Psychology vs.

philosophy: Beauty requires

thought

Written by Tim Newman on May 11, 2017

In a recent study, two of Immanuel Kant’s theories on experiencing beauty were assessed. The

conclusion is that beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, but the beholder will need to think

about it to appreciate it.

Beauty is an ephemeral term. Many of us will find beauty in a tropical beach or

a sunset, while others might find beauty in less likely places. However, we all
experience beauty somewhere along the line.

In the 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant laid out a couple of
theories on beauty – in fact, he is still considered the preeminent authority on
the topic. He theorized that beauty requires thought, but that sensuous
pleasure can never be beautiful.

Although the claims, at face value, appear challenging to approach

scientifically, a study published in Current Biology goes some way toward
testing them.

This intriguing new study was carried out by Denis Pelli and Aenne Brielmann
at New York University’s Department of Psychology.
Assessing Kant’s theories
Sixty-two people took part in the study. They were asked to rate how much
pleasure they felt when they saw an image, ate a candy, or felt a teddy bear.
The participants were shown a range of images: some were beautiful, some
were just nice, and others were neutral (for instance, a picture of cloth or a
chair in a furniture catalog). The beauty of each image and object was rated
from 1 to 4.

After the initial round, the participants were asked to rate the images again,
but this time they were distracted during the process with another task. The
secondary task involved listening to a series of letters, and the participants
were required to press a button if they heard the same letter that they had
heard two letters previously – a task that requires a great deal of attention.

Once the beauty score data had been analyzed, the team found that, although
the reactions to non-beautiful images were not altered, beautiful images took
a hit. Pictures that were rated beautiful during the first, non-distracted
experiment were rated as less beautiful during the second, distraction task.

The psychologists conclude that Kant was right: beauty does require
thought.

The second of Kant’s theories up for dissection does not fair so well. He
claimed that sensual pleasures could never be beautiful, but around 30
percent of participants said that they experienced beauty when eating candy
or feeling a soft teddy bear.
Can sucking candy be beautiful?
This second finding was a surprise to the team, so they followed it up with
another experiment. They asked participants who had responded “definitely
yes” to experiencing beauty when sucking candy to explain their answers. The
authors write about their responses, “Most of them remarked that sucking
candy had personal meaning for them, like a fond childhood memory. One
participant replied, ‘Of course, anything can be beautiful.'”

Although the study was conducted on a small scale, the results are intriguing
and generate a range of new questions to be answered. According to the
authors, they plan to use further studies to ask, “Are there people who cannot
experience beauty? What role does beauty play in decision-making? Is a
sense of beauty necessary for creativity? And, is ugliness the opposite of
beauty or is it a separate dimension?”

Plenty more investigation will be needed before firm conclusions can be

drawn about a topic as nebulous as beauty. However, to be on the safe side,
anyone who would like to experience beauty should attempt to do so without
simultaneously carrying out a cognitively challenging task.

“Our findings show that many other things besides art can be beautiful – even
candy,” Brielmann says. “But, for maximum pleasure, nothing beats
undistracted beauty.”

Learn how people’s brains respond to art.

The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling

beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or etc. A Philosopher claimed that

experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without

thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic

processing but have never been tested. The stimuli, which engage various senses, included

seeing images, tasting candy, and touching a teddy bear. Pleasure amplitude increases linearly

with the feeling of beauty. The distraction greatly reduces the beauty and pleasure experienced

from stimuli that otherwise produce strong pleasure and spares that of less-pleasant stimuli. We

also find that strong pleasure is always beautiful, whether produced reliably by beautiful stimuli

or just occasionally by sensuous stimuli. In sum, we confirm Kant's claim that only the pleasure

associated with feeling beauty requires thought and disprove his claim that sensuous pleasures

cannot be beautiful.

Philosophy and psychology are two fields of study with a common place in
history. Psychology arises out of philosophy. It arose in order to include the
empirical method when examining questions posed by philosophy. Therefore,
philosophy has brought various topics of study to the field of psychology, like
sensation, perception, intelligence, and memory.
In contrast, the solutions that each field gives are different. Although they
share subjects of study, they have different points of view. Even using the
same theories, philosophy and psychology often do not come to the
same conclusions. Therefore, the professionals in each field sometimes see
themselves as opponents.