Beauty

Any honest book on beauty eventually has to deal with Kant, and Schiffter does, though without the reverence philosophers usually bring. Kant saw the same paradox — that a judgment of taste feels personal yet demands universal agreement — and he built an elegant bridge across it. When I call something beautiful, Kant argued, I am not stating a fact about the object, but I am not merely reporting my private pleasure either. I am claiming a pleasure that is disinterested, free of desire and appetite, and therefore one that everyone ought to share. Beauty becomes the feeling I assume all rational beings would feel, if they only looked properly.

It is a beautiful solution, and Schiffter admires its ambition even as he distrusts it. The trouble is the word 'disinterested.' Kant asks us to contemplate the beautiful thing wanting nothing from it — not to possess it, not to eat it, not to sleep with it, just to rest in the pure form of the pleasure. Schiffter, who takes the body seriously, doubts we are ever quite so pure. Our pleasures are tangled up with desire, memory, hunger, the whole disorderly life we actually live. The disinterested gaze may be less a description of how we look than an ideal invented to make our looking respectable.

Here the book takes its sharpest turn. If beauty is neither safely in the object nor innocently in the feeling, Schiffter asks what we are actually doing when we pronounce the word. His answer is uncomfortable: often we are not talking about beauty at all. We are talking about ourselves, and about the people around us, and about where each of us stands.

Consider how a judgment of taste is delivered. It is rarely neutral. To say that a film is beautiful and another merely entertaining, that this music is refined and that music vulgar, is to draw a line — and to place oneself on the flattering side of it. Schiffter notices that our aesthetic verdicts almost always double as verdicts on the people who feel differently. The person who loves what we find cheap is not just mistaken about a painting; he is quietly demoted. Taste, in practice, is a way of ranking.

Step back, and Schiffter's suspicion widens into something larger than a puzzle about paintings. What he is really describing is taste as a social instrument — quiet, deniable, and remarkably effective. We like to believe that our sense of beauty is the most personal thing about us, welling up from somewhere deep and unrepeatable. Schiffter's uncomfortable claim is nearly the opposite: taste is where the social order writes itself into us so thoroughly that it feels like nature.

This is why the language of beauty is so useful and so treacherous. A ranking dressed as a feeling cannot be argued with. If I say your income is lower than mine, that is a fact you can contest or resent. If I say your taste is poor — that you don't really see, that your pleasures are common — I have made the same distinction while appearing only to describe my own delicate sensibility. The judgment of beauty performs the work of separation while keeping its hands clean. It sorts people, and calls the sorting appreciation.

We come back to the painting, the face, the coastline at dusk. The feeling is still there, undeniable, and Schiffter never asks us to give it up. What he has removed is the innocence around it. The word that seemed to point cleanly at the world turns out to be crowded — with our history, our upbringing, our need to stand a little above the person beside us. Beauty was supposed to be the thing we could all agree on. It becomes, in his hands, the thing that reveals how little we agree, and why the disagreement matters so much.