"We find we must give an immanent account of beauty."
More fruitful, methinks, to start from the phenomenon of connoisseurship, than from an abstraction (with so many varied referents) like B. Connoisseurship can be unproblematically analyzed into cultural, perceptive, personal-historical aspects. For instance, while i have seen the "Mona Lisa" (once, briefly, in my youth--at a sizeable distance) & found it a little eerie, at best; it isn't one of my favorite paintings. (I preferred, then & now, painters who are colorists.) But i can recognize a kind of ultimate dexterity in the technique of Velasquez, da Vinci, & above all Vermeer. This, from having tried oil painting for myself. Aesthetics, of course, means one thing in the European tradition, another in the Asian tradition, & something else in Modernism. I have learned to appreciate all of these. And therefore i find anyone who wants to set one over the others (are you listening, Fred?) a bit near-sighted... At the same time, the works i return to, again & again, are ones that say something to me personally. They might not even be by acclaimed artists at all.
What about, say, the taste of Laphroiag? To me there are few sensations more exquisite. But i would not have liked single-malt scotch with the taste-buds of a 25-year-old, much less those of a 15-year-old. When i hear someone complain about one of the flavors i find beautiful, as if it possessed no intrinsic merit, again i laugh (that just means more for ME). Could that person educate themselves into being able to enjoy it? Some might, others might not. Certainly i am far from my culture's norm of wanting extremely sweet flavors; i even dislike them. --Though at one time i didn't.
There are hours, moods when everything i see seems beautiful. And more & more i don't need to have aesthetic sensations that have been culturally mediated. Beauty remains... Is it like a harmony between the perceiver & some portion of things perceived? I find glimpses of the wild rabbits in our yard beautiful, more beautiful than any of the human surroundings. Yet throughout our sojourn on this planet, the only thing most humans could think of to do with a rabbit has been to kill it, eat it, & use its skin to make gloves.
I like rabbit fur best when it's still on the rabbit.
