Philosophy and Beauty and Beautiful Philosophy

guest post by Nick Riggle

One of the things I love about philosophy is its beauty. Philosophical works contain beautiful ideas, arguments, systems, and essays. And beautiful minds are expressed via these—beautifully creative, thoughtful, sensitive, powerful, insightful minds. For me it’s the wonderful oeuvre of Barry Stroud. It’s Kit Fine’s essay “Essence and Modality”. It’s Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good and Frege’s Grundlagen. Plato’s Symposium and Apology. Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. Jorge Portilla’s “Fenomenología del relajo”. It’s J. David Velleman’s Self to Self, Richard Moran’s The Philosophical Imagination, and Sarah Broadie’s work on Aristotle and Plato. Even when I don’t agree, or don’t know whether I agree, I love being attuned to a wonderful system, a beautiful idea, a stunning essay, a philosophically brilliant mind.

When I try to understand why I find some philosophy beautiful, I think about the way these works are constructed, the insight they contain, the big-picture views or systems they develop, the care, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness they embody, the soaring affirmation of intellectual life, the creative and transformative perspectives they offer up. As a philosopher, they inspire me, I want to share these works, understand them better and better, and talk about them. I want them to animate and inform the work I develop and share.

[Dall-E (left) and Midjourney (right) outputs for the prompt "beautiful philosophy"]

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What is the beauty of philosophy? I want that question to have an obvious answer: the beauty of philosophy is just that, beauty, aesthetic goodness. But philosophers have a penchant for making that obvious answer unavailable. By far the most influential theory of aesthetic value is aesthetic hedonism: aesthetic value is the capacity to cause pleasure (or valuable experience more generally) in an appropriately situated individual.

I have had a lot of complaints about aesthetic hedonism, but one of the things that bugs me the most about it is the difficulty it has accounting for the beauty of philosophy. Philosophy doesn’t smell nice, and it doesn’t look like anything. But aesthetic hedonism weds aesthetic value to experience, and even the latest attempts to defend the view tie aesthetic experience to sensory properties. So if a thing cannot be sensed, perceived, intuito-perceived, or whatever, then it cannot be beautiful.

Some philosophers embrace the implication and deny that philosophy (and math, proofs, theories, logic, etc.) can be beautiful. But to me, denying the beauty of mathematics and logic is a nonstarter. And what’s to recommend a philosophical theory of beauty incapable of capturing the beauty of philosophy? I guess you’d have to think that there was nothing aesthetically special about philosophy to shrug your shoulders at that question. But to me the question sticks, and the answer is obvious.

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Philosophers know that it is easier to tollens a ponens than it is to come up with a whole new premise. Is there a way of understanding the nature of aesthetic value that can capture the beauty of philosophy? The idea that philosophy and aesthetic value are both sources of pleasure barely touches the surface of their parallels. I think it helps to appreciate how deep the parallels run. I’ll look at three: viewpoint convergence, self-expression, and community.

Viewpoint Convergence: Here’s a lesson we just learned (yet again) about philosophy: convergence among philosophers about their various views and positions is hard to come by. Some philosophers even argue that (at least some) ideal philosophical communities are incompatible with significant viewpoint convergence. If philosophers tended to converge, then we would tend to miss argumentative nuances, overlook subtle distinctions, and ignore alternative ideas and perspectives. In other words, tending to converge tends to mean being bad at philosophy.

Something similar can be said about aesthetic valuing, the proud paradigm of the failure to converge. We generally value rather different things in our aesthetic lives, and our aesthetic disagreements often persist, even to happy effect. Aesthetic divergence is widespread, and while many have argued that convergence is the aim of aesthetic discourse, I doubt that’s right. If artists tended to make and adore the same stuff, or if lovers of beauty all tended to love the same things, they would tend to be bad at aesthetic valuing.

