Analysis, Critique, Function, and the function of beauty
I would like to propose two philosophical activities that, if accepted as compelling, could be seen as fundamental to seeing how aesthetics is fundamental to judgment of all sorts.
Objectified knowledge we acquire through analysis. Analysis is the activity of taking things apart and seeing how the parts form a working relationship that we may see as the whole. Analytical judgments come about through aesthetic and alethic considerations, that is on the basis of considerations of beauty and truth.
Attitude, which relates knowledge to the interests of a person, comes about as a result of what I shall call the activity of critique. Critique is the activity of placing ourselves within our environment in terms of use and virtue. A critical judgment comes about on the basis of aesthetic and ethical considerations; it is a judgment concerning usefulness and goodness and the harmony between us and our ends and our ends and our means.
Analysis then, is an aesthetic and alethic way of investigating and judging things and critique is a form of judgment regarding utility and its practical as well as ethical considerations, brought together to a fitting whole through aesthetic judgment.
We are probably familiar by now with the notion that concepts model the world through reference (referring to something outside themselves) and inference (what you can say about what you are referring to as a result of the properties it manifests under certain conditions).
You have perhaps also taken on the idea that you cannot learn something about the world you inhabit without in some way conceptualizing it and using the concepts in judgment and reasoning.
The virtual world of thought tries to model what we observe in the world of behaviours by describing that behaviour in terms of ‘things’, ‘events’, and ‘situations’. We also know that concepts are not parallel to the world they describe but form its monstrous twin, they are part of that world and at the same time interfere with it by shaping our experience of it.
Earlier I said that we learn to conceptualize the world into things and relationships by analysing and critiquing what it is that we perceive. We have also already come across analytical judgments that we have called aesthetic and alethic judgements (judgments of beauty and of truth) and we have come across critical judgments, judgments of utility and goodness, or ethical judgments. It is time to take a closer look at analysis and critique, the two main philosophical activities we all of us perform almost all the time. If you can learn by keeping your administration of these two activities neat and tidy, you will be much helped.
Analysis
Analysis as I use the term, is an activity whereby we focus our attention on a thing, any ‘thing’, such as a word spoken or written, what it might refer to, such as a house, a bolt, a motorbike, a tree, a truss, a universe, a dream, a theory… and subsequently proceed to take it apart. We do this in order to see how it best divides into parts and how those parts fit- and work together to form a whole, making that whole what it is.
Analysis is an objectifying activity by which is meant that we do analysis descriptively and evaluate the descriptions purely in terms of their accuracy, coherence and consistency. In order to do this, we name the wholes, and their parts, attribute properties to each and so describe their working relationship to each other as well as we can.
In this way we form a conception of a thing in two directions. Downscale we look to see the whole in relation to what parts it is made up of. In this way we try to form an understanding of the working relationships of those parts. And upscale we try to see what that whole is itself a part of, and how it works together with other things to make larger wholes. In this way a house is a whole made up of all sorts of elements, and a house is itself a part of a neighbourhood, a city, a landscape, a country…
Mereological analysis is sort of like the philosophical equivalent of set theory in mathematics. We can designate anything to be ‘a set’ just as we can designate anything to be conceived of as ‘a whole’. The members of the set are in this analogy the equivalents of the parts making up the whole. But in set theory one thing is missing which mereological analysis cannot do without and that is the philosophically crucial aspect of the working relationship between the parts to make it a working whole.
A good example is a motorbike. For a motorbike to work like a motorbike you need more than just a collection of its parts heaped up in a pile or even sorted neatly in the workplace. They need to be put together into the right working relationship to each other for you to be able to drive with it. We can define a working relationship as the way two or more things behave when they are placed in a certain relationship to each other. It is very hard to be more precise than that. What you could do is develop a catalogue of working relationships.
