the fifth platitude

This essay was originally written in graduate school as an assignment for Dr. Christopher Miller’s Conviviality course at Judson University.

In the first chapter of Beauty, Roger Scruton introduces a set of six platitudes (Scruton, Roger. Beauty, (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 5-6) to help define the subject of beauty and provide a standard to test future theories against. These platitudes, however, create a paradox concerning the judgement of beauty. The first three platitudes are about beauty itself. The fourth platitude introduces the judgement of beauty, which Scruton also refers to as taste. Then, the last two platitudes (five and six) describe the judgement of beauty. It is these last two platitudes that set up the paradox. In platitude five, we learn that when we are describing an object as beautiful, we are describing it and not ourselves. In platitude six however, we learn that there is no way to argue another person into a judgement of beauty that they have not made for themselves. This may not appear contradictory on the surface, but the implications of the sixth platitude cause problems for the fifth. If we accept that there are no “second-hand” judgements of beauty, and that one cannot become an expert in beauty without experiencing and judging beauty for one’s self, then we realize that there must be more to making a judgement about beauty than reason. In fact, according to platitude six, someone must experience beauty for themselves in order to render a legitimate judgment. This means that someone else’s experience of beauty is not enough to inform my own judgment of beauty. But what is the difference between my experience of an object and someone else’s experience of that same object? It is not the object that has changed, it is the subject, or the one having the experience. This creates a problem when we accept the fifth platitude, which clearly states that the judgement of beauty is not a description of the subject’s state of mind. If the description of beauty is purely objective (as the fifth platitude asserts), then it would follow that I need not have my own experience of the beautiful object in order to render a judgement, since my own judgement of the object would in turn be only about that object, and not my state of mind, or experience of it. In this essay, I will argue that the paradox between the fifth and the sixth platitudes can be worked out by accepting the sixth and modifying the fifth to be more accurate about human judgements. In modifying the fifth platitude, I will propose that,

The judgement of taste is about the beautiful object and about the subject’s state of mind. In describing an object as beautiful, I am describing it and me.

Scruton discusses this paradox (Scruton, 7-9) by comparing enjoyment to beauty. He observes that if we haven’t experienced something that others enjoyed, we say that it “seems to be enjoyable” or that it is “apparently enjoyable.” He notices that these judgements focus on the state of the subject’s mind rather than the object. He then distinguishes this from the judgment of beauty. When judging beauty, according to Scruton, we are actually making a statement about the object, we are arguing about an objective reality outside of us which usually involves some sort of rationale. This is very interesting because even though our judgments of beauty are distinct from our judgments of something like enjoyment, they both share the similarity of only being first hand opinions. At this point, Scruton brings this similarity up when he reiterates,

“The judgement of taste is a genuine judgement, one that is supported by reasons. But these reasons can never amount to a deductive argument. If they could do so, then there could be second-hand opinions about beauty. There could be experts on beauty who had never experienced the things they describe, and rules for producing beauty which could be applied by someone who had no aesthetic tastes.” (Scruton, 8)

An important distinction that Scruton makes here is that even though a judgement of taste is supported by reasons, those reasons alone can never amount to a deductive argument that could convince someone who had not first-hand experience. In other words, I can never convince someone that something is beautiful with a reasoned argument. I can only support my own judgement of beauty with reasons. In order to persuade someone else, there is an element that cannot be deduced. Scruton picks this thread up later when talking about being persuaded to like Brahms (Scruton, 136). He concludes that it was not an argument that persuaded him to like Brahms, but a series of internal changes as he listened to the music that allowed Brahms to “work on him” after a while. He also clarifies this point by stating that his change of mind to liking Brahms was not the same kind of “change of mind” as a belief or moral issue. By this, he means that his mind has not been changed by objective means (through argument), rather, his mind has been changed by what he calls “emotional infection” (or through an experience of Brahms again). Shortly after this passage Scruton makes it clear that what he has just argued for is that aesthetic judgement is bound up with the experience of the one who makes it (Scruton, 140). Compare this to the fifth platitude, which states that “In describing an object as beautiful, I am describing it, not me.” (Scruton, 6) These two assertions cannot both be true, because if we accept that the judgement of aesthetics is bound up with the experience of the one who makes it, then we cannot also accept that the judgement only describes the object and not the subject. Of course, the primary purpose of making such a judgement is to describe the object, but in describing the object we are also simultaneously describing something about ourselves. Namely, that there is something about us in particular that derives pleasure from contemplating on this object. In other words, whenever someone describes something as beautiful, they are also describing their own taste. This is because in order to assert that an object is beautiful, a person must be able to experience it as beautiful for them self, which requires their own particular judgement of taste. To say that such a judgment based on experience is only about the object and not about the person is to remove the person from their own experience.

