. (When I was a kid I used to imagine that when I finally fell in love, and declared my love to my beloved, an invisible orchestra would begin playing some swelling romantic tune as my beloved and I exchanged our first tender kiss.) But if music can enhance the expressive power of a scene or a speech, then it's not the words or the scene alone that does the expressing, even when we have words accompanied by music.

It's also possible I suppose for there to be a mismatch between the music and the words (or other representations). Imagine angry words sung to a happy uplifting melody. I suppose, also, that it's possible to exploit such mismatches intentionally and creatively. The result I guess would be a kind of irony or perhaps even satire.

"Pure" music -- for lack of a better term -- probably does raise the issue more accutely, though. By pure music I mean music entirely devoid of representational content -- music accompanied by no scenes or words or images or narration. Just pure sound (ordered and structured to be sure) but still just pure non-representational sound. How does such music achieve such astounding emotive power in the absence of all representational content?

I don't really know the answer, to be frank. I'm not sure I have even a proto-theory. I do wonder, though, whether the emotion is, as it were, "in the music" or merely in our reaction to the music. Let me explain what I mean. You could, I suppose, think that when we called music sad or mournful or happy or said that it expresses unfulfilled longing, we mean nothing more than that it evokes such sentiments "in us." And there might be no deep explanation of why just these sound sequences should evoke just these sentiments or feelings in us. Maybe psychology might eventually reveal something deep. But there might be nothing more than brute fact or something about evolution or something about cultural constructions.

On the other hand, you might think that when we call a piece of music sad we are getting at some sort of response-independent facts about the music itself, about, as it were, the internal qualities of the music.

I tend to think it's a "both and" sort of thing -- though it wouldn't take much to talk me out of this half-formed view.

My thought is that when we call a piece of music sad, we are saying both something about its, as it were, intrinsic musical character -- albeit indirectly -- and also something about our response to it. In particular, by calling the music sad, we "license" certain emotional reponses as "appropriate" in light of the intrinsic musical character of the piece. If you aren't moved to sadness by sad music, you've in a way misperceived the music. Or that, at any rate, is what I believe at the moment. Let's see if it holds up after a conversation with a world-class expert.

The reductive metaphysician in me would like it to be the case that we could eventually say, in non-emotive terms, just what it is about the intrinsic musical character of a piece of music that makes it correct to say that the music is sad. But the music lover in me, wonders if we would really understand music better if we really could do such a thing.

There's a lot more that could be said about all this. Unfortunately, I've got to take off for the studio now. And one certainly shouldn't drive and blog at the same time. (DWB is surely at least as dangerous as DWI.

"Beautiful" and the Metaphysics of Beauty

posted by D. S. Neil Van Leeuwen

People argue whether beauty is objective or subjective. But what would it mean for it to be one or the other? A good example of something subjective would be: tasting good to Bob. If something tastes good to Bob, it’s because of Bob’s subjective experience of it. It depends on the subject. An objective property would be: being 5 kg. Anything 5 kg has that mass independently of any subjective experience of it. It’s in the object. Tomorrow’s episode of Philosophy Talk is on athletic beauty—beauty in sports. So I decided to write this blog on beauty in general to pave the way for tomorrow’s discussion.

Is being beautiful like tasting good to Bob (subjective) or being 5 kg (objective)? The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” suggests subjective. But other sayings—“beauty is truth” or “beauty is eternal”—suggest there is some objective quality to beauty. Advocates of the subjective view emphasize how difficult it is to get people to agree on aesthetic judgments. Advocates of the objective view make arguments like: “The Grand Canyon would be beautiful regardless of whether anyone was there to see it, so beauty is in the object.” Both kinds of advocate are given to more than occasional question-begging.

How we come down on the question of objectivity vs. subjectivity will make a big difference to how we view the experiences of things like sports and music. But before getting into the metaphysics of beauty, I want to make a simple linguistic point. The word “beauty” (and cognates) can be used to make objective claims (claims whose truth is meant to be determined by the object referred to) or subjective claims (claims whose truth is meant to be determined by one’s subjective experience). It can work both ways.

Here’s what I mean.

Often I listen to a piece of music and don’t like it at first. But then later I come to believe, and say, that the music is “beautiful,” even though I didn’t realize it at first. I’ve gone through this process with songs from Shostakovich to Radiohead. And when I claim that the music is beautiful—finally, after hearing it many times—I’m saying that the music has something I wasn’t aware of at first. That property, I seem to be saying, was discovered by me, not constituted by my subjective experience. I was wrong when I missed it at first. When I use the word “beautiful” to indicate something I missed the first time around, I’m using it to make an objective claim about the music. So it seems to be a linguistic fact that “beautiful” can be used to make objective claims.

On the other hand, I once had a friend with a mangy cat who would always say, “She’s beautiful to me.” Plainly there’s some sense to my friend’s words, but they would be silly if “beautiful” were supposed to denote some objective property. You’d be hard-pressed to find something objectively beautiful about that mangy cat, but I don’t think that means my friend said something false. That the claim is subjective is indicated by the phrase “to me”: the truth of the claim is determined by the subject’s experience.

