Is Beauty Subjective? If beauty existed only in the eye of the beholder, would that make it an unimportant quality? Some of the principal Enlightenment thinkers who regarded beauty as subjective – that is, as what the preferences and tastes of individuals project onto the world – took this very fact to be a reason for applauding the human mind, on the ground that it is praiseworthy and admirable that the human mind should impute beauty to things. Hume held such a view, and it was central to Francis Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory. They thus made taste a key concept in aesthetics, and incidentally found themselves agreeing with St Thomas Aquinas, another subjectivist, who identified beauty as a form of pleasure. A quarrel of saints lies in the offing here: St Augustine had long before argued that beauty is the cause of pleasure, not identical with it; he and Aquinas therefore mark out between them the traditional space of the quarrel between objectivists and subjectivists, the former holding that beauty is a property of (some) things in the world, a property existing independently of our human choices and tastes. Augustine had august antecedents for his objectivist stance. There had been a degree of consensus among the ancients that beauty consists in harmony, which the Pythagoreans attributed to underlying mathematical relations, as found – for a chief example – in the Golden Section, observed in a line segment apportioned into two unequal lengths such that the ratio of the shorter to the longer length is equal to the ratio of the longer to the whole. A near-contemporary of Hume and Hutcheson, the great Leibniz, took the same view, with the added tweak that he thought most observers are unconscious of the proportions that underlie beauty. Recent psychoneurological studies of the effect of baroque music on the human mind seem to bear out his view. But suppose that these objectivists are wrong. First, one has to note a prejudice in the view that what exists independently of thought or emotional response somehow has greater existential importance than what is ‘only’ or ‘merely’ in the mind. Pain and suffering are ‘only’ in the mind too, yet they are highly significant (and very real), both to those experiencing them and to others whose sympathies are invited by the fact of them. If judgements of beauty are in effect projections from subjective states of pleasure and admiration, why should that be less important (to whom? or in what scale of things?) than if intrinsic and independent features of an object existed and coerced all observers into an identical aesthetic response? For surely Hume and others are right to say that the human capacity for finding things beautiful does honour to humanity, not least in cases when someone finds (say) someone else beautiful whom no objectivist about beauty could ever agree is so. The irenic suggestion of Kant to the effect that the experience of beauty consists in disinterested non-conceptual pleasure that one is convinced everyone else would share if similarly placed, was meant to bridge the fruitless division between earlier views. But he might as well have said that some things are indeed objectively beautiful, perhaps because of their harmony and proportion, while other judgements of beauty are indeed subjective, because they have other (and sometimes themselves beautiful) motivations. Such is the view I favour. But either way, beauty is never an unimportant quality.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 07:34:17 +0000
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