Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne

Chapter 7: Beauty Merely in the Eye of the Beholder?

4 CHAPTER SEVEN Beauty Merely in the Eye of the Beholder? f BEFORE MOVING EXPLICITLY TO THE AESTHETIC elements in religious experience and to divine beauty as Hartshorne sees them, it will be worthwhile to consider aesthetic relativism. This is a popular view, even among those who are not ethical relativists. Beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, it will be alleged. (In any defensible view, beauty is in the eye of the beholder in some sense.) In one sense aesthetic relativism makes sense when the vagaries of taste are considered, as we will see. At a deeper level, however, aesthetic relativism is a problematic view that deserves criticism, Hartshorne thinks. I will concentrate first on color and then on music in my treatment of his view. We should note at the outset that aesthetic objectivism has been the norm throughout most of Western history. We have seen that Francis Kovach does an excellent job of detailing the compatibility between some sort of aesthetic subjectivism and aesthetic objectivism in medieval philosophy. The basic idea was that the beautiful, which was seen as a transcendental property of every being regardless of its limiting mode, gives disinterested aesthetic delight. Medieval thinkers like Saints Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas admitted that not all beings are perceived as beautiful. This could be due to a lack of accidental integrity or proportion on the part of the object or due to a deficiency on the part of the subject. In any event, there is much compatibility between this sort of aesthetic objectivism and Hartshorne’s aesthetic objectivism, despite the fact that in other areas Bonaventure’s and Thomas’ classical theism is at odds with Hartshorne’s neoclassical view.1 For those who have been positively influenced by the aesthetic obDombrowskiFinalPgs . 114 2/2/04 5:34:38 PM Beauty Merely in the Eye of the Beholder? 5 jectivism of classical theists, opposition to aesthetic relativism might seem to be a rather pedestrian stance. But we will see that Hartshorne’s reasons for being opposed to aesthetic relativism or to an overly aggressive aesthetic subjectivism are anything but pedestrian. That is, his opposition to the idea that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder involves several “bold” claims in the Popperian sense of the term, wherein one stops just short of overstatement in order to focus attention on the claims in question. Consider initially a sensation of the color red. This sensation is felt or appreciated as warm, insistent, or advancing. By way of contrast, blue is experienced as cool, gentle, and receding, while yellow is felt as lighthearted or cheerful. Finally, violet is appreciated as quiet and wistful . Of course the objection will be raised against Hartshorne’s view that these aesthetic feelings are associated with individual history or social convention and hence will vary at the very least from age to age and from culture to culture, if not from individual to individual. In fact, in many circles this objection is nothing short of axiomatic (PP, 65). But is it correct? In the case of colors, at least, there is no clear evidence, as we will see, of such cultural or historical differences. It is clear that the use of colors is different from culture to culture, but it is crucial to notice that this is not necessarily due to the same colors expressing different feelings to different people. Rather, different peoples have different feelings to express. A famous example is provided by the use of white (along with other colors) in Chinese funerals. According to Hartshorne, this example in no way proves, as many cultural relativists assume, that the Chinese feeling for white is different from the Western one. People the world over see a certain purity in white, a certain detachment from the passions. The Chinese, however, do not share the historical conviction in the West that a funeral should solely, or largely, convey darkness, which underlies the traditional use of black in Western funerals (PP, 7). Black and white convey the same feelings in China, North America, and even in Africa (or among African Americans, for whom black is quite legitimately seen as an aesthetic value involving moral seriousness ), even if different peoples have different conceptions of death. DombrowskiFinalPgs. 115 2/2/04 5:34:39 PM 6 Divine Beauty In any tradition of ancestor...