This system of wholes and parts and their working relationships is held in a conceptual model of references and their meaning in terms of cause and effect. This allows us to make inferences such as: ‘if you make the truss of thinner joists, it will buckle under a force nine wind’, or ‘if you make the walls of this restaurant in concrete and do not clad them with something, it will affect the acoustics.’ Such simple sentences belie an extraordinary complex experience of life, which we spend all our time learning about.
However, in order for things to become useful in this way, analysis which looks at things by objectifying them is not enough. We also need to evaluate things in relation to us and that is why we need what I shall call critique.
We need critique for two reasons.
1. When we analyse things and learn to conceptualise them in terms of reference and inference, we have to realize that we look at any ‘thing’ or situation from our peculiar scale of observation and from our peculiar perspective on things. We are decidedly human and biased in our looking. As such all analysis needs to be complemented by careful critique.
And 2. We simply need to know what something means to us. How is any situation we are presented with a threat or an opportunity? So, let’s have a closer look at what critique entails.
Critique
Critique, the way I shall use the word at least, is the activity of evaluating things specifically in relation to us. Where analysis tries to objectify our knowledge of the world, critique is a deliberately subjectifying activity because its task is to establish and consider value, priority, urgency and norm with regard to things, events and situations and their useful relation to us. The way a motorbike works can be objectified, but its value to us is expressed in the uses it affords, the purposes it can serve and the concerns it might raise.
Well, that is quite easy to fathom, and it tidies up all philosophical activity. Critique places our environment in its relation to us in terms of use, norm, value, urgency, and priority. Analysis is an objectifying move and critique is a subjectifying move. In our daily lives they easily hide and camouflage themselves or get muddled together so that it is not easy to tease them apart. And, even when we do try to distinguish them, we always need both in every discussion and every other action. For one, as I already indicated above, we need critique to properly conduct analysis and analysis to properly conduct critique.
In order for knowledge to become properly objectified, we need to take critique very seriously and understand how we are entangled with the world around us in terms of our perception and conception of things.
We need critique in order to explore things and their working relationships in order to find values and norms regarding their analysis, description, and use. For analysis to be truly valuable to us we need to objectify our knowledge of the world accurately and preferably precisely and meticulously. That is what has given us the scientific protocol.
The norms, values and priorities of exact science came about through the careful analysis and critique of our entanglement with the world around us and our attempt to take account of that entanglement so that we could properly objectify our analysis of it. Objectified knowledge is often described as value free, but that is a curious way of putting it.
For one, we over-confidently speak of objective knowledge as if we have fully achieved the objectification of our knowledge, but now that we have a better idea of what a concept is and how it works you can see how brazen we are when we use the word objective in that way.
The world turns out not to be quite so black and white. At the scale of the atomic and a little below and the molecular, physics and chemistry can do a great job describing the world. And we have managed to objectify much of biology and medicine and some social processes. But when analysis tries to understand human being in its psychological doing, we have to learn to understand subjectivity objectively and that is not easy.
Working relationships and the notion of function
When we talk about things working, or elements being in a working relationship with other elements, we talk about the functioning of something. Here it is easy to make a common mistake, muddling things up in our thinking that really gets in the way of a clear and useful understanding of things.
For instance, some of us feel comfortable with the idea that a thing can have qualities or properties that do not perform a function. That, I would argue, is an unhelpful way of looking at the idea of function or indeed at the idea of properties. Why? Let’s unpack the notion of functioning.
The function of something can be looked at analytically and critically. Looked at analytically we can quite happily say that everything that there is, performs a function of some sort, simply on the basis of the qualities or properties it has.
If something has a property that helps it be what it is, then that property is enough for the thing to be given at least that function, the function of being what it is.
In this way we can say redness is a function of a tomato. The function of a stone in a landscape is to be a part of that landscape. It helps form that landscape what it is in a quiet sort of way without itself appearing ‘to be doing very much’.