Self-expression: One reason for this is surely that our aesthetic lives are self-expressive. I mean three things by this. First, at the core of our aesthetic lives are beloved aesthetic attachments—to certain novels, bands, poems, comedians, films, styles of dress, cuisines. These attachments are personally significant. They capture something about who we are as individuals and what matters to us. Second, beyond this core of aesthetic attachment lies myriad discretionary choices we make to value one thing rather than other in our aesthetic lives. And in making these choices we cultivate our individualities, our sense of humor, our eye for design, our particular connection to music—our sense of taste in the varied realm of aesthetic value. Third, we use aesthetic media to make our individualities known, to express ourselves. We design out our living spaces. We share a good novel. We wear our favorite band’s t-shirt (or emulate our favorite influencer). Given the self-expressiveness of aesthetic life, it should be no surprise that viewpoint convergence is not a big concern.

Philosophy can also be self-expressive, and for many philosophers I suspect it is. Where one philosopher is drawn to ruly and rigorous analytic metaphysics, another is drawn to playful and creative aesthetics, introspective and subtle phenomenology, or to the idea of doing good by doing ethics. Something deep and variable in each of us can color and tweak our tendencies to do the many things we do in philosophy: read, think, explore, inquire, imagine, write, articulate, share, speak, reason, revise, and respond. Divergence in philosophical views also spurs these activities further. We encounter another thinker who has developed their views on a similar topic in a very different direction. We are driven to engage, and we read, think, explore, inquire, imagine, write, articulate, share, speak, reason, revise, and respond. As Kieran Setiya puts it: “I don’t need to agree with [philosophers] to love the worlds they have made for themselves.”

Community: Pursuits that call for the development and expression of an individual point of view face the obvious threat that the “worlds we make for ourselves” will be nothing more than that—some single person’s favored point of view with no claim on or connection to anyone else. The problem is exacerbated in practices that also exhibit a lack of viewpoint convergence. In the everyday work of philosophy and aesthetic life there is always a background hum whose tone is captured by the desperate voice of Rilke’s “First Elegy”: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ / hierarchies? Or who, if I published this, would care? This background hum is an ever-present threat of loneliness or misunderstanding, of lacking a sympathetic interlocutor or audience, as if all our efforts might be met with the perfect indifference of The Dude: Well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion man.

The practice of aesthetic valuing solves this problem by encouraging and rewarding social aesthetic valuing. It is a practice that enjoins us to share with others, imitate their products and styles, invite them to appreciate our views and inventions. Hey, check this out. We reach the heights of aesthetic goodness by reaching together. And to do all of this well, we need to cultivate an openness to other aesthetic worlds—to the people and products of other sensibilities. In flourishing aesthetic life, there is a lively cadence of invitation and uptake. Aesthetic goods keep this pulse thumping because aesthetic value is what is worthy of the social practice of aesthetic valuing. But aesthetic valuing is not simply a matter of having special experiences of pleasure. It is a social practice wherein we imitate aesthetic agents and goods, share aesthetic goods with each other, and express ourselves in ways that spur us to imitate, express, and share in turn.

Isn’t philosophy similar? From Socrates provoking his willing Athenian peers in the agora to a current-day professor testing their thesis at the colloquium talk. Even the solo thinker in an armchair imagines their audience (an intrigued, mildly dickish opponent, for me at least). In philosophy we need each other. Together we lurch toward understanding answers to deep and difficult questions about reality, knowledge, morality, and beauty. The goodness of philosophy is marked by this communal effort—I can “love your world” whether or not I agree. Among the best philosophy is the stuff that propels the practice and engages the group—deepening insights, spurring helpful distinctions, meriting responses, and generating ideas that deepen, spur, merit, and generate in turn.

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With these similarities in mind we can say this about both: philosophy and aesthetic life involve people cultivating their discretionary perspective and expressing it to other practitioners doing the same in way aimed to elicit engagement and keep the practice going.

In this light, it shouldn’t be too surprising if one and the same thing that helps one participatory practice flourish also helps another. To value something both as philosophy and as beautiful is to value it as both promoting the kind of understanding and engagement philosophers seek and, at the same time, as worthy of aesthetic valuing: as promoting aesthetic community by expressing an individual style, a wonderfully shareable point of view, opening our valuing selves up to each other and helping us see new avenues of thought and action. Surely pleasure flits around in there, doing its thing, but we needn’t hitch our ride to it.

