Kenneth Walden

Beauty is all around us, in artworks that captivate us, in landscapes that move us, in faces, and in many other things. We often feel measured by these; think that we may not do justice to them, say, if we don’t try to be more in tune with their value. In Beholden to Beauty, Gorodeisky argues that this is crucial: beauty is like admirability, dignity, and comparable values for which emotional responsiveness is called. We might believe that a person is admirable without admiring her. If she is admirable, our belief that she is would be true of her. But believing that she is admirable, or acting on the basis of this belief without admiring her, is not being true to her. Beauty is similar. It is intelligible only in light of a human capacity for feeling. It might seem puzzling that we can do justice to things through feeling, but only if we mistakenly suppose that feelings are blind and unresponsive to reasons. But they need not be. Being true to beauty is feeling a specific kind of pleasure; it is to exercise a human capacity for feeling that is rational and a core dimension of human agency, alongside other rational capacities. Yet, just as the admirability of a person is not derived from the goodness of admiring her or the value of the capacity for it, so aesthetic goodness is not derived from the goodness of the pleasure it merits or the value of the capacity for it.