Functions are expressions of properties in that the property of something is expressed with the verb being and the function of something expresses that same property as a doing. And that small difference is crucial a thing exhibits properties in particular situations under particular conditions. Tomatoes are not red when they are not looked at by us in a particular light. So, if we want to properly objectify our knowledge, we need to take that into account. The way that these properties make things behave just is their function: their working.
Then there is the critical way of looking at function. In the critical mode we look at how something might have some sort of use to us. The implications of the way a thing behaves under certain conditions and in certain situations as understood by someone ready to use them to their advantage, draws the functioning of a thing’s properties into the funnel of purpose.
From that moment we judge their working from our perspective, we see their working and seek out affordances and purposes. In order to use something, we must have what we can call causal and modal competence, that is analytical knowledge of the implications of a thing’s properties under certain conditions and in certain situations.
As soon as we place ourselves in relation to that knowledge for the purposes of use and say that something ‘has no purpose’ or ‘has no function’ we are in fact saying something very different to what the words themselves suggest; it is to say that something does not contribute usefully to a design or to some designer’s purpose.
All properties have a function, some properties are not useful for a particular purpose, some things are not useful to you but might be useful to someone or something else and so forth and so forth. As such to say that something is useless is to give a critical evaluation of something with reference to some use or purpose relating it to you and yours. It cannot be an analytical statement.
Getting them muddled means that we are in danger of dismissing something outright because it does not work towards our purpose when in fact it could be used for other purposes and probably already does so if we were to take the time to analyse the situation.
In other words, distinguishing these two ways of looking at functioning properly sets us up to think sustainably about the part played by everything in our environment.
When we say something ‘has no function’ we are in fact denying it existence within the space of implications. Everything is active within the space of implications.
So, when we more correctly say, “This doesn’t work for me” we might judge this ‘not-working-for-me’ on two levels. Either the functioning of the thing gets in the way of the intended action or design and makes it perform badly or the functioning of the thing is merely redundant and neither helps nor deters the design. Let’s call a spade a spade and no longer use such denials. In this way we would develop a more attentive and caring way to think about ourselves and our place in our environment.
The function of beauty
Our muddled thinking about function and purpose goes even deeper when we say that certain aspects of a design or certain things that we might consider for a design are denied a function.
In this way we often call ornament ‘non-functional’, or ‘aesthetics’ as something that is ‘separate’ to function, and that ‘beauty’ is all very well but not really ‘functional’.
People who hold such opinions would never survive a conversation with Socrates, who, through the dialogues of Plato became famous for showing up people who held carelessly constructed ideas about things.
The function of ornament, the function of beauty in architecture or indeed in anything we endeavour to do or make, can be simply demonstrated by asking ourselves, ‘what is the function of beauty in …architecture, in thinking, in…?’ If we can give a sensible answer to that question —and we always can— we have discovered for ourselves its function.
So, what is the function of beauty in architecture or indeed in any human product or endeavour?
If we take Alberti’s definition of beauty as our standard, namely that beauty is ‘that reasoned harmony we arrive at when we can determine that nothing should be added, taken away or altered from an idea, calculation, image, argument, statement, text, design or artefact of any kind, but for the worse’, we can see that the notion of beauty comes into every (design) decision as a measure of adequacy expressed in satisfaction.
Beauty in that sense is that intellectual satisfaction that occurs when we judge something to fit some idea or some set of criteria, some taste in things, or some intuition or some feeling, or some rebellious impulse or whatever, appropriately.
This should be enough to demonstrate the importance of beauty or its weaker form satisfaction in all our thinking. After all, with every decision we make deliberately, we use exactly that criterion of judgment to sway us: reasoned fittingness, reasoned harmony. Sometimes we make do with a compromise, sometimes we learn to find satisfying that which we earlier did not or vice versa.
When I see something beautiful, it fits with what we loosely might call ‘my taste’. ‘My taste’ we can more rigorously define as that set of positions that I take with reference to my analytical understanding of the world and my critical ideas about what is useful and good in it.