New Voices in Philosophy

guest post by Nick Riggle

Philosophy is a famously rigid and complex discipline full of daunting and difficult prose. As a sign of this, people have wondered whether philosophy is literature. Literature is creatively ambitious, figurative and fun, wildly imaginative and associative. Philosophy, in contrast, is often hyperbolically literal, formulaic, painstakingly logical, tortuous and so often unfun.

But even in a tradition as strict as analytic philosophy, fun can be had, imaginations can run wild, and style can reign. If there is anything true in the complaint that philosophy lacks the quality of literature, it is that philosophy often lacks voice.

What does it mean for a “voice” to be present in works of philosophy? Voice is a vague concept in literary theory and it is often defined in a way that is indistinguishable from the typical definition of literary style. Here is how an expert defines voice: “A writer’s voice is the way his or her personality comes through on the page, via everything from word choice and sentence structure to tone and punctuation.” And here is philosopher Jenefer Robinson’s influential definition of literary style: “I shall argue that style is essentially a way of doing something and that it is expressive of personality. …what count as the verbal elements of style are precisely those elements which contribute to the expression of personality.” If you’d rather not take a philosopher’s word for it, here is poet Frank O’Hara: “Style at its highest ebb is personality.”

But voice and style are not the same. Literary style is the expression of the ideals the writer has for their writing. The writer who values economy of expression and rhythm has a different literary style from the writer who values complexity of thought and detailed emotional insight. Writing that follows strict formulae or rules of composition (e.g. writing legal contracts or instruction manuals) has difficulty achieving style because the rules crowd out the expression of literary values. Trying to inject one of these anti-style genres with style is a recipe for literary disaster. Or worse: witness WeWork’s failed IPO filing.

Voice comes from the perspective the writer inhabits as a writer. A writer’s voice is that of a single mother in Southern California expressing the difficulties of raising two children. She might do this through a poetic economy of expression or through a complex and emotionally nuanced account. A writer’s voice is that of a Zoomer navigating romance through DMs and dating apps, or a bank executive worried about the economy. Literary voice is, in this way, personal, where literary style is artistic.

Of course voice and style are not entirely separate. They can interact and influence each other. A writer’s artistic ideals might be informed by the perspective that drives their voice, and a writer’s voice can be shaped and inflected by their style. Some aesthetic writing practices encourage the former (rap, or romantic poetry with its ‘spontaneous overflow of passionate feelings’) and others tend toward the latter (Flaubert, Proust, Ernaux, French Writing in General?).

But there is an important difference between voice and style when comes to connecting with a reader. While style can captivate and impress, voice is a locus of love. By conveying the specificity of a perspective, literary voice forges connections and grounds affection between reader and writer, where people can communicate elusive truths about the world and their experiences. In doing so, voice has the power to create literary intimacy.

Although style and voice can interact in mutually supportive ways, when it comes to philosophy, style and voice tend to conflict. Philosophers are encouraged to adopt an ideal of philosophical writing that inhabits an impartial or impersonal perspective. Philosophers abstract from all real-world roles and particular perspectives and write from the place that Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere”—speaking from a general ‘we’, making claims about what ‘one’ does, structuring the prose by the general strictures of logic, writing to a faceless opponent.

If literary voice comes from inhabiting in writing a particular role and perspective, then a common ideal of philosophical writing amounts to aspiring to a kind of voicelessness, where everyone tries to write (and read) from the placeless perspective of a General Philosopher. Philosophy thus tends to lack that source of writer-reader connection and affection, and so it often overlooks those elusive truths we can communicate by developing literary intimacy.

The ideal of voiceless writing is a kind of style, and since style and voice interact, the philosophical ideal of writing can be quite literally self-sabotaging—trying to bring a voiceless self forward in writing in ways that clearly present a vocal self. Often that voice is simply a product of its time—the way that Kant, for example, comes across as a very specific dude in a very specific set of circumstances—revealed in various time-stamped expressive devices, e.g. the strategies the philosopher deploys to attain voicelessness.

When we suppress the power of voice in philosophical writing, we tilt philosophy toward voiceless questions that ask for perspective-free answers, and in doing so we encourage philosophers to lose their voices. This is an expressive problem in itself, but the problem is exacerbated when we also care about making philosophy a more diverse practice. Simply gaining membership to an elite club does not mean you can really speak your mind. And a philosopher’s particular identity can deeply influence their philosophical concerns without shifting their writing voice an inch out of the view from nowhere. Without diversifying voice in philosophical writing, we risk losing a source of the intimacy that can communicate the important and elusive truths philosophers possess. To bring voice into philosophy, we need to be able to step out of the view from nowhere and land somewhere, in our own bodies, times, and lives.

