The art of looking

A key on a leather thong

In 1757 the Scottish philosopher David Hume told a story he had borrowed from Cervantes. Two relatives of Sancho Panza, men with a reputation for a good palate, are asked to judge a hogshead of wine. The first says the wine is good, apart from a small taste of leather. The second agrees, apart from a taste of iron. The bystanders laugh at both. But when the barrel is emptied, there at the bottom is an old key with a leather thong tied to it.

The story comes from Part II of Don Quixote (1615), where the squires swap boasts about their families’ noses, and Hume uses it in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” printed in Four Dissertations (London, 1757). He wants to prove two things at once, and they seem to pull apart. The first is that beauty depends on the person who feels it: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” The second is that some people judge better than others, and that we can say who. The true judges, Hume says, are those with “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.” The two kinsmen are the proof. Taste is a sense, a response, felt in the one who tastes; and yet it can be delicate or coarse, trained or untrained, and the key at the bottom of the barrel shows who was right.

This lesson follows that tension. If beauty lives in the viewer, how can anyone be wrong about it? And if there is a standard, what trains a person to meet it? The answer the lecture behind this course gives is that the right training is a kind of looking, and it spends most of its time on how to look.

Beauty in the thing

For most of the history of the question, the answer was the reverse of Hume’s: beauty was in the object, or beyond it. The Pythagoreans had found that musical harmony follows simple ratios of string lengths, and they drew the moral that the beautiful is a matter of number. The sculptor Polykleitos, active about the middle of the fifth century BC, wrote a treatise called the Canon and made a statue to go with it, a spear-bearer. Both are lost; what we know comes from later writers. The physician Galen, citing the philosopher Chrysippus, says that Polykleitos placed beauty in the proportions of part to part, “finger to finger,” and everything to everything else. A line from the engineer Philo of Byzantium, sometimes taken as Polykleitos’s, says that success comes “little by little through many numbers”; the phrase is disputed. Whether the proportions can be recovered from Roman copies is itself argued. A safe summary: he wrote a book of numbers and made a statue to prove it.

Plato went further. In the Symposium, the priestess Diotima describes a lover who climbs a ladder, from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, to beautiful souls, laws, and kinds of knowledge, and who then “suddenly” sees a nature of wondrous beauty: beauty “absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting,” in Benjamin Jowett’s Victorian English. Beauty, here, is not in any thing at all but in a Form that things share. A dialogue attributed to Plato, the Hippias Major, ends in failure to define it, with a proverb: “beautiful things are difficult.” And the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas gave a three-part answer that lasted for centuries: a beautiful thing has integrity, due proportion, and clarity. He also noted, in the Summa Theologiae, that “beautiful things are those which please when seen,” and in that remark the viewer is already present.

Beauty in the viewer

The turn toward the viewer came in the eighteenth century, and it came in steps. In 1711 the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote of contemplating beauty without wanting to own or use it. In 1725 Francis Hutcheson, an Irish-born philosopher who later held a chair at Glasgow, argued that we have an “internal sense” of beauty that responds at once to what he called “uniformity amidst variety.” Hume’s sentence of 1757 states the position most bluntly, and it is the one that the lecture’s slogan echoes: the thing does not please because it is beautiful; we call it beautiful because it pleases. The slogan is no one’s in particular. It fits Hutcheson and Hume, and it appears in almost those words in George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896), where beauty is “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” Santayana, who was born in Madrid and taught at Harvard, wrote it there.

It does not fit Kant, and the difference is worth the trouble, because Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) is the book on which the field rests. He agrees that a judgment of taste is not about the thing’s concept but about a feeling in the person (§1). He says the pleasure must be “disinterested,” that is, not tied to any wish that the thing should exist, be owned, or be useful (§2). So far, Hume. But then he notices something odd. When you call a sunset beautiful you are not just reporting a liking, as you might about a flavor of ice cream. You expect others to agree. You “will speak of the beautiful,” he says, “as if” beauty were a property of the object (§6). The judgment is personal, and yet it asks to be shared. Kant calls this a “subjective universality.” And he reverses the order that Hume’s slogan has: in §9 he says that the free play of imagination and understanding in a judgment of taste comes before the pleasure and is its ground. That is how he keeps beauty from collapsing into mere agreeableness. The pleasure follows from the judging, not the other way round.

Two more phrases from the book have survived in everyday speech. A beautiful object, Kant says, shows a “purposiveness without purpose”: it looks as if made for something, and yet no purpose can be named. That is why a flower or a melody can please without being useful.

The first look

If beauty depends on someone looking, then the quality of the looking matters. The lecture’s central claim is that the best looking has the quality of a first look. “First” here does not mean the first time you ever see a thing. It means a state of attention in which the thing has not yet become familiar enough to ignore.

