Hutcheson on the Idea of Beauty

in “poppies on the wheat,” Helen Jackson compares the farmer’s experience of “counting the bread and wine by autumn’s gain” to the pleasure she feels on her observation of the same farm:

A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat Around the vines.¹

Although we may express ourselves less poetically, we have all had the experience of being immediately pleased with some complex object: the dramatic view from a mountain peak, a series of movements in dance, a pretty face. In An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design,² Francis Hutcheson argues that this common phenomenon is the key to understanding beauty.³ The kinds of pleasure heretofore recognized by modern philosophers have been limited to sensible pleasures immediately associated with simple sensations like taste and smells, and rational pleasures mediated by a process of reflection on the advantage that objects may bring us. This limited understanding of pleasure misses the fact that we often take an immediate pleasure in complex objects that is not reducible to either of these two recognized kinds of pleasure. Based on this insight, Hutcheson argues that beauty is immediately (and passively) perceived by an internal sense, much in the way that we take an immediate (and passive) pleasure in individual tastes or colors. Further, he argues that the cause of the idea of beauty is complex ideas whose forms display uniformity amidst variety (UAV), although we need not know the UAV in order to have the idea of beauty.

What is “the idea of beauty”? Hutcheson follows Locke in holding that the immediate object of thinking or perceiving is an idea. Ideas are either simple (uniform) or complex (resolvable into simple ideas).⁴ All simple ideas originate in experience. What, then, is the immediate object of the internal sense? Hutcheson begins his Preface to the Two Inquiries by pointing to the importance of understanding the various sources of pleasure: wisdom is a capacity for pursuing the greatest and most lasting pleasure, so we must be clear on the kinds of pleasure we are capable of receiving (23). One of the pleasures that Hutcheson brings to our attention is the pleasure that arises from complex ideas of objects. He then informs us that “these determinations to be pleased with [certain complex forms] the author chooses to call senses, distinguishing them from the powers which commonly go by that name by calling our power of receiving the beauty of regularity, order, harmony, an internal sense” (24). The body of the Inquiry follows a similar pattern. Hutcheson claims that there are pleasures that accompany complex ideas of objects, and informs us that “the word beauty is taken for the idea raised in us, and a sense of beauty is our power of receiving this idea” (I: IX, 34). In each case, the internal sense receives some idea which Hutcheson refers to as beauty. The complex ideas themselves are made up of ideas received by other senses (or derived from reason, in certain cases), so the only idea left to be accounted for by the internal sense is the idea of pleasure. In addition, Hutcheson often identifies the idea of beauty with pleasure, as in the phrase, “foundation of the beauty or pleasure” (III: III, 49) and “pleasure or pain, beauty or deformity” (VII: II, 84). Hutcheson also tells us that when we claim that an object is beautiful, “we mean [that such objects are] agreeable to the sense of men” (II: I, 39).⁵ The most straightforward reading of Hutcheson’s description of the idea of beauty is that it is an idea of pleasure taken in certain complex ideas of objects.⁶

Yet, Hutcheson appears to suggest other possibilities in the Inquiry. He is concerned with the pleasure that results from complex ideas of objects, and he sometimes seems to say that the idea of beauty refers to the complex idea itself. For example, he tells us that “there are far greater pleasures in those complex ideas of objects, which obtain the...