Ep. 287: Roger Scruton on Beauty (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 287 is what is Beauty? And we read chapters one through four of Roger Scruton's book Beauty from 2009. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, a body considered as such in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:31 Seth: This is Seth Paskin. And my judgment is binding on everybody from Austin, Texas.

0:37 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, disinterestedly interested in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:43 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, still trying to slake my desire for rib eye by staring at the picture of a cow in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: We are back to aesthetics. Hope folks liked the reissue of our first aesthetics episode. And this will be our the first of two on this book. Because it's a long book, it's a good book, it's sort of a Survey book, but it's not a history book. I mean, it's a piece of philosophy. He's just expounding on these concepts of beauty. The second half of the book that we're going to talk about next time is artistic beauty. But this is all. Well, there's sort of an overview chapter and then human beauty, natural beauty and everyday beauty. So all the stuff that is not all.

1:23 Wes: Were you guys, like me, pleasantly surprised by this book, or did you go in thinking, maybe I'm not recalling really why we got to this book, but I have a lot of respect for Roger Scruton, but I think I expected this to be stodgy and British and boring in the beginning. That's the way I felt. And then I thought, wow, actually this is really, really good, and got very into it. So who turned us onto this book and what were your expectations?

1:48 Mark: I think a listener suggestion at some point brought this to mind, but we had him on our radar as a potential conservative to read. He's written a few things in the area of conservatism, but he also has been teaching aesthetics for many, many years and has several books in the area. Three books on music alone. A book on architecture I was looking at. So this seemed to be the most recent iteration of it and is philosophically rich. He's a Kant scholar. He understands Kant very well. But it's not, you know, like his presentation of Kant is a great example, because actually, reading Kant on aesthetics, as we did in a past episode, it's all just about trying to interpret Kant's language and how his aesthetic views fit in with his overall philosophical system.

That is not Scruton's interest here. It's just, what is the content of the view? How does it jibe with our ordinary experience? What are the philosophical puzzles that come up through these platitudes? You know, basic things about beauty that he thinks we have to account for in any theory.

2:55 Dylan: He's very reflective in the book, and he does a nice job of both presenting a framework for which to think through the question without becoming a partisan of it. And so he'll present. Present Kant's aesthetic theory as a fruitful way of thinking through it, just like he does other ones, but not be a partisan of it.

3:13 Wes: There's some light sprinklings of Kant in here, at least references to Kant, and it's obviously for public consumption. Right. So this is a book that's geared towards the public, which I sometimes find unsatisfying, but it's not dumbed down. It's at the same time, philosophically satisfying.

3:31 Seth: Yeah, it's not a cream puff.

3:33 Dylan: Very readable. I enjoyed it. I didn't have any particular expectations. I heard of Scruton before. I guess I vaguely knew that he wrote on aesthetics, but I'd never read his stuff before. But it's nicely written.

3:47 Seth: And by a weird coincidence, I had been reading this at the beach this past summer in the first post Covid vacation I took. I was reading this book randomly.

3:57 Wes: Reading Scruton on the Beach.

3:58 Seth: Yep, it's kind of what I do.

4:00 Mark: Wes Sounds like the name of a

4:02 Seth: drink I Screwdriver on the beach.

4:04 Wes: Scrutiny on the beach. I'll take a screw down the beach. The Kantian framework so it's clear it's there from the beginning, but he's going to bring up lots of puzzles with respect to it. And it's there just in the sense that he starts out in the preface by asking, right, whether or not, when we make judgments of beauty, when we make aesthetic judgments, are they real in a sense, are they objective in some sense, are they anchored in our rational nature? Or as I think many readers and listeners might be at first inclined to think, are they just purely subjective, purely matters of subjective taste?

So he will, in the first chapter, give us this more or less Kantian framework for thinking about judgments of beauty as disinterested interest, which we'll explain. And then he will bring up some problems with that. When we get to human beauty, it's related to sexual desire. And so how does that fit in? How do we relate that to, say, appreciation of natural beauty? And then how do we relate that to appreciation of artistic beauty? So this is one of the things that I found enjoyable about the book, is these little puzzles which were in my peripheral vision for the stuff that we've done on aesthetics.

He kind of gets at the whole thing about sex and beauty, for instance, which we get some of that in Plato, but for the most part part, when we talk about aesthetics, we're just talking about art. And then, so where does nature fit in? Where does sex fit in? That's one of the nice things about this book.

5:30 Dylan: And I would add to that the sense of aesthetics and beauty that goes towards function and the pleasure of figuring things out as being related to our inclination to the pleasure of beauty. And he talks about that in the natural beauty section when we get to some architecture and stuff like that. But there's a whole chapter later in the book about that. I guess the other thing I would say is I really like the way he starts And I think if there's something he's trying to convince you of, I think it's that beauty is something that's premier human activity, meaning that it marks us as rational beings, it marks us as distinct, and it's because of the way in which it is marked by being an activity of the mind that has structure to it that we can talk about about.

