From the movement of celestial bodies to the distance covered by a single human step, the world as we know it is quantified. Every rock we may reach can be weighted and the weight of those out of reach – estimated. Our measurement systems allow us to not only give order to the real but also to extend our projections beyond experience and imagination. And yet, where it matters most immediately in our daily lives, culture and history can hardly be measured decisively, let alone individual experiences.
Just as we began by abstraction from objects of nature in devising the measurement systems and ended up with their rectification in the form of a metric system for reasons of coherence and convenience of quantification, so have we attempted to devise similar measurement systems for human activities, history and personhood. Statistics, economics, sociology are such fields of inquiry aimed at uncovering the averages of human behavior at large. Psychology and its every offshoot are supposed to account for personal experiences, but they do so by quantifying the extremes of human behavior that are also necessarily averaged. But what of even more intimate events: thought, sensibility, impressions?
At the center of Kant’s Third Critique is the surprising reintroduction of beauty into philosophical debate, starkly argued to be the missing link between reason and the world. The Kantian definition of beauty is hard to argue with, indeed it grows on you the more you wrestle with it. Even today the definition is present in casual German language: it is beautiful because it is exactly how I imagined it, and vice versa. It is so important to Kant, because his definition of beauty is the moment of recognition that the free play of our imagination matches exactly the world as we perceive it – and so by extension serves as confirmation of the categories and rules by which our imagination synthesizes the model of the world. It is the ultimate sense of proof, of the correctness of synthetic apriori or even more importantly – the sensible grounds upon which reason can go to work. It is thus the way that our reasoning is shaped by the boundaries of our sensible perceptions and the content of our schematas acquired by intellectual intuition that makes our reasoning meaningful as opposed to one that spins in the void without achieving any friction upon reality.
Seizing upon this somewhat mystical organon of immediate knowledge, the succeeding generations of German philosophers from Fichte through Romantics to Schelling and Hegel, have attempted to grapple with the idea of intellectual intuition. After Schelling’s Spinozist attempt to resolve the problem of immediacy of such knowledge, gradually the question of beauty has been moved into the area of aesthetics and for the most part aesthetics as a study of art. For romantics, intellectual intuition was not only another, surplus way of knowing the world, it was the only way one could ascertain correctness of those stipulations which are not known directly. In other words, intellectual intuition opens up the path to knowledge which Kant has already declared unknowable in the First Critique, one of the realm of God, Soul etc. And between Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Novalis and others beauty was the criterion by which such truths could be grasped, as if bumping into a sharp object in the dark. Armed with this, and with a certain glance back at Plato’s murky triad of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, we could say that indeed – there are ways to measure, to weigh and to judge among human experiences. Beauty therefore could serve as the light in navigating the infinitely complex maze of human culture and in particular its aesthetic side. It could also serve as the perpetually moving end to the development of culture – if what one seeks is beautiful (perhaps bounded by it being also morally good), one knows the direction of potential development.
Could the concept be turned inside out? Something is ugly or not right because it is not the way we imagined it to be – seems like a logical inverse of beauty. And yet something can be horrible precisely in the ways we imagined it to be. Seen from this point, beauty is not a question of aesthetic prettiness but a kind of embodied response to certain conditions. One way to define the “conditions” is to push further with the “correlation to imagination” aspect. Perhaps beauty is the moment of recognition of the fruitfulness of perception. Fruitfulness implies the possibility of further expanding the perception to fit the great complexity of human knowledge – and to confirm not only the foundations of the imagined but also the consequences of what is imagined. This still fits Kantian definition, although he would undoubtedly strongly object to the collapse of multiple possible sensibilities under one genus. Importantly, this “beauty” does not mean that we find only the totally expected to be beautiful, but that even the surprising fits our larger framework of imagination and rules by which it is constituted.
Beauty of course is historically known in its relation to fine arts, albeit in colloquial use in all arts. To credit Kant’s astonishing precision, beauty, the moment when things fit just right, is all over us. We may also say a different word, in 2023, and arguably long before, the term itself is not quite as important as in Plato’s time. Nice, quite right, wonderful, great, fucking fantastic, just so. There are many variations.The flight of a lone seagull over the ocean may be beautiful in a way that is melancholic and recalls moments in our lives that felt just so, but so do we say also when seeing a perfectly prepared dish, and that dish may be borderline painfully spicy, or when we finally find something in our pockets..We might also find out that when a certain unlikely combination of unfortunate circumstances comes together, an exact extreme we were concerned about, we’d say ah, great. And this sarcastic comment may still fit into the scheme.
Similar complexity appears in fine arts. To apply the term “beautiful” in relation to a work of art is almost reductive, since whenever a rare moment arises that art does provoke a response in us, there are many varieties. Such responses exceed the idea of ineffable that is traditionally thought to be destroyed by further reasoning and clarification – the idea as old as Leibniz’s doubts and Rationalist debates on whether rules kill or give birth to poetry. The flight of lone seagull over the ocean does not only recall the class of melancholic associations, but also those sensations gathered over a lifetime from which such associations are woven. A painting, a sculpture, a dance, a song are beautiful “as” – as that cold autumn morning in childhood, as the taste of a dish on that tragic morning, horrible as the smell of canteen food in kindergarten. If we need to, we may unravel the chain of aesthetic associations that constitute the complex flavor of our response to an artwork (hence why I find the original formulation of Sublime by Pseudo-Longinus to be more articulate than the later Burke and Kant’s formulations). But such responses involve more than prettiness, and may in fact subsume altogether the sublime, the horrible, the disgusting. The palette is large and arguably always has been, perhaps today it is much less a subject to moral restrictions and demands of excellence of skill contingent to the past. Moreover we may disagree about our aesthetic associations radically. Communities form around agreement and disagreement with aesthetic associations and our temptation to consider these as genuine, natural even. Such disagreements are the first stumbling block on our path to find out whether beautiful is also the experience of the true.