History has shown that philosophy can inhabit a wide range of literary forms in the service of voice—novels, letters, memoirs, dialogues, confessions, plays, and poetry [as I was editing this piece Helen De Cruz posted this]—and past philosophers have effectively developed voice in their works. Unfortunately, perhaps the most famous and widely taught example is Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, where, to me at least, he at best semi-convincingly deploys the voice of a man desperate for knowledge to encourage the reader to cultivate their own doubt. There are more effective examples in Montaigne, Emerson, de Beauvoir, Arendt, Cavell, and others. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes from the perspective of two radically different worldviews to get his readers to inhabit them and appreciate their differences. Sor Juana’s The Answer and Friedrich Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre scream with voice.

Some contemporary philosophers have tiptoed outside of the confines of academic writing. Most recently, Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard adopts the voice of a man who suffers chronic pain and of a philosopher who wants to understand the place of pain in a life well lived. Chloe Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty combines a philosopher’s discernment with deeply personal, beautiful, and humorous insights into her own disability. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s impassioned voice in Elite Capture is blazing with his own sense of care and conviction. My recent book This Beauty develops the voice of a man who had a challenging childhood, who is becoming a father, and who sincerely wants to understand what, if anything, makes life worth living so that he has something sincere and thoughtful to say to his sons. Philosophers like John Kaag, Anthony Appiah, Agnes Callard, and Alexander Nehamas prove that philosophers can write from places of pain, oppression, loss, joy, need, and love. And in doing so they show how philosophy can handle deep and difficult issues in ways that bring to the fore the humanity they have forged by living and confronting life in the actual world as unusually reflective and intelligent people.

Let’s unleash the literary power of philosophy and let our voices sing.

[image source]

Power Clashing and the Structure of Practices

guest post by Nick Riggle

Some things just go together. Medjool dates and salted cashews. Hot pink and cyan. Unagi and oloroso. Sunshine and grass. Put these together and please enjoy your happiness. Other things not so much: manspreading and crowded subways, espresso and cottage cheese...

Zebra stripes and plaid?

Fashion is an aesthetic practice full of rules and restrictions: navy and brown yes, but no navy and black. No socks with sandals. No denim on denim (boooo). The long history of fashion provides a background of formalities and traditions whose dictates guide us in often unseen ways.

What, if anything, justifies these rules? In poetry, rules tend to serve other values, e.g. the value of complex and powerful prose. The strict rules of a pantoum key us into subtle changes in the meaning of a repeated and repurposed line, amplifying the power of the line and of the poem and poet in turn. The basic rules of pop song construction (~3 minutes, 4/4 time, no key changes, intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure) provide a kind of sonic public playground, an accessible template for fun and endless variation.

In the case of mixed patterns the justification seems simple: mixed patterns clash. You don’t mix zebra stripes and plaid because you don’t mix visually conflicting prints and patterns, perhaps especially when one is a South African animal print and the other is Scottish tartan. They do not look good together. It seems that the rule couldn’t be easier to justify, since fashion is a practice that cares about aesthetic value. Mixed patterns are visually confusing and displeasing. Fashion is about looking good. No mixed patterns. QED.

That might seem easy, simple, and true. But it is a wildly superficial account of the practice.

[image source]

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Aesthetic practices are full of rules that cannot be justified by such simple appeals to aesthetic value. A recent paper by Guy Rohrbaugh discusses the example of  Western classical music performance, where score compliance is strictly necessary. The rule, play all and only the notes of the score, is so forceful that it does not matter if playing a different note would have greater aesthetic value. Playing other notes might sound better, be performatively expressive, or shock the audience—none of that matters because one must play all the notes. Why is there such a rule? And why is it so forceful?