And so he's going to be adamantly against the notion that it is in any sort of simple minded way purely subjective, but he's not strident about that being a simple thing to address.

6:31 Mark: Right. It's subjective in the sense that it is. Each individual subject has to come to its own conclusions. Right. Because it's our senses feeding stuff to our minds. You have to contemplate it firsthand. One of the platitudes is that you can't get judgments of beauty secondhand. Somebody could tell you that something is beautiful, but you can't really agree with them. You could mouth the words, all right, according to you, that is beautiful until you actually see it yourself. So it is subjective in that sense, but it has claims to universality.

When you say something is beautiful, you're not talking about yourself, you're talking about the object and its capacity and. Or you're talking about an interaction between the object and potential observers yourself. But it's not a modest. You're not, I was listening not that long ago to that discussion on with Tamler Summers on free will that we did, and this came up as like, when you make a judgment of taste, what is the propositional content of that? Are you saying this is great for everyone? Are you saying modestly, well, I like it. So Scruton says no, maybe in the case of this tastes yummy, then you are really talking about yourself.

But if you say something is beautiful, you are making something that strives toward universality.

7:49 Wes: You're making a claim on others. You're making a claim that can be argued for or against. There can be reasons for it, even if those reasons can't lead to a demonstrative proof. Right. It's a puzzling kind of in between place to be because it doesn't definitively ever become like other, what we would call objective judgments. And the reasons play a kind of, when you do art criticism, reasons kind of play a different role there than they might in a scientific or mathematical context. But yeah, it's still not just all, hey, this is the way I feel.

8:22 Dylan: I would comment, especially in the way Mark framed it, that you own your verdict of beauty. Someone can tell it to you, but you don't really own it until it's. I guess, in your own contemplative sphere,

8:35 Seth: it's experiential, not deductive. You can't read a bunch of books.

8:39 Dylan: Yeah. So this makes me think about learning, right. What you just described makes me think about Meno. You don't understand it until you understand it for yourself.

8:50 Wes: It's more like qualia knowledge than scientific knowledge in this sense. So this is kind of one of the paradoxes, right? Which is that. So this is his sixth platitude. And just for listeners, when he talks about these platitudes, he's talking about trivial things that we can assert about beauty that we would all agree on. He kind of borrows this from our deflationary concepts of truth, where you say, what does it mean to say something is true? So S is true if and only if s is true is true. So you give some kind of trivial definition of something so that you're not going to be biased in one direction or another, and then you can go on to talk about.

About the substance of it. So he's doing the same thing that Tarski did with truth. Now, that platitude, in a way reminded me of the Frank Jackson argument, the idea that if you'd never experienced color, then you couldn't, by reading scientific texts about color, ever come to have the experience of color. So you couldn't just read scientific texts about how the brain in relation to the world, processes color, all that stuff.

9:54 Dylan: Stuff. You couldn't have the experience of it.

9:56 Wes: Right. So you couldn't know color from that firsthand, in that firsthand experiential sense. But you could have lots of judgments, lots of true judgments about color, what color is and what's involved in people seeing color. But in this case, you can't just read books on criticism and understand fully what those critics are saying and adopt their reasons or be able to reject them. So direct acquaintance here is actually really important. So this no secondhand judgments criterion is actually a really important one that makes it quite distinct from other forms of judgment that we think have a claim on other people.

10:39 Mark: And the philosophical source for this is in Kant. But it's pre-Kant. In Hume, Hume and Smith we had talked about, we had a whole episode on how there were moral sense theorists. You know, not that we think you have an extra. There's touch and there's sight and there's also the moral sense that has its own special faculty, but it's kind of like that that we get the information, of course, through our basic five senses, or far fewer than that. But somehow through contemplating that, we come up with that restriction that you just gave. You know, it's not just like somebody else could tell us this.

We have to experience it firsthand hand. And then we have this sui generis sense of this is beautiful, or in the case of morality, this is good. And in both those cases, again, it's a sense that you're having individually, an experience you're having individually, but yet it reaches out, it makes claims toward the social world. So that you're saying other people will and should feel the same way that I do about that. And that, according to those guys, is the only thing that could possibly ground morality. Right? Because there's no such thing as sort of objective moral rules out in the world.

Well, in the same way, there's no such thing as objective. You know, you can't just say something in itself, apart from any human beings on earth, is beautiful, but yet if it triggers the sense, and you might not even be able to write down specific rules like, oh, beauty is always symmetry, or beauty is always blah, blah, you know, it is irreducibly the product of this particular human sense.