As such I am capable of finding beauty in anything that so fits. Beauty is a seal of approval of things so judged and expressed in a form ranging on a scale from a light satisfaction to a profoundly emotional joy.
So how can we possibly say that beauty has no function? It is rather the other way around. The beauty and ugliness of things are implicitly of such enormous all-encompassing importance to everything we do, that we have lost sight of them, they matter more than everything: they nudge us in certain directions for our use and purpose finding, avoiding others. They judge our (dis)satisfaction, attraction, joy, revulsion, and sadness in everything. Beauty and its complicated twin ugliness (twins are not straight forward things in this book) are as big in our thinking as the sky above us and the ground below us are in our daily being.
But there are difficulties in coming to terms with this view. The reasoning involved is complex and one can easily drop a stitch. Alberti’s definition of beauty expressed as a test is quite separate from the collection of values and norms that make up the criteria against which he personally judged things beautiful according to the test that the definition entails.
So, for Alberti a harmony of reasons is reached under very different conditions than it would be with you or me. His context was the context of Early Renaissance Italy, with all its entrenched and normalized views on almost everything that differ radically from equivalent concerns today.
The point is to make the criteria for fittingness, for the moment that we decide that reasoned harmony is achieved, explicit to each other. Only then can we have a sensible conversation about whether these criteria are reasonably well-grounded or not. I do not think that all of Alberti’s values and norms as manifest in the book are well-grounded. Nor do I share all of them, even though I have to acknowledge that I absolutely love their architecture.
For instance, with regard to the beauty of human beings the definitions judged against a certain norm can become very oppressive indeed. But there are ways to get around it, that show you on the one hand how good the definition and its test are and on the other, where, for example, Alberti and Plato, get stuck in their norms.
If the norm of beauty for the human male body for instance is taken as Leonardo da Vinci’s version of the Vitruvian man, and if we say: ‘He is a person that passes Alberti’s test-definition, then all of us who do not conform to this supposed ‘ideal’ are in differing degrees ugly. And this is what many of us do, we take a certain standard as universal without questioning it. But you do not have to go that way. Why should the Vitruvian man be the standard of beauty? There are at least two ways around this.
We could try the following line of argument: No, the Vitruvian man is not a necessary norm, it is a contingent norm mystified by the geometrical accident that he fits in a square and a circle, furthermore he is muscly, not too fat, and has a generous topping of hair. Many of us just happen to find all that taken together beautiful. However, we could just as easily say that any form in which humanity manifests itself is the norm for humanity and we find humanity take together beautiful.
Beauty can be found in all people. The challenge then becomes to find the harmony that is there in any and everybody. That is the point of Marc Quinn’s famous and admirable statues of Alison Lapper. There is beauty in the statue and in the woman portrayed. And Marc Quinn turns the table on us and seems to ask: how far are you willing to go in accepting that? Beauty-finding thus becomes a question of aesthetic athleticism.
To normalize all bodies and to find their beauty, means that we become more ready to see the uses and purposes of all people as, in principle legitimate. Having done that we can have a further conversation as to whether we ought to or not and on what grounds. Of course, all this takes time and a lot of energy, which is why such things are often left to norms that we accept lock stock and barrel from our environment. It saves us from having to puzzle things out every time.
Another way around the Vitruvian man norm, is to say that John is the norm for being John. Everything that makes John ‘John’ is in harmony with the idea of John and so John is the most beautiful John. This sounds trivial but is in fact quite profound. But to elaborate it would take an evening with beer. There are also other ways round. All of them with exciting and puzzling challenges. For example, we can say we need to have an image of our own ideal and anything that demonstrably conforms to that idea achieves a harmony of reasons. Nevertheless, the Vitruvian male and its female equivalent in Venus continue to have a strong attraction and this may well be due to the fact that their beauty has been hard-wired through evolution. That, however, is no excuse for accepting things. A human being is a being that can overcome himself. And so, we do not have to stick with any norm, however hard-wired.