So there are at least two senses of “beauty”—one objective and the other subjective. (See this PT blog by Alexander Nehamas for a closely related view.) What, if anything, unifies these two senses? It is not as if the two senses of “beauty” are unrelated, like the senses of “bank” (of a river) and “bank” (the financial institution). I hold that what unifies the two senses is that objects that are truly “beautiful” (in either sense) give rise to a certain kind of experience. I’ll call this ‘aesthetic experience’. The difference is that the objective sense of “beautiful” refers to the property itself in the object that causes the experience, while the subjective sense of “beautiful” refers to the subjective experience alone. 

So my idea is this. A Leonardo painting, Chinese calligraphy, ballet, and a Michael Jordan move to the basket can all truly be called beautiful in the objective sense because of the properties they possess. But other things, like my friend’s mangy cat, may—although they are less grand—elicit an aesthetic experience for some people despite lacking the relevant properties of objectively beautiful things.

I won’t try to describe aesthetic experience. You all have had aesthetic experiences. But I will say something further about the objective sense of “beauty.” What property does it denote? Actually, I think this is a misleading question. There are several different properties that something can have to make it beautiful in the objective sense. I doubt I can give a whole list, so I won’t try. But some words will suggest what some of these properties are: simplicity (in an appropriate context), harmony (the matching of parts), and fluid motion. That these properties are distinct can be seen as follows: something can be harmonious without being simple (a Bach cantata); something can be simple in the relevant sense without having fluid motion (a simple painting); and something can have fluid motion without either simplicity or harmony (a turbulent rapids). And, again, the reason why these properties all get to be denoted with the same word, “beauty,” is that they all, when recognized, elicit a certain kind of experience. But objects can have these properties—and hence be objectively beautiful—even if no one is around to experience them.

Where—to connect this discussion to tomorrow’s show—might we hope to find the properties of beauty in sports? Answering this completely would take volumes. But I’d like to make one suggestion. I often noticed when watching Michael Jordan that his movements had something that was only rarely found in the movements of other players—and then only to a much lesser degree. They seemed to be the simplest movements possible for accomplishing the goal he set for himself. When other players were faced with having to drive on multiple defenders, they would juke, cross over, and spin in all sorts of fancy ways. Michael Jordan, however, would move his body and the ball in the simplest, most direct trajectory to allow him to get up for the dunk—spinning and juking only minimally and fluidly. That’s beautiful.

Thus I think that one of the properties that the objective sense of “beauty” refers to is that of solving a complex problem in the simplest way possible. This is a property that can be shared by dunks, musical harmonies, and mathematical proofs. It’s the property referred to when a theory is called “elegant” or a movement is called “natural.” It’s apparent in the shape of a dolphin’s body and its movements. Thus, this kind of beauty is both in works of human art and in nature. I would say that Michael Jordan’s moves belong to both categories.

Strange Behavior (Or: On Watching Sports—a follow-up to Tuesday’s show on basketball)

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

Aristotle’s characterization of man as the rational animal will seem flattering, if you think about many behaviors we people engage in regularly. While many people in our society are overworked, short on knowledge, and pressed for time, many of us take time out to watch unusually tall individuals get together in groups to hurl a spherical object through a suspended ring. These tall individuals get dressed in outfits with shiny colors and are glorified for the ability to hurl the sphere through the ring. Whole buildings fill up with people who want to watch the hurling of the sphere and pay good money to do so, often sacrificing the valuable time and money they could have used for more sensible things like food and shelter.

Of course, I’m talking about watching basketball, which, when I put it in familiar terms, doesn’t seem strange at all. “Watching basketball isn’t irrational,” the indignant fan might reply, “because it brings entertainment!” But the indignant fan here is missing the point of my inquiry. My question is: why do humans get entertained by such a contrived and bizarre ritual? Or, what is the human mind such that it takes pleasure in the activity of watching sports competition?

So my question starts out as anthropological, but cuts very quickly to being psychological. To see how puzzling the phenomenon of sports watching actually is, let’s take the perspective of a Martian anthropologist and compare her impression of human sports watching to her impressions of other human activities. Keqen is the name of our anthropologist from Mars who comes to observe us humans.

When Keqen first comes to Earth she notices farming, which they don’t have on her planet. At first she’s puzzled at why humans spend so much time pushing around dirt and putting things in it. But when she sees how humans get food out of it and survive, her curiosity is satisfied. Next she’s puzzled by all the little pieces of colored paper we carry around in our pockets and make such a big deal out of. It seems odd that humans, who are so careless with other pieces of paper, should be so protective of the little colored slips. But Keqen soon realizes that these little slips act as symbols in a societal convention that allows humans to exchange goods and services across the whole society. Quite clever, she decides. Other things look more familiar to her, like the ritual of having young people who don’t know a lot sit down in a room and get knowledge from older people who know more. That makes sense, because the young people can then put the knowledge they glean to any number of purposes—even purposes not dreamed by the instructors themselves.

Keqen is so far quite impressed by humans. She notices that a good number of humans engage in various activities that keep their bodies healthy. They run; they swim; they ride a miraculous two-wheeled contraption that somehow doesn’t fall over when moving; and they even do this thing of running up and down a rectangular surface in groups throwing a ball around and trying to put it through a hole. The complexity of the last activity is a bit puzzling, but Keqen can easily explain why a rational animal would do it, since it results in increased health and fitness like the other activities. She decides to call these activities “fit-maker activities,” since making fitness is their obvious function—as far as she can tell. The people who do them are “fit-makers.”

