On Aesthetic Pleasure

I was watching an interview of the recently deceased literary critic Harold Bloom (1930–2019), and a question came to my mind: if someone were to dedicate their life to entertainment as seriously as Professor Bloom did with literature, why is it that we would not regard this person with the same level of admiration and respect?

The aesthete is thought of as a noble figure while the other is thought of as an enthusiast who takes a hobby very seriously. Why is that?

We could simply say that one is devoted to intelligence while the other is devoted to pleasure, but that is too reductive. If we are being honest, both are simply following their private inclinations; both merely follow their pleasure, yet only one out of the two pleasures is highly regarded.

The pleasure we ascribe to entertainment certainly seems to us more self-indulgent than the one we ascribe to art. We may not know how or if art and entertainment are distinct, but our hearts seem to foster a different opinion of the two. That second one seems selfless, educated, and humanistic. There is a sense that art transcends personal interests and that studying the history of humanity’s heart and soul turns one into a sort of apostle — carrying the torch of eternity in their heart.

But again, the two individuals being compared are pursuing their respective interests out of pleasure, and it is their pleasure that comes across as either noble or not. If someone followed art through no interest of their own, we would feel differently about them; but if someone studies art because their tastes are tailored to art, we regard them as dignified. It is their pleasured pursuit of beauty that we regard as noble, and it is the movie enthusiast’s pleasure that we regard as self-indulgent. Why is that?

Is it because the content being pleasurably consumed is profound and filled with great wisdom — and so perhaps we instinctively feel as though the person is a wise lover of knowledge — , but if we are being honest, the knowledge that one acquires in the consumption of art and philosophy is quite arcane — it is not practically useful in any discernible way. Why would we regard as noble someone who fills their heads with nonsense?

One could answer that art’s noble reputation comes from its aristocratic origins. Lower classes were thought of as crude and dull while the powerful were thought of as educated and virtuous. Over generations, we grew to associate art with the nobility that produced it. The upper classes always possessed the means to distribute and proliferate their values across society, and by adopting these values ourselves we more readily consented to the righteous economic domination of our masters. According to this idea, high art is noble because the upper classes manufactured its nobility in their image. Thus, the nobility of high art is a lingering bourgeois mystification; an old illusion convenient to the ruling class of yesterday that is now genealogically congealed in the values of today.

But if we imagine a person who — while living under a tyrannical regime — is reading high literature against the grain of the accepted aesthetic order, they come across to us as being heroic and virtuous as they hold on to eternal values. In this scenario, the individual comes across as a sovereign soul standing up for beauty and morality against the illegitimate values of the powerful. All the worrisome aspects of bourgeois domination have vanished, yet the aesthetic pursuit remains noble.

Here we find our first clue to understand the nobility of aesthetics: Engaging in aesthetics reveals moral character.

Aesthetics and Morality

The idea that aesthetic judgment is intimately tied to moral judgments is an old one. Today, I will use Immanuel Kant’s and Roger Scruton’s versions of the idea to lay the foundation for my own hypothesis.

Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good; and only because we refer the beautiful to the morally good […] does our liking for it include a claim to everyone else’s assent, while the mind is also conscious of being ennobled, by this [reference], above a mere receptivity for pleasure derived from sense impressions, and it assesses the value of other people too on the basis of [their having] a similar maxim in their power of judgment.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

The argument being made here is that the aesthetic judgment expresses and reveals an individual’s values, priorities, and standards; and those who share these aesthetic particularities would form a rich “value-community” together. Moral cohesion is the sharing of values. Thus, shared aesthetic judgments are a prerequisite to a morally ordered cultural society.

[…] the thrill that you feel is an endorsement of the things you observe.

If it is so offensive to look down on another’s taste, it is, as the democrat recognizes, because taste is intimately bound up with our personal life and moral identity. It is part of our rational nature to strive for a community of judgement, a shared conception of value, since that is what reason and the moral life require. And this desire for a reasoned consensus spills over into the sense of beauty.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty

Here too we read of how someone’s aesthetic judgment reveals highly intimate details about their dispositions, values, and character. Morality can be understood as what a given community of values agrees is good or bad. Given that all humans share a long evolutionary history, we expect a shared moral archetype different communities will express differently. “Nobility” may be understood as the practice of a community’s ideals!