Ok, back to function. In order for something to be something, it does something and in order for something to do something it has things to do it with. That is true for everything. As such it is useful to talk about things as activities because it allows you to understand the functions a thing performs in terms of what those functions are incompatible with and what the consequences of those functions are, so that you can change or avoid them. Any object usually accumulates a whole series of critically decided functions on the basis of its properties, it being a whole, made up of working parts and their working relationships. Take a door. Analytically, a door is, roughly speaking, made up of a doorpost, a threshold, and a large usually rectangular plane made of some material that hinges within that doorpost. Critically on the other hand, it has many uses: It functions to separate an inside from an outside, it functions to filter things through so that big things can’t get through and small things can, it has the function to announce itself to those wanting to make use of it, it has the function perhaps of giving some indication of the status of the owner of the door or of whatever institution the door gives access to; it may have the function of ‘fitting in with the rest of the design’. It may function as an example of beautiful craftsmanship or high-tech production techniques. The door also functions as an example in this text. If it is painted red, it functions by association to remind us of a famous song. We could go on for a long time like this. Things have a limitless number of possible functions, analytically… and critically. Never ask whether something has a function, ask instead how it might function and to what end and who might benefit or be hindered.
What is important to consider is that any element designed:
- at least performs all the functions the designer intends it to perform and that these are compatible with each other and with other functions other elements need to perform.
- avoids those functions that are destructive of the intended goals (including the final one of making our life flourish).
- and that any unintended functions remaining do not get in the way of those intended ones and that other elements within the design do not hinder the functioning of the element under discussion.
It is the designer’s task to respond to all these possibilities for function and decide which ones they are going to devote some consideration to in the design, deciding how each function should be expressed, emphasized, or downplayed.
Learning just is analysing and critiquing
If you get the distinction between analysis and critique and the role of working relationships as related to function, you have already learnt something useful with regard to what learning means. Because getting to grip with these and what they mean is essentially what learning is.
By carefully extracting ourselves from our entanglement with things, we try to objectify the world around us to model its working, and then relate that working to us with reference to its implications for effect (consequence) and use. If you think about it, you might say that education (the process of learning through teaching) begins and ends with someone (perhaps even your own imaginative self) telling you what things there are, what to call them, describe how they work, what to do with them, and speculating what else they could be useful for. Learning is also acquiring the appropriate movements and performing them in their correct sequence to achieve some purpose. This you learn by being told, by observing others and by trying yourself and either being corrected through the feedback you get from someone else or from the response of the things you are manipulating.
Learning is working through your understanding of implications in terms cause and effect, incompatibility, and consequence, exploring implications for possibilities and affordances. You could almost use this list as a checklist. And indeed, further down, where I paraphrase a brilliant breaking down of what understanding means given by the philosopher Robert Brandom, you could actually use that list as a checklist to see whether you or your student can rightfully claim to understand something.
In this way you learn to do things with a purpose instead of haphazardly or by accident. And you even learn to playfully explore the arbitrary, the seemingly purposeless for their creative potential. That is what distinguishes a sapient creature from the helpless objects in the universe that simply undergo whatever happens to them. Moreover, by learning you learn to recognise happy accidents for their opportunities, or indeed unhappy ones as possible threats. You even learn to explore alternatives in order to see what they might hold. This bit is very important for creative processes whereby you explore what happens under certain conditions (the ‘what-if’ scenarios) and what is possible.
How do you learn? You learn by observing the world around you, including the person telling you stuff. The learning is done either when trying to do what you have observed others do, that is your body learning what to do, what movements to make, or when thinking and talking about what you have observed and working through its implications regarding how it could affect you and yours. For more detail on this bit, see the essay on mimicry and imitation.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
[1] I treat of these activities in greater detail in an earlier part of the Theoria Project *
[2] This part relies on the work of Kathrin Koslicki, The Structure of Objects, Oxford (2008)