When she notices that other people often gather around to watch people who are particularly good fit-makers, she has a ready explanation for this as well. “Why, they’re trying to learn how to do the fit-maker activity better themselves.” On closer inspection, however, this explanation falls to pieces. Many people, for example, watch the ball-throwing fit-maker activity and never even attempt to do it for themselves. Worse yet, some humans stay inside and get heavy watching the ball-throwing fit-makers on the flickering-image-box. If they were trying to learn it for themselves, presumably that’s because they want to be fit. So why do they stay home and get heavy watching it and never go outside?

So Keqen has a mystery. Why do humans watch the fit-maker activities? Her first attempted explanation doesn’t work, since too few of them bother to learn the fit-maker activities for themselves from watching them.

She tries a second explanation. Humans have a notion, which she has never well understood, of ‘beauty’. For them, things that are ‘beautiful’ are considered to be intrinsically worth watching, touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, or even just thinking about. Now, why humans have this particular notion is possibly the deepest mystery about them. But she’s willing to grant for the time being that they do have the notion and to consider that they watch the ball-throwing fit-makers because their motions are ‘beautiful’—whatever exactly that means.

But the ‘beautiful’ explanation fails as well. For Keqen’s other research reveals that humans actually have houses of things ‘beautiful’ they call “museums” that receive far fewer visitors than the buildings for watching fit-maker activities. If ‘beauty’ were what they were after, humans, she reasons, would spend far more time in the museums and far less time watching the ball-throwing fit-makers on the flickering-image-box. But that’s not the case. Furthermore, humans get excited just about numbers on printed paper—statistics—having to do with the fit-makers, which aren’t ‘beautiful’ at all. So whatever it is that gets humans excited about watching fit-maker activities, it can’t be ‘beauty’.

So Keqen tries a third explanation, already starting to get flustered. She has noticed that people who watch the fit-maker activities make approving noises when the people from their own area put the ball through the hole, or whatever they’re trying to do. Perhaps, she hypothesizes, the fit-makers are used when there is something two places are fighting over to decide who gets it. That would explain why people from one place or the other take such an active interest. Perhaps, for example, there is something that “New York” and “Philadelphia” both want, the possession of which will be determined by the outcome of the ball-throwing fit-maker activity between people from both of those places. Having just a few people fight, Keqen reasons, is in fact somehow more civilized than having the whole town fight, so maybe she can make sense of it that way.

But Keqen finds again that this explanation fails. The only thing that the outcome of the fit-maker activity determines is the right to engage in more such activities, ‘games’. And apparently the people want their ‘team’ to be able to go to more ‘games’. But that presupposes that people want to watch the fit-maker activity; it certainly doesn’t explain it. The fit-makers themselves who are watched have incentives like getting lots of the colored paper slips, but that doesn’t explain why people get so excited watching them. Keqen remains confused . . .

***

Enough Martian anthropology. My claims are that (i) human minds, in a quite widespread fashion, have a psychological property of gaining enjoyment from taking in sports and that (ii) it is quite mysterious what that property all involves and where it came from. Feel free to offer your own explanation in the comments, but I’m skeptical about any simple story’s doing the trick. The right thing to say as a start about why humans like watching sports is that it activates many different centers of enjoyment all at once, and that’s what’s so appealing about it.

None of the explanations that Keqen attempted was sufficient on its own to explain sports watching, but all of them hint at part of what is so appealing. In watching professional basketball, one observes a certain virtuosity of movement that one can attempt to develop in one’s own game. But there’s also a certain beauty in the virtuosity observed, which may not be the beauty of a Monet painting, but still adds appeal to watching sports competitions. And there may not be much reward at stake for people watching sports competitions, but if one of the teams playing is from your school or city, it sure feels that way. Why that is is a whole different question.

A complete explanation of why humans like watching sports will probably have many more components still, all of which would need to be sketched out and argued in detail. But the basic idea is this: sports somehow manage to have a combination of elements that activate many centers of excitement in the human brain at once. Does that make them worth watching? Probably—at least once in a while.

Storytelling Creatures

posted by Joshua Landy

Why did human beings develop traditions of storytelling? Of course, any answer to this question is going to be speculative. But it might be reasonable to assume that the capacity for imagination is adaptive (I need to be able to predict what is going to happen as a result of different courses of action), and that engagement with fictions helps to hone the relevant skills. This is, I believe, more or less Gregory Currie's view, and I think it's an entirely plausible one.

Still, this is completely unsatisfying as an answer to why I get so passionate about, say, In Search of Lost Time. The evolutionary account is far too general. It doesn't even really explain why I like novels, let alone (say) first-person novels, let alone (say) In Search of Lost Time. So what do specific fictions do for us?

Most of us are brought up, I think, to answer that question by looking at content. We think that literature is valuable if we learn something from it: we learn what went on in, say, turn of the century Paris (propositional knowledge). We learn what it feels like to be someone like Proust's main character (knowledge by acquaintance). We learn to be more like this character (emulation).

There may be something to these ideas, but they raise all kinds of problems (in part for reasons mentioned by Neil in an earlier post) and above all are monstrously limited. If I wanted knowledge of turn of the century Paris, I could find out more reliably some other way. Do we really go to literary artworks for that? (I'll return to knowledge by acquaintance in a moment.)

