Judgments of Beauty in Theory Evaluation. Devon Brickhouse-Bryson
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that all these absurd implications of relativism about beauty relate to commonsense features of our judgments of beauty and the ordinary ways we interact with beauty. We make, revise, and improve our judgments of beauty; we engage in critical disputes about the beauty of artworks; we travel the world to see especially beautiful buildings, artworks, and landscapes; we listen to the expertise of art critics. None of this would be sensible if relativism about beauty were true and that painful revision to our considered judgments about beauty is enough to warrant the denial of relativism about beauty. But there is one more absurd implication for relativism about beauty related to our ordinary experience of beauty. Above I examined several arguments for relativism about beauty that were based on disagreement about beauty. I responded that those arguments, even granting their premises about disagreement about beauty, do not entail relativism about beauty. But here is another problem with relativism and disagreement about beauty: there is significant agreement about judgments of beauty as well, even across time and culture. There is widespread, persistent agreement that the Taj Mahal, Yosemite Valley, Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony are all very beautiful. There are countless other buildings, natural landscapes, paintings, pieces of music, and so on that we could list that would command widespread agreement on their beauty. There is, of course, some disagreement about beauty: even on these paradigm cases, there will be a few stubborn or strange detractors. And there are certainly cases that are less clear: we are far less certain about whether many cases of modern art are beautiful (of course, many cases of modern art are purposefully not supposed to be beautiful).12 If relativism about beauty were true, then there should not be such patterns of agreement. If relativism about beauty were true, then our judgments of beauty should whimsically dart in every direction: a judgment of beauty would be true in virtue of being claimed, so true claims about beauty should be utterly haphazard. Relativism about beauty cannot explain the significant agreement about beauty that we experience and a theory’s running roughshod over that body of data is enough to deny that theory.
All of these absurd implications of relativism about beauty can be tied together by noting that relativism about beauty reduces beauty to an empty concept. If relativism about beauty is true, then there is really no truth about beauty at all. According to relativism, all claims about beauty are equally true, equally false, depending on whether they are claimed or denied. But this is better understood as asserting that claims of beauty are neither true nor false at all. If claims about beauty were properly true and false at the same time and the same respect, then straightforward contradictions are generated and relativism falsifies itself. Thus, relativism should understand claims of beauty as strictly speaking neither true nor false. Relativism must maintain, on pain of contradiction, that all claims about beauty—everyone’s individual claims, claims about improvement, claims about great artworks, claims about art expertise, patterns of agreement about beauty—are strictly speaking neither true nor false. This means that there are no truth conditions that govern the concept of beauty at all, which makes it an utterly empty concept.13 Thus, relativism about beauty—in the myriad ways I’ve argued above—destroys the concept of beauty in a way that runs utterly roughshod over our considered judgments of beauty. The most fundamental of these considered judgments is merely the considered judgment that beauty is a real and important concept. This considered judgment underpins our enjoyment of beauty, our attention to beauty-related greatness and expertise, our patterns of agreement about beauty, and our critical discussion of beauty when faced with disagreement. Relativism about beauty strikes at this most fundamental of considered judgments of beauty—that it is real—and so relativism should be rejected. Relativism’s violence to our considered judgments about beauty is enough reason to justify belief in the denial of relativism.
Arguments against Relativism from an Analogy to Moral Relativism
These arguments against relativism about beauty should sound familiar. They are closely analogous with arguments against relativism about morality. Although relativism about morality does not enjoy as widespread endorsement as relativism about beauty, anyone who has spent some time teaching ethics knows that relativism about morality is often (uncritically) endorsed. It is often the first task of teaching ethics to uproot a naïve relativism about morality; the arguments that are used against relativism about morality track the arguments against relativism about beauty given above. Disagreement (including intractable or even necessarily intractable) about morality is commonly cited as reason to believe in relativism about morality.14 But the counter to this argument is likewise to point out that disagreement does not entail relativism, given that disagreement is an epistemic phenomenon and that relativism is about the truth status of moral claims. If disagreement about morality does not license moral relativism, then neither does disagreement about beauty license relativism about beauty.
The analogy continues: if driving a wedge between disagreement and relativism is not enough to undermine relativism about morality, then the argument against relativism usually proceeds to point out the many ways in which relativism about morality runs roughshod over our moral considered judgments. Relativism about morality means that moral claims are true merely in virtue of being claimed. This has several implications, given that people can claim all kinds of things about morality: (1) that people cannot be wrong in their earnest claims about morality, (2) that they cannot improve their moral beliefs (since all moral beliefs are equally true/false), (3) that no action is any more or less moral than any other action (since someone could believe that any action is moral), (4) that there is no such thing as moral expertise,15 and (5) that patterns of agreement about morality are mere coincidence. These are all profoundly counterintuitive implications; together they make morality an utterly empty concept. The violence that relativism about morality does to our considered judgments about morality is enough reason to reject relativism about morality. Or, at least, this is often the kind of argument that is used to reject relativism about morality. If this kind of argument is successful, then my arguments against relativism about beauty will also hold up. On the other hand, if one is not satisfied with my arguments against relativism, then relativism about all normative values is just around the corner. If the damage relativism does to our considered judgments is not enough to warrant rejecting relativism, then radical skepticism about normative domains (in the vein of logical positivism) will follow.16
My arguments against relativism about beauty thus rest. I have undermined ordinary arguments in support of relativism about beauty and shown how relativism about beauty does not fit with our considered judgments about beauty. Both of these types of arguments have analogs to ordinary arguments against moral relativism, which are overwhelmingly thought to be successful arguments. In my experience, relativism about beauty is hard to shake for many philosophers outside of aesthetics and lay people: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has almost the status of a dogma. But I have shown that this aphorism is underspecified and not enough to entail relativism about beauty. None of this of course has been to establish any particular theory of beauty, much less to argue for the thesis of this book—that judgments of beauty are relevant to theory evaluation. But with thoroughgoing relativism about beauty now out of the way, the concept of beauty is on the table and worthy of our serious consideration. In the next chapter, I’ll examine an account of beauty that will get us more of a grip on this concept. With that account in hand, I will be able to develop the argument for my thesis in the remaining chapters.
NOTES
1 Throughout this chapter, I will refer to “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” as “the aphorism.” Like most aphorisms of this kind, it is difficult to discover its full origin. It seems the aphorism first appeared word-for-word in print in English in Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s 1878 novel Molly Bawn.
2 The audience for this chapter (like the rest of this book) is a general philosophical audience (along with the interested lay reader). This is because the thesis of this book—that beauty is relevant to theory evaluation, including philosophical theory evaluation—is of general philosophical interest. This does mean, however, that this chapter is not addressed to narrow debates in aesthetics on the precise formulation of the truth conditions of judgments of beauty (what the “truthmakers” of judgments of beauty are, what kind of semantic we should give to judgments of beauty, and so on). Nor does this chapter speak to the dreaded realism/antirealism debate (see Zangwill 2001 for a good overview of that debate).