Beauty: Pleasure we attribute to the object, and have an idea that something in the object makes this pleasure.

Interestingly, this means that smell and taste are disqualified for making beauty attributions. Amazing! But it’s true: in ordinary language we never say that something tastes or smells beautiful.

Why? Because the thing in the object that makes it beautiful must be a plurality of contents. Without plurality, there is nothing for form to inhere in. Only through plurality can other things besides the absolute unity of raw sense consciousness, which is a dumb in-and-for-itself.

If there is no plurality, there is nothing to arrange, there is no opening for this other dimension of being over and above mere pixels or point-moments. The fact is, odors and tastes are too overwhelming and too lingering. To play Bach with food would require 120 tastes per minutes. And how to give two tastes spaced apart enough to be a two, a juxtaposition? Not possible. So we cannot appreciate the pleasure of this note here and that note there: that’s nicely done. And if you cannot present plurality-in-unity, neither rhythm (due to the lingering problem) nor harmony, then there can be no variety of form. Thus building a piece can never get off the ground. And so there are no taste works of art, and no smell works of art.

The pleasure of beauty has as its object the interrelations of parts. This relation is constituted by subjective act, but an act that follows the pre-given ways-of-variation given through sensation. All formal unity is in-formed in the very act of your being stimulated into action. Unities, which go higher and higher thanks to associations with an infinity of objects outside the piece, spring from the very act of apprehension.

This is how form and beautiful form come to be “in” an object. All talk of beauty goes beyond sensation, and yet is attributed to objective features.