Functional Beauty Examined

In Functional Beauty, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson defend the importance of Functional Beauty—that is, the view that an item's fitness (or otherwise) for its proper function is a source of positive (or negative) aesthetic value—within a unified comprehensive aesthetic theory that encompasses art, the everyday, animals and organic nature, natural environments and inorganic nature, and artifacts. In the following section, I outline the main lines of argument presented in the book. I then criticize some of these arguments. I do so, however, from the perspective of someone who shares the authors' commitment to the importance of Functional Beauty and their dismay at its neglect in contemporary aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding the objections I present, I congratulate Parsons and Carlson for developing the case for Functional Beauty to an unprecedented extent. I conclude that their approach presents an important corrective to the narrowness of neo-Kantian aesthetics and opens up aesthetics and the philosophy of art to the influence of and cooperation with the empirical study of aesthetics practiced in the sciences.

I

1. The aim of this book is to rehabilitate the notion of Functional Beauty, which is the view that the match or mismatch between an item's features and its function is a source of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure. I say 'rehabilitate' because, as the authors point out in the first part of their historical review (1-20), the idea that beauty measures the adequacy of things for their nature or purpose was advocated from ancient times until at least the late eighteenth century. The dominant rival to this account was and remains what Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz dubs the 'Great Theory of Beauty.'¹ In classical times, the Great Theory equated beauty with formal proportion and harmony. In the medieval period this idea was given a theological slant, with the assumption that formal unity and integration are reflections of God's perfection and beauty. And formalism, which received Kant's endorsement at the close of the eighteenth century, was most commonly advocated as the basis of aesthetic beauty into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as Tatarkiewicz observes, the functional theory of beauty was a long-running supplement to the Great Theory up to the eighteenth century where it appears, for instance, in Hume.

Above all, it was Kant who banished considerations of utility and function from the aesthetic arena. His paradigm of aesthetic appreciation is offered in his account of free beauty, which is the formal beauty of an item regarded disinterestedly and without regard to what kind of thing it is or its roles or purposes (21-4). Recognizing or assessing something's free beauty does not involve bringing it under a determinate concept; rather, it involves the free play of imagination and understanding. Admittedly, Kant also recognizes a kind of 'dependent' or 'adherent' beauty that is conditional on its object's classification. But, according to the account offered by Paul Guyer and followed by Parsons and Carlson, Kant's notion of dependent beauty departs significantly from the notion of Functional Beauty.² On this interpretation, Kant allows that recognition of a thing's kind and function can constrain how or what about it can be beautiful, but the relevant qualities do not derive their beauty from the success with which they contribute to its discharging its function; that is, the item's functionality is not a source of its beauty (21-3). As Parsons and Carlson put it, if something possesses Functional Beauty there is an internal connection between its beauty and its function, whereas the connection allowed by Kant in his notion of dependent beauty is external (120-3, 231-3).³

Later philosophers who adopted Kant's formalism and expanded the notion of disinterested contemplation, which is widely regarded as the state on which aesthetic appreciation is founded, went so far as to insist that all knowledge of an item's kind, origins, history, intended purpose, and potential utility had to be put aside if the appreciator's experience of the item could...