Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Hume said beauty is no quality in things themselves — it lives only in the eye that looks at them. Fine. Then explain why some decisions are still, unmistakably, wrong.
That contradiction is where this episode lives.
You are waiting in line at a bank. It is late. The machine in front of you has a touchscreen that is too bright, almost blinding. The button to get a ticket is tiny, recessed, and feels slippery.
You are holding your coffee, and you want to press something solid. I am not saying you are wrong to want solid. I am not saying comfort is a virtue. I am just saying that the design of this machine fights you at every step.
It does not serve you. You stand there, annoyed, and you think, "This is ugly. This is badly made." You think the designer was lazy or stupid.
But David Hume, the guy who gave us the saying, looked at a flower and said the flower does not contain beauty. It does not contain ugliness either. The flower is just there. It is a collection of cells and sunlight.
Beauty, Hume said, is a feeling in the mind. It is not a physical thing on the wall or the screen. So if beauty is not in the thing itself, why does this machine feel so wrong? Why do we get angry at objects that cannot help themselves?
Why do we blame a wall for being cold? This episode is about that anger. It is about the gap between how something feels and how it is. We are going to look at why some judgments are better than others, even when the quality is not in the object.
We are going to talk about why you cannot explain your design decision just by pointing at the result. You have to start somewhere else, and we are going to find where that is.
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty." I still believe that. But if beauty is just a feeling inside my head, then how do I explain the time I showed a client a chair I designed and they hated it? I said, "This chair holds your back well."
They said, "It looks cheap." I told them, "It feels solid, it’s oak, it has a five-year guarantee." They didn't care. They looked at it and they felt nothing but embarrassment.
I was trying to argue with their feelings. I was using the chair’s physical facts to fight their emotional reaction. That never works. If beauty is a feeling, then a bad chair is still a bad chair, just a different kind of bad.
This is exactly the problem a Scottish philosopher named David Hume had in the eighteenth century. He sat in a coffee shop in Edinburgh and he worried about art. He realized that when we say something is beautiful, we are not pointing at a feature of the object. We are not pointing at a leg, or a curve, or a color.
We are pointing at our own mind. We are saying, "This object makes me feel good." Hume called this a "sentiment." A sentiment is just a fancy word for a feeling or an opinion that comes from inside you, not from a ruler on a wall.
The trouble is that we pretend these feelings are facts. We act like beauty is a physical law, like gravity. We say, "This is ugly," as if ugliness is written on the object in invisible ink. Hume knew this was wrong.
He said that the chair is just wood and nails. It is not ugly. It just does not make you happy. And the client who hates my chair is not a bad person for feeling that way.
They are just a person with a different mind. But here is where Hume got stuck, and this is where we have to start. If beauty is just a feeling in the mind, then if I design a chair and you hate it, I cannot say you are wrong. I cannot say your judgment is bad.
But if I cannot say your judgment is bad, then how do I ever defend my work? How do I say, "No, this is actually good"? If we are just all walking around with different opinions, then my opinion is just as valid as yours, and I might as well be making chairs in my basement. I have to be able to say that some judgments are better than others.
But how do I do that if beauty is not in the thing itself? I have to find a way to talk about the mind without arguing about feelings.
Fair enough. You might be right. If beauty is a feeling, then it is just a matter of taste, and taste is like pizza toppings—you either like pineapple or you don’t, and no amount of logic will change anyone’s mind. But think about the opposite.
Imagine I design a door handle that is shaped like a snake. It is smooth, warm, and perfectly ergonomic. You pick it up and you feel a jolt of disgust. You think, “That is repulsive.
I would never touch that.” That is a feeling, too. It is in your mind. But you are not just being a snob.
You are reacting to something dangerous. That snake handle is designed to hurt your hand, not to help you open a door. Your disgust is a warning. It is your mind telling you, “Do not touch this.”
So if we accept that feelings can be warnings, then we have to accept that feelings can be good or bad. They are not just noise. David Hume realized this, too. He knew that if all feelings were equal, we would be walking around with no sense of danger.
We would touch fire and like it, and we would eat poison berries and like the taste of them. He said that some feelings are more reliable than others. But he didn’t stop there. He found the only place where feelings can be reliable, and it is not in the object itself.
It is in the history of the mind. He said that when we say something is beautiful, we are not saying that the object is perfect. We are saying that this object makes us feel something that we have felt before. We are saying, “This reminds me of something I like.”
When you look at a simple white wall, you feel nothing. But when you look at a Greek statue, you feel awe. Why? Hume said it is not because the statue is special.
It is because thousands of people over thousands of years have looked at it and said, “This is good.” That feeling of awe has been passed down to you. It is in your mind because you have been trained to see it. So if beauty is a shared feeling, then it is not just a random mood.
It is a conversation. It is a history of human minds agreeing on something.
I have to stop calling it "taste" if I want to build anything that lasts. Taste is just the place where we hide when we are afraid we made the wrong choice. "Third, creativity is a process, and not innate quality (which goes back to the first point), which means that it's something that everyone, including you and me, could cultivate; and, Fourth, the notion of creativity is built inside all of us (AKA "innate"). The society puts things in hierarchy.
Would you say that David Beckham is more talented than Mozart? It would be like comparing an apple to an orange." I mean that you cannot measure a chair in the same way you measure a player on a field. A sofa either holds your spine or it does not.
It either breaks in six months or it does not. That is a fact. If a sofa is too soft, you sink in and your head is lower than your feet. That is a physical problem, not an aesthetic one.
So when you are in a meeting and someone says your work is "ugly," stop trying to argue about the shape of the armrest. They are not looking at the armrest. They are looking at the history of their own mind. They are remembering a chair they like, or a chair that broke, and your design is failing that memory.
You might say, "But it looks like a cloud, and clouds are light and free." And I might say, "This is a hospital waiting room, and clouds make people feel like they are floating in a void, and floating is not good when you are in pain." That is not about opinion. That is about the constraint.
I am not defending the cloud shape. I am defending the fact that it keeps the back straight. So when you defend a design, do not point at the result. Point at the problem it solves.
Point at the person who is sitting there right now, tired and hungry, and explain why this thing is the only thing that can help them. That is where the argument lives. That is where you can prove you are right.
People say they want to be beautiful because they want themselves to appreciate it, but that's not entirely true since the constant desire for other people's acceptance is what you desire for when you fabricate yourself to appeal to the world of external beauty. It's the only internal beauty, what you are as a person, that could make you happy because you can be content with yourself without having to rely on other people's acceptance. No emphasis, at all, should be placed on how we look. If I cannot point to the chair and say, "This is ugly," but I can point to the wall and say, "It hurts my neck," then is the problem that I am judging my work by how it makes me feel, rather than how it works?