Beauty, observation and objectivity

The following fact is typically seen as evidence for the subjectivity of beauty:

1. Very long necks look beautiful to the Padaung but not to contemporary Americans.

But the following fact is not typically seen as evidence for the subjectivity of beauty:

2. Van Gogh's Wild Roses is looks very beautiful by visible light but not so much by x-ray.

Why do we not see (2) as evidence for subjectivity about beauty? I think the answer is simple: Wild Roses is no more meant to be viewed by x-ray light than the Moonlight Sonata is meant to be viewed visually in Fourier transform. Wild Roses and the Moonlight Sonata are intended to be beautiful in those respects that are perceived visually or aurally, respectively, and they succeed admirably at these aims.

We can be a bit more subtle here. A microscopic examination of Wild Roses is not going to reveal the relevant beauty of the work, nor will an auditory examination of the individual notes of the Moonlight Sonata. These works are beautiful in respect of those features that are salient to the appropriately trained "eye" or "ear"—and of course it is not the literal eye or ear that is mainly being trained.

But why not say the same thing about long neck of the Padaung woman, then? She intends her long neck to be beautiful in those respects that are salient to trained Padaung observers. Maybe she is beautiful in respect of her long neck in contemporary North America, too, but we lack the training to make salient to us the features that make her beautiful.

Moreover, it is important to note that the features that make something beautiful may very well be relational features. A part of what can make a work beautiful is precisely the allusions to other works and to the outside world—what makes Anna Karenina a great work of art is in part that the people in it are like real people (which does not mean that every work of literature needs to have people in it that are like real people). Thus it may be that the Padaung woman's long neck is beautiful in part precisely by its relation to particular social practices (and hence when she travels to North America, and is no longer appropriately related to these social practices, she ceases to be beautiful in respect of her neck). Recognizing the aesthetic role of such relations is not a form of subjectivism, relativism or contextualism—it is no more that than recognizing the aesthetic role of the reality of the characters in Anna Karenina makes one a subjectivist, relativist or contextualist.

(Of course, there is also the possibility that the Padaung are simply wrong in their aesthetic judgment. But it is hard to say that without their training. And the possibility of their being wrong is significant evidence for objectivism about beauty.)

[Edited on March 16, 2011, to remove near-contradiction. -ARP]

On a relativism about beauty

Consider a naive relativist theory on which, necessarily,

• y is beautiful to x if and only if x takes y to be beautiful.

This cannot be a complete theory about beauty.  After all, exactly the same theory can be given for ugliness:

• y is ugly to x if and only if x takes y to be ugly.

Since nothing has been said that distinguishes beauty from ugliness, the theory cannot be complete.  

Moreover, there is a further oddness about the theory as I've given it.  According to the theory, the fundamental concepts are relational: being beautiful (or ugly) to.  But on the right hand side of the biconditionals we have the monadic beautiful (or ugly).  If someone fully accepts the theory, she won't take anything to be beautiful simpliciter, but only beautiful to her.  So, perhaps the relativist should say:

• y is beautiful to x if and only if x takes y to be beautiful to her.

One serious problem with this is that then nothing is beautiful to the self-conscious objectivist, since the self-conscious objectivist takes nothing to be beautiful to her--she does not have any relational "is beautiful to" predicate.

And consider another problem.  Suppose I am essentially logically omniscient, so that if p and q are logically equivalent, then it is an essential property of me that I believe p if and only if I believe q.  Applying this to the biconditional, I get:

• It is an essential property of me that: I believe that y is beautiful to me if and only if I believe that I take y to be beautiful to me.

But to take something to be beautiful to me is just to believe it is beautiful to me.  So:

• It is an essential property of me that: I believe that y is beautiful to me if and only if I believe that I believe that y is beautiful to me.

But that is surely wrong: logical omniscience should not imply omniscience about my internal states.

Maybe, though, I am being too cognitivist about "takes y to be beautiful to her".  Maybe to take y to be beautiful isn't to believe anything about y but to have a certain appreciative attitude to y.  That takes care of the problem of the objectivist and the logically omniscient individuals.  

But we still have another problem.  Imagine that I love Mozart.  I go to a Mozart violin concert, and then during the intermission I get a message about a family emergency and I need to go home.  The first part of the concert was beautiful to me.  Tomorrow I hear that the second half of the concert was even better in the respects I appreciate.  I conclude that I missed some beautiful performances.  But on the appreciative attitude version of "takes", that's false.  For the second half of the concert wasn't beautiful to me, since I didn't take it to be beautiful in the appreciative sense.  

A familiar response is to amend the right-hand-side of the biconditional to replace "I take y to be beautiful (to me)" with "I would take y to be beautiful (to me) if I experienced y."  But probably not.  After all, had I stayed for the second half of the concert, worries about the family emergency and guilt that I am enjoying someone's fiddling while my home burns (literally or figuratively) would have spoiled my enjoyment of the concert.  Of course this is just a special case of the problems that go under the head of "the conditional fallacy."  

