Is There a Scientific Beauty? From Factual Description to an Aesthetic Judgement

Through empirical observation of French National Heritage researchers, this article intends to address in a sociological perspective two traditional issues in philosophy and aesthetics: the discrepancy between factual descriptions and value judgements, or between scientific objectivity and aesthetic subjectivity; and the use of beauty criteria. After having evidenced that the latter may come out of actual mental procedures grounded in highly controlled processes of categorization, the conclusion briefly suggests a sociological twist in the “objectivity of values” issue.

 

1. The image of a house

I shot this photograph in a small village in Brittany, a western region of France, where I was achieving a sociological survey on the Inventaire, an administrative service in charge of the inventory of French national heritage for the ministry of Culture. I was standing beside the researcher, a young art historian, who had kindly accepted to comment for me what he was seeing, writing, shooting, and sometimes drawing. When on the field, his task was to select some interesting buildings (using a variety of criteria that my survey was intended to evidence), locate them on a map, fill up a description form, and photograph each of them. Once in his office, he would put all these data together and organize them into files, write commentaries, maybe an article or even a book.

As for my own task, the subject of my survey was not this house or village, nor any other one: it was this man in front of the house - and a number of his colleagues, whom I also accompanied “on the field”. This is why the photo here carries no other function than to help understand the researcher’s description, below.

 

2. The researcher’s description

Let us listen to him now, saying aloud what he is writing down on his notebook:

“This one, it’s second quarter 20th. So we have a rectangular plan house, two rooms on ground floor, or two rooms per floor…Span elevation… I think the side dormer windows have been added, though… Interestingly, the central span is emphasised by an overhanging dormer window… Well… We have a few ornaments: arched windows, this is interesting… I have a balcony… I have zinc storeys, modest indeed, but… And here we are… So we have a semi underground basement and a raised ground floor, an attic… Balconies have probably been transformed… We have some ironwork: railings have been replaced…Interestingly, we have a double flight of stairs… It’s a beautiful one! I mean, It’s pleasant… »

 

3. What is at stake: value judgements and criteria of beauty

To a layman’s eye – such as the sociologist’s here -, this house does not obviously deserve such an admiration: it looks like so many other examples of middle class country housing between WW1 and WW2; it would probably have not been selected twenty years ago, when criteria of ancientness, rarity, decoration etc. used to be more severe[1]. But this is not what is at stake here: we will neither discuss the content and relevance of this value judgement, as art historians or art critics would do; nor try to demonstrate the relativity of judgements, as post-modern sociologists would do. That value judgements are relative to their historical and spatial context – to their “culture” – should be considered obvious: it cannot be the aim of research but its starting point, from which the social scientist has to analyze the actual properties of actors, objects and contexts involved in a value judgement, and the way they interfere one with each other[2]. Thus our focus here will be the very existence of this value judgement, since it is far from expected in that context.

Indeed, the words “It’s a beautiful one!” should not have been pronounced in the frame of an administrative and scientific inventory of architectural heritage: even though the notion of heritage pertains to values associated with aesthetics and authenticity[3], there is a strong forbidding and self-censorship on any value judgement, as we shall see below. This is why the description spontaneously provided by the researcher is merely technical, according to the collective deontology and know-how that he is supposed to convey. His monologue traces the trajectory of his own scrutiny, carried on by the words he uses to describe the house and justify its selection in the corpus. Only at the end of this precise analysis of each element, framed by the pre-existing items of his form, something unexpected irrupts:

“It’s a beautiful one!”

And immediately after, as a concession to the collective norm of value judgement avoidance: “I mean, it’s pleasant…”

But the recorder was there, to testify: the word has been said.

Two issues arise at this step. The first one has to do with the status of value judgements in our society: why and how should they be avoided by researchers whose work constructs more than the National Heritage corpus - its very notion? What is at stake in this split between description and evaluation, facts and values, which scientists both observe and transgress? And why such a compulsion to evaluation, in spite of a strong and well organized requirement for factual description?

The second issue has to do with the very meaning of “beauty” as it is intended here. Is it the same as the one usually met when speaking of “the shock of the beautiful”, or when praising the formal qualities of a work of art? Indeed, the researcher’s value judgement did not come out immediately, as an emotive reaction to a sudden feeling: it came after a slow, systematic and analytical description of the house, suggesting that what is at stake here is not exactly what we use to mean by “aesthetics”. We will see that there is actually a difference between the layman’s and the scientist’s beauty, so that the words “It’s a beautiful one!” may be not so far from factual description as one might have thought.