            This leads us to reexamine the fifth platitude, since it is actually the only platitude which causes problems for the others. Scruton’s discussion of the “enjoyable” and how it is different from the “beautiful” only led to a reiteration of the paradox because he asserted that the judgement of whether something was enjoyable has to do with the state of the person’s mind and not the object. This is actually only partly the case, because even when someone is emphasizing how they felt while having an experience, they are still telling us about the object of their experience. How could such an experience happen had there not been an object for the subject to experience? But this categorization of the judgement of enjoyment as purely subjective is just what causes the paradox with the judgement of beauty. Scruton assumes that because we emphasize how we feel when we talk about enjoyment, it is a purely subjective judgement. For the same reason, he assumes that because we emphasize a quality about the object when making a judgement of beauty, we are making a purely objective description. But the emphasis of our descriptions do not take away the fact that we are describing an experience, and an experience cannot occur without both a subject and an object. For this reason, the fifth platitude is only partially true. The judgement of taste (not beauty itself) cannot be removed from the subjective realm. Scruton acknowledges this with a reference to Kant (Scruton, 32). Kant says that the judgement of beauty is both universal and subjective. In other words, all humans make judgments about beauty, but these judgements are all based in the experience of beauty, which is necessarily subjective (since we must have both object and subject for an experience to occur).

My case for the modification of the fifth platitude then, is this. If we accept that:

1:         The Judgement of Beauty is necessarily based on Experience.

2:         Experience requires both a Subject and an Object to occur.

3:         The Judgement of Beauty, then, is based on both the Subject and the Object.

4:         In describing an Object as Beautiful, I am describing my Experience of it as Beautiful.

5:         In describing an Experience of Beauty, I am describing both the Subject and the Object.

Therefore, the fifth platitude may be rendered as:

The judgement of taste is about the beautiful object and about the subject’s state of mind. In describing an object as beautiful, I am describing it and me.

As a clarification, I am not saying that beauty does not reside within the object. I am simply asserting that in order for the judgement of beauty to occur, there must be an experience of beauty first hand. In experiencing the object first hand, there is necessarily both an object and a subject. It follows then that any description of an experience of beauty must describe both the subject’s state of mind and the object.

painting the inner life

Traditionally, painting has been a representational art form. Since the renaissance, the search for new and better techniques for representing objects has culminated in the photograph. Shortly after the photograph became a widely used technology, painters began to focus less on realistic representation. Abstract painting can be interpreted as a rejection of tradition, as a rejection of limiting the art of painting to representation. Abstract art is no longer art for the sake of the subject matter, it is “art for art’s sake!”

Throughout most of my college years, I thought of modern art with this lens. However, I had a paradigm shift after reading Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky does much more than comment on aesthetics, style, and history. He describes a totally different worldview and the vocation of the artist within it. Concerning the Spiritual in Art discusses many profound ideas about the role of the artist, the purpose of art, and effect of color on the human spirit. One of the more subtle concepts that Kandinsky introduces in this book is the idea that material things are not just material, and therefore, painting is and never has been about representing only the material things. But before he gets into this idea, he recounts the state of affairs that the world of painting was in around the turn of the century. He writes,

“The wild battle for success becomes more and more material. Small groups who have fought their way to the top of the chaotic world of art and picture-making entrench themselves in the territory they have won. The public, left far behind, looks on bewildered, loses interest and turns away.”

