A Larger Sense of Beauty

GrahamHarman
More than a century ago, George Santayana published The Sense of Beauty, one
of a tiny handful of philosophical books on the arts worth multiple rereadings.
In comparison with such topics as logic, metaphysics, politics, and the theory of
knowledge, philosophical discussion of beauty has been confined to a minor
role. Scattered classic books on the subject have appeared from the pens of
great thinkers, but one still gets the sense that aesthetics is an underdeveloped
field like a young nation made up of isolated frontier towns rather than great
cities.
This fact ought to shock us more than it does. As Santayana himself observes,
beauty plays an almost overwhelming role in everyday life. In our choice of
clothing, homes, vacation sites, and mates, in our strong preference for certain
kinds of pets or specific foreign languages, and in our near-physical disgust at
annoying voices and hated styles of music, aesthetic considerations play a
pivotal role. Animals detect the slightest variations in patterns of color and
sounds, and even lifeless stars and crystals display a kind of aesthetic
structure. According to Santayana, philosophers have ignored beauty mostly
because aesthetic standards seem at first to be so personal and arbitrary.
Mathematical theorems are true for everyone, but to rank Picasso as greater or
worse than another painter strikes many people as no less pointless than
debating whether peppermint or chocolate is a superior flavor. Yet
disagreement of opinion is not enough reason to place all beauty in the eye of
the beholder. To be dazzled by a sunflower or ruby is not to live inside my own
self-obsessed daydreams, but means instead that I reach out and grasp
something in the things themselves, even if other humans do not follow me.
This is why Santayana defines beauty as pleasure objectified, for it is pleasure
seen as a quality belonging to an object, not just a bodily pleasure felt in my
tongue, ear, or some other organ.
Already, we have found in Santayana two basic principles for developing a
larger sense of beauty. First, beauty is not one limited neighborhood of reality,
one tiny theater district or concert hall of the world, meant to entertain us after
the days serious work is finished. Instead, beauty penetrates every square inch
of reality; the world as a whole has an aesthetic structure. Second, the sense of
beauty is not just a random personal taste projected onto a boring objective

world of chemicals and neutrons. Although we humans may disagree about

whether a canvas by Jackson Pollock is beautiful or not, this debate happens
not because we are miserable isolated egos unable to communicate. There is no
reason to be so cynical. Instead, we disagree about beauty because we live
outside our private minds, agreeing and disagreeing about the objects that
surround us all.
Furthermore, it is not true that all aesthetic opinions are equal. The artistic
judgments of Clement Greenberg are clearly not those of a three-year-old
child. And though it may be impossible to verify which critics are right, and
though critics throughout history have sometimes overlooked masterpieces and
overvalued absolute junk, and though standards of taste change greatly as the
centuries unfold, this only shows how difficult it is for the human mind to
pierce the swirling mists of the world. It is quite possible that one object is
absolutely more beautiful than another, just as one object is hotter or colder
than another, even if temperature is easier to measure objectively. Our inability
to agree on the most beautiful object does not mean that there is none.
Next, it should be admitted that art and beauty do not entirely overlap. The
common-sense view, like the classical view, is that artists are concerned with
creating beauty and scientists are occupied with detecting reality. But as the
philosopher Slavoj Zizek recently noted, there has been a reversal of roles
between artists and scientists. It is now scientists rather than artists who praise
the world for being elegant and beautiful. The new superstring physics is
often praised for its mathematical loveliness no less than its possible truth, and
when Crick and Watson found their model for the structure of DNA, they
decided that it was too beautiful not to exist. But where are the avant garde
artists these days in discussions of aesthetics? The search for beauty and
elegance would strike many of them as laughably nave. It is now the artists
who give us the contact with brute reality, which used to be the domain of
science. Real artists no longer focus on creating pretty objects: instead, they
throw dissected cows into vats of chemicals, or spit from windows onto random
pedestrians, or make films of clowns using the toilet. There may be artistic
merit in some of these gestures, but my concern here is with beauty in all
domains, not with the arts in their various pleasing and displeasing forms.
While Santayana was surely right to complain that philosophers have not done
justice to the important status of beauty in human life, he should have pushed
his complaint even further. One recent fashion in French philosophy holds that
all philosophy should be based on ethics. My own view, by contrast, is that all

