Intelligible Beauty and Being of Human

An increasing number of philosophers have recently argued that ‘intelligibility' should foreground philosophical approaches to aesthetic experience and beauty. They regard the ‘intelligible' as whatever is related to understanding or intellectual grasp. Beauty is thus understood as that which calls for, requires, or makes appropriate intellectual exploration, interpretative understanding, or related avenues of thought. It is as crucial for defenders of this approach to characterize the aesthetic in terms of intelligibility as it is crucial for them to criticize Kantian views, according to which beauty is tied to pleasure, for ‘driving a wedge’ between beauty and intelligibility. But, first, Kant and contemporary aesthetic Kantians emphasize the intelligible nature of beauty by arguing that the proper affective response to it is reflective, self-conscious, communicable, and reason-responsive. It is a feeling that involves a grasp of the object as calling for such a response. Second, the noetic approach cannot dismiss the Kantian one because it relies on it to have a purchase on the aesthetic, given that nothing devoid or independent of affective appreciation amounts to doing justice to aesthetic excellence. Third, the way that noetic philosophers treat the affective as passive, non-reflective, involving no grasp of the object and its world, and as opposed to the intellectual, which they regard as divorced from the affective, receptive, and vulnerable, betrays a confusion about what it means to be human.