Speaking with Thomas Jockin is an infinite joy, and he thinks and teaches on topics like virtue and beauty, illuminating links which suggest that our capacity to experience beauty is contingent on our conditioning and ability to be open to beauty. I think this is the case, and I believe that a reason it is so difficult for people today to believe that beauty is objective is due to the environment we live in, which is to say we lack full experience that make it possible to really “get” beauty as objective. What do I mean? Well, let us consider the following image, which is inspired by Walker Percy, who I elaborate on in “On Beauty” by O.G. Rose.
Imagine we hear a rumor that someone is coming to town to perform a “symphony”—we hardly know how to say the word. We work in the fields all the time back in 1824, but our uncle has a little money and buys a ticket so that we can attend—a gift. We almost never hear music except in church, and when we do it is mostly hymnals and not accompanied by instruments. The day arrives.
And we listen to Beethoven’s 9th before it is “Beethoven’s 9th.”
And we never again hear it.
As we age, we tell people about what happened. They nod.
Is beauty objective?
After Beethoven’s 9th, the very place the world “is” forever changes. What is possible in it is not the same. The event forever shifts how we act in the world and has a very real causal impact on how we live. That change is undeniable and observable.
Can something that is merely a preference casually change how we behave in the world?
Can it radically change what we believe is possible?
When we hear Beethoven’s 9th under these circumstances, it can feel like a radical unveiling of what is possible in the world versus a concealing of what the world can do behind a pleasant experience that helps us escape the drudgery of life. And indeed, the world is entirely new, and it is new in beauty. This “change” itself is objective and an undeniable occurrence, and thus beauty is objective.
This is paramount: the objectivity of beauty is not primarily found in the aesthetics of the object or thing itself, but in the “surprise” of a holistic experience that changes our horizon in the world. Unfortunately though, this experience is now very hard for us to undergo regarding aesthetic goods like music, paintings, and the like, precisely because works of art are mass-produced and always ready for us to access, and since we also mostly look to ask questions about beauty in works of art, it seems like beauty is mere taste. And so we end up confused…
Walter Benjamin famously warned that the mass-production of art removed “the aura” of works, which is to say they cannot “strike us” like they once did (this “strike” is another expression of why beauty is objective). To allude to Walker Percy, we see photographs of Paris before we visit it, and thus the ability of Paris to “strike us” is lessened (to some degree), because we already have a preset idea of what it is like before we arrive. We cannot experience it like the person hearing Beethoven for the first time, and though that doesn’t mean we can’t “find it beautiful,” the critical “surprise” and “feeling of wonder” is lessened and hard to experience. And since that experience is the foundation for objectivity of beauty, where the experience is lessened, it is harder to believe “beauty is objective.” And so we “rationally” come to believe it isn’t…
Today, we today listen to music all the time, and we can listen to Beethoven’s 9th on repeat for hours. We do not have to wait until a concert a month from now; we do not have to enter a concert hall and undergo a “full body experience”; we don’t have to listen to it only once in our entire life. And all of these matters of convenience bring with them certain benefits, but they also make it much harder for works of art to “strike us” and change our entire horizon of the world. And since that “strike” and “surprise” is the very objectivity of beauty, if we exist in a world where works of art cannot so “strike” us, then relative to our scope, it is not wrong for us to say that “beauty is just preference,” for that is indeed all we experience. It is rational, and so the notion of “beauty as objective” fades.
If we could only see a cathedral when we were in the full-body experience of it, if we could only see Cezanne in person, if we could only hear great music once in our entire life—it would be far easier to believe that “beauty was objective.” We would diligently seek to remember what we experienced, to have our minds “cling on” to what occurred, and this very desperate effort to have our minds “cling to” the memory would strongly suggest that beauty was not mere preference. If it was, we’d likely let it go (we don’t cling on to every memory of every meal, precisely because it was just something we digest and move on from). Here, we see another basis for “the objectivity of beauty” is precisely the reality of the mind’s effort to cling to the memory of the experience and not let it escape. This effort is not a matter of opinion; it is happening and real. It is occurring.
What’s critical to note is that the objectivity of beauty arises in “the full experience” of something: it is not just Beethoven’s 9th that “strikes us” and brings about a radical change in our life, but also in 1824 the fact itself that we rarely hear music, that we will likely only hear Beethoven once in our life, that life is not full of art—all of these factors are part of what make Beethoven’s 9th “strike us,” not merely the particular arrangement of the instruments, and so on. When we ask “Is Beethoven’s 9th beautiful?” and only look at the music itself, we cannot readily answer the question properly, for we cannot reduce the question to just the work of music; rather, the “beauty” of the music is thanks to “the irreducible whole” of the moment in history when it is heard, how often it is heard, and the like.