Status of value judgements, criteria of beauty: these rather standard issues in aesthetics or philosophy of art will be addressed here according to the methods and epistemic groundings provided by an empirical, inductive and comprehensive sociology, based on the analysis of actors’ attitudes and discourses in ordinary situations, in order to enlighten their logics and meanings in their own eyes[4].

 

4. The norm : prohibition of value judgements

When reading the Inventaire official book of prescriptions edited by the “methodology office”[5], aesthetic judgements do not seem to have any place in the work. When asked about it, the researchers themselves are prompt to declare that they should not interfere, or quite marginally. Everybody agrees: any value judgement is associated with subjectivity, that is, lack of scientificity. And scientific knowledge has always been the main goal of this administration. This is why the norm is clearly that of a scientific approach, meaning standardized, explicit and “opacified” procedures, rather than an aesthetical one, meaning invisible and “transparent” criteria, “self-evident” quality, intuition, immediate “gaze”[6]. In our western culture, value judgements tend to be spontaneously associated with lack of objectivity; and among all kinds of value judgements, taste judgements appear as particularly subjective, be they “aesthetic” (referring to the object’s properties) or “aesthesic” (referring to the subject’s feelings). Thus aesthetic value stands at the very opposite of scientific fact.

Factuality vs. value judgement: we shall not discuss here the rich literature on whether this opposition is grounded or not. Some theoreticians accept it and try to specify its semiotic status[7]; some refute it, mostly in order to save the “rationality” of values[8]. What is relevant here for us is that the difference between factual description and value judgement appears as a self-evident, if not a basic condition, for the objects of our survey: in the eyes of both researchers and instructors, it provides a fundamental criterion of professionalism. By the way, we readers also share this conviction in front of our researcher’s comment: “it’s a rectangular plan house” obviously pertains to a different kind of enunciation than “it’s a beautiful one!” – doesn’t it?

The prohibition is quite internalized: when asked if they use the term “beautiful”, a chief researcher answers “Oh no! [laugh] Not at all!... Truly, it’s an issue, euh… I wouldn’t say it’s a stain, but in a way, it is…Because… Our processes is supposed to be scientific, with statistics etc… I would say it’s something like the return of the repressed… We’ll have lots of arguments, but not “it’s beautiful”… We’ll rather say “it’s interesting”...” Here lies a major problem, due to the necessity to conciliate a scientific method, presuming objectivity, an administrative frame, presuming homogeneity, and a patrimonial object, presuming emotion and subjectivity since it is embedded in such values as authenticity, singularity and beauty.

Once on the field, however, things are slightly different: having to actually qualify objects, researchers sometimes happen to let value judgements come to the surface, in spite of this well internalized norm. One of them explains: the word “beautiful” is “a taboo word, but it lies in the secret of all our processes. The fact is, there’s a kind of discretion, a prohibition to express it”. And because researchers are quite conscious that expressing their own taste would be illegitimate, they laugh each time they use an aesthetic term, or their voice becomes so low that the sociologist’s recorder can hardly keep a trace…

 

5. The practice : euphemization and marginalization of the value judgement

In spite of this prohibition, value judgements come back again and again in the researchers’ expertise, even if the sociologist’s presence should foster self control. When positive, they typically appear through qualifications in terms of “beauty” (“Here is a beautiful corner window, see…”), or equivalents such as “elegance” (“What is also interesting here is the hipped roof, which gives the house someelegance…”). But negative judgements are still more frequent than positive ones, with the recurrent “ugly” (“…The house beside, with its small canopy, uglyindeed…”), “awful” (“Anyway, it’s awful!” [laugh]), “appalling” (“This is typically a serial work, part of those which have always been considered as not to be studied, out of any category of art history…Well, let’s say they are still appalling!” [laugh]), or “disgusting”: “No doubt it’s a disgusting daub! …”