This is the way that Kandinsky, a hero of the modernist movement, viewed the modern art phenomenon. He reinforced the idea that as each trend came and went, art became more and more material. Painting was less about the “what,” and more about the “how.” What you were painting didn’t really matter, it was how you painted it, and the “how” kept changing as trends continued to leave people wanting more novelty. Kandinsky observes that this kind of art culture left the public behind, and so modern art became siloed in its own echo-chamber. It became art for art’s sake. Now Kandinsky asks the question that every modernist painter is wondering. Where do we go from here? How should we paint? His answer is not an easy one,

“If the emotional power of the artist can overwhelm the "how?" and can give free scope to his finer feelings, then art is on the crest of the road by which she will not fail later on to find the "what" she has lost, the "what" which will show the way to the spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life. This "what?" will no longer be the material, objective "what" of the former period, but the internal truth of art, the soul without which the body (i.e. the "how") can never be healthy, whether in an individual or in a whole people.”

Kandinsky argues that the style of painting, or the “how” is not what matters. It is the artist’s emotional connection to what is being created that is most important. According to Kandinsky, when the subject of the painting is no longer just material, art can be revitalized and reborn. The “spiritual food” he speaks about is the new painting which represents the soul of what is being depicted, not just its body.

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty, comments,

“The mouth that speaks, the eyes that gaze, the skin that blushes, all are signs of freedom, character, and judgement, and all give concrete expression to the uniqueness of the self within. The great portraitist will ensure that these high-points of bodily expression reveal not just the momentary thoughts but the long-term intentions, the moral stance and the self-conception of the individual who shines in them.”

Traditionally, the primary focus of a great painter was not to represent the material world accurately, it was to represent the soul accurately. Roger Scruton, a classicist writing in the twenty-first century, can agree with Kandinsky on this point of spiritual focus. But Kandinsky takes the idea farther still. In commenting on Cezanne’s work, Kandinsky says,

“Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything.”

Kandinsky’s conception of the word “soul” is clearly broader and more amorphous than the traditional anthropocentric understanding. He uses the phrase “inner life” to describe what Cezanne saw in a teacup, not what he made out of a teacup. Kandinsky is making a point about representation. It is not that Cezanne has chosen to sacrifice representation for imagination or artistic expression. It is that Cezanne can “see” more than other painters, and can therefore represent more than other painters. This is why Kandinsky considers him remarkable.

For Kandinsky, modernist painting was not a search for new techniques, new forms, or new styles of representation. It was a re-focusing on what was essential for all art in all time periods. Through different means, methods, and styles great painters throughout history have chosen to represent the inner life first. The outer appearance was a vehicle to serve this primary purpose. Wassily Kandinsky was one of the first abstract painters. His work is full of pulsating colors, lines, and dynamic mark-making of all shapes and sizes. The reason for his abstraction was not to escape from the represented subject, but to shift the subject from people and objects to feelings and ideas themselves. Instead of painting the inner life of a person place or thing, Kandinsky attempted to represent the “things” of the inner life. Painting is a timeless art because it has always been about illuminating and therefore valuing the inner life. Although Kandinsky’s work appears to be a rejection of tradition, I don’t believe that he intended it to be that way. I think, like other modernists at the time, Kandinsky was rejecting the calcification and stagnation of traditional painting, not the tradition itself. When the arts become absorbed in materialism, it is difficult to see a way forward that can restore a healthy culture of art and inspire the creativity of the next generation. According to Kandinsky, only by returning the soul of painting back to its body can the tradition of painting find its true purpose.

the nature of building

As designers, we are tasked with planning out how physical objects will be made. The word design is similar in its meaning to the word plan, and although we may have new associations for it, designers are essentially planners. The title of designer, then, stands in contrast to the older title of artist because an artist plans and makes the objects. The transformation of the artist (or artisan, craftsman, etc.) into the designer has been described by many as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The dramatic opportunities industrialization created for the economies of the world meant that a large volume of objects could be produced more efficiently if the tasks involved in production were divided up.

In principle this makes sense, and there is nothing unnatural about this transition from artists to designers and laborers. However, in the process of transitioning from traditional to modern economies, the expertise gained by the artist in creating objects has not been retained by the designer learning in a school or working in an office. This is unfortunate because, by definition, the designer or planner must be able tell the laborer what to do. How can our designers wisely guide our laborers in the construction of objects if our designers have never constructed a single object? Of course, the unique expertise of the designer is the task of producing plans and getting these plans to be sold and used. But this does not excuse the designer from the duty to lead the laborer well, and how can any designer, even the most talented, lead laborers without the fundamental wisdom and experience gained through construction?