Not so fast. If a community’s values are particular, then are we saying that dedicating one’s life to video games would be noble? It may very well be well-regarded, but it would lack that sense of transcendent nobility we seem to observe being deployed at a consistent kind of person throughout the history of cultures. That is the kind of nobility I care to understand. We must conclude art possesses “something” that makes it noble in this way.

[…] the pleasure we take directly in the beautiful in nature also presupposes, as well as cultivates. a certain liberality in our way of thinking, i.e., an independence of the liking from mere enjoyment of sense; but here the freedom is still presented more as in play than as subject to a law-governed task. But the latter is what genuinely characterizes man’s morality, where reason must exert its dominance over sensibility […]
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

Here is the distinction: The experience of beauty is uniquely rational because it is a natively human faculty that stands in opposition to the modules of pleasure. Beauty is a separate enjoyment from the bodily pleasure that animals can enjoy. Aesthetic judgment is a characteristically human gesture of moral acknowledgment for order, harmony, cultural propriety, manners, and tradition. Aesthetic judgment is deeply rooted in our socio-rational and cultural instinct; it is an element of that categorical calculus that makes man disposed to civilization. To lose touch of that which the aesthetic judgment values and to replace all instances of aesthetic objects with those of pleasure is to subject the world and man to the same conditions as those animals; it is to desecrate man as an irrational beast. To cultivate aesthetic values is to cultivate one’s natural civility.

Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community — of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty

Put in more conversational language, consuming entertainment is taking part in an isolated pleasure that can only be shared with the group one affiliates with, but consuming art is taking part in a transcendent pleasure that reveals one as being reliable and principled irrespective of the community to which their values conform: they are an apostle of that pure disposition to culture. Religious awe is not a sentiment of complacent pleasure felt between friends, it is a submissive aesthetic experience whose evolutionary function is to open us to loyal and fruitful cultural fraternities with other humans dedicated to a selfless goal.

This must be why relatable art or art that serves a function in the real world (propaganda, representation, etc.) evokes a level of moral utility and sometimes cultural significance, but never aesthetic significance. This kind of art is nothing but the indulgent signaling of a group’s hermetic pride; it does not and cannot strive for something impersonal and transcendent, which is the function of the highest art. It is all too frequent that we see products that simply pander to an audience’s identity, speaking in in-group references, or relying on real-world references; these works call for in-group empathy rather than transcendent selflessness.

These works encourage tribal feelings, whereas transcendent aesthetic feelings encourage selfless humanism by evoking deep instincts of ours that put impersonal importance in a common emblem of higher value. One triggers empathy while the other triggers compassion. Empathy is fiery but only directed towards one’s own tribal members, while compassion transcends tribal affiliation. It is hard to call empathy moral, and in the same way, it is hard to call the consumption of works that agitate hermetic pride and other self-indulgent pleasures “moral”. True morality is an undiscerning moral regard for what is “right” and “true” beyond the self.

Rationality, discipline, and selflessness are all interrelated. In all societies where populations have passed a certain threshold of density, one of the noblest virtues found throughout those societies is the ability to delay one’s own desire for gratification in the service of the public good. In Western culture, we have made this universal moral principle into an intellectual one. When we think of “rationality,” we both think of intellect and self-control. Acting rationally is “not falling prey to one’s base desires” and “behavioral continence”, it is the customary version of our instinct.

This aesthetic, rational, and cultural instinct is at the root of why we regard a specific kind of “art” as noble. This kind of art brings humans into societal, value-oriented relations with one another through culture and a contract of selflessness. The kind of art we regard as noble is the tangible glue that holds a value-oriented civilization together.

Thus, the reason why we feel aesthetic pursuits are noble is because it signals the most primordial instinct for durable social association. They make us feel the evolutionary promise of an eternal cultural union.

This species of art — the one we consider the pursuit of to be noble — often plays into other instincts, most notably the “ancestor worship” instinct. There we can observe a core logic of why the transcendence reverence of ancient artists, geniuses, creations, and accomplishments are together regarded as a cohesive and undifferentiated noble activity. By worshiping and valuing our ancestors as possessing a level of discipline and wisdom far outweighing ours, we are putting transcendent value in an external myth of values that people can use as the basis for aesthetic associations. Ancestor worship is a kind of “civilization drive”.

