Aesthetics & The Office: Is Hilary Swank Hot?

I elevate few television shows to as high a status as classics. But you who are familiar with the hijinks of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, may empathize with my impulse to connect profound human experiences through a classic episode of The Office. Yet at the outset I must, I think rightly, call out this particular episode for a vulgar, objectionable question which governs the episode "Prince Family Paper": is Hilary Swank hot? While we rightly might object to objectifying a human being in this question (which I will certainly address), the process the characters embark on to answer the question illustrates an important lesson in the realms of aesthetic judgment, our conception of beauty, and the subtlety between objectivity & objectifying. It intend to not only journey through these aesthetic issues but also to land on a particular kind of aesthetic practice.

One Question, Two Sides

"You've got no taste, Stanley Hudson," Phyllis charges. Others chime in wondering what in the world is wrong with Stanley. Phyllis and Stanley disagree on whether or not the actress Hilary Swank is hot. As the rest of the office begin to offer their thoughts, someone points out early on, "She is an amazing actress." "That's not the question," Kevin replies, without skipping a beat.

Jim, ever the unifying member of the office, suggests a vote to settle the matter. Five raise their hands affirming Hilary Swank is hot; five raise their hands affirming Hilary Swank is not hot. Kevin, again, aptly raises the important question, "5 to 5. What do we do now?" What follows is a fairly succinct illustration of aesthetic dialogue & debate.

When Andy opens the debate with, "Topic: Hilary Swank is attractive," half the office objects. Why? The question is whether or not Hilary Swank is hot. Stanley in turn offers the first interesting objection: "What's the difference? Attractive? Beautiful? Hot? It's all the same." Once again, Kevin replies, "Huge difference. A painting can be beautiful, but I don't want to make out with a painting." Here, we see an equivocation between different aesthetic terms & words which operate under different functions, namely, those which incite one to commit....acts of passion.

Soon after, Angela & Kelly bring in two additional perspectives. "Hot is a temperature, people," speaks the ever-literally-minded Angela. Again, someone takes issue with the very terms of the debate. Angela objects because the word "hot" applies most properly, in her mind, to a scientific & descriptive scheme, not as an aesthetic category. Not too long after the group brushes aside Angela's interjection, Kelly erupts,"If Hilary Swank isn't hot, then I'm not hot because there's no way I'm as hot as Hilary Swank!" Ouch. Underneath her own emotional concerns stands a conception of 'hotness' as a spectrum, wherein there are degrees & standards to which one is hot and may compare oneself objectively to others.

The final two perspectives offer radically different paths. Oscar, the office's Wikipedia, presents a picture of Hilary Swank with a carefully constructed grid superimposed over the image. He explains the naturally occurring symmetry of her face. He connects this recognition to koinophilia, an evolutionary hypothesis proposing that during sexual selection, animals preferentially seek mates with a minimum of unusual or mutant features, including functionality, appearance and behavior. Yet Oscar affirms that Hilary Swank is attractive while denying that she is 'hot'. Stanley responds with an appeal to sentimentality. He acknowledges perhaps only 15 years of life remaining before him, and though past Stanley may have found something to complain about, how could one deny how beautiful & hot Hilary Swank is in light of life's brevity? Where Oscar appeals to evolutionary theory, Stanley appeals to one's sentiments & finitude.

With the best of both sides presenting their cases, the office takes one final vote to decide once & for all: is Hilary Swank hot? Alas, the second vote still splits perfectly down the middle. Oscar laments, "This is the problem with debating. People only get more entrenched in their beliefs." In the closing scenes of the episode, Michael Scott walks into the office, notices a picture of Hilary Swank still hanging up from the debate, and remarks, "Oh, Hilary Swank! She's hot."

Thus, the debate over Hilary Swank ended through a simple majority. This episode of The Office, perhaps intended as a fun commentary on the nature of debate in contemporary work contexts, does raise interesting questions on the nature of aesthetic judgments, judgments regarding that which we call beautiful. How do we decide what objects, plays, songs, people, or mountains are beautiful? Is it simple majority? Are there mathematical standards or concepts something must adhere to to be called beautiful? Does beauty reside "in the eye of the beholder" and remain a solely subjective realm of experience? Here, I turn (briefly) to the insights of 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant for his careful considerations of aesthetic judgment.