Rather than resorting automatically to content, I suggest that we consider two other dimensions: (1) literary form; (2) the process of engagement with fictions. First, literature can provide us with formal models of how best to live, not in what a given work puts on display but in how it presents it. According to the life-as-literature theorists (Alexander Nehamas, and--very differently--Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre), we can look to well-crafted stories for inspiration for the crafting of our own lives.

Notice that the content of the fictional lives is, for these purposes, no longer important. I can substitute my own content without loss. Notice too that the very pleasure we derive (what Neil called the “this-is-awesome” feeling) is the same satisfaction we stand to gain from crafting our own lives in an aesthetically pleasing way. So here the expansion of formal imagination is at least related to, if not necessarily responsible for, our aesthetic enjoyment.

Now via the process of engagement with fictions, I argue, we stand to hone our skills. This is entirely different from learning facts, and also from gaining a new set of values. Some of the pleasure we gain from an intricately-crafted fiction has to do with the successful deployment of some of our cognitive capacities. Here again pleasure is bound up with longer-term gain (though I'm not making an evolutionary argument).

Some--like Martha Nussbaum--might say that these capacities are, in an ideal case, my moral capacities. I fine-tune my moral skills, the argument goes, by engagement with fictional works. (Richard Rorty, and a caller on the show, would add that by empathizing with characters who are not like myself, I learn to fold all of humankind under the rubric “us,” rather than designating some types of people as “them.”)

Is this true? Well, even if it were, it would be unfortunate to consider this the function (or value) of literature, as Nussbaum often appears to. Further, it's not at all clear that empathy with fictional characters leads to empathy with real people. (Conversely, it's not at all clear that empathy with vicious fictional characters leads to vice. When I watch a mafia movie, I briefly take on the values of the mafiosi in imagination; but I do not go home planning a career in organized crime. And surely I don't end up feeling the pain of pedophiles after reading Lolita. If so, maybe it should be banned!)

Nor is it clear that empathy, in the sense of getting inside someone's head and learning what causes them pain, is guaranteed to yield altruism: this skill is of course extremely useful for sadists and torturers (a point made by Richard Posner in response to Nussbaum).

It seems to me that we should think of fictions as a catalyst for a process which may lead to an increase in altruism, but which may just as well lead to an increase in other-sacrificing perfectionism, or again to morally neutral change, or indeed no change at all. (Alexander Nehamas writes about this unpredictability in his recent work on Beauty.) When we engage with a great work of literature--where the stakes are high, where everything conspires to yield powerful effects--the pieces that compose us are shaken up; we may come to see these pieces more clearly; we may come to imagine new ways of organizing them; we may seek to change some, by bringing them into line with others (second-order and first-order desires, for instance); and we may hone skills necessary to these various ends. What a fiction does for us depends not just on what kind of work it is but also on what we choose or manage to do with it. If you don't lift the weights, the weights are not to blame for your lack of muscle growth.

We’re All Crazy (Prelude to Tuesday’s show “Art and the Suspension of Disbelief”/follow-up to John’s most recent blog)

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

Have you ever watched a foreign film without subtitles in a language you don’t speak ? You probably didn’t watch the whole thing, because—no matter how worked up the actors got—you didn’t follow it and they’re just actors anyway. Contrast that feeling of lack of interest with the intense feeling of engagement you get watching your favorite film. For me that would be American Beauty or The Godfather, Part I. Let’s call the first kind of feeling the this-is-lame feeling and the second the this-is-awesome feeling.

Here’s the puzzle I want to raise, which I think is the same as the one John was getting at in his most recent blog. It seems like—rational creatures that we are—we should be having the this-is-lame experience for any fictional work or drama that we take in. After all, we know that the events depicted aren’t real; all that’s real is a bunch of people making noise and playing with props on stage or in front of a camera. We know this. Worse yet, there might only be words or flickering images on the screen, with the authors or actors long dead. How and why is it that a bunch of fakers manage to give us the this-is-awesome experience? People are normally committed not to take fakers seriously.

Consider the magnitude of this puzzle! Society spends billions of dollars and who-knows-how-many hours on movies, novels, video games, plays, and TV shows. Why so much expenditure for so much Unreality? You may explain the expenditure by saying fictional drama gives pleasure. But that just pushes the question back. Why do we enjoy certain, but not other, forms of Unreality so much?

If you like evolutionary psychology—as I do in some moods—you could put the puzzle like this. How on earth did the disposition to take pleasure in stories we know aren’t true evolve? Isn’t spending time on such stories just wasting valuable time that could be spent surviving and reproducing? We can make sense of people’s enjoyment of true stories from an evolutionary perspective, because a propensity to enjoy true stories might get us to listen in ways that produce knowledge (which could ultimately be used to help us survive and reproduce). But how do we make sense of our enjoyment of stories we know aren’t actual? Why wasn’t this propensity weeded out by natural selection?

I’m not going to solve this mystery here. My purpose is rather to quicken our sense of the mystery; fiction is so common that we take enjoyment of it for granted, but we shouldn’t. In keeping with this purpose, I want to take a few paragraphs to shoot down two rather tempting approaches to solving the mystery and thereby show that it’s still a pretty big mystery after all.