In The Artless Word, Fritz Neumeyer describes Ludwig von Mies Van Der Rohe’s emphatic position on the trades,

“Mies believed that those who still recommend handicraft methods in the twentieth century in the assumption that they possess an innate ethical value have ‘no inkling of the interrelationships of the new time. Even handicrafts are only a work method and a form of economics, nothing more… But it is never the work method but the work itself that has value.”

And, indeed, Mies Van Der Rohe’s work had great value. But Mies himself was not trained as a designer, he was trained as a mason under his father who was a master mason. A talented architect, Mies thought differently than many of the other avant-garde designers of his day. He commonly used the phrase “the nature of building.”

“Never have the building trades been more talked about than today, and never has one been further removed from understanding the nature of building. For this reason the question as to the nature of the building art is today of decisive importance. For only when it has been clearly understood can the struggle for the principles of a new building art be conducted purposefully and effectively.” (Mies Van Der Rohe, 1924)

The arts in our society are left in an unideal situation. In a traditional society, an artist of great renown and talent would never experience a lack of fundamental wisdom with regard to construction, but most designers in our modern societies have not mastered any craft, let alone worked as a laborer for any significant portion of their lives. Because of this, we see a lack of care for construction in our designers, and lack of care for design in our laborers. The two are divorced. This is the case in almost every “design” field where designers and laborers are significantly removed from each other. The task of the artist, thusly divorced into designer and laborer, will rarely produce objects of quality. After all, I would ask Mies, how can either the planner or the laborer alone and separate really know what “the nature of building” is?

Why did we end up in this situation? Was it because of technology? The Industrial Revolution? Capitalism? Materialism?

In reality, the reason has to do more with the way we value art as a society. Ultimately, objects can only be produced if there are consumers to sell them to. If the producers begin to lower the quality of their product to make the product more affordable, then they expand their market into larger and larger portions of society. What is the significance of this? Unfortunately, most people (in any society) do not appreciate the amount of work and thought that goes into making a quality product. At least, they do not appreciate it enough to make a difference in their purchasing decisions. Most people can (to a certain extent) see the difference between quality and mediocrity, but they do not value quality more than mediocrity given the price point that mediocrity can achieve.

Therefore, we can say that most people’s valuation (or lack thereof) of quality art is the reason why we are in this situation. By most people, I mean the consumers and the producers, the students and the educators, the employees and the employers alike. Also, this is not necessarily a class issue. “Most people” means the aggregate, across all strata of society. So really, industrialization has only revealed the underlying reality of our culture’s current ability to appreciate art.

Under the less efficient system of the traditional crafts, even great artists had to start as humble workers doing manual labor. This meant that all artists, both great and humble, had an appreciation for construction technique and good craftwork. They had a wisdom produced by dealing with the materials they worked with. Being in close contact with the physical attributes of materials means learning how they are best handled, how they are properly joined, and how they will weather with age. Also, most craft traditions instill a sense of aesthetic taste. Style in traditional societies is not the result of the individual’s whim, it originates as a natural correspondence between the necessities of a culture and the physical limitations of the raw material they have available. All of these factors make traditionally crafted objects well-made, useful, durable, and formed out of practical necessity according to the nature of their function. The traditional approach to form-giving is methodical, precedent oriented, and slow to change. Since change happens at a much slower rate, objects and the forms they are given by craftspeople exhibit a much more gradual, evolutionary development.

Refinement and beauty can only occur after years of resolving practical considerations and harmonizing all of the demands placed on the object by humanity and the laws of nature alike.

Regardless of the economic system, the tradition, or the production method, those years of discovery and adjustment must be put in for anything like truly great work to be made.

Maybe this is the nature of building.

If we use the term “building” liberally, “the nature of building” can apply to a shoe, a chair, a poster, a mural, a coat, a car, a tea kettle, a house, or even a space ship. With each object, there are unique conditions, limitations, and necessary functions. The extent to which we understand these factors will be the extent to which our work is worthy of the term “art.”