Kant on Aesthetic Judgment

Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Judgment explores our faculty of judgment, especially our judgment of the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, & the good. First off, Kant grounds judgment of beauty in subjectivity. This means that beauty is not a property of some object (like color, size, smell, etc.) but rather is the pleasurable accompaniment to the presentation of some object to your senses as your mind intuits the object. So, when we make an aesthetic judgment ("That is a beautiful painting!") we are not so much naming a quality in the object ("Look! There's the beauty, right between Mona Lisa's hairline & eyebrows!"). When a human subject's mind encounters a beautiful object, it judges that object 'beautiful' because it is grounded in pleasurable the experience of the subject, not as a purely empirical phenomenon fit into some category of 'beautiful'. Thus, Kant concludes that we ought to be disinterested in beauty. He does not mean we should not care, but rather that we ought not let our desires override the beauty of an object. So, should you find the works of the painter Michelangelo unagreeable on account of your disdain for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Michelangelo, Kant would argue that you ought not let your disdain cloud your judgment that the art objects are beautiful.

So, is Kant arguing that beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder? Far from it! His second requirement for aesthetic judgment concerns normativity. Since our experience shows that human beings share the same faculty of aesthetic judgment, if we one person is presented with the same art object then their mind ought to experience the same pleasurable experience & thus judge the object to be beautiful as would next person. Though our judgment for beautiful things is grounded in the pleasure we experience from the object, it still means that art is objectively beautiful to any normal, rational person. The degree to which one may appreciate a work of art my change & grow, but people ought to be able to judge beauty correctly if freed from those things which inhibit the mind from properly experiencing the object.

So, why did I need to bring Kant, Jim Halpert, Stanley Hudson, & Michael Scott into the same conversation? I did so for two reasons. First, the debate in The Office shows that normal people's aesthetic judgment works similarly to what Kant described. No person objected that Hilary Swank was beautiful, they all agreed & even appealed to that belief. The second reason is that even though we talk about & conceive of beauty as an objective experience, we often fall into the nefarious trap of objectification.

Objectivity vs. Objectification

Though we might be tempted to fall into a relativistic, "beauty is solely in the eye of the beholder" mentality, this contradicts into our everyday experience of art & beauty. We, along with the characters of The Office & Immanuel Kant, talk about beauty as if it is objective. Even if it is not an empirical quality in the object, we agree that someone ought to find the same object beautiful to some degree, even if it goes against your own personal taste. But from the helpful & human realm of objective aesthetic judgments it is only so easy, much like the characters on The Office, to fall into objectification.

You see, objectivity grounds some degree of universality in an experience for every person given the same conditions. Art is the experience of elevation, raising an object to a kind of experience beyond apprehension. Objectification, on the other hand, is the experience of reduction. Objectification is Kevin saying he can't make out with a painting. In our world, objectification often involves reducing a human being down to an object which may be used for that which you desire. Sometimes the desire is sexual, or perhaps for someone to feel more substantial in comparison to who they objectify. Just as The Office demonstrates some of the nuances when people discuss aesthetic judgments, it also shows the dehumanizing force of objectification. Hilary Swank is objectively beautiful as a human being. But for some reason a reduction does seem to take place where the term 'hot' transforms aesthetic elevation into at best mere taste preferences and at worst the objectification of a human being into an object of desire.

In past times, the notion of idolatry carried more weight than it carries now. Yet a recent revival, stemming from issues of objectification & dehumanizing forces, sees a return to both sacred & secular notions of idolatry. Idolatry most often means elevating the non-human & dehumanizing the human. Idolatry is not just golden calfs & painted pictures. Elevating one's desires such that they turn actual human beings into mere objects is just as much the work of idolatry. Thus, there is a sense in which our appreciation of beauty may veer into the territory of objectification & idolatry, such that in turn lose the kind of beauty which made something so wonderful to behold to begin with.

To close, I turn to an approach to aesthetics proposed by Hans Georg Gadamer nearly two hundred years after Kant. Gadamer's project does not concern a certain & rigid concept of art, though he remains indebted to the work of people like Kant in articulating the experience of aesthetic judgments. Rather, Gadamer offers a hermeneutical aesthetics, a method to deepen our understanding & appreciation of art. Where Kant wanted to demarcate the aesthetic from the moral & scientific, Gadamer charts a course for aesthetics as that which elevates our appreciation for beauty in the world. I find great solace in an approach to beauty which calls one to truly contemplate & thus, in a sense, participate in beautiful art.

You are not wrong to see beauty in visual art, poetry, a sunset, or my wife. We err when we merely reduce what is beautiful down to that which accords with one's desire. To truly experience beauty & contemplate art is to begin to let your inner life understand & reflect that which is beautiful. So in the end, let us affirm:

Hilary Swank is beautiful.