I today can listen to Beethoven’s 9th on my computer, but I cannot hear it like the person in our thought experiment from 1824—that is not possible for me (it is not “in my horizon”), and thus it is not possible for me to experience the beauty of Beethoven in the same way. And since I need that “strike” to experience the objectivity of beauty, it follows that I would then not be sure how to prove “Beethoven’s 9th is objectively beautiful.” Indeed, it isn’t in of itself: it is objectively beautiful only when situated in a full context which can “strike us” in a way that changes our life.
Yes, perhaps some pieces of music are more likely to so “strike” a person than others, and that argument can be made in comparative art, but the point is that the “strike” itself is not guaranteed. I think a mistake we have made is conflating “objectively beautiful” with “a guarantee of experiencing beauty,” when these are different inquires. I cannot guarantee that anyone will find Beethoven “objectively beautiful,” because I cannot guarantee that they will experience conditions which make it “strike them” (as discussed in “Conditionalism” by O.G. Rose). However, a lack of guarantee of a “strike” does not mean the strike itself isn’t “objective” when it occurs. After all, it causes us to change our lives, and that change happens.
Also of note, we do not have a culture of rereading books, just consuming “the next” piece of music and work of art, and beauty has a lot to do with our change of relation to a thing. But a change in relation requires us not just to move on to the next thing, but to repeat and revisit the same text to see how the same thing can become something different to us (which discloses a possibility of the world). Religions in the past tended to bring with them cyclical time and rereading of the same books and parables, and yet in the repetition stories would change in their meaning, and “the routines of the same” would unveil a change in how we related to that sameness. In this circumstance, the strange way in which our relationship to the same thing can change, and this experience is fundamental for us to experience beauty. If we don’t engage in these repetitions (only continually move on to the next thing, a new experience), it will be hard to experience the “strike” of beauty, and thus to believe beauty is objective. Indeed, from our scope and lens, it never is—it’s only a taste. (For more on this topic, please see “Negation, Repetition, and the Tensions Between Writing and Speaking” by O.G. Rose.)
Regarding beauty, there will always be something “objective” involved. If no one experiences the “strike” of beauty, then it is “objectively” the case that beauty is subjective and mere preference, because that is what everyone around us undergoes and experiences. We end up enclosed in a world where the “strike” doesn’t happen, thus, relative to within that enclosure, it is “objectively the case” that beauty is just a matter of taste. And so then “objective beauty” is “objectively” lost—though fortunately what is the case in an enclosure is not what must be the real case. “Strikes” can still be possible, if only the enclosure might be broken through.
Notably, we can also associate beauty with a great athlete, a great performance, and a great accomplishment, and today because of the reproduction of art and difficulty of thus being “struck” by them, we might have to look more to athletics and other sources to experience the “strike” of beauty. I’m not saying it’s impossible for art to be a place where beauty “strikes” us now, but the artist is going to have to be very aware that he or she must produce a full context in which this “strike” can occur, not just hope to make it in the work of art itself (though I don’t mean to say this is impossible). This can impact the creative process and might require difficult sacrifices; for example, a dancer may have to decide never to film his or her performances. That demands a lot of the dancer, for the dancer must then redo the performance every time. And yet it is perhaps only with such sacrifice that we can experience beauty as “striking us” again, making its objectivity clear.
To close, the brilliant Thomas Jockin asks the question on if beauty is primary in Plato for education, which is to suggest that unless we believe the world is a place which can “disclose itself,” a place where there is a profound break between what we experience in our everyday life and what is possible in the world, then we will not really engage in education (especially once we understand there is a difference between “modern certification” and “a life-longer seeking of truth”). Once we experience beauty, that radical “surprise” that changes our entire horizon of what is possible in the world, the world becomes an entirely different place, and we can suddenly motivate ourselves to seek further experiences of the world not being what we thought it was but something deeper. This is “intrinsic motivation,” and for me it suggests that us becoming “intrinsically motivated” to seek education is tied profoundly to the experience of beauty. Indeed, the fate of beauty seems to be the fate of motivation, which I believe is the fate of us.
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