The Force of Beauty

The architect Christopher Alexander used to run a strange experiment. He would hold up two objects, an ordinary salt shaker, and a ketchup bottle.

He would then ask people a question that sounds like it shouldn’t work.

Which of these is more like your own self?

People laughed. They were a bit taken aback. What? They would ask. The question seemed like a category error or perhaps a parlor trick. And then when he pressed his audience to look, to sit with the two objects and ponder the question more sincerely, something rather unexpected happened. Largely, they all agreed. Not always, not perfectly, but far more than one might imagine. There was something about the salt shaker, some quality of proportion or quietness or life by which it kept getting chosen. The agreement was the point of the experience. Make no mistake, however, Alexander wasn’t asking what someone preferred. He was trying to show that underneath our preferences, there is something that we connect with, and that we’ve lost the confidence to say.

I tried the experiment myself recently at a restaurant with my own family, a salt shaker and a ketchup bottle on the table. I asked the question rather naively, with no preamble. Which of these is more like your own self? Invariably, after a little bit of confusion and conversation, everyone chose the salt. Everyone called it more beautiful. My wife noticed that you could see inside both of the bottles, that the salt was clear through the glass, the ketchup red through the plastic, and that the salt’s shape was smaller and simpler, unadorned, while the ketchup’s was a bit larger and more immediately recognizable. Our oldest son made a timely comment, comparing the salt’s granularity to sand in an hourglass. And somehow, that plainness, that sturdiness and delicateness, was what everyone chose.

Alexander noticed the same thing in mathematics. Mathematicians use the word beautiful without embarrassment. An elegant proof is a beautiful theorem, and this is standard practice in the field. When they say it, they agree about what they mean. There is no crisis of subjectivity in the mathematics department.

G.H. Hardy, the English mathematician, said it as plainly as anyone ever has. The mathematician’s patterns, he wrote, must be beautiful the way a painter’s or a poet’s are, the ideas fitting together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test. There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. A working mathematician can be wrong and still be doing mathematics. An ugly proof, Hardy thought, barely counts as one at all.

But, and this is where I imagine Christopher Alexander’s frustration, if you walk across campus to the school of architecture, for example, the word beautiful becomes contested, apologetic, wrapped in air quotes. Beautiful? Alexander spent his life wondering why one field kept its shared language for quality while another had lost it.

I keep coming back to this because we are living through a moment when the question stops being academic. Machines can now generate things like buildings, essays, images, music, in any style, endlessly, for almost no cost. And everyone senses that something still separates the good from the merely generated. We reach for words to describe this, words like taste, craft, quality, judgment. Yet the words feel a bit thin in our mouths. We use them constantly, and we no longer really know what stands behind them.

It seems worthwhile to go back and watch what happened, not to build an argument exactly, more to point at a few thinkers and trace the movement of their thought. The way you might trace a river to see where it bends.

The bend starts with Kant.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, took beauty seriously, perhaps more seriously than anyone before him. In the Critique of Judgment, he noticed something genuinely strange about aesthetic experience. When I say a thing is beautiful, I’m not reporting a private sensation, like saying I find this soup salty. I’m making a claim I expect others to share. He believes that he speaks with a universal voice, Kant wrote, and claims the assent of everyone. And yet I can’t prove it. There is no rule, no concept, no measurement that I can appeal to. Beauty is a judgment that demands agreement and can never compel it.

That’s a precise description of the situation, and it’s Alexander’s situation exactly. But watch what Kant does next, to protect his judgment from being reduced to appetite or usefulness. He insists that it must be disinterested. All interest, he says, ruins the judgment of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality. Real aesthetic pleasure, Kant says, is contemplation without desire. You must not want the thing. You must not need it. You stand back, at a remove, and exercise your judgment.

And there, in that word disinterested, something drains away. Beauty becomes a spectator’s sport. The beautiful object sits on one side, the judging subject on the other. In between them, a polite, rather cool distance. In many respects, Kant meant to save beauty. Instead, it could be argued, he constructed the glass case it’s been confined to ever since. Subjective versus objective, in the eye of the beholder. Every shrug we give when someone asks whether a thing is good, we inherited from that move.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, had read Kant closely and broken with him decisively by the time he wrote this. He saw the disinterestedness and was merciless about it. “The beautiful,” Kant said, “is what pleases in a disinterested way.” “In a disinterested way!” In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche points out that Kant, like all philosophers, considered art only from the point of view of the spectator, never the artist, never the lover. And against that, he sets a true spectator and artist, Stendhal, the French novelist, a man who desired things, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur, a promise of happiness. Nietzsche loved this because it puts the interest back in the equation. Beauty isn’t what you contemplate from behind glass. It’s what reaches through the glass and takes hold of you. It promises something. It pulls you toward a life you don’t yet have.