Drawing on work by Aron Edidin, Rohrbaugh argues that there are indirect aesthetic reasons for the rule. First, some works have a complexity of thematic repetition, inversion, and sonic play that cannot be realized improvisationally—for their value to be realized they have to be written down and played as written. (This of course is not to say that improvisational works cannot be extremely complex.) Second, writing the music down and playing it as written allows for repetition and dissemination—more people can hear it, and everyone can hear it again. Third, this allows people to develop and deepen their understanding and appreciation of the work. And fourth, performers can bring this understanding and appreciation to bear on their performances in ways that realize different expressive, performative, and appreciative values.

The rule cannot be justified by individual-level evaluative considerations, but it can be justified at the wider practice level. The rule helps realize the goods of collective aesthetic life—sharing complex aesthetic value, deepening our understanding and appreciation of it, and expressing that understanding in our performances, experiences, and interpretations of the work. And since these goods structure aesthetic practices in general, our individual aesthetic actions must bend to them.

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There is a kind of uber-value in fashion that mirrors this, generating various individual-level rules. Fashion is an art of self-expression. As such, anything goes, as long as it works, and what works is what captures something about who one is in a way that communicates with one’s audience. In this way, fashion goes hand-in-hand with style, where style is the expression of ideals. But expressing yourself and having style through clothing are not easy. So it helps to have more and less stringent rules addressed to individuals who, by following them, can’t go too far astray—guardrails that keep people on track and the group more or less together.

To use an entirely random example, it might befit a philosophy professor to wear cargo pants, t-shirt, and unbuttoned button-down shirt every day. The rules approve. The professor can make some limited choices within that general look – a colorful or a black tee, maybe with some philosophy reference on it, or a plaid overshirt that’s a bit ‘90s Seattle/lumberjack. The look conveys a lot; people have an easy time putting the professor in the right social group, noting a thing or two about their sensibility. The professor can rest assured that they don’t look too bad, but expression trumps looks: it matters that this look is self-expressive—a beautiful and expensive Italian suit would look great but it wouldn’t work.

To see this even more clearly, enter the power clasher—my favorite example of expression trumping looks in fashion. Power clashing has been around for some time, long enough, at least, for future Jack Donaghy (“Alterna-Jack”) to brag about his mastery of it. Power clashing is about clashing boldly—wearing animal prints with tartan and throwing naval stripes in there for good measure. Clashing patterns are primally visually confusing—hence the rule against—but visual confusion can ground expressive power and expressive power always wins. The power clasher says Yeah, I’m shining a flashlight in your eyes—what are you gonna do about it? The hope of fashion is that you shine back in your own way.

The individual-level rules of fashion are not ultimately justified by appeal to visual appeal. They typically help us look good, true, but more importantly they help us meet minimal conditions of self-expression. Power clashers prove that an apparently ruly practice can be deeply unruly at its heart, because the practice’s heart is the powerful and elusive value of self-expression through dress. We should think of the rules of fashion not as strict rules—ones that obviously change all the time anyway—but as communal notes on how to realize the practice’s governing value.

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This makes me wonder about philosophy, which is full of stringent norms and standards, and full of people ready to enforce them—implicit and explicit norms of logic, form, voice, argument, address, and interaction. There are so many that our vigilance in observance of them threatens to make our essays and books oppressive to write and exhausting to read, as if we always had to wear formal dress lest we be regarded as unserious at best, dumb at worst. Is it too easy to forget that philosophy can be done without adhering to such norms? Like poetry, the beauty of philosophy can shine through and because of its rules, but poetry has embraced its ‘free verse’. I sometimes wonder if we collectively lost our sense of philosophy’s potential for literary creativity.

The sad truth is that philosophers can be extremely dismissive of those who fall out of line with philosophy’s conservative standards of writing, painting Wittgenstein as a charlatan, Nietzsche as a madman, the novels of Iris Murdoch as irrelevant, the dialogue as a lost genre, or anything outside of the standard form professional publication as lesser. I don’t know whether we can literally power clash in philosophy but I wouldn’t mind a few more flashlights in my face.

