因为许多美丽的事物都没有外表，所以第一个说美丽只是肤浅的人显然是错的。顺便说一句，当我还是个孩子的时候，我们常常继续“……但是丑到骨子里了。”当然，说话者可能是在打比方。也许他或她想说的是，美是一件事物所能拥有的最不重要的美德。但这真的是一个恰当的比喻吗?也许我们可以把隐含的标准应用到比喻本身来回答这个问题。我想，“肤浅”的比喻一点也不美。一个美丽的比喻会让我们更深入，而不仅仅是看到事物的表面。

But I digress. What I really want to talk about is the experience of beautiful things and why having such experiences matters.

Experience is in one sense something subjective. An experience is some kind of inner mental state with an inner qualitative character. In addition, experiences can also have perfectly objective contents. This makes experience a Janus face thing - one face looks to the world, one face looks inward. We make perceptual contact with something outside the mind -- the experienced object -- by having a mental something -- an experience -- occur within the mind of the experiencing subject.

It's possible to get oneself all tied up in knots thinking about experience. Take the very phrase 'the experience of beauty.' There are two different things you could mean by it. You could take 'beauty' to refer to the inner qualitative character of an experience or you could take it to refer to the thing, presumably outside of the mind, that is the content of a possible experience. Using the phrase in both ways, I suppose you could wonder whether experiences of beauty were beautiful as experiences.

But I really want to talk about the value of experiencing things that are beautiful. I hope I can do that while bracketing the question of where the beauty resides. I don't want to have to decide right now whether beauty resides in the character of our experience or in the objects themselves. There should be some things we can say without having to settle that issue.

我认为很明显，体验伟大的美好事物是有内在价值的。置身于美好事物面前是一种运输。想想一件真正美丽的艺术作品的力量——无论是音乐、诗歌还是绘画。当然，还有一个问题是，艺术是否必须是美丽的才伟大。但显然，一些伟大的艺术作品是惊人的美丽。无论一件艺术品的力量来自何处，美都是力量的源泉之一。

Perhaps, though, we call a work of art beautiful just because it has the sort of power to arrest, command, and and delight that is characteristic of the best art. But I'm not sure that is right. Some think of beautiful things as sources of deep pleasure. But great art need not be pleasing. Think of the movie Requiem for a Dream. It's a very fine and powerful piece of film-making. But it is an unrelenting journey into the psychology of addiction. It takes you down into the very depths, never let's you up for air, never gives you any hope or any trace of light. Though it is in no way pleasing or pleasant, it is a very fine film indeed.

Is it a thing of beauty? If beauty entails pleasure, then it is not. I'm not denying that there is pleasure in some way associated with seeing a greatly disturbing work of art. I was pleased that I saw the movie, and admired the searing psychological reality of the movie. But I can't say that I was pleasedinseeing the movie.

Here's a thought. Though many beautiful things are sources of pleasure, perhaps the real intrinsic value of experiencing beautiful things has more to do with the power of beautiful things to arrest our attention, to take over our consciousness and move us to new places in unexpected ways. Often that will be a pleasant thing. But sometimes, like with Requiem for a Dream, it will not.

Alternatively, we might want a larger category that includes the both the beautiful and various dark cousins of the beautiful -- the shocking, the horrible, the ugly. They would be differentiated by what they do with us once they have arrested us, where they take us, and how they take us there. I think this is perhaps both philosophically under-explored and artistically under-explored territory. There isn't a great market for great and powerful ugly art. But could there be?

Finally about the comparative value of the experience of beautiful things. Whoever said beauty is only skin deep was wrong in another way. Suppose you had a choice between two lives. In one life, you have all the merely useful things that you could wish for, but little in your life is beautiful. Perhaps you have great wealth and can buy anything you want. But you are so busy with getting and spending, thaT beauty is simply crowded out of your life. In another life, your life was filled with things, people, and experiences of great beauty, but you have only enough useful things to get you through the day. You are not particular wealthy, partly because you are so consumed with the pursuit of beauty. Which life would you choose? For me, it's obvious. Though I wouldn't trade health for more experiences of beauty, I would certainly trade wealth for it. And though I'd like a life filled with merely useful things, I wouldn't want more of that at the expense of beauty.