That’s a promise, though, and a promise is still in the future, something waiting to come. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, enters the conversation here, asking what beauty can do right now.

For Deleuze, the fundamental aesthetic event is not judgment, but rather encounter. An entirely new landscape opens up on this register. Something happens in between, not recognized, because recognition is matching a thing to what you already know, and nothing new happens in recognition. It’s all about encounters. A work of art, he says with Félix Guattari, his collaborator, in What Is Philosophy?, is a block of sensations, a compound of affects and percepts that stands on its own, and acts on whoever comes near.

Beauty, on this account, isn’t a property of the object, or even an opinion of the subject. It is a force that passes between them. Something happens to you, your capacity to feel, to think, to connect, expands. The question is no longer, do I like it? The question is, what can it do? It’s also why Deleuze found so much inspiration in Spinoza, who asked, what can a body do? For Deleuze, a body is defined by its capacity to affect and be affected, and by how its speeds and slownesses combine with other bodies.

Life is itself an aesthetic phenomenon.

Line these three thinkers up, and you can see the whole movement. It’s like looking at a topographical map from above. Kant discovers that aesthetic judgment is real and shared and yet unprovable. Then he encloses it behind disinterest. Nietzsche and Stendhal break the enclosure, beauty as promise, as pull, as a call toward something else. Deleuze finishes the escape, beauty as force, as intensity, as what happens. The river bends away from the spectator and back toward the world.

And Alexander, for his part, arrived at the same place through doorknobs and courtyards and salt shakers. His quality without a name, the thing that makes a room feel alive, is not a preference and not a measurement. It’s felt bodily, and it’s shared, which is exactly what the philosophers kept discovering time and again. The mathematicians never lost it, because in mathematics, the encounter and the community stayed closely tied together. A beautiful proof does something to everyone who encounters it, and so the shared language survived.

Which brings us to now.

When artificial intelligence generation becomes cheap, everything that Kant had bracketed comes rushing back as the main event. Walter Benjamin worried about something like this a century ago, when photography and film first made reproduction inexpensive. What’s different now isn’t reproduction, it’s origination. The machines don’t just copy an existing beautiful thing. They produce a thousand new candidates for the category. What they cannot do is stand in front of the thousand versions and feel which one has life in it. That act, the felt discrimination of intensity, is suddenly the entire craft. Not production, which is abundant, but discernment, which is rare. And discernment, if the thinkers above were onto something, is not a private quirk. It’s a capacity, and it can be learned, like a mathematician’s eye is trained. It can even be shared, like a mathematician’s language is shared. The interesting question of the next decade is whether the fields drowning in generated material will develop what mathematics has always had, a working consensus about quality, spoken without embarrassment.

I don’t know if they will, but I notice that the people working closest to these machines and these questions are already starting to agree like mathematicians. And this isn’t just engineers, but also designers. “That one doesn’t feel quite right,” they say, as they scroll past. “That one, however, has something special about it,” and they nod at each other through the screen, and they mostly agree. And nobody can quite say why.

Sometimes I imagine Christopher Alexander joining one of our sessions. He would immediately recognize the scene. Two outputs, like two objects on a table. Which of these is more like your own self? I ask myself. The question still sounds like it shouldn’t work. I suggest that we ask it anyway, that we sit with it patiently, sincerely. The salt shaker is still there. It’s quiet. There is no trickery. It’s evidence, in one way or another, that beauty is in the room. It is doing something. It is actively participating in our encounter with the world.

Our youngest son, having also chosen the salt shaker, grinned and asked if someone could please pass the ketchup. It brought a smile to everyone’s face.

Christopher Alexander once said he was trying to make a building that was like a smile on a person’s face.

The question is serious. It is never too serious for cheerfulness. Beauty asks for sincerity, but it asks for levity too.

Something happens in that room between the salt and the laughter and all of us at the table, and the joy is as much a part of it.