12:08 Wes: Sense.

12:09 Mark: That's at least Hume's view, which I think carries through Kant to Scruton.

12:13 Wes: I think this kind of lends itself to the idea that there's a contemplative component to beauty, which Scruton expounds on in various ways. So that when we appreciate beauty, it's not just a matter of sensory experience, or it's not like, for instance, being pleased by the sensory experience of taking a warm bath. It is something directed towards the mind and toward the. That involves contemplation and thinking. That's why Malebranche, for instance, in our last episode, wanted to put beauty in the intelligible realm and say it's like extension and matter and space. Intelligible extension. Beauty belongs there.

12:51 Mark: Would it make sense for us just to read through these platitudes and not just as a list, but let's read the first one. And what does he make of that and how does it relate to. Just spend some time with each one them of them. So beauty pleases us. This is kind of what he starts the whole book out with. Is beauty like Keats said, truth and beauty are one and the same. Not that they have to be identical, but it looks like, say, if you're considering Plato's description of the forms, that part of Plato, then truth and goodness and beauty, it's all one form.

13:21 Seth: Right.

13:21 Mark: It's the thing that we are inevitably turned toward. So that's a primary intuition behind our notions of beauty. That it is something that it just has inherent. This is also number three. Beauty is always a reason for attending to the thing that possesses it. Right. It pleases us, and it has its own magnetism. I mean, are those the same thing? I guess that one has a rational component.

13:46 Dylan: Yeah, but I mean, there are other reasons for attending a thing than beauty. So three, beauty is always a reason, meaning the. That you could be attending to something because it's beautiful, but it's not the only reason why you would attend to something. It could be painful.

14:02 Mark: Okay, I guess you're right. Attending versus seeking.

14:04 Dylan: Well, attending versus pleasing. So beauty pleases us. It's a pleasurable thing. And the inclination to attend to something is different than being pleased by it. That's the difference between one and three.

14:15 Mark: So I guess he doesn't just actually say beauty is always a reason for seeking the object because that's sort of as he peeks further into that Platonic image. Well, you get the other part of Plato's take on beauty, which is why he wants to dismiss all the artists from the city. That actually, in practical terms, it does pull apart from goodness and truth. And there are plenty of beautiful things that are downright immoral or just lies.

14:44 Dylan: And notice that three isn't. Beauty is always a reason for wanting to possess a thing that possesses beauty. You want to attend to it. You want to be around it. You want to. That's going to be the precursor to contemplating it.

14:57 Mark: So the second one in between those, one thing can be more beautiful than another seems obvious, but he makes a lot out of that to say, actually there are whole different realms of beauty. There are sort of the beauty of the sacred, the most beautiful, and then just like, oh, that's nice. And those lower forms of beauty, he thinks are really important and not to be shunned. They're like a vital part of our life on a daily.

15:21 Wes: So he'll want to talk, for instance, about this minimalist beauty. So the things just looking right. For instance, the way in which the aesthetic enters into everyday life. And it could be as simple as the way we set a dinner table. It could enter into the way we, you know, what a door looks like in the house. But I hadn't made this connection to the comparative aspect here because I know he'll talk about these sorts of different types of beauty, but I didn't know he was ordering them according to this scale. I just thought they were kind of different, incommensurable types in a way, or not incommensurable.

15:59 Mark: But the one annoying thing in his style here is that 50 pages later he'll just say, and this follows from my second platitude. And you'll have to be like, so it sounds like you did not flip back and find. And that's why I'm making the connection, because he makes that connection. It's not a creative move on my part.

16:14 Wes: Where does he make that?

16:16 Mark: In the everyday beauty section, he says, it follows from number two.

16:19 Seth: This platitude is very loaded. You know, the first one is intuitive and is a source of reflection. The second one, one thing can be more beautiful than another, invites you to immediately think about the types of things that you're comparing. Are you comparing two of the same kind of thing, or are you comparing a landscape and a painting, a landscape and a bust, a well ordered table?

16:43 Dylan: Does that matter for the platitude, though? What kind of distinction of more beautiful than.

16:48 Seth: I don't think it matters for the platitude. What I'm saying is I think the platitude invites you to explore that. So when you say one thing can be more beautiful than another, your immediate thought, I think, is to go to two things of the same kind. So you might say, this person is more beautiful than this other person person, or this dog is more beautiful than this other dog. But then if you start saying something like, well, this dog is more beautiful than this view from my deck, you're immediately like, I don't even know how to think about that. So that's what I'm saying is it just seems very loaded, but in an

17:23 Dylan: interesting way to me, that harkens to his conversation. That's related, that's part of the minimal beauty. But he breaks beauty into these. These two categories, which seems kind of strange, but I think is made more clear by what we're just talking about, that you have aesthetic success and extreme

17:41 Mark: aesthetic success, or enrapturing appeal is the

17:45 Dylan: term, uses the phrase aesthetic success over and over again and uses this phrase extreme aesthetic success as well. You do the comparison say, well, this sunset is more beautiful than my dog. I think you're sort of in that extreme, extreme aesthetic success kind of question where you have something that's sort of. You verge into the conversation of this is a kind of epitome of beauty in itself.