Sexiness and Love Island

guest post by Nick Riggle

Sexiness can seem straightforward. Everyone knows what it’s like to want and respond to it—in oneself, in others—and I’d venture that most people do indeed want it one way or another. But the ease of feeling might flow in the other direction. Rod Stewart reminds us that sexiness more than flirts with objectification: If you want my body and you think I’m sexy… The desire for sexiness seems to include the desire for bodies as such, and so its aesthetic value seems to flirt too directly with ethical disvalue. It is difficult to know how to feel: aesthetically attracted, ethically repulsed.

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One response to the sexiness problem is what I call the Prince Strategy. In his song “Sexy M.F.” Prince solves the problem by transforming sexiness from sexual to mental attractiveness.

We need to talk about things, tell me what cha do
Tell me whatcha eat, I might cook for you
See it really don't matter 'cause it's all about me and you
Ain't no one else around
I'm movin' with the blindfold, gagged and bound
I don't mind, see this ain't about sex
It's all about love being in charge of this life and the next
Why all the cosmic talk?
I just want you smarter than I'll ever be
When we take that walk

…

You seem perplexed I haven't taken you yet
Can't you see I'm harder than a man can get
I got wet dreams comin' out of my ears
I get hard if the wind blows your cologne near me
But I can take it, 'cause I want the whole nine
This ain't about the body, it's about the mind

Prince emphasizes that true sexiness is ‘about the mind’. This conceptual engineering gives him the best of both worlds. As he sings later in the song, “I'm happy to change my state of mind for this behind.”

[Midjourney rendition of Prince cooking eggs for a sexy woman]

As many philosophers have pointed out, sexiness is bound up with patriarchy and its attendant restrictions on women’s autonomy. The Prince Strategy tries to sidestep the connections between sexiness, women’s bodies, and patriarchy by replacing sexual, bodily attractiveness with mental attractiveness. This is an appealing strategy, for under patriarchy it is not enough to agree with Martha Nussbaum’s point that objectification means many things (7 by her count) and it is not always ethically wrong. Under patriarchy it often is, and that’s one reason why the Prince Strategy can seem attractive in this extremely nonideal world.

The problem with the Prince Strategy is not that minds cannot be sexy—obviously they can, says this philosopher—it’s that it seems to deny that bodies can also be sexy. Having watched more than a few seasons of Love Island UK I can report: obviously they can. Should we simply ignore that fact? I should clarify that watching Love Island UK is not my only evidence.

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Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin develop another response by intervening in the patriarchal culture of sexiness that encourages women to embrace a notion of sexiness that conforms to the male gaze. On their view, we should retain the link between sexiness and sexual desire but revise the concept of sexiness to construct one that is respectful of all persons: “To find a person sexy in this sense is to see their body as infused with an expression of self and animated by their own sexual identity. … Respecting sexiness involves seeing others not (only) as sex objects but necessarily as sexual subjects: human beings who are in charge of their sexual agency.” (p. 305)

Call this the Embodiment strategy: sexiness is the attractiveness of a person’s embodied sexuality. A sexy person expresses their sexuality in their look, demeanor, composure. To find someone sexy is to be attracted to their embodied sexuality.

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Now consider: the Love Island Phenomenon. If you’ve watched as much Love Island UK as I have, then you have witnessed the following phenomenon many times over: You meet someone and find them very sexy. But over time you come know more about them: their personality, their values and goals (or lack thereof), their interests and style. And, like magic, their sexiness disappears.

Nothing need change about how they embody their sexuality, so what could explain the change in sexiness? And while the Embodiment strategy seems unable to capture the change, the Prince strategy can’t capture the initial attraction, for initially we know almost nothing about their minds and quite a lot about their bodies.

It seems that Love Island UK spells trouble for all.[1]

One response that Lintott and Irvin might offer is to say that the Love Island Phenomenon is best described not as a change in sexiness but as a change in attractiveness. What changes is not the person’s sexiness but your being attracted to it. Their sexiness is neutralized by your awareness of their unattractive traits. But this response makes me wonder why, if sexiness is embodied sexuality, information about the person’s non-sexual character should change how I feel about their sexiness.

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Here is another proposal, call it Prince’s Synthesizer: Maybe the sexy truth lies in a synthesis of the Prince and Embodiment strategies: sexiness is more than embodied sexuality—it is embodied mind, where the features of mind that matter are any features we might find hot. Humans are extremely creative in finding hotness. Some of these features can shine as and through embodied sexuality: the embodiment of confidence, quirkiness, sexual poise, self-possession, boldness, and so on. But others shine in other ways: a person’s sexy intelligence, sincerity, drive, resilience, grit, creativity, worldliness, or…the way they eat falafel, or curl their lip, or smell a certain way.