First, a lot of people think taking in fiction brings learning and knowledge. (I actually heard my Dad say this recently. Sorry, Dad.) Fiction doesn’t teach us facts about the actual world, so the story goes, but experiencing fictional works exercises our ability to think about possible situations that might arise. We rehearse in our minds what might happen in certain situations and learn how to respond. Thus, to complete the story, fiction equips us for life.

This solution is bunk. Socrates pretty much already demolished it in Plato’s Ion. Ion, a Homeric rhapsode, argues in that dialogue that studying Homer helps people become better generals, warriors, deliberators, horsemen, and the like. Socrates makes the point in response that if you actually consider the relevant passages from Homer on warfare and such, you see that they’re totally unhelpful for actual situations. Any real general that fought like a Homeric general would get wiped. The fictional events are stylized and unrealistic enough so as to be useless for purposes of generating applicable knowledge. But Homer is one of the greatest dramatists in history at generating the this-is-awesome feeling. So whatever it is in fiction that generates the this-is-awesome feeling, it can’t be generation of useful knowledge about how to act in “possible situations.” The mystery remains.

Here’s the second attempted solution. We have a lot of emotional centers in the brain—amygdala, hypothalamus, etc.—that respond to stimuli in a way that’s largely independent of higher cortical processing. If someone throws a rubber snake at you, you could well feel fear even if you know the snake isn’t real. If you add that going through emotional experiences often leaves us feeling good whenever we come out well in the end, then maybe we could explain why fiction gives us the this-is-awesome feeling as follows: the actions and events depicted in fictional drama stimulate the emotions without the participation of higher cortical processing or higher belief systems, leaving us with an emotional this-is-awesome experience despite our not believing in the events. The idea is that lack of belief in the reality of the story doesn’t matter as long as the images or events depicted are such as to get the emotions going—spark the emotional systems. Reason doesn’t matter for fictional enjoyment. (Book X of Plato’s Republic actually gives a picture of fictional enjoyment that looks something like this.)

But this “solution” doesn’t work either. Remember the experience of the foreign film without subtitles—the this-is-lame feeling. There were probably many emotionally charged scenes depicted in the film—kung fu fights or angry arguments to excite the emotional centers in the brain—but the overall experience was still lame. The reason it was lame was that a higher-level understanding of the events was missing. (Or, if you did have the this-is-awesome feeling at the kung fu film, it was probably because you could follow the plot despite not knowing the language.) So some sort of higher reasoning is needed to get the this-is-awesome feeling after all. Thrills of the rubber snake variety won’t keep us in our seats for two hours. Mere images to excite the emotional centers aren’t sufficient to explain the this-is-awesome feeling of good fictional drama. So the second attempted solution doesn’t work. The mystery remains.

Will the show on Tuesday solve the mystery? I think John, Ken, and Steven (our guest) will make a good crack at it. But it’s tough. We might never figure out the real solution (I actually think the real solution, whatever it is, would involve revising and somehow combining the two solutions mentioned here). But it’s something to think about next time you’re driving to Blockbuster to drop another four bucks to see moving pictures of guys in tight pants. Who knows? Maybe your sense of the mystery will heighten the enjoyment even more.

Beauty that Haunts

posted by Ken Taylor

Alexander Nehamas  was an excellent guest.   Thanks so much to Alexander for appearing on the show this week.  You can check out the episode here. 

I want to respond further to one of Alexander's central claims.  He says that beauty has to do with what he calls "the promise of happiness."  To find something beautiful is to perceive in it a promise of happiness. He even says that when  you have exhausted what a thing  has to offer you in the way of happiness, you will no longer find it beautiful.   This  line does  explain a lot about what I'll call positive beauty, for lack of a better term.  I'm not sure, however, that it works for what I'll call negative beauty. 

By  negative beauty, I mean a beauty that haunts.  When something haunts you, it resides with you; it seizes your consciousness.  You turn it over and over again.  You revisit it at unexpected hours in unexpected ways, in  your first waking moments, at a dinner party, in quiet moments alone, when your thoughts wander, or when your  lover's look brings to mind some enduring gulf  between you     Being haunted is a way of being engaged, perhaps very deeply engaged, but not necessarily in a happiness making way. Losing presidential candidates, I am told, are typically haunted by memory and by doubt, for the rest of their lives.  We are all from time to time  haunted by thoughts of what might have been, by  memories of great loves lost or of opportunities not seized. That which haunts may be inexhaustible in a way.   It's the sort of thing that drives one to the therapist's couch for years without end. Though  being haunted by a thing has a similar structure to loving a thing, that which haunts does the very opposite of offering a promise of happiness.

There is, I think, such a thing as beauty that haunts.  This is the beauty of movies like Requiem for a Dream.  Imagine a work of art dedicated to doing nothing but portraying the psychology of evil, not in such a way as to praise or condemn,  not to represent it as other, alien and incomprehensible, but  merely to make us see it as it is.   In our episode on  Evil,  Peter Van Inwagen claimed that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us.  But I  don't think I agree.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it lurks in us all, but  I do  think we overestimate our own distance from it.  This is a point well made in Thomas Nagel's beautiful essay on Moral Luck.  But to return to our imagined artistic portrayal of pure evil.  To get what I'm after you have to imagine a work  that  does not represent  evil as being bound to lose out, in the end, to the good -- as so many representations of evil do.   I'm thinking of a work that gives no quarter to the optimism that we all so very much want to experience.     Such a work might be truly haunting.  If the presence of real evil in the world is a haunting reality,  then a beautiful representation of that haunting reality might be at least as haunting as the reality itself.