The Roman poet Lucretius made the point in the second book of his On the Nature of Things, in lines 1023–1047. Look up, he says, at the bright, clear color of the sky and everything in it. If all this were being shown to mortals for the first time, suddenly, what could be called more marvelous? Yet, he goes on, in H. A. J. Munro’s Victorian English, people now “wearied as all are to satiety with seeing” hardly care to look up. (His point in context is a plea not to dismiss his new teaching simply because it is new.) The philosopher Seneca made the same point twice. In his Natural Questions he observes that it is natural to marvel more at the new than at the great: the sun and the stars go unwatched, he says, while a comet sets the whole world agog. In a letter to a friend he says he gazes at wisdom with the same wonder with which he sometimes looks at the sky, which he often beholds “as if I saw it for the first time” (in Richard Gummere’s English), and his Latin has a lovely phrase for the state, spectator novus, a new spectator.

The sculptor Auguste Rodin, in conversations written up by Paul Gsell and published in 1911, said that to an artist worthy of the name all in nature is beautiful. The lecture’s paraphrase, that masters find beauty in familiar things, is looser than the text, but the spirit is there. And Chinese readers meet the same teaching in a school text. The Great Learning, chapter 7 of the commentary, says (心不在焉，视而不见，听而不闻，食而不知其味), in James Legge’s 1861 English: “When the mind is not present, we look and do not see; we hear and do not understand; we eat and do not know the taste of what we eat.” Its remedy, in Zhu Xi’s reading, is to keep the mind present by reverence. The last clause, about not tasting, is the old tie between attention and the tongue.

Psychology gives the idea something to hold on to. Repeated stimuli are answered less and less; this is habituation, and the first look is what habituation takes away. In short, the brain turns down what stays the same and turns it up when something changes. Try it on the toy below, and remember that its numbers are invented.

The lecture builds a distinction on this. Ordinary looking, it says, takes in what is given without distinguishing, and so keeps the looker at a distance. Gazing is a deliberate act: it picks out what is unique in a thing and gives it a meaning it never had. From this the lecture draws a claim about originality: that originality comes from fighting the habitual, since what you cease to see you cannot make anything of. That is the lecture’s own thesis, and a strong one. It is not a result of any study, though it fits what habituation suggests.

One of the lecture’s illustrations does not hold up as told. It describes a scene in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus in which a boy asks his piano teacher whether any feeling is stronger than love, and she answers, “interest.” The scene exists, but it is different. In chapter 8 of the novel, after a lecture, the composer Adrian Leverkühn and his friend, the narrator Serenus Zeitblom, walk home in winter fog. Adrian asks whether Zeitblom thinks love the strongest of the passions. “Do you know a stronger?” “Yes, interest.” Zeitblom takes this to mean love with its animal warmth drawn off, and Adrian answers, laughing, that they should agree on that definition. It shows Adrian’s coolness. The moral that interest keeps love alive is the lecture’s own.

Two ways of meeting nature

Behind the idea of a first look is an older picture of nature as something veiled. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with a saying, physis kryptesthai philei, which is usually rendered “nature loves to hide” (fragment 123 in the standard numbering; one scholar argues the verb means “is accustomed to”). Plutarch tells, in On Isis and Osiris, of a seated statue of Athena at Sais in Egypt, whom the local people identified with Isis, bearing the inscription: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered” (the robe became a veil in later retellings). The goddess of Sais was in fact Neith. Friedrich Schiller made a poem of it in 1795, “The Veiled Image at Sais,” in which a young man lifts the veil at night, will never speak of what he saw, and dies young. And Kant, in a famous note to §49 of the Critique of Judgment, wrote that perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said than the inscription over the temple of Isis, “Mother Nature”: “I am all that is, was, and will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.”

The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) used the image as the thread of a book, The Veil of Isis (2004; translated by Michael Chase, 2006), and the lecture leans on it heavily. Hadot’s book follows two thousand years of the question of how to lift the veil. There are, he says, two attitudes. He puts the first under the patronage of Prometheus: it questions nature, forces it, uses technology and experiment to extract its secrets. Francis Bacon is his model, and he notes that Kant, too, who compared the scientist to a judge forcing witnesses to answer, belongs on this side. The second he dedicates to Orpheus, the singer who charmed animals and stones: it acts through melody, rhythm, and harmony, in respect and disinterestedness before a mystery. Poets, painters, and a good many scientists are here, and Goethe is Hadot’s favorite example of someone who combined both. The lecture matches the two to the lecture’s own scheme: the Promethean is the scientist’s way of meeting the world, and the Orphic is the aesthetic.

