E.G.

I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I do not agree with Lord's view.

Lord's paper deserves a solid and careful critique, but I will not provide one of those here. I will just make a few scattered points.

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Lord identifies a few problems that he calls "existential." There is "the problem of material boundedness," which includes the fact that "[o]ur bodies will wilt and die at a relatively rapid speed." And then there is "the problem of disenchantment," which "arises from threats to the meaning or value of our particular lives." Under this latter problem, Lord groups two further sub-problems. First, there's the problem that a "deterministic, scientistic view of reality" "seems to immediately void the meaning of our lives," thus disenchanting us. And second, there's the problem that various social forces, including capitalism, also disenchant us, e.g., by "propelling us into a system of shallow exploitation."

A value is "salvific" if it solves existential problems such as these. Lord says there are two mechanisms by which a value could be salvific: reactive inheritance (whereby, roughly, your reaction to salvific value solves an existential problem for you) and redemptive constitution (whereby, roughly, your possession of salvific value solves an existential problem for you).

I take it that Lord's hope is that we can be saved from our existential problems either through our reactions to beauty, or through being beautiful ourselves.

This, I think, is not a good hope to have. For one thing, I think it is a false hope. I feel sure that beauty can't save us from any of the existential problems that Lord is (reasonably) worried about. Also, I worry that cultivating and being guided by this hope might lead to bad choices.

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For Lord, beauty is "the zenith value of ordered complexity." He tries to clarify this in a footnote: "Not all things with ordered complexity are beautiful (perhaps pace Proust)! To be beautiful is to have the zenith value of ordered complexity."

And Lord says that loving the beauty of X, whether X is a painting or a person, involves trying to understand X, to craft a "theory" of X. Beauty is in this way a "noetic" value.

One of my concerns about this account is very basic: I do not see that beauty is tightly connected with "ordered complexity" in the way that Lord suggests. Many of the things that are beautiful are beautiful because they are simple. Quaker meeting houses are usually more beautiful than any Roman cathedral, for example. Also, some of the things that are beautiful are beautiful because they are disordered. 

Lord's view seems to be consistent with the view that X can be more beautiful than Y even if X is simpler than Y or more disordered than Y. But I think Lord's view might not be consistent with the view (which I take to be plausible) that X's simplicity or disorder can in some cases contribute to X's beauty.

But suppose we run with Lord's "ordered complexity" account of beauty. I still have qualms with Lord's view.

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Lord structures his discussion of the beauty of persons around Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza, a movie that I haven't seen. The protagonist of the movie is Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old novelist who found literary success early in life, and has since devoted himself to pursuit of pleasure, but is now disenchanted, and is facing the sorts of existential problems outlined above.

Then Jep falls in love with someone named Ramona. About this, Lord writes:

Jep’s love for Ramona re-enchants his life in two ways. First, loving her beauty endows upon him a certain sort of significance. He comes to be valuable in a certain way because he appreciates her beauty.

This is Lord's mechanism of reactive inheritance. And:

This is not all that Ramona provides for Jep. Jep’s eros not only makes him good, it also ignites a passion to participate with Ramona’s beauty. This second type of re-enchantment is what really pulls Jep out of his alienation.

This is Lord's mechanism of redemptive constitution.

I do not understand the dynamic that Lord approvingly describes here. The idea that loving someone's beauty can give you some sort of extra significance is puzzling to me. I am not even sure that I understand what it would be to love someone's beauty (as against loving the person herself).

Does Jep objectify Ramona? If so, does he do so in an objectionable way? Is objectification inherently objectionable?

The story of Jep and Ramona reminds me of this song by Sofia Isella.

I am not saying that Jep views Ramona as a "doll person," "art you can fuck," a "statue with a pulse," or a "painting with legs" (to borrow some of Isella's words). I haven't even seen the movie.

Also, I am not saying that Lord's view entails or implies that you can save yourself from your existential problems just by reducing other people you regard as beautiful to the status of mere art objects.

But I suppose that anyone who likes Lord's view will need to distance Lord's hoped-for aesthetic salvation from the kind of objectionable objectification that I take Isella to be talking about.

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To try to create such distance, one might refer to Lord's account of beauty, according to which, as I mentioned above, beauty is "the zenith value of ordered complexity." Lord, or someone who likes Lord's views, might say that the sort of thing that Isella is talking about is different from, and worse than, the sort of thing that's going on between Jep and Ramona, because (a) Jep is reacting in a certain loving way to Ramona's ordered complexity—whereas (b) Isella is clearly taking aim at something baser and more problematic, e.g., unwanted lustful gazing at strangers' bodies.

When people object to men's objectification of women, as I take Isella to be doing, I suppose they are not usually talking about love of (and attempt to reach an understanding of) some individual person's ordered complexity. And that latter sort of thing is what Lord is talking about in his recounting of the story of Jep and Ramona.

So, maybe Lord's view doesn't suffer from as big of an objectification problem as might be thought. But the problem might still exist.

When you observe a painting in a museum I think you are "objectifying" it in some sense, even though you are (probably!) not lustfully gazing at it. Of course, it's fine to objectify paintings. But if our love of one another is to be understood in aesthetic terms, and thus classed together with appreciation of inanimate art objects such as paintings, then it too might end up being a form of objectification, though of a fairly odd sort.

***

Even if aesthetic appreciation of other people's beauty is not objectionably objectifying, I do not see how it could be of any use in addressing the existential problems that Lord talks about. Lord's remarks about how beauty supposedly addresses our mortality (what he calls the "problem of material boundedness") are particularly mysterious. He writes:

Jep’s engagement with beauty—Ramona’s and otherwise—is an artistic project. This engagement creates a perspective that is itself beautiful. This perspective will outlive Jep. It will be the proper object of love and thus will have the capacity to inspire the creation of new beautiful perspectives. In this way, beauty essentially has the capacity to perpetuate itself.

I do not understand what Lord is talking about here. Anyway, here is my favorite substitute for an afterlife. It does not require anything having to do with beauty.