18:09 Wes: So I found the part that Mark is talking about on page 56 where he says the Idea of the sacred takes us to the upper end of the beauty scale. And it would be wise to come down a step or two and to remind ourselves of our second platitude that beauty is a matter of degree. And then he goes on basically to say that for the most part we're not going to be in this kind of urgent passion in relation to these things that are ultimately beautiful. But beautiful manifests itself in less splendid, less urgent ways in day to day life. So. Because I think we can think about this in two ways in light of that, you know, we can think about the different types of beauty in comparative relation to one another.

And I don't know if we can really compare landscapes and dogs. I don't know how that works exactly. But we could say, you know, the sacred beautiful is more beautiful than the beauty of a table setting or something like that. But then obviously there's just. There's more mundane comparisons between things that are clearly of the same type. You know, this is a more beautiful vase than that.

19:15 Seth: Just keep in mind that he frames this prior to his platitudes, talking about the true, the good and the beautiful beautiful. No thing can be more true than any other thing. There are no comparatives in truth. And what's odd about beauty is that if you think of it as the kind of thing similar to truth.

19:32 Wes: Yeah.

19:33 Seth: That it's comparative makes it weird and odd. I think that's the point.

19:38 Mark: Unless you're William James. And then everything is true and so far forth. And then something could be more true than another thing.

19:44 Seth: Yes.

19:45 Dylan: Which makes it a lot more sensible how truth becomes an aesthetic judgment.

19:49 Mark: Just since you say that, Seth. Because in that he's talking about truth and goodness and beauty. Well, goodness is clearly something that is comparative. So it's not that beauty is unique in there. It's just that truth is actually the odd man out.

20:01 Seth: If you're lumping the three of them together. Yes.

20:03 Wes: Well, he prepares us for the idea that truth and good, you can make an argument for them going together. But in this first chapter, in the first section, the idea is that. That beauty is different because beauty can be subversive. It can tempt us away from the truth, it can tempt us away from virtue. This is one of several puzzles that he's confronting us with. But it's not clear that those things can actually go together.

20:26 Mark: It's interesting that he doesn't have in the list something like beauty is multivalent. In other words, there could be apples and oranges, sunsets and dogs that you just can't. You could compare in terms of the amount of enthusiasm that you might have over them, but that there's no single scale of beauty that you can just put things on. And so he gets into this by making that distinct distinction Dylan was referring to, of like, well, you could call beauty just aesthetic success, or you could say there are different types of aesthetic success.

Beautiful is one of them. Let's call that the enrapturing appeal. What is really, really pretty, that's one kind of beauty. But there's also the sublime, right? He's very aware, of course, of Edmund Burke and everything he has to say about the sublime. And then I think he's pointing to these other things. Like, actually, the charming is not something, even though that's a word Kant uses of like, ah, the charming, that's just a bunch of trash. The beautiful is what you want. But no, Scruton has a lot of respect for the charming, the elegant, the precise.

There's a bunch of other ways that things could be beautiful. However, he doesn't want to go so far as Nelson Goodman that we read, who thinks that, like, oh, there are whole different languages, that different artists, or different attempts to make things beautiful, such that there's just no commensurability. Like, I feel like even though Scruton is making these distinctions between different kinds of beauty, they all can be put into a grid, into some kind of matrix, so that, you know, they're all a matter of rational contemplation, so that we understand that the enrapturing is a fundamentally better kind of beauty than the merely elegant, but that they both have their place.

22:02 Dylan: I'm not sure that he have to wait to get to the end, that he would make the judgment that. That the enrapturing is qualitatively more beautiful than the other. So I'll hold that off. But he starts exactly on this. I mean, the very first paragraph of the book is him. Basically, we discern beauty in concrete objects and abstract ideas, in works of nature and works of art, in things, animals and people and objects, qualities and actions. As the list expands to take in just about every ontological category, and I like this, there are beautiful propositions as well as beautiful worlds, beautiful proofs as well as beautiful snails, even beautiful diseases and beautiful deaths, it becomes obvious that we are not describing a property like shape, size, or color uncontroversially present to all who can find their way around the physical world.

For one thing, how could there be a single property exhibited by so many disparate Types of thing. I thought that was a great way to begin. And the fact that he would embrace all of those aspects of beauty, because I think that's very commensurate with certainly an everyday as well as a refined understanding of aesthetic experience.

