Not A Blog™

Here’s another topic I keep coming back to, musing over the philosophical minutia of our previous discussions on art. Beauty has become like my version of Persig’s quality, the difference being that rather hope to not go insane over it, though I can’t make any promises. Beauty can be defined easily enough, and it’s thrown around as applying to objects d’art, and we can talk about its various contexts and, for the most part, we know what is beautiful to us. But outside of it being an idea, it doesn’t have a tangible existence.

An idea, as a product of the mind, means that each person’s interpretation of the idea must be subjective because no two people have the same mind. This was established a few months ago in arguments I won’t rehash. But in my ongoing quest to get to the bottoms of things, I keep returning. My original thought was that disagreements arise over a matter of craft—whether or not the type and amount of work that went into a design does (or should) contribute to the overall perception of the design having a property such as “beauty”. Being that concept drives any piece, craft is largely inconsequential.

What I ended up considering was this. If beauty—or quality or any of these “idea” properties—if these exist only in a mind, it makes no sense to talk about them on the same level of certainty as we would with more empirical qualia, such as “redness” or “hotness”. And yet, throughout our discussions, we have sentences similar to:

John Cage’s 4′33″ is beautiful.

Why does that sentence cause disagreement? Up until a few days ago, I would have told you it arises over the ambiguity of beautiful. Today, however, I have a different theory. I think it arises over the word is.

Is it beautiful? Really? What does that even mean? We must not know, otherwise we wouldn’t still be arguing about it all the time. But if you think about it, no art can really be any quality that isn’t physically verifiable by some measure. The verb “to be” forms declarative statements, truths about reality. But there’s nothing about beauty that is any particular way, so how can an object definitively have it?

It seems that disagreement regarding idea-qualia such as “beauty” can be avoided by not using the verb “to be”. The statement could be reworded thus:

I feel John Cage’s 4′33″ has beauty.

At which point a curious thing happens. The quality moves from existing as declarative fact in a theoretical abstract space into the person making the statement—which is quite literally where it resides, anyway. The sentence shifts the focus from the quality to the point of view. It highlights itself as being nothing more than one’s opinion, or perception. You could argue that the person is broken, but to do this in any sort of effective manner requires a great deal of hubris, not to mention it must insult a huge number of people, because you have to come up with a deficiency for every last person who disagrees with you in order to maintain the integrity of the illusion of pure objectivity. It’s interesting to note that this was done during the previous debate, and it really is an indefensible position.

But what about stuff you can empirically measure? Is anything red? Consider “The apple is red” versus “I see the apple as red”. The comparison highlights the real question here, which is: does everyone see the apple as red? In other words, is red an inherent quality of the apple, or a result of perception?

Obviously it’s a result of perception; color blind people don’t see the apple as red. Putting a red apple under a green light makes it not red anymore. Or put the apple in a dark room; now you don’t see it as red. To say that an apple is red in a pitch black room doesn’t really make sense.

We could reduce it further and say “The apple is reflecting photons vibrating at a frequency of 700nm” which is scientifically, verifiably correct. In this case, “is” (to be) is the right verb because at the time the statement was made (presumably) the apple did have this property of reflecting 700nm wavelength photons. The property exists independent of the observer, and it would change if the light changed.

Another example just for fun: “The coffee is hot” versus “The coffee tastes hot”. The word “tastes” shifts the focus to the observer (implied in this instance). It is how they perceive the coffee. Hotness is a subjective property again, because compared to the hyper-pressurized steam in the primary loop of a nuclear reactor, your “hot” coffee isn’t all that energetic. Our bodies have evolved to make the best use of sensory input that’s relevant to us, so we happen to have short-hand terms for things that matter; in this case, something potentially damaging. The molecules of the steam in a nuclear reactor are so absurdly energetic that “hot” doesn’t really describe them adequately to you, anyway. They’ll just kill you. Along those lines, however many BTU’s your cup of coffee puts out is only “hot” because your body can’t absorb that much energy without cell damage.

That’s really what hot means: molecules energetic enough to be damaging. “Cold” means the molecules aren’t energetic enough to help sustain cell processes. But whether or not the molecules you’re in contact with are energetic enough for you to be comfortable (meaning the energy of the molecules is just right), this is only relevant to you.

Of course, humans have a lot of commonality. The coffee that will burn me would probably burn you, too. It’s a safe bet, regardless. And so we can make a statement like “Watch out! That coffee is hot” and the ambiguity of meaning never becomes an issue.

The problem arises because this is not a universal rule, so we run into all sorts of philosophical quandaries when we start to apply it haphazardly to qualities that have a very wide range of interpretation. No book is ever really good or bad. I can do a review and say I think it has the property of bad because of x, y, and z and state my reasons. But “goodness” or “badness” isn’t an inherent property of any book. An inherent property would be something like “the book measures five inches by seven inches”, although technically this is subjective, too, because it’s only true at our level. Once you get down to the subatomic level, there’s really no way to tell where the book absolutely ends and your finger beings, so we see the book as measuring five by seven… etc.

Rather than considering the verb “to be” as a utilitarian workhorse, I think it should be considered a type of slang. It’s a useful, quick slang for every day life, but it almost never describes reality. In fact, I can’t think of any instance at all where it actually illuminates understanding. Either it states a fact that we would have had to verify and know before we state it, in which case it transmits no new information, or it makes an approximation which muddies, rather than clarifies whatever we’re talking about.

We can improve rational discourse by curtailing, if not eliminating the verb “to be”. When discussing philosophical topics such as “beauty” or “quality”, using “to be” doesn’t make sense. Nothing IS beautiful outside of its observer/concept. But that doesn’t make it any less real when we sense the beauty in the art. Criticizing people for not seeing beauty or quality—or seeing it in the “wrong” things—makes about as much sense as criticizing the color blind for not seeing red.

But most important: “to be” acts more like slang than the declarative it masquerades as, and I think I’ll try treating it as such.

-Ted