Prince’s Synthesizer makes better sense of the idea that when (or at least often when) we find someone sexy, we are attracted to their style, or the way they embody their personal ideals—the way their dreams and aspirations manifest in their ways of living. Sexual aspiration generates style as much as intellectual or athletic aspiration. Eros wends its way through each. We might catch a glimpse of a person’s style in getting a sense of their sexuality, but that is only part of a bigger stylistic picture, which, when it comes into full view, along with the minds that bodies embody, might reveal something…not hot. Love Island UK Season 9 now streaming!

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[1] Big thanks to the students in my Fall 2022 Aesthetics and Ethics class for a great discussion about this.

Wearing Band T-Shirts of Bands You Don’t Know

guest post by Nick Riggle

A recent trend has teens and twenty somethings wearing band t-shirts of bands they don’t know. You can know that they don’t know the band because you can ask them: Are you a fan of AC/DC, Nirvana, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, The Doors, Slayer, Led Zeppelin? They will respond with breathtaking nonchalance: Huh? Oh, this shirt?

They wear it for the look.

Could the look be flattering? For Millennials, and most certainly for Gen-X, there might be no clearer example of a negative volitional necessity that generates the unthinkable. Thou shalt not wear a band t-shirt if thou knowest not the band. No thought is so bold, so unafraid of rejection, as to cross the Millennial and Gen-X mind.

But to them it’s edgy. It’s street. It’s rock n roll. It’s Kendall Jenner.

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Who knows where it started (perhaps Ghesquière for Balenciaga in 2012), but everyone knows that Jenner slays. Long an influencer in the glammed-up band t-shirt game (along with her sisters), Jenner has been spotted wearing, among others, Metallica, Kiss, AC/DC, ZZ Top, and Led Zeppelin shirts, but when it comes to concerts she favors Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, and Fleetwood Mac. Philosophers have wondered whether you should be consistent in your personal aesthetics. Jenner seems unconcerned. When the metal band Slayer’s guitarist Gary Holt wore a t-shirt that read “Kill the Kardashians” on the band’s farewell tour in 2019, Jenner responded with classic Kardashian shade. She rocked a Slayer shirt that said “RIP” and (probably) helped bump the legacy band’s merch sales up to 10 million dollars that year.

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Is it wrong to wear band t-shirts of bands you don’t know? In one sense it is obviously a mistake. I find it useful here to think about the groundbreaking theory of aesthetic value that Dominic McIver Lopes develops in his 2018 book Being for Beauty. Lopes argues that aesthetic value is metaphysically tied to the rules and norms of specific aesthetic practices. Your aesthetic reasons for acting one way rather than another when it comes to e.g. pulling an espresso shot are tied to the specific norms and achievements of the practice of pulling espresso. In the practice of band fandom that produces and distributes band t-shirts, one of the rules is crystal clear: wear a band shirt only if you love the band. If you wear one without knowing the band, then you’re not very good at the practice. You are not responding to the reasons the practice generates.

But Lopes’s theory allows for a single non-aesthetic property (or set of such) to ground different aesthetic properties in different practices. Different practices have different ‘profiles’, mapping different movements, shapes, colors, images, and so on onto different aesthetic values. The same contours and colors that are lively in minimalism are subdued abstract expressionism; the same sequence of movements that is beautiful in tap dance is awkward in ballet; a few perfect poetry verses make for a few terrible rap verses.

Maybe Kendall Jenner (and whoever else) established a new aesthetic practice of wearing band shirts as a non-fan. Wearing the shirt will potentially have different aesthetic values in each practice. Wearing one as a fan is metal, dark, unruly. As a non-fan it is edgy, indie, street, and…Kardashianesque.