So we would have to idealize: I would take y to be beautiful if I experienced y in ideal observing circumstances.  But as the above example shows, the ideal observing circumstances need to include being in the right mental state.  We better not define the right mental state as the one in which one's appreciation is correct, since then our theory isn't subjectivist any more.  And given that what one appreciates can be so heavily dependent on one's emotional state, it seems that at this point matters are hopeless.  

And all the same goes for similar theories about morality.

Getting a joke: Some ramblings

A Jewish joke goes as follows:

A Polish nobleman laughs three times at a joke. First, when you tell it. The second time when you explain it. The third time when he gets it.

What does it mean to get a joke? The butt of this Jewish joke is the nobleman seen as both dense and unwilling to admit his stupidity. It sounds, then, as if to get a joke is a cognitive achievement.

Certainly, getting a joke has an intellectual component. A necessary condition for getting the above joke is knowing a number of salient facts about the relevant European culture, such as that intelligent people get jokes immediately and that people are expected to laugh at jokes only when they get them. If one does not know these facts, then one has not got the joke, even if one has found the joke funny for some other reason. To get a joke, then, requires that one be aware of certain facts that the author of the joke was aware of.[note 1]

But of course simply being aware of the salient facts is not a sufficient condition for "getting it". One also needs to be aware of these facts as salient to this joke.

What if one is aware of the salient facts, and aware of them as salient to the joke, but nonetheless one does not find the joke funny? (And here I do not just mean a case where someone says "That's not funny"—such an utterance can signal that one does find the joke very funny indeed but one wishes one did not.) Does one, then, get the joke? It is plausible that the thing to say in such a situation is that:

1. It is false that one got the joke; and
2. It is false that one failed to get the joke.

To fail to get the joke is not simply the denial of getting the joke. To fail to get the joke is an intellectual failing—it is to be dense in the way the Polish nobleman in the joke is dense, or at least not to be as smart or as knowledgeable as the teller. But to get the joke might be more than a purely cognitive achievement—it might require one not just to understand what makes the joke tick, but to actually experience the joke as funny. Or maybe the right thing to say is that one got the joke, but to cancel the standard implicature from "getting" to "finding funny".

In any case, in a situation where the listener is aware of all the salient facts, when she knows what makes the joke tick, but she simply does not find the joke funny, I think we are inclined to think of the failing as quite possibly on the side of joke-teller. It is not particularly embarrassing for the joke-teller that the Polish nobleman doesn't get the joke—rather, it is the nobleman who should be embarrassed. But if the nobleman fully understood the joke, but found it entirely unfunny, embarrassment would be appropriate on the side of the joke-teller.

There are many embarrassing ways the teller can fail here. For instance, the listener might have already heard the joke (it is interesting to ask why this is not a failure on the part of the listener) or one very much like it. The teller might have butchered the joke in delivery. The joke might not only be inappropriate (a morally and socially inappropriate joke can still be taken as funny) but inappropriate vis-à-vis the listener in such a way as makes it emotionally impossible for the listener to see it as funny (e.g., a joke about a disaster that the listener's loved ones have just suffered). But, finally, it might just be that the anecdote is simply not funny. This is the most embarrassing failure of the joke-teller qua joke-teller (a morally inappropriate joke is a failure of the joke-teller as a person, but at least prima facie not as a joke-teller).

I think if we think all these things through, we may still have room for some contextualized objectivity about jokes. There may well be such a thing as a joke being objectively humorous in a given context, independently of whether the listener actually gets the joke. A part of what happens when the nobleman gets the joke before his third laugh is that he realizes that the joke was all along humorous, though only now he has finally got it. But sometimes when one gets what the joke-teller was up to, one realizes that there was no humor there.

I find interesting the following question: Does the context of humorousness for a joke include an upper bound on the listener's intelligence and knowledge? After all, if a listener is too smart, she will see where the joke is heading and may therefore not see it as funny. If there is an upper bound, then it might be true that juvenile jokes really are objectively humorous in a context where the intelligence and knowledge is juvenile. And, if so, then probably nothing will be funny to an omniscient being—every joke will be juvenile to such a being, though the being will fully understand why the joke objectively is humorous to beings of our intelligence and knowledge.

Or are there some things that are objectively funny regardless of the intelligence of the perceiver? Maybe these "things" are not jokes, though. So, maybe, a joke requires an upper bound on the listener's intelligence and knowledge, but there may be humorous things—humorous facts, say—which are objectively funny to all. I find rather plausible that our hectic and silly lives of minor sins might be funny to the angels. But maybe the angels are too good-natured to laugh at them.