Philosophy Talk: The Blog

"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.

Was Lance Armstrong Self-Deceived?

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

I’ve gotten some nice responses on my previous blog on Self-Deception and Moral Dilemmas. I argued there that self-deception in the context of a moral dilemma has morally negative consequences, because it undermines our ability to minimize damage on whichever side of the dilemma we break a moral requirement.

Two major questions arose in the comments. First, what’s the definition of self-deception? Second, was Lance Armstrong self-deceived in thinking he could beat cancer and come back to win the Tour? The idea the second question suggests is that self-deception might be good insofar as it can help people have a positive outlook that facilitates overcoming the odds. As one commentator, calling himself Anaxagoras, put it, “self-deception can be transformative, and . . . believing in the irrational is what gets us through our day jobs, our lonely nights, and our limitations.” Of course, the answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first, so I’ll handle them in order. (Warning: the definition stuff is technical; feel free to skip the next three paragraphs to get to the discussion of Lance, which can still be pretty well understood without reading the definition.)

Here’s the definition I’ve come up with.

An agent is in a state of self-deception if and only if she holds a belief (i) that is contrary to what her epistemic norms in conjunction with what evidence she has would usually dictate and (ii) a desire for a certain state of affairs to obtain, or to have a certain belief, causally makes the difference what belief she holds in an epistemically illegitimate fashion.

“Epistemically illegitimate fashion” in the second clause means here illegitimate according to the usual epistemic norms of the agent. I relativize in this fashion because it isn’t psychologically interesting when an agent believes contrary to epistemic norms she doesn’t actually have; it’s when the agent’s own better standards of belief are subverted that you get a bizarre and interesting epistemic upheaval. Of course, it can’t be just any desire that plays the role of the deceptive element; it must have a content relation to the resulting self-deceptive belief. So I add a content restriction to complete the definition.

Content Thesis: in order for the definition of self-deception to be satisfied, the first-order content of the desire that brings about the belief must be identical to the content of the belief or its negation, or the higher-order content of the desire must be the content of the belief.

I won’t parse my definition at length (email me if you want a more thorough discussion). But there’s one important thing to notice. It’s not necessary for a belief to be false in order for it to be part of a state of self-deception. The reason falsity is not required is that, from a psychological perspective, it’s possible to be in the same mental state as someone who’s self-deceived, even though your belief comes out true accidentally. Take the following case: an abused spouse in denial counts as being in a state of self-deception about whether her husband will beat her again even if he gets hit by a bus the next day and never does beat her. Her belief that he wouldn't was still self-deceptive, even though it turned out accidentally true.

This is a good place to turn to the second question. Was Lance Armstrong self-deceived? If you require falsehood of the belief as a necessary condition on being self-deceived (as philosophers like Al Mele and Robert Audi do), then he wasn’t. But the better question is, I think: was he in a state of self-deception? It’s perfectly possible for him to have been in a state of self-deception with respect to the belief that he could come back and win, even though that belief ultimately was true. (Seven times!)

Let’s distinguish a few questions for the sake of precision.

Alpha: Was Lance in a state of self-deception in believing he could come back (and win)?

Beta: If he was in a state of self-deception, did that causally contribute to his success in coming back?

Gamma: If Lance’s hypothetical self-deception did in fact contribute to his later success, is that a good example to follow in that we should allow ourselves to become regularly self-deceived?

The first two questions are empirical and would best be answered after a lengthy personal interview with Lance himself. But the deeper ethical question is the third, Gamma, so I think it’s still a good idea to hazard some speculations about the first two with an eye to considering the third.

On Alpha, we need to distinguish between believing in the unusual and believing in the irrational; for it’s only the latter that is tantamount to self-deception. Lance believed in the unusual in believing he could come back, but it wasn’t irrational. Lance had already shown evidence of unusual abilities before his cancer; if he did overcome cancer, it would be not irrational to take prior success as evidence that he would still be capable of the unusual. Believing in your ability to achieve the unusual is only self-deceptive if you’re a usual person. Lance Armstrong clearly isn’t. So I answer Alpha in the negative.

On Beta, my answer to Alpha makes the issue moot. But let’s imagine in general what effect self-deception might have on athletic performance. The tempting thought is that it can enhance performance by increasing confidence. But convincing yourself that you have an ability increases confidence in a helpful way only if you actually have that ability. In short, it’s only helpful to convince yourself in a confidence-building way if it’s not really self-deceptive to do so. Convincing myself I can jump the ditch is only helpful if I actually have it in my legs to jump it. It won’t help me jump the Grand Canyon. You might object that there are many situations where it’s uncertain whether you can actually do something but it can’t hurt to try, and in those situations it’s helpful to be self-deceived. I don’t think so, because being self-deceived could decrease your awareness of what needs to be done to increase your chances. A documentary I saw on Michael Jordan made the point that he was originally thought to be a mediocre defender. He later won the NBA award for Defender of the Year. I believe that only by being honest with himself--not self-deceived--could Michael Jordan zero in on exactly what work needed to be done to make him a top defender. Self-deceptive overestimation of your abilities can cause you to do less work, not more. In situations of uncertainty, determination and self-honesty are in the recipe for success; self-deception isn't.

It should be clear by now what I think the answer to Gamma is. But let me just say one thing. Even if Lance Armstrong was in a state of self-deception and was helped by that, that’s the exception among self-deceivers, not the rule. For every Lance, there are 1,000 drunk drivers who think they’re sober, 1,000 abused spouses in denial, 1,000 dropouts who won’t face up to reality, and 1,000 bad relationships in which people won’t face up to their problems. Having something good happen because of self-deception is like winning the lottery: very unlikely, and there are much better routes to success. I conclude that it is still best to cultivate the kind of mind that is as little susceptible as possible to self-deception.

Steroids and Baseball

by John Fischer

I do not want to distract us from the "heavy" (no pun intended) issues to which we have devoted our attention recently, but, what with the opening of baseball season and all, I thought I'd ask you to think about the following. Steroids (of the sorts used by some players and other athletes) apparently have serious health side-effects. For that reason it certainly seems reaonable to ban their use. But now suppose our wonderful pharmaceutical companies could develop side-effect free steroids--comparable medicines with (by stipulation) no bad health effects. Under such a scenario (admittedly implausible), would it still be reasonable to ban their use? Why exactly?

I believe that John and Ken had the distinguished Kant and baseball scholar Allen Wood on Philosophy Talk to discuss baseball, but unfortunately I haven't yet listened to that episode; I'll check out the archive at Philosophytalk.org.

Meanwhile, cheers, and Play Ball!