Several of the lecture’s details need correction. Prometheus was a Titan who stole fire, not a sun god. Orpheus is usually said to be the son of the Thracian king Oeagrus, though some ancient writers name Apollo. And Hadot himself is careful: he does not set a good attitude against a bad one (“I do not mean to oppose a good and a bad attitude,” he says), the two are often found in the same person, and his “Orphic” category is wider than the aesthetic, including poetry and the philosophy of Plato’s Timaeus. As for art, the lecture quotes Hadot as saying that art extends nature’s mysterious creative action. We could not find those words. Nearer ones are in the book: human art, “especially in its aesthetic aspect,” is “in a sense the prolongation of nature” (p. 92 of the English edition), and the conclusion says that nature is art and art is nature, human art being only a special case of the art of nature. One more detail: the many-breasted figure often called Isis, “mother of nature,” is the Artemis of Ephesus or the later figure of Nature, merged with Isis in the Roman and eighteenth-century traditions.

The pure onlooker

On January 12, 1907, the philosopher Edmund Husserl wrote from Göttingen to the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal had visited him on December 6, 1906, after lecturing in the town, and had probably sent him a volume of his short plays. Husserl’s letter says that pure aesthetic seeing requires a strict “switching off” of any belief that the thing really exists, and that this is closely related to the stance he was working out in philosophy, the one that makes the world a pure phenomenon. Husserl later called the method epoché, “bracketing.” (It appears in the first book of his Ideas, 1913. It is not doubt; it is the suspension of the habit of taking the world’s reality for granted so that one can study how things appear.) He ends the letter by joking that he is a hopeless sort of professor who cannot open his mouth without lecturing.

The lecture then gives a long passage describing a pure observer: someone who is simply present, without a will to act; “a hidden comrade, the silent brother of all things,” who suffers from every change in them and, suffering, rejoices. The lecture attributes it to Husserl’s letter. It is not in the letter. It comes from a lecture by Hofmannsthal himself, “The Poet and This Age,” given in late 1906 and early 1907, in which he describes the poet. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk discusses the exchange of letters in a short book that the lecture cites, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice (translated by Karen Margolis, 2012; the German title is Scheintod im Denken, 2010). The lecture’s point is that the aesthetic person’s stance resembles the philosopher’s epoché: both hold back the wish to use, to possess, to survive, and look. That is a fair reading of the letter’s kinship claim.

Chinese readers will recognize the figure in two places. In the Zhuangzi, the butcher Cook Ding says that when he began to carve oxen, all he saw was an ox; after three years, he no longer saw a whole ox. What he cared about, he says, was the Way (道), something beyond skill. And in another chapter: “Heaven and earth have great beauty and do not speak” (天地有大美而不言).

Playing with things

The lecture ends this stretch with a bold reversal of a familiar proverb. “Wanwu sangzhi” (玩物丧志), “to play with things is to lose one’s purpose,” has long been a warning against idle hobbies. It is in the Book of Documents, in the chapter “The Hound of the Lü” (旅獒). After the Zhou conquered the Shang, the western people called the Lü sent a gift, a great hound, and the Grand Guardian (traditionally the Duke of Shao) wrote to instruct the king, King Wu. The line is 玩人丧德，玩物丧志, which James Legge renders: by trifling with men “he ruins his virtue; by finding his amusement in things (of mere pleasure), he ruins his aims.” It is advice to a ruler about distraction. In the eleventh century the philosopher Cheng Yi used it against literary writing: to write is also to play with things. The lecture’s reading is the opposite. A person who wants something from the thing, a purpose, spoils it; so the true aesthetic person must “lose purpose,” and play with things completely. It cites Wang Shixiang as the example: a man who spent a lifetime with crickets, pigeons, and Ming furniture and asked nothing beyond them.

Wang Shixiang (王世襄, 1914–2009) was born in Beijing and educated at Yenching University; he worked at the Palace Museum and later at a music research institute. He was labeled a “Rightist” in 1957, and his collection was seized during the Cultural Revolution. He was known in China as the leading amateur (玩家) of his time, and his work on Ming furniture, first published in Chinese in 1985 and in English soon after as Classic Chinese Furniture, made the subject an international one. He received the Prince Claus Award in 2003. A safe summary: he studied Ming furniture, crickets, and pigeons with equal devotion. Whether he was the model of the lecture’s “pure” player, whom no purpose spoiled, is the lecture’s reading. Wang Shixiang’s own life, with its political troubles and its scholarship, was not purposeless. The lecture also says it is the first to give the old proverb a new meaning; Cheng Yi’s use, at least, shows that people have argued about the proverb for a thousand years.