philosophy should be grounded in aesthetics: not because there is no truth and

we have to shape our truthless lives like a personal artwork, but rather because
beauty stretches far beyond the human mind, and inhabits even the causal
relations between stars, trees, and water. It is possible to explain this view
clearly and briefly.
The English word object usually refers to lifeless bulks made of such materials
as wood or stone. Lets redefine the word here to refer to anything that exists:
not just atoms and hammers, but also universities, armies, wishes, numbers,
diamonds, rivers, and moons. Anything that exists can be called an object.
While there are many different types and families of objects, all of them must
share two basic features. First, every object is unified as somehow a single
object, or we would never give it a name. An army contains many weapons,
many soldiers, and the many body parts of each of the soldiers, yet historians
still speak of the actions of a single army led by Caesar or Saladin. For the
purposes of military history, the countless tiny parts of the army are irrelevant,
and it can be treated as a unified whole. Second, every object must have
specific features not shared by all the others, or else all objects would be the
same. To cite a trivial example, a list of the features and qualities of coffee is
very different from the same list for airplanes or dogs. This may seem absurdly
obvious, but our goal here is to shed strange new light on the obvious, which is
the only thing worth doing in philosophy. To repeat the point, every object is
unified as one object, and every object also has thousands or billions of
qualities, if not infinitely many.
In 1970, the philosopher Saul Kripke reminded us that the name of a thing goes
far beyond any list we can make of its qualities. There is no way to define a
person such as Churchill or his enemy Gandhi. We can write everything we
know about each of them on a piece of paper, write books about them
stretching to tens of thousands of pages, even millions of pages, and still we
will never exhaust the reality of these two men. There will always be something
more to say that is left out of our description. Some of our information may
even turn out to be false, but this is not important. The names of Churchill and
Gandhi are not abbreviations for detailed lists of qualities, as though the names
changed their meaning every time we learned new information about these
people. Instead, names are like fingers pointing rigidly at stable individual
people who are never completely understood, no matter how much information
we amass about them. A person always hides behind his or her properties,
forever capable of surprising us. The same is true not just for people, but also
for animals, plants, buildings, candles, sound waves, and atoms. Although

objects can only be experienced through their qualities, in some way they must
always exceed or hide behind these qualities. This apparently simple idea has
surprisingly deep implications.
Now, what is most typical of everyday life is that we usually confuse a thing
with its qualities. The philosophers Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger both
claimed that we do this because we tend to reduce things to their usefulness
for us. Individual grains of salt are unimportant as long as they usefully give
our food the desired salty taste. We do not usually care about the inner soul of
a bureaucrat or teacher, as long as they give us what we expect. Science has no
interest in the secret internal life of a specific star, but simply measures all its
known properties and lists them in a table comparing it with other stars. The
womanizer moves from one woman to the next, each of them equally capable
of serving his needs. The common link in all these cases is that objects are
stripped of their individual reality, and turned into a cash value of
interchangeable usefulness. Any object having the right qualities fills the role
that we plan for it just as well as any other object with similar qualities. In most
cases this is not morally evil, but is simply a question of mental health. If we
paid tender loving attention to each grain of salt at lunchtime, we would rightly
be viewed as insane. No one could function normally in everyday life if they did
not reduce most objects to their use-value.
Yet there are numerous cases in which objects are no longer fused together
with their qualitiescases in which an object becomes highly unique, elusive,
and alluring. Lets use the term allure to describe what happens when an
object is split from its qualities and seems to hover outside them, beyond our
grasp. Allure is the root not only of beauty, but of many other things as well.
Imagine the case of a dull bureaucrat whom we visit regularly to do paperwork.
We have no interest in this person, as long as she stamps our forms in the
correct manner. But imagine that one day she is lost in a shipwreck, is
kidnapped and never seen again, commits suicide, turns out to be a terrorist
operative, or blows us a passionate kiss without warning. In these cases the dull
bureaucratic faade is no longer fused together with the person as a whole. We
now sense a mysterious hidden reality or persona in the bureaucrat, an
individuality that was previously suppressed from view, and which lies much
deeper than all the boring, stereotypical mannerisms of a government official.
All of these possible surprising or chilling events would give us the same
dizzying thrill that beauty always does.

