Philosophy in Review XXXI (2011), no.

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Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson

Functional Beauty.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2008.
240 pages
US$75.00 (cloth ISBN 978-0-19-920524-0)

Functional beauty has been a sadly neglected topic in recent aesthetic theory. Parsons and
Carlson seek to remedy this, arguing that it is an important aspect of aesthetic experience.
However their purpose is much deeper than that: one could say that they are attempting a
major revision of aesthetics itself, unifying it by placing functional beauty at its core.
Carlson has long been a strong advocate for the aesthetics of nature and has promoted a
well-known theory that natural phenomena are only appropriately appreciated from a
base of scientific and common sense knowledge. He has also written more generally on
environmental aesthetics, including the aesthetics of the built environment. Parsons, a
younger colleague, has taken a similar position about the aesthetics of nature in his
writings. Now they are teaming together to talk about the role of functional beauty in
aesthetics as a whole.

The book is logically constructed with an opening chapter on the history of

functional beauty followed by another on the role functional beauty plays in
contemporary aesthetics, then two chapters that deal with possible problems for their
theory, followed in turn by chapters that cover how functional beauty relates to nature,
architecture, everyday aesthetics, and art. So far, I have followed convention by referring
to functional beauty without capitalization. However, Parsons and Carlson constantly
mention something called ‘Functional Beauty’. Irritatingly, sometimes this term refers to
their own theory (i.e. that objects have such aesthetic properties as ‘fitness’ and
‘elegance’ in light of our knowledge of their functions), sometimes to the concept of
functional beauty, and sometimes to functional beauty itself. That aside, this is an
excellently written book which makes several important points. I am particularly
sympathetic to the authors’ project of widening the domain of aesthetics beyond that of
fine art and natural phenomena to include everyday life. However, within the domain of
everyday aesthetics, I find the expansion too narrow since it is limited to utilitarian
objects, and among these, to phenomena that can only be appreciated by eye and ear.

The opening chapter is noteworthy for drawing our attention to certain neglected
aspects of the history of aesthetics. The idea of ‘beauty as fitness for function’ goes back
to the ancient Greeks, notably to Socrates’ identification of beauty with functional fit. In
response to Socrates, someone might think that although some things may be beautiful
because they are fit for their function, this is not the only source of beauty. Moreover
some things seem to fit their function and are not beautiful at all. The authors avoid some
of the problems with Socrates’ position by transforming it into the idea that beauty is
looking fit for function, the look being perceptually pleasing. (Socrates of course would
hate this idea of giving primacy to appearance and pleasure.) The authors will also later
insist, contra Socrates, that functional beauty is only one species of beauty. We also learn
in this chapter about how such 18th century thinkers as Berkeley and Hume further

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developed the notion of functional beauty, and how others criticized it. For example
Burke claimed that a peacock is beautiful but not functionally so, and the pig’s snout is
not beautiful despite its functional excellence. Although the authors agree that fitness is
not necessary for beauty, they disagree that it is not sufficient, arguing (following
Alison’s reply to Burke) that, although perhaps ugly overall, the pig’s snout may contain
an obscured beauty based on its fitness for function. The chapter ends with a discussion
of Kant as the leading historical opponent to basing beauty on apparent fitness. Although
Kant famously excluded ideas of purpose from his notion of pure beauty, he also brought
it back in with his notion of dependent beauty. However the authors follow Paul Guyer in
arguing that, for Kant, ‘fitness for function’ is present only as a constraint within
dependent beauty.

The authors then skip to the 20th century when such writers as Edward Bullough,
with his notion of aesthetic distance, and Jerome Stolnitz, with his ideas of aesthetic
attitude and disinterestedness, continued the Kantian tradition. However, for various
reasons, these ideas went into decline in the late 20th century. So why has there been no
renewal of interest in functional beauty? One reason is that art continued to be the central
concern of aesthetics. Another is that developments in aesthetics entailed a continued
separation of the artworld from the everyday world where functional beauty is more
prominent. Also, the alliance of the aesthetics of nature with natural science led to
adopting science’s suspicion of teleological concepts. The authors admit that the
aesthetics of architecture talks about function at great length. However they observe,
following Roger Scruton, that discussion of these ideas has generated two problems for
the very idea of functional beauty. How does one determine what something’s function
is? How does one translate concern for function into something aesthetic? These
problems, if not resolved, lead, they argue, to an unacceptable relativism. Indeed, they
think that ‘everyday aesthetics’ has been neglected mainly because writers in this area
have not yet developed clear criteria of evaluation, criteria that could be found through a
turn to functionalism. They think that what they call ‘rich cognitivism’ has overcome this
problem in the aesthetics of art and in the aesthetics of nature, and should also do so in
the realm of everyday life. Since they believe that a better aesthetic theory is one that
covers all forms of aesthetics as a unified discipline, they wish to use the idea of
functional beauty to unify aesthetics of art, nature and everyday life.

