The Objectivity Of Beauty

If you live in America then you almost certainly have heard the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  The times this saying will inevitably surface can become quite predictable.  People might meet together; someone judges a thing to be beautiful; the others do not share that perception; the group then intellectually shrugs it off by saying that beauty is subjective, implying that no one's aesthetic judgments are truly correct.  One can easily demonstrate, after all, that people undeniably disagree about aesthetic judgments.

One person finds a waterfall more visually appealing than a colorful arrangement of plant life, whereas another person believes the opposite.  One person prefers a significant other with red hair to one with other hair colors, but another person judges black hair more beautiful.  Each pair of judgments cannot be simultaneously correct--but it does not follow that nothing is beautiful in and of itself, independent of perception or preference.  Beauty is objective.  I mean by this that something is beautiful in and of itself or it is not, but our perceptions and preferences have no effect on this (and even aesthetic nihilism acknowledges this).

So, how can beauty be objective if everyone has a different subjective aesthetic taste?  For starters, it is logically invalid to claim that beauty is not objective because people disagree about what makes something beautiful.  This succumbs to a common type of non sequitur fallacy.  If two people from different civilizations or eras of time met and disagreed about scientific matters, does that mean that no objective scientific truths exist?  Of course not!  If two historians dispute whether or not a particular event occurred, with one claiming that it did and the other denying this, does that mean that objective historical facts do not exist?  Not at all!  Likewise, two or more different perceptions of beauty do not mean that no objective beauty exists.

Aesthetics still differs from logic and mathematics in an important regard: no one can show that a judgment of beauty is correct or incorrect, only that something is either objectively beautiful or not beautiful.  If two people calculating the solution to a math problem arrive at different answers, one of them or an observer could (if the problem is simple enough) pinpoint exactly who has a false answer and how to correct it.  The same goes for disagreements about whether a syllogism has sound form or not.  But there is no way to know which of two conflicting perceptions of beauty is right--or if either one is right.  Still, none of this negates the objectivity of beauty.

A rarer claim that I want to address at this point is the belief that if beauty exists, then God must exist.  There is a beauty argument for God--it has the same basic structure as the moral argument.  Just as no morality could exist if God did not exist, no such thing as beauty could exist in the ontological absence of God (although subjective moral and aesthetic preferences do not prove that morality and beauty exist, thus not proving that God does).  Now, people may object that even if God did not exist then some things would still be morally right or wrong--or aesthetically beautiful.  But how?  Without a deity, people could still have arbitrary, subjective perceptions and opinions about what makes something good, evil, beautiful, or ugly, but there would be no metaphysical anchor for these judgments.  Nothing would make them true or false beyond the fact that it is true that people have the perceptions.

People would simply, by nature or because of social conditioning, find that certain things seem beautiful or moral or immoral to them, yet nothing would ever actually be moral, immoral, beautiful, or ugly.  Besides, people would still hold sharp disagreement over the criterion for morality and beauty, but no deity would exist to reveal the criterion.  Not only would no anchor for them exist in a metaphysically atheistic cosmos, but, even if objective morality and beauty did exist in a universe without God, we would have no hope of ever learning of them in a general or specific sense except by complete accident.

The reasoning I have described in this post also applies to other areas as well--disagreement about what makes something good, evil, sexy, boring, fascinating, or fun never means that nothing objectively has those properties.  But since the Bible does not informs us about any of these things except morality and since humans can only experience subjective perceptions of many of these things, we humans have no way to know if many of our perceptions align with reality.  We cannot know what is, for instance, objectively fun or boring.  Logic proves to us that these concepts are objective, yet logic cannot demonstrate to us when something possesses these attributes.  Divine revelation also does not.  The Bible contains extensive information about how to distinguish good from evil--and it even calls certain men and women objectively beautiful [1]--but it never divulges the criterion by which to distinguish the objective veracity and falsity of value judgements about other issues.

Perceptions of beauty rest entirely in the eye of the beholder, but the beauty of a thing itself exists or does not exist entirely independent of our awareness or preferences.  It puzzles me that people who realize this about morality hesitate to say the same about aesthetics.  You could probably find people in your life who already treat morality one way and beauty in another, despite the illogicality of doing so.  With all of this in mind, watch yourself if you ever find yourself about to say that beauty is subjective--for this amounts to a fallacious claim.


Summary of observations:
1. People disagree about what makes something physically beautiful.
2. Disagreement about beauty does not mean that objective beauty does not exist.
3. Something is either objectively beautiful or not (law of non-contradiction and law of excluded middle), regardless of our perceptions.
4. Logic and the Bible do not tell us what makes something beautiful, but the Bible does mention that certain men and women were physically beautiful.
5. We are ultimately left with subjective perceptions of beauty that are either objectively true or not.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-beauty-of-both-genders.html