The metaphysics and aesthetics of plastic

There’s a passage at the beginning of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel Foundation’s Edge which I’ve always found delightfully preposterous.  Referring to Seldon Hall on the planet Terminus, Golan Trevize says:

Is there any structural component visible that is metal?  Not one.  It wouldn’t do to have any, since in Salvor Hardin’s day there was no native metal to speak of and hardly any imported metal.  We even installed old plastic, pink with age, when we built this huge pile, so that visitors from other worlds can stop and say, ‘Galaxy!  What lovely old plastic!’

The very notion of “lovely old plastic” seems absurd on its face, and I imagine Asimov wrote the passage with tongue in cheek.  Aged wood, stone, or metal structures or furniture can be aesthetically appealing, but aged plastic only ever seems shabby at best and positively ugly at worst.  Now, why is that?

Of course, many regard aesthetic judgments as entirely subjective, and if that were the case then the question would be of limited interest.  But for the classical philosophical tradition and Scholasticism in particular, aesthetic judgments are not entirely subjective.  To be sure, Aquinas holds that “beautiful things are those which please when seen” (Summa theologiae I.5.4), and this characterization makes reference to a reaction in the beholder.  However, it is “the cognitive faculty” which responds to what is perceived as beautiful, and what it is responding to is something objective in the thing, namely its form (in the Aristotelian sense of “form”).  More specifically, Aquinas says, “beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind.”  That is to say, the “due” proportions of a thing are those that reflect the kind of thing it is, where what is definitive of a kind is, in the case of natural objects, something objective.  Hence a beautiful face becomes ugly when disfigured.

But things are much more complicated than that, especially in the case of human artifacts.  Is an automobile engine ugly?  The answer, of course, is that it depends.  Stored on the dining room table, on the front lawn, or next to an altar in a church it would be an eyesore or worse.  But in a smoothly running new car or even on a garage bench it is a thing of beauty.  In general it takes, I think, careful analysis to explain exactly what it is about artifacts and their natural and cultural contexts that accounts for our judgments about their beauty or ugliness.  And the right answers are not necessarily the ones that might at first glance seem obvious.

So, consider some paradigm cases of ugly old plastic: a piece of cracked and sun-bleached patio furniture; a child’s broken toy lying around the house or the yard; the depressing piles of garbage that collect on beaches.  (Put aside for the moment the environmental problems posed by such garbage; what matters for present purposes is that it would be ugly even apart from those problems.)  There are several possible accounts of their ugliness that might seem obvious but which I think are wrong or at least incomplete:  It might be thought, for example, that it is the damaged or non-functional character of such objects that makes them ugly; or that as man-made objects they seem out of place in a natural environment; or that qua “artificial” substance, plastic is ugly in a way natural substances are not; or that it is the chaotic, jumbled character of the debris tossed up on a beach or scattered about in the yard that makes it ugly; or some combination of these factors.

But on reflection none of this seems quite right, or at least not the whole story.  Ancient ruins can be beautiful despite being severely damaged man-made structures whose pieces are strewn about chaotically.  It might be thought that this is because the stone or wood elements from which the structures are made have a “natural” feel that makes them suitable to their surroundings.  But modern ruins involving the products of high technology can also be beautiful -- for example, the sunken ships, tanks, and other World War II era materiel of Truk Lagoon.  Is this because undersea forms of life have made a habitat of these ruins?  Surely not.  A rusted out but barren tank is no more or less beautiful than a rusted out tank covered with barnacles; it might even be a little more beautiful.  Furthermore, an old abandoned plastic sand bucket or Styrofoam food container which some form of sea life has made its home seems no less ugly than any other piece of plastic debris.  (It’s worth noting -- to underline how complex aesthetic matters can be -- that an abandon former weapon of war can have a haunting beauty that something as innocent as a child’s toy or a container for take-out cannot!) 

Is it the mass produced character of plastic items that makes a random pile of them ugly?  That doesn’t seem convincing either.  Imagine a sea floor or even a beach covered with 19^th century glass bottles and tin containers.  Somehow that doesn’t seem as ugly as a beach full of plastic junk clearly is, or even necessarily ugly at all. 

That appeal to the “artificial” character of plastic is not a satisfying answer is also evidenced by the fact that there is a sense in which plastic is not artificial.  As I’ve noted several times (e.g. here), the traditional Aristotelian distinction between “nature” and “art” does not correspond exactly to the distinction between what occurs in the wild and what is man-made.  For the Aristotelian distinction is ultimately concerned with the difference between what has a substantial form or inherent principle of its activity, and that which has only an accidental form.  And there are man-made objects that have substantial forms (e.g. new breeds of dog or of corn, water synthesized in a lab), and naturally occurring objects that have only accidental forms (e.g. a random pile of stones that has formed at the bottom of a hill).  Now as Eleonore Stump has pointed out, irreducible properties and causal powers are the mark of a substantial form.  Water has a substantial form insofar as its properties and causal powers are irreducible to those of hydrogen and oxygen, whereas the properties and causal powers of an axe (Stump’s example) are reducible to those of its parts.  But to take another of Stump’s examples, Styrofoam, though “artificial” in the sense of being man-made, also seems to have a substantial form insofar as it has irreducible properties and causal powers.  It is thus as “natural” in Aristotle’s technical sense as new breeds of dog or corn are.  And plastic in general seems no less “natural” in this sense.  (The metaphysics of substantial form is discussed in detail in my forthcoming book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.) 

Moreover, plastic, though in another and obvious sense “artificial,” is not ugly when new and functional.  Indeed, the plastic components of computers, automobiles, toys, and many other artifacts can all be aesthetically highly pleasing.  (And 3D printing may be the coolest thing ever invented.)

But old, broken plastic seems pretty much always ugly in a way old, broken stone, metal, wood, or glass need not be.  Why?  My answer is, I don’t know.  Plastic is a little mysterious, and philosophically interesting.  Who knew?  That guy in The Graduate was onto something…