Euphemisms are readily used, such as “not bad” (“This is not bad… Even good…”) or « not ugly » (« That’s not ugly, is it, with the small pigeon house…”), “mediocre”, “poor”, “secondary”: “See, it’s extremely poor… The canvas is quite mediocre, it’ssecond rank painting”. Euphemisation still resides in negative forms (“These varnished shutters, not wonderful indeed”), in litotes (“Something of less good taste, see there, the Christ head… [laugh] It’s not that wonderful, but…”), quotes (“It’s a very classical building, part of the “beautiful” ones – quotes of course – of the second half of the 19th century…”), or softening: “We are going to see other farms, some not beautiful and some less beautiful… [laugh] [Question: The latter was rather beautiful, wasn’t it?] It was interesting, yes”. Sometimes the value judgement also shifts from the quality of result to the quality of fabrication process, that is, from aesthetics to techniques: “This is a good one! A good one indeed! The quality of construction is beautiful!” The shift can also get to side documents (“The blueprints are very, very beautiful!”; “Here, I think the postcards are splendid!”), or even to the outcomes of researchers’ work: “…So as to get also a beautiful publication…”

Though it does not match with scientific process, value judgement is thus not totally absent from the vocabulary and, consequently, from the selection criteria. Rather, it is rejected at the margins, used either in order to complement descriptive and analytical criteria, or in “heteronomous” situations, when audience is no longer that of peers but of laymen, general public: “A very beautiful house of the 16th century!”, an researcher explains while displaying his results in front of local representatives; “You do have a beautiful farm! With many beautiful buildings! », another one says to an old reluctant farmer. A young researcher explicates this discrepancy between scientific qualification, intended for peers, and aesthetic judgement, for popularization purpose: “It allows us to let people understand why this building has been selected: the beautiful, I mean… The beautiful, the pretty – you get it… [Q. But when you said « beautiful », it was only for popularization purpose?]Well, I said « beautiful », but, euh… No, no! No ! I do not use it, hey ! As a researcher, I stick to terms… I don’t say beautiful, pretty… It’s only a kind of shortening to… It has no objective value: what is beautiful, what is art, well, you see, it’s always, euh…[laugh]”.

Between the « scientific » suspension of any value judgement, through exhaustive use of factual description, and the “aesthetic” affirmation of a judgement about beauty, the Inventaire does the splits, pushed on by the patrimonial valorisation of beauty and authenticity, drawn back by the scientific disqualification of value judgements, and forced anyway to take sides because of its administrative mission. For the evaluative dimension of normativity (“it is beautiful”) regularly leads to the prescriptive dimension (“it must be protected”): the value judgement tends to turn into action, that is, concretely, advise to the concerned authorities. This dimension of action is still present in the scientific mission of the Inventaire: it is a reason why it is so difficult for its employees to totally avoid value judgements. Another reason is the general impulse to develop and express opinions: in our society, values are heavily present, probably much beyond what social sciences have yet been exploring and measuring.

 

6. Aesthetic vs. scientific beauty

We thus understood the reason of that “I mean, it’s pleasant”: a euphemization strategy intended to minimize the illegitimate use of a value judgement. Now, we still have to understand what the “It’s a beautiful one!” means for our young researcher. Is his conception of “beauty” here really the same as a lay person’s confronted to an object whose characteristics fulfil one’s requirements for harmony, formal perfection, balance, impressiveness, or any other property commonly associated with “beauty”?

The answer is no; and it is not only because the house is not precisely one of those in front of which anybody would spontaneously express admiration. In other words, the specificity of his conception of beauty pertains not only to his very specialized knowledge, that is, to his capacity to perceive qualities that would remain invisible to the general public. It also has something to do with the very nature of the selected qualities. The commonly “beautiful” means a somehow blurred feeling of harmony, of pleasure, of immediately perceivable quality; while the researcher’s “beautiful” comes but after a while, out of an analytical splitting up of properties (even if he is so used to this work that he himself probably does not perceive it anymore). And their objects may be quite different: the former will rather focus on a handsome castle, an old church, a masterwork, whereas the latter will also focus on a small farm, an industrial building, an ordinary retable – or, as we see here, a humdrum house…

