Aesthetic thought cannot coherently treat beauty as a bare property — it is essential to aesthetic thought that aesthetic properties arise from nonaesthetic properties.
This claim is very intuitive, but let us try to say something more in support of it. It seems to be a deep fact about beauty and other aesthetic properties that they are inherently “sociable”; beauty cannot be lonely. Something cannot be barely beautiful; if something is beautiful then it must be in virtue of its nonaesthetic properties. Furthermore, knowing this is a constraint on our judgments about beauty and other aesthetic properties. We cannot just judge that something is beautiful; we mus