Bringing beauty back to the eyes of the beholder

April 16th, 2007 admin Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »

Anant sent me a wonderful article from the Washington Post newspaper today. The article, titled “Pearls Before Breakfast”, by Gene Weingarten, appeared on Sunday, April 8th 2007. Here is the link to the article, hoping the link continues to work for a long time.
Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten
Reading the article evoked many thoughts which I sent back to Anant in an email, and also present here, hoping that my thoughts might futher thinking on this issue.

Anil: Anant, this is a brilliant cultural and psycological experiment that results in what the author might have found a little baffling, but fails to surprise me as much. That said, I was very happy to have read it, since it confirms my suspicions. My elation in having correctly identified human nature is matched by my disappointment at its meaning. The article distills the theory of three philosophers, regarding beauty, thus – “What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?”. Yet another viewpoint, we have all heard of, is “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” But I wonder if it really is. Why do people pay hunderds of dollars to go listen to Joshua Bell at a concert? Why do people pay millions for a Van Gogh painting? Are they all acting out of the pure lure of beauty? I sincerely doubt it. Are many a people in the concert audience there because they want to please someone – maybe spouses, maybe bosses, maybe for their own future cocktail discussions? Are many collecters buying paintings to be able to sell it in the future for a higher price, or maybe to appear appropriately dignified and aware in their social circle? Who is judging or defining beauty here? Is it the observer or has the quatification of beauty already been done by a select few; a panel of “experts” who have been given the job of branding, evaluating and weighing beauty of an art-piece? Does their word then percolate down to the ticket costs and price tags? Is this branded beauty making people more aware or less aware of what beauty truly is? Is it training people to not heed to their own sensibilities and evaluations, but rather to always be skeptical of their own belief and to habitually fall in line behind the sensibilities of the masses? This ties in with, and runs against the grain of the overrunning theme in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good…need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” But is that what is happening? Are we handing over the responsibility, and therefore the return, the true joy, of appreciating what is beautiful, to others? And this ties in with the overriding theme of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. The book talks about a world full of second-handers who depend on and imitate, yet resent and try to extinguish the prime movers, the first-handers, the visionaries of this world. This article highlights a subtler expresion of the same distinction; one within a single human being. It points to how, within a single human being, the second-handedness matures and stifles out the primal motivation to be honest, capable judges of beauty that every child is. Thanks for the forward. I hope we can continue to be aware and honest.

The following are a few more thoughts on this issue based on my reply to Anant’s email response, presented as a dialogue (though it was not, Anant’s response came together all at once, not in response to my statements presented below).

Anant: Anil, your analysis was very thought-provoking. I definitely do not think beauty is measurable and even if it is the majority of the people would not have the inclination or time to make that measurement.

Anil: I think beauty is measurable. It is not standardizable. The measure is individual and subjective. The International Standards Organization cannot come up with a “unit” for beauty. However, each one of us, has the capability to distinguish between greater beauty and lesser beauty. Indeed, is that not the resource we tap into when we say “I loved this movie” vs. “It is an Oscar winner, but I did not think it was that great”. What makes me sad is that even though we all have this skill and the sensitivity to appreciate beauty, it is the opposing quality of insensitive honesty that is found lacking. The courage to honestly and individually appraise beauty, rather than meekly submit to others’ appraisals, is what we allow to slip away over time.

Anant: If it is subjective, is there a basic sense of what is beautiful in every person that is built in, like an instinct? Like you said, it is this instinct that is being stifled due to a number of factors: the need to conform, lack of time, wrongly ordered priorities etc.
Another thing that came to my mind was that they really didn’t need Joshua Bell to prove this. For an untrained ear like mine or the majority of people who walked past him, there is no difference between how a world-famous violinist plays and how a merely good violonist would play. But I guess the stamp of “genius” that the experts have put on Bell does make the story more dramatic.

Anil: The whole point of beauty is that even to untrained ears like ours it should still qualify as beautiful! The ear of a child is probably untrained, at least in the sense you probably meant it, yet, if the music conformed to his or her sense of beauty, the child would be attracted to it. It is important to recognize that I am not saying the passers-by were stupid. Maybe the music itself was overrated! Afterall, the music that some Victorian-era musician composed with great elation and suffering, does not automatically qualify to become beautiful. As a slight diversion, my take on the issue of effort is that honest, sincere creative effort more often results in beauty than secondhanded imitation. So, for all the effort the composer and the violinist put in to the performance, the result likely will be quite beautiful. But it does not necessarily have to be. My take on the experiment itself, however, is that things of great beauty might still need time to familiarize themselves to the observer; they might not be beautiful at first sight and might need the “state of mind” that Kant talks about. The results of the experiment were partly sullied by the requirement that music, more than visual art depends on the “state of mind” and time to prove its worth. In any case, my thoughts in the previous mail were more or less independent of this particular experiment, although the article certainly evoked those thoughts.