To understand this, let us select some other examples in our corpus. A researcher stops in front of a small ordinary farm, commenting: « See, this is really the small local heritage, in all its splendour, I would say: in all its splendour… It’s often the poorest heritage which keeps its style at best, because modest people can’t afford to improve it…” Indeed, the terms “small”, “poor”, “modest” are not commonly associated with “splendour” and “style”. But the reason of such a positive judgement is to be found in the coherence between the characteristics of the item (a farm among many others) and the general properties of the category to which it belongs (the regional farm): in other words, its typicality. This is why researchers so often use the word “example”, evidencing the relationship between one particular element and the many other items of its category: “Here we have a nice example of farm, probably abandoned, but with a beautiful hall, beautiful pillars…”

An older researcher tries to transmit his admiration for a 16th century farm; he first invokes the “first glance” evidence: “When you see a house like that, can there be any hesitation as for its interest, just at first glance?” After such an introduction, the layman expects adjectives in the classical aesthetic register, such as “beautiful”, “splendid”, “gorgeous”, “perfect”, “harmonious”, “radiant”… However the remainder brings out but technical nouns and dates: “It is schist, see, but freestone! Look at the colours… Not a single stone is not at its right place! Everything is exactly at the right place… It’s faultless! Look at the small ornaments, here… Come and see!... It’s fourth quarter 16th. A faultless volume, the wood frame is there, eveything is there !” The only qualifiers are “faultless”, “at the right place” and “there”, which implicitly refer to the requirement for coherence: coherence with the origin of the house (that is, authenticity), and coherence with its category (that is, typicality).

“When you see a house like that, can there be any hesitation as for its interest, just at first glance?” In fact, this introducing judgement comes out of an analytical splitting up of properties, then related to the whole category filled by the already known items. So it needs a long learning of the typology, acquired through years of experience: it’s the said “first glance”, apparently so immediate, but so long to purchase indeed… When on the field, the feeling of “beauty” directly results from this analytical splitting up, allowing to perceive the “ideal-typical” character of the item; in other words, its being wholly “representative”, that is, saturated with the characteristics of the category to which it belongs.

This properly scientific notion of “beauty” is exactly the same as when a doctor, or a sociologist, praises a “beautiful” case: it means something so typical that it renders an item “exemplary”, that is, totally “representative” – exactly as the weberian “ideal-type”, defined as an abstract construction putting together all the properties of its category[9]. Thus one goes up from the “typical” to the “representative”, and to the “interesting” (endowed with an abstract coherence with the other items of the same type), until eventually reaching the “beautiful”, when no element defining the category lacks, and when each of these elements is itself, in its kind, full of the defining properties.

Note that the “scientific beauty” shares with the “aesthetic beauty” a common requirement for coherence: that which, in the latter case, is sometimes named “harmony”. But the coherence expected by aesthetes is more concrete, since it concerns the relationship between immediately perceivable items: a façade and a roof, a farm and an outbuilding, symmetry of openings, harmony of colours, etc. Conversely, the coherence expected by scientists is more abstract, since it relies on the relationship between the estimated object and the characteristics of the category to which it belongs; it thus requires highly specialized knowledge and ability to abstraction: that is, relating an item to a whole. It is at the very opposite of the common notion of aesthetics, favouring immediate sensations and unique chef-d’oeuvres. However, the same adjectives arise in both cases: “beautiful”, “faultless”, “splendid” …

Thus aesthetic judgement is not absent from the criteria used by the Inventaireresearchers: first because, though prohibited, it is indeed practically used, even under marginal or self-censured forms; and moreover because it appears in a specific way, coming out of a compromise between the aesthetic logics of patrimonial administration and the scientific logics of inventorial study. When addressed within actors’ actual experience, the issue of aesthetic judgement appears indeed as a little more complex than philosophers use to figure out when speculating on beauty…

 

7. Between objectivity and subjectivity : the objectification of values

Let us then consider that there is a “scientific” beauty. Does it mean that we eventually discovered an absolute, objective, naturally grounded value, which might be demonstrated exactly as a scientific fact? Should we consider the house above as “objectively” beautiful, because a specialist is able to enumerate all the factual properties that define its unquestionable belonging to its category? Would the researcher’s “It’s a beautiful one” be a “falsifiable” proposition, in Popper’s words[10]?