Now you may ask,  "why appeal to a hypothetical work of art?"   First, I can't off-hand think of a work that has just the features I'm after -- though many come close.   But more philosophically,  I myself always find  the space of possibilities  more philosophically interesting than the space of actualities.    The actualities represent some sample of the possible, often an interesting sample of the possible.   It is a certainly a deep and important question to ask why, of all the possibilities,   just these been actualized. But here  I think the answer in many cases won't be deeply philosophically interesting or illuminating. The answer will depend on the contingencies of human history and culture and sometimes just on pure accident or the mechanisms of distribution currently at play. If we have free market capitalism we might expect this or that kind of art to get produced.  If we have a high degree of state intervention and subsidy of the arts, we might expect another kind.    In the case of negative beauty,  I can't think of many mechanisms that would cause a lot of it to be produced.   People just  do not enjoy that which haunts in the same way as they do that which promises happiness.  We don't seek out the haunting.  Indeed, we typically seek to rid ourselves of that which haunts.   That's why it can drive us to the therapist's couch.

Everyone agrees, I think that there are haunting realities.  Listen to Bill Clinton speak about the genocide in Rwanda.   He is still haunted by his own decision not to intervene.   Probably the Lewinsky affair will haunt him too for the rest of his life.  But one might wonder if one can  make beauty out of haunting realities.  If you accept the Nehamas line that there is beauty only where there is the promise of happiness, then perhaps not.  You could of course  represent that which has the potential to haunt as capable of being overcome in a beautiful work of art.  But by this way of thinking the representation of it as capable of being overcome would be crucial.    The monster has to be defeated, the darkness may  loom, but the  sun is not extinguished, even if aferwards it shines less brightly.  Lord of the Rings comes close, in a way, to not giving us this kind of reprieve.  Though the darkness is overcome, the effects of having confronted it never go away.   Frodo never manages of his own will to destroy the Ring of Power.   Only accident saves him.   He will be haunted for the rest of his days by his inability to give up the Ring when it most needed to be given up.  He will never be the self he once was.

I am arguing, in effect,  that  the connection between happiness and beauty is contingent not necessary, extrinsic, not intrinsic.    Beauty may either haunt,  promise happiness, or invite us to some mixture of the two.  We much prefer positive beauty to negative beauty, but  they are species of the same genus.

You could view my line as a friendly amendment to Alexander's own.  Much of what he has to say about beauty,  style and individuality can still be said.  It's just that there are two sides to it.  I am defined not just by that in which I find the promise of happiness, but also by that which I find haunting.     We may be more disposed to seek out that which promises us happiness, but if we would be fully ourselves and know ourselves fully perhaps we would be well advised to open ourselves as much to the haunting power of negative beauty as to the happiness making power of positive beauty.

Beauty: Skin-Deep, in the Eye of the Beholder and Valuable?

by  Alexander Nehamas

Let me make some dogmatic remarks about beauty and subjectivity.  We can discuss them in more detail on the air tomorrow.

There is such a thing as beauty that is only skin-deep.  It is the beauty of appearance, what we call "looking good."  It has little to do with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities. 

The beauty of appearance -- what we can judge, say, by looking at a photograph of a face -- is something that psychologists have been investigating a lot recently.  In general, they show people photographs of faces and ask them to rank them in terms of their beauty.  Since these are digital photographs, it is possible to combine them into composite photographs.  What seems to be the case is (1) the larger the composite photograph (the more features of individual faces it combines) the more people are likely to consider it beautiful and (2) there is remarkable agreement, both within and between different cultures, about which faces are more beautiful than which.

Several hypotheses have been offered to account for these phenomena, and it seems agreed that they have something to do with the likelihood of reproductive success.  The more features a face combines, the more average it is.  Now it is very counterintuitive to say that the average is what strikes us as beautiful (since the people or works of art we find beautiful usually stand out against their background), but it turns out that average members of groups are less likely to be subject to external evolutionary pressures and more likely to be healthy and survive in the long run.  (That may suggest that even beauty that is skin-deep shows something about the nature of the person it characterizes.)

But the fact that there is significant agreement about such judgements (as well as the fact that it is explained in terms of evolutionary success) suggests, in turn, that BEAUTY THAT IS ONLY SKIN-DEEP IS NOT SIMPLY IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER.

Now, not only are these psychological results counterintuitive -- they also contradict another aspect of everyday experience.  Most people in the known universe have, at some time or other, loved someone and most people in the known universe have, at some time or other, been loved by someone, though that is not always, unfortunately, the same person.  But the point is (here I am being very dogmatic) that it is impossible to love someone or something that you do not find beautiful.  And so, since most people in the world are not, by the evolutionary standards above (or even by the standards applicable to supermodels, male and female) beautiful, either most people in the world are deceived all the time or there is more to beauty, so to speak, than meets the eye.

