Richard writes about beauty and appreciation after reading an essay on them by Alexander Nehamas.#

Alexander's main problem is how to reconcile differences in taste, both between you and I, and between the characteristics of those things I find beautiful. Why is green good in nature but not on clothes?

It is more than an expression of purely personal feeling, more than simply saying that I like a work of art. The aesthetic judgment is a normative claim; it says that the work should be liked. Although my reaction is based on a feeling, it is not beyond reason. I expect agreement. I am often upset when others, especially people who matter to me, withhold it. Kant writes that although "there can be no rule by which anyone should be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful," aesthetic judgments still speak with a "universal voice…and lay claim to the agreement of everyone." But how can I convince you that something is beautiful if there is no reason for my reaction? How can I even expect your agreement if I have no idea how you, and the rest of the world, actually feel?

With more reference to Kant, Alexander describes his failings:

I want to defend aesthetic judgments, but I also believe that Kant was bound to fail, for two reasons. One is that he was right to say that no features can ever explain why an object is beautiful. The other is that he was wrong to say that the judgment of taste demands everyone's agreement.

One of the things that Jacques Barzun wrote in The Culture We Deserve in the essay What Critics Are Good For, is that art is not science. You can not break it up into smaller pieces and say, "Ah, that's where the beauty is." This is because art is more like life than symbolism. Human life and experience cannot be boiled down to single events, causes, or properties--and thus neither can art. Art is beautiful when it evokes feelings and changes lives. It is okay that there is not a golden standard of beauty, just it is okay that there is no a golden standard of human happiness or purpose.

Alexander begins to touch this idea:

The judgment of beauty is not the result of a mysterious inference on the basis of features of a work which we already know. It is a guess, a suspicion, a dim awareness that there is more in the work that it would be valuable to learn. To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if we spend part of it with that work.

This is again referenced when referring to the quest for beauty and the experience of it:

It is possible that spending a life, or part of a life, in the pursuit of beauty—even if only to find it, not to produce it—gives that life a beauty of its own.

What this means to me is that your life is changed by art in the same way that it is changed by meeting other people. With the idea that art is encapsulated human life and experience, it seems to follow very easily that to experience that art and appreciate it, you life is changed. And beauty is that art that changes it for the better.

And of course, because the art had a creator, you are interacting with them and learning from them. Richard writes about this aspect,

Another way I look at the above highlighted quote critiquing Bloom's conception of enjoying the beautiful as a solitary act is the sense that, while in university, writing papers and preparing presentations and the like—especially, by definition, if it's not group work—seemed on the surface to be a solitary act. But we students were engaged in a process of learning from people both alive and dead, and, more importantly, engaging in the conversations that were happening around us by producing works of our own. Rather late in the process—but thankfully at the beginning of upper level studies—did I learn that way of thinking about my education and that (coupled with a practical course in analyzing arguments) is the major reason for my later success academically.

And who are we interacting with when we experience the beauty of nature and life itself? This is where the notion of God comes from, it seems to me. The first artist and the origin of beauty.