Not at all. Here, “scientific” means a certain kind of value judgement, grounded on specific modes of evaluation based on categorization. According to Hume’s definition, we believe that facts and values pertain to different kinds of utterances[11]: searching factually grounded, or “objective”, “natural”, “transcendental” values is a matter of metaphysics (if not theology). Sociology – that is, empirical study of actual experience - can in no way provide any evidence for such a hypothesis. In other words, a researcher can demonstrate that this house is “typical” – but he can convince nobody convinced that it is “beautiful”. There is no more “natural aesthetics” than “natural law”…

But contrary to what philosophers might think, absence of absolute objectivity does not mean subjectivity. Value judgements are indeed more subjective than factual descriptions, and taste judgements more than value judgements; among value judgements, aesthetic judgements are probably more subjective than, say, ethical judgements[12]; and among aesthetic judgements, criteria pertaining to what we called “aesthetic beauty” are more subjective than criteria pertaining to “scientific beauty”. However, the latter are not more “objective”, in the sense of “transcendental”, grounded in a supra-human realm, a platonician world of ideas: they are but more “objectified”, that is, submitted to collective framings, standardized categorizations, contextualised arguments, shared references. In a word, they are more collective.

When metaphysical tradition – together with common sense – opposes “subjectivity” (usually associated with poorly literate people) to “objectivity” (associated with scholarship), it tends to understate the latter as “transcendental”, anchored in nature, thus absolutely true, valuable for anyone at any time. Instead, the sociological insight evidences the contextual nature of any statement, its constitutive “immanence”, its invulnerability to whatever supra-human proceedings. Because fundamentally descriptive, it displays the various positions (and sometimes their discrepancies) on continuous axis: here, the axis between subject-oriented arguments and object-oriented arguments; and the axis between individual and collective. The more “objective” an utterance, the more anchored in “social” processes of objectification – that is, the more robust, the more convincing, the more commonly shared.

Thus, all value judgements are not condemned to an absolute “subjectivity”: even the feeling of beauty is more or less “objective”, that is “objectified”, through precise and descriptible modes of “objectification”, as illustrated in the above example. Collective norms are indeed much stronger than whatever “natural” values might ever be…

 

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REFERENCES

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Boudon Raymond, (1995), Le Juste et le vrai. Etudes sur l’objectivité des valeurs et de la connaissance, Paris, Fayard.

 

Chastel André, (1986), « La notion de patrimoine », in Nora Pierre (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, II, Paris, Gallimard.

 

Dispaux Gilbert, (1984), La Logique et le quotidien. Une analyse dialogique des mécanismes d’argumentation, Paris, Minuit.

 

Ermisse Gérard, (1997), « L’Inventaire aujourd’hui et demain », in Nora Pierre (ed.),Science et conscience du patrimoine. Entretiens du patrimoine, Paris, Fayard-Editions du Patrimoine, 1997.

 

Genette Gérard, (1994, 1997), L’Oeuvre de l’art, I, II, Paris, Seuil.

 

Hacking Ian, (1999), The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

 

Heinich Nathalie, (2000), "From Rejection of Contemporary Art to Culture War", in Michèle Lamont, Laurent Thévenot (eds), Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States, Cambridge University Press.

 

Heinich Nathalie, Schaeffer Jean-Marie, (2004), Art, création, fiction. Entre sociologie et philosophie, Paris, Jacqueline Chambon.

 

Heinich Nathalie, (2006), « La sociologie à l’épreuve des valeurs », Cahiers internationaux de sociologie (to be published).

 

Junod Philippe, (1976), Transparence et opacité. Essai sur les fondements théoriques de l’art moderne, Lausanne, L’Age d’homme.

 

Michaud Yves, (1999), Critères esthétiques et jugement de goût, Paris, Jacqueline Chambon.

 

Popper Karl, (1935), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, Hutchinson Co., 1959.

 

Principes, méthode et conduite de l’Inventaire général, Paris, Editions du Patrimoine, 2001.

 

Putnam Hilary, (2002), The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

 

Riegl, Aloïs, (1903), Le Culte moderne des monuments : son essence et sa genèse, Paris, Seuil, 1984.

 

Schaeffer Jean-Marie, (2000), Adieu à l'esthétique, Paris, PUF.

 

Searle John, (1995), The Construction of Social Reality, New York, The Free Press.

 

Weber Max, (1949), The Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York, The Free Press.

 

 

 

The Beauty Shock, Winter 2006