The Problem of Aesthetics: Can We Trust Ourselves to Recognize Beauty?

Last year, I hosted a chocolate-tasting lab for a large group of honors students. I provided them with several types of chocolate, and together we went through a slow process of reaction, evaluation, and comparison. Their specimens for consideration included: Hershey’s milk chocolate, a very fine 72% dark chocolate, an increasingly bitter 80% dark chocolate, and a dark chocolate infused with chili pepper. I expected this experience would change their lives, as I assumed many of them had likely not experienced the wonders of beautiful, dark, European chocolate. At the end of the lab, we voted to determine the most preferred chocolate. The majority winner? Hershey’s.

Later that day, I resigned.

(I kid, mostly.) I give this illustration, though, because much of my research pertains to the notion of “taste” as it relates to the philosophy of aesthetics. Together with eighteenth-century philosophers such as Voltaire and d’Alembert, I routinely ask, “Do I like something because it’s tasteful, or is it tasteful because I like it?” Curious about the differences between one culture’s posture toward this question and another’s (e.g. much of Europe in the 1750s vs. much of North America today), I frequently discuss the nature of taste with students. Most often, they think of taste in terms of their preference—instinctive, related to their sense of identity, and, therefore, authoritative. When teaching, it is my goal to invite them to consider that taste and preference, although both attended by pleasure, are two distinct things. And, as such, preference might not necessarily be the best measure of aesthetic¹ goodness. (Looking at you, Hershey’s.)

As I offer the possibility of an intellectual alternative, I recognize that our experience of pleasure is not something we can easily ignore. It is deeply persuasive, motivating us to engage in a cycle that determines many of our choices. In many instances, desire draws us toward an object, at which point interaction with this object may result in pleasure. This pleasure may then motivate us to pursue it again and again, resulting in a habit—something that ultimately changes us as it either moves us toward the Good or away from it.² The difficulty with this pattern is that pleasure, since it attends many different experiences (both good and bad) is not always directive when it comes to living a life of virtue. Thus, if one surrenders one’s pleasure as a guiding authority, one must then identify a different mechanism by which one can recognize and pursue goodness. The question is: how can one know if one is successfully doing so?

On some days, I teach philosophy classes. Other days, I give collegiate music lessons. On Fridays, I do both. Very often, the questions that arise in each context collide, and I recognize (thinking literally here of the connotation “coming to know again”) that there are certain human questions that pervade all spheres of life and learning if given the chance.

On one of these recent Fridays, I was faced with this difficulty endemic to pursuing the Good. In a piano lesson, I was working with a student on Liszt’s “Sposalizio,” from his first Années de Pelerinage. This piece is a sonic reflection inspired by Raphael’s painting, “Lo Sposalizio” or “The Marriage of the Virgin”—an early sixteenth-century masterpiece depicting the marriage of Mary and Joseph. Much could be said about both the visual and musical works, but what came to the fore in the recent lesson is the reality that seemingly simple musical phrases are often the hardest to play well. My student was, in fact, already doing a lovely job. But there is something almost intangible that separates a generally pleasing musical interpretation from one that is truly beautiful. In pursuit of this beauty, I asked her repeatedly to try once more—to experiment, to imagine nuances in sound quality, to care about each phrase as if it were the most important thing in the world. This kind of practice is exhausting. To uphold the importance of the relationship between one note and the next is to alternate between fleeting glimpses of beauty and feelings of complete inadequacy as one seeks to do the music justice. I think of T. S. Eliot describing “A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”³

At the end of the lesson, my student looked at me with fatigue, and I could tell she felt the weight of the task before us. As she considered the work that lay ahead of her, she asked, “When I’m practicing by myself, how do I know what is more beautiful if I only know the beauty I can imagine?”

What an important question.

A few hours later, I was with another group of students, and we were engaged in a Socratic dialogue centering around a small portion of Plotinus’s Enneads. In the text, Plotinus works to define the nature of beauty itself, while also examining the nature of our interaction with—or participation in—this beauty. As a class, we were pursuing the question, “What characteristics make something beautiful?” when one student suggested: “Perhaps something is beautiful because we sense the presence of God in it.” Another student joined in with enthusiasm, and exclaimed, “That must be why we have different opinions regarding what is beautiful; we sense God’s presence in different contexts!” They looked as if this settled the matter, at which point I prompted them to return to the text, in order to determine whether Plotinus would support their supposition. Whether or not the author is “correct,” the text is always a good teacher, if we are willing to submit ourselves to it for a time.