23:11 Mark: Number five. I just want to. The judgment of taste is about the beautiful object, not about the subject state of mind. In describing an object as beautiful, I'm describing it, not me. So that was back to that. I don't know if that's sufficient in itself to proclaim it sounds literally, it is objective. In other words, it is in the object. I'm not talking about me.

23:31 Dylan: Did you skip 4 on purpose?

23:33 Mark: I did. Talking about the different types of beauty, it wouldn't be that hard to move to talking about different effects that it has on people. And even if you're talking about the object itself, maybe you could be talking about its disposition or its capacity to produce different effects on people. I was thinking about this because he mentions this Indian thinker that I had not heard of, Bharata B H A R A T a Bharata Muni. So I was looking up that. And this is an ancient Indian dramatist who he's writing about kind of like Aristotle's poetics, but he's writing specifically about the drama.

And here's, like, different tricks, different effects that they can use. So, like, there are a number of types of different rasas or tastes, literally juices, juice, juices that a play could, you know, dramatic effects that it could have. But that makes it sound like, again, we're dividing beauty into different things because we're not actually talking about the things at all. We're talking about human reactions. And that's how we would distinguish the different types of beauty. And that is exactly what Scruton wants to avoid with this platitude.

No, we're actually talking about the thing itself. I mean, what do you think about that? Is dispositions still talking about the thing, even though you're indirectly talking about. About people?

24:49 Seth: Well, I think he uses the term platitude. So he is saying, when I say something's beautiful, what I mean is that I'm talking about a property that belongs to the thing and not my experience of it in this moment. I think that's all this is meant to say, is that judgments of beauty purport to be about the object in question and not a mental state or an experience.

25:18 Dylan: And this one is, like, at the nub of one of the most interesting things about beauty. And also, to me, the one of the most interesting ways he talks about it is, yes, beauty is in the object itself. But what does it say? Beauty is the subject matter of a judgment.

25:35 Mark: Yeah, this is number four that I skipped. So it totally fits with number five.

25:39 Dylan: Yeah. And so. So when we talk about beauty, we're talking about something that involves a contemplative activity, an activity of the mind of a human being. So there's a way in which it's inextricable from our experience of it. That also goes to number six. Yet it's also the case that the judgment is about the object itself. So you get this wonderful mix of objectivity and subjectivity in thinking about this whole thing.

26:08 Seth: Thing.

26:09 Wes: We can be agnostic as to what it means for something to be in the object and what the object is. Right. This is Kantian framework. It's very easy for Kant to say beauty's in the object because he's a constructivist. We're putting everything in the object anyway. Spatiality we put into the object. So beauty is not such a terrible problem for that to be in the object as well. If we reject that constructivist point of view and we're naturalists and materialists, it gets a little trickier to say. A lot trickier, I think, how we might justify the claim that beauty is in the object.

Or we could just be straight up Platonists or rationalists like Malebranche and just say it's in that intelligible realm. So we get some mind independent truth maker for saying beauty is objective. So you can go all these different routes. And that's, as Seth was pointing out, it's a platitude. So. So it's meant to be agnostic with regard to all the different ways in which we might try to defend this. And maybe we wouldn't defend it. You know, the judgment of beauty purports to be about an object, but maybe it fails to do what it purports to do.

27:16 Mark: I mean, that extreme version of the constructivism, which I think gets to, you know, by the time of Sartre, is even like fearfulness. Fearfulness is in the object. But clearly fearfulness, even if you're a constructivist, the way that fearfulness is in an object seems like it's different from the way that color is within an object. Because presumably if you have, if you're not colorblind, if you're not jaundiced or whatever, the things that would, then you'll perceive color. At least we think in a uniform way to other people. That is one of those things that, again, it's subjective but yet universal.

You know, you have to see it with your own eyes, but you at least assume in making color attributions that they apply to everyone. But if you say something is fearful, it is unclear whether you really mean that. Are you really saying it is objectively fearful or are you saying in a roundabout way, I feel fear? Either now or I would expect to feel fear. I don't know. I feel like there is a distinction there. And that shows that this aesthetic sense, it's saying something interactional, it's not actually saying something just about the object, it's saying something dispositional about the object.

It is beautiful because it has the capacity, the tendency to arouse judgments that it is beautiful.

28:34 Wes: That would be the constructivist account, though, for any property. I mean, fear is different, but you'd be saying, look, our minds are constituted in such and such a way, such that if our minds are working properly, right. So if we can see if our, our occipital lobe is functioning properly, then certain stimuli are going to be taken to be spatial in certain ways. And so we can get inner subjectivity. We can get shared objective judgments about whether or not the Pythagorean theorem is true. And that's grounded in our shared cognitive capacities.