This leads them, in their third chapter, to deal more explicitly with the problem of
indeterminacy of the concept of function. Here, they reject the view that function should
be defined in terms of human intention (which they regard as theoretically messy) and,
inspired by Beth Preston, develop a notion of proper artifact function dependent on
selection within the marketplace. Their formal account of this is: ‘X has a proper function
F if and only if Xs currently exist because, in the recent past, ancestors of X were
successful in meeting some need or want in the marketplace because they performed F,
leading to manufacture and distribution of Xs’ (75). Yet, as they observe, some have
argued that this approach would denude novel artifacts of any proper function. Their
answer to this objection focuses on cases of extreme novelty. I would argue however that
the problem is not that novel artifacts have no ancestors but that their proper function
cannot be determined by reference to the way their ancestors met needs in the

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marketplace. It would not be a bad thing if the theory could not handle completely novel
artifacts, since there are none. It is more problematic if it cannot handle relatively novel
artifacts, or recognize that the proper function of a relatively novel artifact is not the same
as that of its ancestors. Moreover, the introduction of ‘market success’ fails to take into
account that this is a relative matter: some items can be very successful in small markets
(e.g. avant-garde art) but not in larger markets.

Whereas Preston’s definition of artifact function inspires Parsons and Carlson’s

third chapter, Kendall Walton’s theory of aesthetic appreciation of art based on
categorizing non-aesthetic perceptual properties into standard, variable, and contra-
standard, dominates the fourth. The authors use Walton’s categories to classify several
kinds of functional beauty. There is one kind in which there are variable features highly
indicative of functionality and there are no contra-standard features (e.g., the muscle car).
There is another in which the object has a high degree of perceptible properties that are
standard for a functional category and it lacks contra-standard features. Most unusual is
the authors’ notion that something can have functional beauty if it has no contra-standard
features but has certain variable features that seem to contradict the first.

Although the authors have some interesting things to say about the role of the
appearance of fitness to function in appreciation of animals, landscapes, buildings, and
art, I will limit my remaining comments to the application to everyday aesthetics. Here,
the authors launch a criticism of a group of philosophers whom they call, appropriately
enough, Deweyans. These include Carolyn Korsmeyer, Yuriko Saito, Arnold Berleant,
Emily Brady, Richard Shusterman, and myself. Carlson and Parsons’ main objection to
Deweyans is that they allow mere bodily pleasures to be aesthetic. Defining these
pleasures in terms of the proximal senses (e.g. smell and taste), Carlson and Parsons
defend the traditional primacy of the distal senses, namely sight and hearing. (They admit
the pleasures of the proximal senses as adjuncts to aesthetic experience proper.) Their
argument appeals to linguistic usage, i.e. that we do not refer to the pleasure of a warm
bath as aesthetic. I think we do sometimes refer to warm baths as aesthetic. Also, the
point does not necessarily extend to other cultures, for example to the Japanese. In
anticipation of this cross-cultural point Carlson and Parsons observe that the Turks and
the Chinese have different words for aesthetic and bodily pleasures. Perhaps so, yet
Turkish baths are famous for their aesthetic delights, and the Chinese have a word for
gourmet food, mei-shi, which literally means “beautiful food.”

My main problem with this approach to beauty is that it presents us with an

insufficiently unified notion of beauty. It also depends on too narrow a notion of
functionality. For Parson and Carlson the functional beauty of an object can be spoken of
as somehow distinct from its beauty in general. The problem can be made concrete by
looking at fashionable open-toed shoes. The authors take these as not having functional
beauty because they do not serve the function of shoes which, they believe, is to cover the
toes while walking. And yet, as the authors admit, the shoes may be strikingly beautiful.
They think those who admire such shoes ‘are not really considering the shoes in their
actual functional category’ (109) and that if they did so they would find that the shoes
look ugly. Yet I would argue that the shoes’ proper function in this case is the one they

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display within the context of the world within which they work, i.e. in the world of
fashion. The authors themselves say later that most items of clothing ‘possess important
expressive or cultural functions as well’ (170). Although this is heading in the right
direction it seems to contradict the earlier point. And, if expressive and cultural functions
are allowed, why not decorative function too? While emphasizing utilitarian objects of
everyday life the authors neglect objects that are mainly decorative. They also neglect
experiences (for example, the experience of watching a child play insofar as it gives
aesthetic pleasure), many of which are not functional at all. Similarly, the authors inform
us that, in assessing the functional beauty of a chair, how it functions does not arise since
all chairs operate on the same principles (93). Surely, how chairs function differs greatly
based on cultural context, decorative aspects, and so forth.

Despite my disagreements I believe Parsons and Carlson admirably succeed in

their stated goal of arguing for the importance of the look of functional fit in aesthetics.
For this, and for the interesting issues raised, I believe this is a book that everyone
interested in aesthetics should read. In their future writings I would like to know more
about the relation between functional beauty and beauty generally. What is the extent of
functional beauty’s domain: does it cover most of aesthetics or is it less ambitious than
that? Is there, for example, room left for non-functional beauty? And if decoration serves
a function then does it fall under functional beauty even though it is non-utilitarian?
.
Thomas Leddy
San José State University

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