We must be careful here, for the easy way out is to say that there is such a thing as "inner" or "psychological" beauty, to be contrasted with the beauty of appearance.  But that is only easy, and nothing else -- in particular, it is not true.  For even if you love someone on account of their character or wit or whatever, these features will manifest themselves in the appearance of the person in question: you will literally perceive them in their face, their posture, their voice and their behavior.  That is, a person you love will not appear to you as they do to others who don't love them or as they appear to you when you are indifferent to them.

Such beauty is, unlike good looks of the sort psychologists investigate, very controversial, which is why we keep asking ourselves what our friends see in the people they love, but whom we can't stand. The sense in which there is more to beauty than meets the eye is not that it is "inner," but that it is not likely to meet many eyes.  That is, beauty, generally considered, is a product of love and not, in general, its antecent cause.  That's what locates it in the eye of the beholder.   BUT BEAUTY THAT IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER IS NO LONGER ONLY SKIN-DEEP.

It is this beauty that I find philosophically interesting and important.  It applies equally to people and things, particularly works of art.  It certainly is valuable, although I am not sure its value is intrinsic, as Ken suggests (it may be -- I really am not sure).  But its value, along with the value of all the "aesthetic" features that are associated with it, is very different from the moral values that seem to have acquired a monopoly over human life in philosophy and public discourse.   Moral values, broadly speaking, depend on the similarities and connections that require us to treat each other impartially, fairly and equally.  The values associated with beauty, by contrast, depend on the differences between various human beings and give preference to individuality, autonomy and personal style.

More tomorrow.

The Experience of Beautiful Things

posted by Ken Taylor

Since lots of beautiful things don't have skin,    whoever first said that beauty is only skin deep was clearly mistaken.  When I was a kid, by the way, we used to continue "...but ugliness is to the bone."    Of course, the speaker was probably being metaphorical.  Perhaps he or she was trying to say that beauty is the least of the virtues that a thing can have.   But is it really an apt metaphor?   Perhaps we can  answer by applying  the implied standard to the metaphor itself. A "skin deep" metaphor would, I suppose, not be  beautiful at all.  A beautiful metaphor would take us much deeper  than merely to the skin of things.

But I digress.  What I really want to talk about is the experience of beautiful things and why having such experiences matters.   

Experience is in one sense something subjective.  An experience is some  kind of inner mental state with an inner  qualitative  character.  In addition, experiences can also have perfectly objective contents.   This makes experience  a Janus face thing - one face looks to the world, one face looks inward.   We make perceptual contact with something outside the mind -- the experienced object -- by having a mental something  -- an experience -- occur within the mind of the experiencing subject.    

It's possible to get oneself all tied up in knots thinking about experience.  Take the very  phrase 'the experience of beauty.'    There are two different things you could mean by it.  You could take  'beauty'  to refer to the inner qualitative character of an experience or you could take it to refer to the thing, presumably outside of the mind, that is the content of a possible experience.   Using the phrase in both ways, I suppose you could wonder whether experiences of beauty were beautiful as experiences.

But I really want to talk about the value of experiencing things that are beautiful. I hope I can do that while bracketing the question of where the beauty resides.    I don't want to have to decide right now whether beauty resides in the character of our experience or in the objects themselves.    There should be some things we can say without having to settle that issue.   

I think it's obvious that experiencing things of great beauty is intrinsically valuable.   Being in the presence of a beautiful thing is transporting.  Think of the power of a truly beautiful work of art -- be it music, or poetry or painting.  Of course, there is a question of whether art has to be beautiful to be great.  But clearly some great art is astoundingly beautiful.   And wherever else the power of a work of art comes from, beauty is one source of power.

Perhaps, though, we call a work of art beautiful just because it has the sort of power to arrest, command, and and delight that is characteristic of the best art.  But I'm not sure that is right.  Some think of beautiful things as sources of deep pleasure.  But great art need not be pleasing.  Think of the movie Requiem for a Dream.  It's a very fine and powerful piece of film-making.  But it is an unrelenting journey into the psychology of addiction.  It takes you down into the very depths, never let's you up for air,  never gives you any hope or any trace of light.  Though it is in no way pleasing or pleasant, it is a very fine film indeed.

Is it a thing of beauty?   If beauty entails pleasure, then it is not.  I'm not denying that there is pleasure in some way associated with seeing a greatly disturbing work of art.  I was pleased that  I saw the movie, and admired the searing psychological reality of the movie.  But I can't say that I was pleased in seeing the movie.

Here's a thought.  Though many beautiful things are sources of pleasure,  perhaps the real intrinsic value of experiencing beautiful things has more to do with the power of beautiful things to arrest our attention, to take over our consciousness and move us to new places in unexpected ways.  Often that will be a pleasant thing.  But sometimes, like with Requiem for a Dream, it will not. 

Alternatively,  we might want a larger category  that includes the both the beautiful and various dark cousins of the beautiful -- the shocking, the horrible, the ugly.  They would be differentiated by what they do with us once they have arrested us, where they take us, and how they take us there.  I think this is perhaps both philosophically under-explored and artistically under-explored territory.   There isn't a great market for great and powerful ugly art.  But could there be?

