Beauty

Can being constantly surrounded by ugly things and people ruin own's sense of the aesthetic? Conversely, can constantly being surrounded by beautiful things and people ruin own's sense of the aesthetic?

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As long as you mean something straightforward by "sense of the aesthetic," like "sense of taste" or "discernment regarding beauty," I think most people would consider the answer to your first question obvious: Yes. That doesn't mean the answer "Yes" is true, only that it is a common assumption about beauty and one's ability to discern it.

The common assumption lies behind arts-education programs for children. The thinking is that if children don’t get exposed to good music, visual art, film, and literature early enough in life, they will not come to take genuine pleasure in it. And where they do not take genuine pleasure in music or poetry, they will have more difficulty telling the fine examples of each from what is crude or catchy or otherwise vulgar.

The process probably makes more sense in connection with such complex and difficult cultural productions as Beethoven’s late quartets and Ozu’s films than with natural phenomena. The person completely unexposed to such cultural productions might be equally moved by the best and worst examples of them, or equally unmoved in all cases. They can’t tell the difference.

However, it’s hard to imagine that a child who grows up mostly indoors, with an exterior environment of concrete and overcast skies, would not get the beauty of a sunny clear day in an open meadow.

I’m not sure what the phrase “and people” is getting at. It’s one thing to worry that a child has no sense of art and sensory sophistication in its life; what are you imagining that might go wrong if the people one knows are unattractive? Would such a person be too likely to be attracted to an ordinary-looking person, imagining that person to be much better-looking than they really are? That might happen, but calling it a “ruined” sense of the aesthetic sounds to me like making a problem out of a quite wholesome tendency to find people attractive.

Still on the subject of people, the converse phenomenon you refer to might happen. Someone who grew up surrounded by beautiful faces is repelled by ordinary ones. Well, that would be too bad. People with (what they consider) extremely high standards of beauty are merely annoying when the subject is music and art, dissatisfied with all but the greatest masterpieces of artistic creation, but they might well have genuinely sophisticated tastes. Their sense of the aesthetic would have been heightened not ruined. (Though they have to be careful not to be mere snobs, who are not sophisticated but rather highly vulgar.) However, people with what they consider extremely high standards of beauty for human beings are often likely to cross over from an aesthetic assessment of people to a broader social assessment, using their putatively high standards as an excuse to mistreat human beings. Something is ruined in such cases, but saying it’s their sense of the aesthetic is not saying enough. Their sense of what is ethical is probably in bad shape too.

Let's start with the phrase "ruin one's own sense of the aesthetic." There might be different ways to interpret that, but the reading that first occurred to me was something like "undermine one's ability to appreciate things aesthetically" or perhaps "undermine one's ability to make sound aesthetic judgements."

In either case, the question isn't just philosophical. It's partly a matter of what the actual psychological effects of being surrounded by beautiful—or ugly—things actually is. And although we might have guesses about the answers, our guesses might not be good ones.

With due regard for the fact that philosophers can't really answer the question, however, we can still ask some rather more conceptual questions. What about aesthetic value might suggest that being surrounded by ugly things could ruin our aesthetic sensibilities? One possible reason is that if we're surrounded by ugliness, we may have trouble noticing things that are beautiful or in some other way aesthetically rewarding. However, it's at least possible that if we only rarely encounter beauty, we might be more attuned to it. Which, if either, of these is true isn't something we can answer by guessing.

A related possibility: it can take time, effort and attention to appreciate the aesthetic value of some things. It could be that if our spirits are beaten down by ugliness, our capacity for certain kinds of subtle perception might be damaged. But again: all we've done is identify a possibility; whether things really work this way is another matter.

At first your second question might seem odd: we might wonder how being surrounded by beauty could ruin our aesthetic sensibility. But it's not too hard to imagine some ways this could work. Perhaps if we're constantly surrounded by beauty we become insensitive to it—we stop noticing. Another possibility: not everything that's aesthetically valuable is beautiful. For example: there's music that I value highly, but that doesn't seem beautiful. It's too fierce for that. It could be that an overdose of beauty makes it hard to appreciate other kinds of aesthetic value.

Though I'll now sound like a broken record, a philosopher can't tell us which of these speculations is correct. But it does seem to me that there's some potentially interesting and fruitful research that might come out of combining methods in experimental psychology with the insights of artists, appreciators of art, and aestheticians. I'd be very curious to see what we'd actually uncover if we pursued this sort of multi-disciplinary investigation.

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