Each group has its own respective and unique cultural valuations, but all groups share this instinctual ancestor worship. Throughout cultures, we can observe the figurative to literal deification of ancestors. Such a practice does not seem to be culturally respective, it seems to hint at a profound dispositional strategy for social associations between humans. Social bonds appear to always aim for cultural bonds, and this appears to be our evolutionary method for accomplishing it.

Entertainment tries to replicate the real world, be topical, evoke the discourse, play into references and clichés, etc. Entertainment asserts current values whereas art attempts to create a system of transcendent values to which a group subordinates itself, thereby allowing culture to evolve into its intended design. But today, the transcendent order that makes people receptive to such things has vanished from our world.

The Western world is historically unique in that it prioritizes the individual over the community. Through the language of the individual, we have the character of the romantic individual, chasing aesthetics on his own.

It is almost as if the romantic aesthetic individual is a lost citizen of that pre-cartesian transcendent society, searching for that lost harmony inside works of transcendent art — his eyes closed as the furious apparitions of beauty that inhabited that former world now only exist as unrealized ghosts in their mind, awaiting material concretization in culture. Today, the aesthetic individual feels this fury alone — as though they were the last bee on earth, looking for a hive because of instincts they cannot understand.

Here is the gist of it: some works are accepted — either customarily or through evident virtuosity — as being expressive of that transcendent realm of important values. Somewhere, deep in some instincts now without customs to legitimize them, we are disposed as a species to worship transcendence (ancestors or deities).

Whoever dedicates himself to works from our pantheon of worship evokes in us that now voiceless instinct of transcendence.

We might simply be taking part in a Westernized form of ancestor worship. We have before us a group of intellectual and artistic heroes who have toiled to excavate and make incarnate the aesthetic truths concealed in the formless Western spirit; their art and ideas strive towards absolute knowledge of the most profound answers humans can find: aesthetic ones, spiritual ones, moral ones, philosophical ones, religious ones.

By valuing these paragons of culture, we are ourselves joining in on their quests and thus become acolytes of their mission. Just as practically every other culture on earth worships its previous generations and turns them into legends and Gods, our artistic and intellectual lineage is endowed with a super-significance. Studying this lineage might feel like what ancestor worshipping feels like, hence the noble and moral pleasure.

Since our ancestors are turned into noble representatives of an established moral order by this evolutionary-cultural psychological algorithm, the desire to protect their ancient greatness is by default noble and moral.

To conclude, let us say one last thing. While we started with Kant’s and Scruton’s aesthetic ideas and have used them as a jumping-off point, we can now let go of their most problematic point. We must let go of the Western dichotomy of “reason vs. pleasure” in matters of art. It is simply not true that — while we are consuming high art — we are in ascetic rational ecstasy — an emotion unavailable to animals. That being said — now that we have defined aesthetic pleasure as a selfless openness to civilization — , it is nevertheless easy to see how philosophers could have reached the conclusion that aesthetic pleasure is grounded in rationality.

Post Scriptum

I think the point has been made well-enough that we can now look back on exactly what has been accomplished over the course of this article.

My purposes were to try and study “a feature” of art, like a blind man traces someone’s face with their hands. Art is invisible to us, yet its existence is definite and certain. Words and definitions are thought to help bring in clarity, but definitions are less like beams of light and more like cages. If we want to know what art “is”, we must look at it in action, at its existence.

In other words, we can try to describe art with sentences such as: “Art is the formalization of human experience”. While this is not “wrong”, it also cannot exhaust the fullness of art. Such definitions are too verbal. It is pragmatic to have a general term (art) that subsumes all creative activities. But all pragmatic terms such as this one exist in a universe of their own — they do not delimit and identify the real ingredients of reality.

If we took a thousand instances of what can be called “art”, we would encounter wildly different things. Some would be different in the way “painting” and “music” are different, but others would be different in the reactions they cause us to have. These differences are more abstract, but they reveal facts as important as those that distinguish painting and music.

Through our observation that the literary man’s pleasure is more highly regarded than the cinephile’s pleasure, we can momentarily touch a facet of art as its existence fades in and out of our brain’s visual range.