When someone disappoints us or pleasantly surprises us, here too they break
away from the qualities that we used to believe were fused directly into them.
We are now confronted with a mysterious depth to the person that we never
suspected was there. Their previous useful function in our lives collapses, and
we are both confused and bewitched by the new reality that lies before us, since
it is difficult to define in terms of known properties. The same is true of
profound courage, in which someone refuses to adapt his or her actions or
compromise to changing circumstances, but continues standing for a deeper
principle than the cynics and manipulators who shifts their ideals like
chameleons. Here too, there is an alluring split between the surface qualities of
the person and their deeper unified cores. Allure is the root of humor as well:
as Bergson showed a century ago, comedy occurs when a person or other living
force is unable to adapt to changing situations, and in this way becomes
exposed as something separate from its surroundings. Love is also a kind of
allure, since it aims at something in a person that is indescribable or
indefinable and never quite clear, and which can often resist numerous
deceptions and disappointments.
Even more importantly for us, metaphor is always a form of allure. If a journalist
writes that Lebanon is the Arab France, we may be able to think of specific
common features between Paris and Beirut, specific character similarities
between the two peoples, and even a shared relation to the French language.
But the statement remains a metaphor because, unless it becomes dull and
trivialized through overuse, it remains hauntingly vague and can never be
translated into any clear and definite list of similarities. Through the use of
metaphoric language, Lebanon becomes a ghostly force hidden from any
direct access, and deeper than any of its known properties. It exerts a
gravitational pull on certain known features of France (cosmopolitanism?
sensuality?) while repelling others as inappropriate (the land of high-speed
trains). No exact list of common features between Lebanon and France will ever
succeed in recreating the metaphor, simply because it operates at a deeper
level than all features and qualities.
My view is that every form of beauty can be described as a specific type of
allure. Bottles and houses usually have a practical function, and can be
efficiently used without ever being noticed. But when someone succeeds in
designing an especially beautiful bottle or house, there seems to be a hidden
spirit at work in the object, one that secretly dominates all of its surface
qualities without being identical with them. Critics can work hard to identify the
features that make any object beautiful, but they will never quite succeed in

exhausting the magic, since that magic is something that clear descriptions can
only partly approach.
Allow me to end on a somewhat stranger and wilder note. There is no reason to
believe that allure belongs only to human artistic experience, or bird songs, or
the radial symmetry of flowers that is so attractive to insects. For there is no
such thing as qualities in isolation from objects. When fire burns cotton, it does
not burn flammability, but burns the cotton itself. We have already seen that
no human can ever fully grasp the depths of cotton or fire, since these objects
remain mysterious units that exceed all of their visible qualities. But the same
thing must be true of the relation of the cotton and fire to each other. The fire
reduces the cotton to an ability to be burnt, not reacting at all to its fragrance,
its softness, its price on the world market, or the story of its origin in a village
field. To repeat, the cotton itself is something deeper than all of its qualities,
something that can never fully approached. The fire both touches and fails to
touch the cotton. It destroys the cotton without ever fully reaching its depths.
But this is strikingly similar to all the more human forms of allure, in which we
encounter a unified object split from its properties, an object that we can sense
but never fully define. This leads us to the following question: is it possible that
even physical causation has a metaphorical structure? I believe that the answer
is yes. And if so, then beauty lies at the root not only of human daily experience
(as Santayana saw), but even at the root of physical events such as fires,
earthquakes, and the explosion of stars. If there is something ghostly and
magical about beauty, then this disturbing magic already lies in the heart of
physical matter, not just in the privacy of the human soul.