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Immediacy

Rationalism about beauty is the view that judgments of beauty are judgments of reason, i.e., that
we judge things to be beautiful by reasoning it out, where reasoning it out typically involves
inferring from principles or applying concepts. At the beginning of the 18th century, rationalism
about beauty had achieved dominance on the continent, and was being pushed to new extremes
by les gomtres, a group of literary theorists who aimed to bring to literary criticism the
mathematical rigor that Descartes had brought to physics. As one such theorist put it:
The way to think about a literary problem is that pointed out by Descartes for problems of
physical science. A critic who tries any other way is not worthy to be living in the present
century. There is nothing better than mathematics as propaedeutic for literary criticism.
(Terrasson 1715, Preface, 65; quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks 1957, 258)
It was against this, and against more moderate forms of rationalism about beauty, that mainly
British philosophers working mainly within an empiricist framework began to develop theories
of taste. The fundamental idea behind any such theorywhich we may call the immediacy
thesisis that judgments of beauty are not (or at least not primarily) mediated by inferences
from principles or applications of concepts, but rather have all the immediacy of
straightforwardly sensory judgments. It is the idea, in other words, that we do not reason to the
conclusion that things are beautiful, but rather taste that they are. Here is an early expression
of the thesis, from Jean-Baptiste Dubos's Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music,
which first appeared in 1719:
Do we ever reason, in order to know whether a ragoo be good or bad; and has it ever entered into
any body's head, after having settled the geometrical principles of taste, and defined the qualities
of each ingredient that enters into the composition of those messes, to examine into the
proportion observed in their mixture, in order to decide whether it be good or bad? No, this is
never practiced. We have a sense given us by nature to distinguish whether the cook acted
according to the rules of his art. People taste the ragoo, and tho' unacquainted with those rules,
they are able to tell whether it be good or no. The same may be said in some respect of the
productions of the mind, and of pictures made to please and move us. (Dubos 1748, vol. II, 238
239)
And here is a late expression, from Kant's 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment:
If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then
he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all
the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful . I will stop my ears, listen to no
reasons and arguments, and would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false than
allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof, since it is
supposed to be a judgment of taste and not of the understanding of reason. (Kant 1790, 165)
But the theory of taste would not have enjoyed its eighteenth-century run, nor would it continue
now to exert its influence, had it been without resources to counter an obvious rationalist
objection. There is a wide differenceso goes the objectionbetween judging the excellence of
a ragout and judging the excellence of a poem or a play. More often than not, poems and plays
are objects of great complication. But taking in all that complication requires a lot of cognitive
work, including the application of concepts and the drawing of inferences. Judging the beauty of
poems and plays, then, is evidently not immediate and so evidently not a matter of taste.

The chief way of meeting this objection was first to distinguish between the act of grasping the
object preparatory to judging it and the act of judging the object once grasped, and then to allow
the former, but not the latter, to be as concept- and inference-mediated as any rationalist might
wish. Here is Hume, with characteristic clarity:
[I]n order to pave the way for [a judgment of taste], and give a proper discernment of its object,
it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be
made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and
general facts fixed and ascertained. Some species of beauty, especially the natural kinds, on their
first appearance command our affection and approbation; and where they fail of this effect, it is
impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence, or adapt them better to our taste and
sentiment. But in many orders of beauty, particularly those of the fine arts, it is requisite to
employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment. (Hume, 1751, Section I)
Humelike Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, and Reid after him (Cooper 1711, 17, 231;
Hutcheson 1725, 1624; Reid 1785, 760761)regarded the faculty of taste as a kind of
internal sense. Unlike the five external or direct senses, an internal (or reflex or
secondary) sense is one that depends for its objects on the antecedent operation of some other
mental faculty or faculties. Reid characterizes it as follows:
Beauty or deformity in an object, results from its nature or structure. To perceive the beauty
therefore, we must perceive the nature or structure from which it results. In this the internal
sense differs from the external. Our external senses may discover qualities which do not depend
upon any antecedent perception . But it is impossible to perceive the beauty of an object,
without perceiving the object, or at least conceiving it. (Reid 1785, 760761)
Because of the highly complex natures or structures of many beautiful objects, there will have to
be a role for reason in their perception. But perceiving the nature or structure of an object is one
thing. Perceiving its beauty is another.

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