But talking about how it's true in itself, apart from human cognition, right. It's not something we can really do. It seems like it doesn't make sense. So we could do the same thing with beauty if we wanted. So we could say there are certain fundamental things built into cognition, such that certain things are beautiful and others aren't. But then we have to get to the. I mean, mark, as you were saying, we had to figure out, well, how does education work then? Some people's tastes are more educated than others. So we would have to have to talk about this in terms of.

If you had more mature, educated aesthetics capacities, this is how it would seem.

29:42 Mark: Yeah, which is exactly Hume's thing as well, that of course people disagree about aesthetics, even though there is an aesthetic sense. And people disagree about moral matters, even though we have essentially a moral sense. Because some people are not thinking right, they need to be educated properly.

30:00 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if all you know is, this probably would be offensive. But if all you know is pop music, right. And classical music is objectively more aesthetically, subjectively more beautiful, let's say, than pop music, for most people who haven't been educated to appreciate classical music, just they're not going to have that judgment. So you always have to have this criterion about. It's like the criterion of what the. In Stoicism or virtue ethics, about what the wise person would do, what the moral person would do, what the guru would do. Your standard is not just any old person. It's someone who has the requisite virtues or the requisite educations.

30:35 Mark: So.

30:36 Wes: Or it's been to expose to all the possibilities in a sufficient way. Right. So you could even argue if someone has been sufficiently exposed to classical music and educated properly in it, then there's no way they could just choose. I'm not endorsing this, by the way, but there's no way they could choose pop music over that.

30:52 Mark: I think that is Scruton's position. That is definitely in listening to the intro to one of his books about music is he's like, I start teaching this and students are just. Just by default, relativists about tastes. And it's only sort of as they learn, as I show them. Like, classical music involves a kind of capacities for interacting with it on a sort of more conversational basis than pop music does. There's just. There's more meat on the bone, and that's sort of what makes it objectively better. It's not that you have necessarily more intense experiences when you're encountering it.

It's just that beauty is not just about sort of an immediate, like, how warm is the warm bath. When I added bubbles to the warm bath, that makes it even more tingly because it involves a contemplative aspect, an aspect of our rationality. There's just more ways that we can interact with beautiful things than just that.

31:47 Wes: Yeah, children's books can be quite pleasing, maybe just as pleasing as a complicated novel level. But one of those options is going to invite far more of our rational, contemplative, or however you want to put it, engagement than the other.

32:03 Dylan: There are analogies with just taste in terms of the consuming of food as well. It has to do with how you weigh sophistication and richness as being a metric of ordering. So something that is. We're talking about beautiful or. Or its flavor. The more sophistication, the more engagement you have to have with it. I think it's probably right to say that it's more of that thing. Maybe I have to think about that a little bit more.

32:32 Wes: It's at least very defensible position, let's put it that way.

32:36 Mark: One of the things that made this make a little more sense to me is this distinction between when we like something aesthetically, when we find it beautiful. It's not just that we're attributing the quality to the object, but we're saying, saying I'm interested in this object. I'm not interested in what benefits it brings me. Like I derive pleasure from seeing the beautiful, but my interest in the beautiful object is not in my own pleasure. Because then you could just, well, maybe something else would give you more pleasure. No, I'm interested in that object.

33:06 Seth: There's two aspects to that. One is I'm interested in the object and not in my own pleasure, so to speak. But there's also the fact that I'm interested in that, that object in its particularity, it's double edged. It's about that specific thing, that particular. Not the class, not the type, not the genus, not the species. And it's about, as you said, mark, the object itself and not my specific pleasure in it.

33:33 Wes: Yeah, he comes up with that criterion. This is one of a number of criteria that he's going to develop as a response to the paradox section. Right. Where he says that items, platitudes 1 to 3 apply to what's attractive and enjoyable as well, but not really so much, and also six, but not five. Right. So the judgment. When I talk about things being enjoyable, I'm not about the object. Now we have to get into criteria that will help us distinguish things that are simply pleasurable from things that are beautiful. And this is where among a number of other criteria, this idea that we are focused on the individual ritual comes up.

34:11 Dylan: It's beauty is in that object and beauty is in that object.

34:18 Wes: His example is like if you. I forget what fruit he uses. We were always using apple or I was, but was it peach?

34:25 Seth: Peach.

34:25 Wes: You know, if there's a peach in front of you and what you desire to do with it is to eat it, then any peach of equal quality will do. It's not that particular peach that you are interested in. You just want a peach. But if you're interested in the peach aesthetically or if it's a girl named peach, or if it's a piece that's written by Mozart called peach, if it's a particular piece of music, then it doesn't become substitutable in the same way. It's not just something that's a means to some sort of pleasurable end and it's not like any other thing can just fit into that.

