Rafael De Clercq (Lingnan University), "How Beauty Moves"
Rafael De Clercq (Lingnan University), "How Beauty Moves"
Forthcoming, The Philosophers’ Imprint
The claim that we are sometimes moved by beauty probably needs little defence. But what if we take the claim to mean that beauty sometimes causes us to have certain feelings?
A lot of philosophers would balk at such a claim. Their reaction is not hard to understand. One popular view of causation sees it as a manifestation of laws like the ones discovered by the natural sciences. However, it seems that no one has come up with laws that tell us how the beauty of an object affects its environment. The prospect of finding such laws seem even dimmer when one considers that beautiful objects do not have to exist in space. They can be ‘abstract’ objects such as stories and proofs.
Another issue is familiar from discussions in the philosophy of mind and metaethics: if the beauty of an object is what causes us to have certain feelings, then how about the features that make the object beautiful: the shape of the object, for example, or the storyline it contains? Don’t these features have an at least equally good claim to being the causes of our feelings? But now we seem to end up with too many causes of our feelings—a case of systematic “causal overdetermination”.
Finally, if beauty were to cause things to happen, then wouldn’t it be possible to tell whether something is beautiful simply by looking at how it affects its environment? Wouldn’t beauty leave an imprint, as it were, by which we could detect its presence without anyone ever having to experience it? But that seems absurd. At least it is very remote from the way we normally tell whether something is beautiful.
In my forthcoming paper, I explain how these, and related, issues can be addressed by someone who believes that beauty is a causal factor. In fact, there is at least one precedent in the literature. In his book, The Objective Eye (Chicago UP, 2006), John Hyman explains why one cannot detect beauty by the imprint it leaves independently of anyone’s experience. His explanation is that beauty only produces an imprint—only has causal effects—once (that is, after) it has been experienced.
Unfortunately, Hyman omits to tell us how the experience of beauty comes about, given that it is not itself an effect of beauty. To rectify this omission, I propose in the paper to regard the experience of beauty as an effect of beauty that mediates all its other effects. In other words, whatever else beauty causes, it causes via an experience of itself. The proposal modifies Hyman’s view while retaining its capacity to explain why experiencing beauty is an ineliminable step in the process of coming to know that something is beautiful. The proposal has another potential advantage: it may be able to explain why an experience of beauty is more valuable to the degree that the object experienced is beautiful. The explanation (admittedly, speculative!) is that causation involves the transfer of a quality from cause to effect, as philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine have suggested. Just like a transfer of kinetic energy takes place when the trajectory of a ball causes another ball to move, a transfer of intrinsic value takes place when the beauty of an object causes someone to have an experience of beauty.
In this summary, I have skimmed over technical distinctions that play an important role in the paper, for example: the distinction between regularity and counterfactual theories of causation; between dispositional and nondispositional theories of beauty; and between naturalism and nonnaturalism. However, there is also a more existential side to the issue that the paper does not mention and which I shall add here: if it is true that beauty is not just a value, but a difference-making cause (in the same sense that more mundane and scientifically respectable properties are causes), then our world really isn’t much less enchanted than, say, a world filled with Greek gods.