While morals are reasoned in relation to either their ends or logic of coherence of their principles, the pull of beauty as true is unreasonably irresistible. Where ethics bump into actuality, obstacles social, physical, normative, the pull of beauty is blinding, conceptually bordering on pure desire. This can be considered as a variation on the pleasure principle, but beauty isn’t always about pleasure. Nor is it about a release of energy, as getting to the point of regularly experiencing beauty means expending a lot of effort but experiencing a beautiful performance may be energizing. The pull of art may create an illusion of its universality, but that gravity does not occur without being at home with the context in which art appears meaningful. A context that is fully artificial, a product of human efforts sometimes spanning generations.
Kant’s ambition went much further than art, as he considers it to be a minor genre of beautiful experiences, one that pales against nature. Romantic thought would seize on this point and extend intellectual intuition to being the one true way of knowing the structure of the world. Minus the mystical aspects, Kant may have been talking about the same things contemporary cognitive science works on. And the contemporary attempts at devising AGI do reveal the problematic of constructing a mind which has no perception and requires knowledge served “ready made” or in other words – already quantified.
But the glue by which our sense of beauty is indicative of objective beauty in the world is as thin as our assumptions that classical logic reflects the real relations among objects in the world (e.g. Tarski’s permutation thesis). If the rules and principles of our imagination are reflective of the world around us, as Kant would have it, the inevitable question is where such rules come from. Bar Schelling’s Spinozist approach of unity of thought and nature through the bridge of Absolute, the other path to solving this appears to be the assertion that rules by which our imagination synthesizes are normative, communal and importantly, bounded by our interaction with nature. The extent to which our imagination and knowledge can be limited by (variable, alterable) nature of our bodies and environment is somewhat more clear (in ethics for example) than the question of boundaries for thought. To Kant, the boundary is clear but also somewhat fatal to his project: what has no sensible content is pure empty form. Therefore the horizon of imaginary is also the horizon of sensible. A horizon over which lay the unintelligible and the sublime: the great expanses of nature defying our efforts at quantifications and Descartes chiliagon, mathematical objects too large to imagine in their entirety. And yet, along with Badiou’s thoughts on logic and artists’ experiences in making art, we know there are certain tools at our disposal that provide ways to look beyond the horizon of the sensible, and to bring it closer to the actuality of our experiences.
Consider the principles of making art. It is an open secret that making art according to a solidly laid out plan is problematic, not least because the interest for the artist may evaporate early on. After all, if you can tell what the work is about, why not just tell it? So, the artist, any artist works within dimensions of skill, medium, budget, knowledge and library of personal aesthetic associations (preferably ones intelligible to the public), but not necessarily with a clearly defined goal. When all such boundaries and limitations are laid against each other, the space within which the potential artwork can be made is much narrower than a hypothetical “do anything”. Still, the initial idea will inevitably fail during the process of making, writing, dancing, singing, not least because of all unforeseen material constraints and contingencies. Then the artist learns to adapt, and go wherever the work leads. Formally defined, the process can be described as one of constructing one hypothesis, testing and deriving the consequences, then constructing another hypothesis and so on. This process may take a very long path and lead incredibly far from the initial idea. But what serves as a destination in each step, the criterion of judging how to proceed can be deemed beauty. Unfortunately a similar intuitive but nonlinear path can also be taken outside art for any purpose, such as construction, perpetuation and extension of conspiracy theories.
The image of pursuit of beauty within art is not exclusive to the field. When mathematicians speak of beauty, they imply a similar thing (and even their messing around is reminiscent of artistic processes). We know that pursuit of beauty differs from the pursuit of knowledge, but we don’t know whether the sense of beauty is ultimately tied to our embodied capacity to compress vast amounts of information into associations via emotional states. A mathematician can “live in” the mathematical world, or to program their imagination and associations to intuit among possible and impossible paths to proof, much like games are compartmentalized sets of instruction for thought and action. And perhaps we can do so with our actual ethics, although there we run the risk of incompatibility of our artificial aesthetic worldviews against others or against nature.
Although Kant denied a straight path to knowledge of that which we have no experiential content to, Romantic approach to true knowledge of the world suggests that the door has been left open for anything to slip through – so long as it is felt right, it may appear right to us truly. Mass politics rely heavily on aesthetics, on the idea of constructing a series of values that are not only shared, but also felt as genuine parts of self. Parts of one’s worldview tightly interwoven with the personal library of impressions gathered through whole life. And in this situation the sense of experience of fruitfulness or truth does not help us to the truth itself.
Much as it may help us to unwrap the contexts of the past and feel almost as if we are time traveling – like reconstructing the context of Sappho’s fragments and feeling what love meant and felt like in her day, – we are still left with isolated contexts of aesthetic worldviews. Kosseleck’s idea of sediments comes very close to considering such worldviews as legitimate objects of historical research, albeit the conditions on which some sediments are recognized and others aren’t are not anything like a stable ethical framework, but only a personal hermeneutic.
Therein lies the danger of throwing away the ladder and pretending that our history is one and that it is linear. With its irresistible pull of rightness, beauty is as good and as dangerous a tool for moving forwards with our ethical programs. It does not make it a criterion that should be avoided in personal life, as such life would arguably be barren and decisionless. But it does not provide us with a vector for development although it may help us to continue in our quest of building the artifice of human into the cold, dark and empty space of the future. And it is a ladder that we can never afford to throw away.
By Alexey Vanushkin