35:02 Mark: If I'm interested in the song Peaches by the President of the United States of America and you play me the song Peaches by Justin Bieber. It will not do.

35:10 Wes: Is that what happens?

35:11 Seth: I just. I was doing the exact same thing. I just pasted the link to the President of the United States version in the chat. Going to the country, going to eat

35:21 Wes: me a lot of peaches. Okay. There was an extra layer of irony, which is that you got the one that you didn't want when you searched

35:27 Dylan: for

35:30 Seth: Mark got peach.

35:30 Dylan: Rolled peaches. Factor into a nice John Prine song

35:34 Seth: as well, I'm sure. Oh, John Prine. Yet another one we lost.

35:39 Mark: I wonder about the accuracy of. Yes. He says, okay, if I'm listening to a particular Mozart suite or whatever, and you just come in and you rip it off and you put on a Haydn one that's equally beautiful, I'll say, hey, hey, that's not the same thing. But I do feel like, as a music addict, that what I'm after is the high. You know, it's like a drug that, you know, when I hear a new album or, you know, a new symphony or whatever, I'll sound elevated by saying symphony. But I don't really listen to too many symphonies. Then, yeah, you know, there's a certain.

Like, the third or fourth time you hear it. Like, that's when it really hits the spot. But then you keep playing it, and it might get old and stale, and so you want something else that will fill that spot and make you feel like you felt, you know, when you heard that other thing the first time or the third time or the fourth time, whatever it is.

36:31 Seth: So that's really interesting, Mark, what you've just done. You just said, when I'm appreciating something aesthetically for its beauty, I'm interested in my experience, not the thing itself. And you're basically in contradiction. But remember that what he's talking about here is about judgment. He's not talking about the subjective experience. He's saying, when you judge something to be beautiful, when you say that it's beautiful, you're not saying, I am having a wonderful experience of this. What you're saying is this thing has a property that you should recognize as well.

So just be careful not to conflate. I'm not saying that there's no validity to the subjective experience. And in fact, fact, I think it's an interesting question whether you could say that searching for a particular subjective experience in. When confronted by beauty, whatever it might be, I have a similar subjective experience in front of art that moves me in a certain way. It could be a Cy Twombly, it could be a Basquiat. It could be, you know, a Monet. That my subjective experience is, is my own thing, which is differentiated from my judgment that this thing is beautiful.

Because when I'm experiencing something myself, I'm not making a claim on anybody else's experience. But when I say something's beautiful, what I am saying is Wes pointed this out at the beginning of the podcast, is that I'm making a claim that if I find it beautiful, you as a rational person who's appropriately educated and whatever, should find this beautiful as well. Which is a different sort of thing than saying, I'm having this experience right now.

38:16 Dylan: But importantly, that claim also does not necessarily translate into you ought to have the same pleasurable experience. There is this aspect of things that you would acknowledge are really beautiful that are, because of the contemplative effort required with it, you may not be up for it. There might just be too much work.

38:41 Seth: Wagner.

38:42 Wes: Yeah, for me, this is an experience

38:44 Dylan: of I have a list of movies that I really want to watch, but when I think about watching them, it's just too much effort to engage with them. And so I go watch the Bourne Identity again.

38:56 Wes: Yeah, I think that speaks to the different amount of charm, what Kant would call charm, that's in those things, right? So pure aesthetics versus plot and suspense and wish fulfillment, fantasy gratification. But I was just thinking, with respect to the whole, trying to get at this, what I think is a difficult idea to understand, that we could be focused on the individual, right? And not just on a kind of generic experience. I was thinking when I go to my shelf with all those music CDs or no LPs, right? This non existent shelf, because it's long gone, it's all on Spotify.

Now back in the day, if I were picking a CD from a shelf and there was the White Album right next to Wish youh Were Here, and I got to make a choice, right? And I picked those two albums because I know we all agree that they are the exactly equivalent pleasure value, right? You get the exact same amount of pleasure, pleasure from either of them. We have to make a choice. And you might say, well, sometimes I'm in the mood for that, sometimes I'm in the mood for the other. Maybe the argument would be, but that's just one way of saying that despite the fact that in my case, I love those albums so much that there's no way to say which one I love more and why do I make the choice I make at any particular given moment, it has something to do with the qualitative distinction between those two types of music, and you could call that mood, but what that reflects is that the distinction might not be about pleasure per se, but about the particularity of the thing, the particular form of the thing, and my interest in that particular form.

I don't know if that works or not, but that's one way of trying to get at it.

40:38 Dylan: The first platitude is beauty pleases us. Beauty isn't the only thing that pleases us. So there may be among the things that please us, that we may make choices because of things that please us. It's not always going to be that beauty is the criteria.

40:54 Seth: True. And there's no platitude in here. But have you had the experience of beauty pleasing but also paining you? Have you had the experience of seeing something so beautiful that it just. It actually made you hurt?