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There are many aesthetic practices that cast the products of another aesthetic practice in a new role. In bad cases it is ignorant cultural appropriation. In good cases it is brilliant fusion or avant-garde innovation. Even with billionaire influencers involved, wearing band t-shirts of bands you don’t know seems less like Ikea selling “jerk chicken” (bad) or sushirritos (good) and more like Jim Stark, the rebel without a cause, the jobless teen wearing work boots. Some aesthetic practices are freeloaders. Some other practice imbues the band shirt, the boots, the jeans with meaning. Outsiders detect that meaning, are somehow attracted to it, they latch onto and repurpose it without contributing to the original practice. In a sense they have to repurpose it because they don’t really know what it is. But it seems cool or interesting or irresistible and so whatever they do with it is unlikely to be the aesthetically right thing according to the practice. But being moved and inspired in this way is just part of what it is to aesthetically value something—it is to want to imitate it, incorporate it into your life, make it yours and share it with others. And in a sense they are not wrong: Band t-shirts are obviously cool.

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If wearing band t-shirts of bands you don’t know is a new aesthetic practice, then there is ignorance on each side. From the fan’s point of view, the Kendall Jenner imitators are brazenly ignorant and disrespectful, flippantly adopting a mere ‘look’ by exploiting something deeply personal. From the Jenner point of view, the fans are at best overly protective, at worst plain pretentious. It’s just a t-shirt, after all, and look how dope it looks with jeans, heels, and the right jewelry!

But these freeloader practices are sure sources of confusion and letdown. Fan shirts are a quick path to aesthetic community. As a fan, you might get excited to see the youth—or perhaps billionaire influencers—in your fan club. You give a knowing nod to the unusually cool-looking person wearing an ‘80s Megadeath shirt and they return a cold stare. You say what a proper fan might say: Endgame was surprisingly good huh? To which they respond: Oh, the shirt? I don’t really know this band, I just like how it looks.

If the aesthetic goods in the non-fan’s practice piggyback on the goods in the fan’s practice, then surely the fan is owed something: Deference? Recognition? Respect? This suggests a rule that structures aesthetic practices in general: aesthetic freeloaders should orbit and defer to their source practice; they should not spin away in an attempt to create their own orbit.

What could justify this rule? It’s not that bad to ignorantly wear band t-shirts—it just kind of sucks—so the idea that it’s morally wrong seems off. And if specific aesthetic practices are practical worlds unto themselves, then it’s not immediately obvious what resources Lopes’s theory has to make good on the wrongness. But here is a thought: the aesthetic value of band t-shirts lies in the way they promote aesthetic community. They anchor individuality, express it to others, and occasion community. The t-shirt freeloader misunderstands the aesthetic value of their clothes. Doing so is apt to produce confusion and missed connection, and so some deference to the aesthetic goods of a source practice is called for.

When the right deference, recognition, or respect is not forthcoming, one might be tempted to respond with contempt at the failure of aesthetic connection, at the disrespect for the norms of a good practice. But just beyond the confusion and let down is a social opening—an opportunity for these different individuals to bond. The failure of communication is an opportunity for enlightenment: “Well you should check out Rust in Peace. “Tornado of Souls” is my favorite song.” That might take a little extra swagger on the part of the true fan. All the more reason to do it. Boldly opening up can create a bridge between worlds, and venturing into each other’s different aesthetic worlds can both expand and refine our own.

Bridges go both ways. As it turns out, Gary Holt’s encounter with the Kardashians made him a lot more Kardashianesque. Although he wore the “Kill the Kardashians” shirt because he wanted to “kill their careers”, they seem to have rubbed off on him. He now sells a lot of those t-shirts online and has expanded his collection of merch to include a range of anti-Kardashian graphics and products. A bona fide influencer.

One of my brothers is a deep player in the niche sneaker world. Like, Pizza Hut branded Reebok Pumps deep. And he got me a pair of niche sneakers that I wear now and then. I barely understand what I own. My main relationship with the shoes is that they are by far the most comfortable pair I have ever worn. So I rock them gladly, and almost every time I do some stranger comments: Nice kicks; dope shoes; fire *whatup headnod*. I happily reap the communal benefits of a practice I don’t understand.

The older I get, the more I get used to being ignored in public. Increasingly rare is the lovely random encounter, sparked by whatever, lighting up the day. Maybe I’ll buy half a dozen random band t-shirts, wear them around town, and see who I meet.

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