We discovered that Plotinus—while he does not address the notion of the presence of God specifically—does indeed consider reasons for differences between one person’s recognition of beauty and another’s. For Plotinus, it belongs to the domain of the soul to “see” that which is beautiful. He writes, “The soul speaks of it as if it understood it, recognises and welcomes it and as it were adapts itself to it. But when it encounters the ugly it shrinks back and rejects it and turns away from it and is out of tune⁴ and alienated from it.”⁵ If we consider only these statements, we might conclude that all souls respond to beauty in a similar manner. However, Plotinus does not believe this to be the case. In fact, much of the text articulates differences between the type of soul that recognizes beauty and the type of soul that does not. The question thus becomes: how does one become this first kind of soul?

The habits of the musician prove to be a fruitful analogue, since we know that no good musician can produce beautiful works without engaging in regular practice.⁶ In a similar way, Plotinus suggests that in order to see beauty, the soul “must be trained, first of all to look at beautiful ways of life: then at beautiful works…then look at the souls of the people who produce the beautiful works.”⁷ With this notion of practice in mind, I asked the group: “What if the reason for our different perceptions of beauty is simply due to the fact that none of us are yet fully trained?”

The entire room was quiet. When one is teaching, these are the moments one hopes for but cannot demand—moments when a student temporarily surrenders belief as they are awakened to the possibility that there may be something more to consider. To ask a question with sincerity is to be vulnerable; one must be willing to temporarily relinquish the intellectual comfort that attends a sometimes long-held assumption. The paradox, though, is that this species of discomfort is fundamentally attended by hope that truth will be encountered. This is the difference between agnosticism and humility.

In the face of our own possible inadequacy, I asked a final question: “If we are still being trained, can we trust ourselves to recognize beauty?”

Fortunately, Plotinus offers encouragement here. In order to understand how the soul sees beauty, we must first better understand the nature of the soul. As such, he writes, “The soul, since it is by nature what it is and is related to the higher kind of reality in the realm of being, when it sees something akin to it or a trace of its kindred reality, is delighted and thrilled and returns to itself and remembers itself and its own possessions.”⁸ In short, the soul sees beauty because it belongs to the same realm from whence beauty comes. Within this paradigm, the training of the soul is not an arbitrary suggestion. It is a process which, when engaged, results in the soul becoming more itself. In Christian parlance, we might suggest that in a very similar way, we encounter beauty because we are created by God, in his image, and we become the most ourselves when we, ultimately, behold his beauty.⁹

As this class concluded, I was amazed by the relationship between these questions and the first question asked by my piano student when she said, “How do I know what is more beautiful if I only know the beauty I can imagine?” When I next see her, I will suggest that she can hope to recognize beauty, in part, because she was made to. I will also assure her that by practicing, she is already partially engaged in this good work of training her soul. I will suggest to her the words of Plotinus: “Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright, and never stop ‘working on your statue’!¹⁰ till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you.”¹¹

Ultimately, Plotinus concludes that the soul recognizes beauty because to do so is to return it, in a sense, to its proper place.¹² Lewis, however, suggests that we want far more than to simply recognize it. Rather, “We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become a part of it.”¹³ And still, it seems to me that the promise of becoming a more beautiful soul is only a shadow of an even more transforming sort of recognition yet before us: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”¹⁴

1. A note regarding my use of the term “aesthetic”: I refer to it here with its earlier connotation found in A. G. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, wherein it refers to one’s cultivated capacity to rightly perceive beauty. This is distinct from today’s pervasive usage which denotes something more akin to one’s “style.”
2. James K. A. Smith deals with these patterns throughout many of his books, including You Are What You Love, Desiring the Kingdom, and Imagining the Kingdom, to name a few.
3. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from The Four Quartets: A Poem (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2023).
4. The language of attunement or harmony in relation to our right perception of beauty has long been a valuable analogical tool. Plato’s Phaedo provides an apt image of the soul in relation to the strings of a lyre; Boethius describes a certain correspondence between cosmic and human harmony; A. G. Baumgarten describes the harmony that attends the “tasteful spirit,” etc.
5. Plotinus, Ennead, vol. I, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1989, I.6.2.
6. This foreshadows, with amazing similarity, Baumgarten’s description of “tägliche Übungen” or “daily exercises” needed for one to become a “geschmäckvolle Geist—a tasteful spirit.
7. Plotinus, Ennead I, I.6.9. Italics mine.
8. Plotinus, Ennead I, I.6.2.
9. Psalm 27:4, English Standard Version.
10. Here, Plotinus references Plato’s Phaedrus.
11. Plotinus, Ennead I, I.6.9.
12. This recalls Augustine: “A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s movement is not necessarily downwards, but to its appropriate position…things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest.” Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13.9.10.
13. C. S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory (New York: Harper Collins, 1949, revised 1980), 42.
14. 1 John 3:2, English Standard Version