41:07 Mark: Yeah, I think Scruton acknowledges that. I think that there are some things that can be too beautiful sort of for the situation. That's what it comes down to. The different types of beauty. That there are the minimalist beauties that, like. He talks about that in terms of architecture, that if there are beautiful Gothic cathedrals or whatever, but if every building is a beautiful Gothic cathedral, then, like, that would just be crazy. That'd be too much.

41:31 Seth: So what you're talking about is, he's talking about place and comparative. That a thing that is unique in its context. Like the cathedral that sits alongside the. These simple dwellings, you know, or the cathedral that's got office buildings next to it. Right. There's something comparative about the experience of it. What I'm talking about is, have you had the experience of seeing something or experiencing something so beautiful that you felt physically pained? Like emotionally like pained?

42:02 Wes: You mentioned Wagner. What about the end of Tristan und Isolde, where it's enough to make a grown man cry himself to sleep after listening to that? Exquisitely beautiful, but sad.

42:16 Mark: That's a different way of interpreting pleasure. You still say that whole experience was pleasurable in the sense of wonderful and fulfilling, but not necessarily that it made you feel the actual physical sensation of pleasure.

42:29 Wes: But it is pleasurable. It's almost too pleasurable, one too painful at the same time. I don't know. That's my experience. It's hard to explain. You know, there's a lot we could read about. For instance, why is tragedy pleasurable? Why would we ever be pleased by watching a bunch of bad things happen to people? And there's a lot of interesting theories about that. So. So it's Been addressed. And I think we could do an episode one day on that stuff. I'm thinking of some psychoanalytic aesthetics as well, and stuff that's kind of in line with. With.

There's one theory, for instance, to take seriously the idea that beauty and interest are kind of at cross purposes with each other, so that the more beautiful something is, the less interesting and the more evocative of death it is. And that kind of gets at, you know, do I want to go to the superhero movie tonight or do I want to go to a Lars von Trier, you know, marathon? Marathon. And I'm like, fuck that. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. Is it better? Maybe not him specifically, but is this great artist filmmaker, is that aesthetically superior? You're goddamn right it is.

Am I going to put myself through that tonight? No, because it's going to bore me. I want the charm. I want the interest part. So beauty, like the Schopenhauerian idea that beauty gets you out of desire and gets you out of will, that brings you more towards death and being in a deathlike state, which is kind of like that contemplative state. And often we don't want to be in that contemplative state state. Want to be more alive and passionate.

43:56 Mark: Yeah. So in our second half here, we'll have to talk more about these different. The beauty of the sacred versus the beauty of the sexual. That next to Kant, the Symposium seems to be the thing that he most has on his mind. That beauty, as we've said for Plato, can be the thing that is like goodness and truth, that is magnetic, but it can also be something that is base and can undermine those things. And. And so he tells that story together, since you mentioned, you know, the psychoanalytic stuff in a way that I thought would make you happy, Wes, that he talks about it being a rescue.

Humanity is a kind of extended rescue operation in which drives and needs are lifted from the realm of transferable appetites and focused in another way so as to target free individuals singled out and appreciated as ends in themselves. So it's like we are with sex or whatever, using people like a peach, you know, I just. Hungry for that peach. But what love actually does, or what appreciation of erotic beauty, erotic interest does, is sublimation channels it into the. The higher thing that Plato ends up approving of in the Symposium. That the Symposium is just all this story about how there's erotic desire with him and Alcibiades.

But then the way that that is supposed to transform is into this just loving teacher, student relationship where you're both oriented toward the good and producing things creatively out of that passion.

45:22 Wes: What he's going to do is he's going to take these, some of these things he's talked about in the first section and apply that to solving the problem of how beauty is related to sexual desire, right? So this idea that we could be focused on the individual, for instance, but also it's not just wanting the individual, it's being able to treat the individual, to want them as an end in themselves and also to be focused on the individual in a way that's not purely sensory. Again, it's a contemplative relationship. It's a relationship to the way the object is presented.

It's not the warm bath phenomenon. So you can take all that stuff. What he does is takes all that stuff and applies it in the second chapter to tell you how we could be aroused to sexual interest in another person and by the way they look physically, for instance. But there's still something else going on where what we really are related to is their subjectivity as a person.

46:18 Seth: Right?

46:18 Wes: We're not just completely objectifying them and using them.

46:21 Mark: So I think the platitudes that we've gone over, this overview of his views should be sufficient to get people to our next episode. 288 also on this book. However, if you want to hear the second half of this discussion, we will go more into the everyday beauty, into the sixth, evolutionary psychology and more. That's going to be the next thing in your feed. If you are supporting us just through Apple, you're not going to see that till next week. Thanks.