Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty

1 A familiar feature of the history of modern aesthetics is the cycle of suspicion and defensiveness connected with the idea of beauty, as though its very appearance suggested something exaggerated, something requiring deflation, which then provokes a certain polemical stance on the part of both its defenders and detractors. People who would not be tempted by a reductive account of other concepts (for example, of thought, or desire, or action), may still feel that beauty has to be shown to be illusory or explained as a mere guise of some other force or quality altogether in the end. One might, for instance, have reasons to be suspicious of pleasure itself, its role in culture, or the exaggerated claims for it, or one may have metaphysical scruples deriving from the idea that beauty can be no property of things in themselves but can only be a projection of our own sensibilities upon the world. In different ways, then, there can seem to be a certain extravagance built into the notion of the beautiful itself, as though it were internal to its invocation that it claims more for itself than it can deliver on. Familiar as these thoughts are, however, their import is far from clear. The thought about projection, for instance, need not be any more skeptical than the parallel claims that are made about secondary qualities generally, the supervenience of which on our sensory dispositions is not