Finally about the comparative value of the experience of beautiful things.   Whoever said beauty is only skin deep was wrong in another way.  Suppose you had a choice between two lives.   In one life, you have  all the merely useful things  that you could wish for, but little in your life is beautiful.   Perhaps you have great wealth and can buy anything you want.  But you are so busy with getting and spending, thaT beauty is simply crowded out of your life.  In another  life,  your life was filled with things, people, and experiences of great  beauty,  but you have only  enough useful things to get you through the day.   You are not particular wealthy, partly because you are so consumed with the pursuit of beauty.  Which life would you choose?  For me, it's obvious.  Though I wouldn't trade health for more experiences of beauty,  I would certainly trade wealth for it.  And though I'd like a life filled with merely useful things,  I wouldn't want more of that at the expense of beauty.   

Beauty and subjectivity

by John Perry

Here are two truisms about beauty:

Beauty is only skin deep

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

With respect to the first I can only say, “Thank God.”  The idea is that beauty is a superficial characteristic that does not provide great evidence for character, personality, wit, intelligence and other such virtues.  As a one of the beauty-challenged members of our species, I would really resent it if beauty were a good indication of those things.  Enough is enough.  Let the rich and the beautiful be boring and dimwitted as far as I am concerned.

It’s the second truism I want to discuss a little.  What in the world does it mean to say the beauty is in the eye of the beholder?  And why would anyone say that?

We might put a literate-sounding gloss on this by saying it means “beauty is subjective”.  But, then, what does that mean?

Subjective is now opposed to objective.  Oddly enough, “objective” originally meant “in the mind” as the object of one’s desires, hopes, fears and the like is in the mind, even if it is not out their in reality.  My Porsche roadster, the object of one of my desires, has objective reality, but not formal reality, given Descartes’ use of these terms.  He argued that given the nature of God’s objective reality (i.e., what my idea of God is like), we can infer to his formal reality,(i.e., that there really is something that instantiated all the forms, or properties, required to be God, which is pretty much all of the good ones and none of the bad ones.)

Now “objective” usually connotes having to do with facts about the physical, material world.  Subjectivity means “in the mind of a subject”.  A “subject” is the thinker of thoughts, the haver of experiences.  Objective truths are true apart from what goes on in any subject who is thinking about the truth.  Most philosophers agree that truths about that material world, or at least a lot of them, are like that.  After all, the material world was around for a long time before there were any minds to think about it.  Some believe that truths about numbers are also objective, while others believe they fit better somehow into the next category we will discuss.

These are truths about phenomena that is in some way depends on there being minds, that is, thinking, perceiving, sub jects.  Such truths depend on subjectivity, on there being minds around to perceive and think thoughts about the things the truths are about.

Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke all were impressed with the difference between “primary” and “secondary” qualities.  Primary qualities were objective in the sense we now assign to this word.  Objects would have shape, size and motion whether or not there were any minds around to perceive them.  But, it seemed, at least to these thinkers, that objects would not have secondary qualities, that is, colors, sounds, smells and tastes, if there were not minds to see, hear, smell and taste them.  The idea is that secondary qualities have to do with the effects that the objects have on minds.  No minds, no secondary qualities.  So secondary qualities are subjective.  They are in the eye (ear, nose, or tongue) of the beholder.

There is a weaker grade of objectivity that secondary qualities have, however.  Although they might not exist without minds, the minds that there are agree about them, at least in favorable conditions.  If your vision is normal and my vision is normal and we are both in favorable lighting conditions we should agree on which objects are red, which green, and so forth.

But what about the fact that you like green, while I don’t; I love red; but you hate it? How about the fact that I hate lima beans, while others (I’m told) actually like their taste?  How some object strikes us, whether it arouses pleasure or something more like pain when we see, smell, hear or taste it,  seems doubly subjective.  First of all, our perception will involve secondary qualities, and so depend on the existence of thinking, perceiving subjects.  Second, the combination of qualities we perceive will strike individual subjects as pleasant or unpleasant.  On this second matter, we don’t expect intersubjective agreement.  Tastes differ; to each his own, and the like.

Where does beauty fit in?  Is it an objective, mind-independent property of things?  I’m sure that some philosophers have thought this, but it doesn’t seem very plausible.  Lots of beautiful objects, like mountains and forests and lakes, could exist without minds.  But they wouldn’t really be beautiful would they, if there weren’t minds around to gain some enjoyment from observing them?

Is beauty like a secondary quality, mind-independent, but intersubjective?  That is, if people are in the right conditions, will they agree on what is beautiful and what is not?  What would the right conditions be?  Not just good lighting, but also, perhaps, a proper upbringing, a well-trained eye, ear, or palate.  I have some sympathy with this idea.  It seems to me that there ought to be intersubjective agreement that the pop music of the sixties is better than that of the benighted eighties, for example, and anyone who doesn’t agree has probably had their ears damaged by walkmans that were turned up to high or excessive use of drugs.  However, upon sober reflection, it seems likely that this is just my bias, due to having come of age in the fifties and sixties.

So that leaves beauty in the third category, the doubly subjective, not only dependant on minds for its existence, but not even something on which minds can be expected to agree, even in favorable circumstances.  The Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, the Chrysler Building---- like the taste of lima beans, or the BeeGees, some people like ‘em, some people don’t.

Can we really accept that there is no more to beauty than that?  What will happen to Art Appreciation classes?  To appreciating great literature?  And, Egad, to the difference, surely objective, between quality philosophy and dreck?  Perhaps we need some more categories, some more analogies, and some more models to think about this.  Let’s see what happens when we discuss beauty on Philosophy Talk.