Is beauty really subjective or is it objectively determined by God?

[Mongo]

Just pointing out that it is not objective, which could be further defined as universal. Some people are going to like those smells and tastes…myself among them…others will not. That is subjectivity, and it applies to art, nature, appearance and so on. I don’t happen to find deserts to be beautiful most of the time…many people swoon for them.

John

Why does something have to be either subjective or objective? There are aspects of both in everything. There is always a subject perceiving an object. Just because the subject perceives it doesn’t imply that it is purely subjective. The perception is subjective, but it is of an objective reality. Just because one man doesn’t percieve the beauty of an object doesn’t imply that it isn’t beautiful. It just means that he didn’t notice the beauty. He may not see beauty in a desert or in a forest or the mountains, but they still might be beautiful. Some people prefer Beethoven, some like Mozart, and some like Bach. I personally don’t like Bach much, but that doesn’t make it less beautiful.

The interesting thing about this is that I see the subjective as a proof of the objective, because the subjective wouldn’t exist if the objective didn’t exist.

 

[Pallas_Athene]

The interesting thing about this is that I see the subjective as a proof of the objective, because the subjective wouldn’t exist if the objective didn’t exist.

This is true, but beside the point. In the objectively existing reality there is something called “distance” between two objects. It is an objective attribute. But the question of “is it far”, or “is it near” is not an objective assessment. It depends on the person who has to negotiate that distance. The same applies to “beauty” or “taste”, for example. There are all sorts of objective attributes, but hey do not establish an “objective beauty” or an “objective yumminess”.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

It is very funny that you keep talking about “inherent greatness”, but you cannot define what that “inherent greatness” is supposed to be.

Your comments on how the universe began to exist indicate you know virtually nothing on the subject, nor the various theories about the origin of the universe. You refuse to acknowledge that something objective event objective happened that set this universe in motion, and that our perception of it according to various theories (all subjective) have nothing to do with that event which happened long before consciousness ever came to be.

That we cannot prove what happened exactly does not mean that something objectively determined that origin.

Inherent greatness in a poem is not anything I can prove to you if you do not recognize it and feel it when it slaps you in the face.

You persist in conflating art with science. Please stop doing that. Stop demanding proof. Demand more of your own sensibilities and rise to the occasion of appreciating great things in art instead of reducing all art appreciation to the subjective monster.

 

[Pallas_Athene]

Inherent greatness in a poem is not anything I can prove to you if you do not recognize it and feel it when it slaps you in the face.

Prove??? You can’t even DEFINE it. In other words, you have no idea what you are talking about. That would be fine by me, if only you would admit it.

You persist in conflating art with science.

Art and taste and all that good jazz. It is YOU who conflate them when you attempt to talk about “intrinsic” beauty, and “intrinsic” yumminess. And “intrinsically” far or near, or intrinsically “hot” and “cold”. The temperature of an object is objective… the feeling of “too hot” or “too cold” or just right is subjective. The amount of salt in a dish is objective. The perception of “too salty” or “not salty enough” is subjective and based upon the “taste” of the person. Can’t you understand that???

Stop demanding proof.

I am demanding DEFINITION, not proof. Proof would be the next step.

 

[oldcelt]

Why does something have to be either subjective or objective? There are aspects of both in everything. There is always a subject perceiving an object. Just because the subject perceives it doesn’t imply that it is purely subjective. The perception is subjective, but it is of an objective reality. Just because one man doesn’t percieve the beauty of an object doesn’t imply that it isn’t beautiful. It just means that he didn’t notice the beauty. He may not see beauty in a desert or in a forest or the mountains, but they still might be beautiful. Some people prefer Beethoven, some like Mozart, and some like Bach. I personally don’t like Bach much, but that doesn’t make it less beautiful.

The interesting thing about this is that I see the subjective as a proof of the objective, because the subjective wouldn’t exist if the objective didn’t exist.

All that you have mentioned are subjective tastes. They have nothing to do with the intervention of a deity. They are purely, in my estimation, human interaction with what they see, hear. touch, taste…thus subjectivity.
BTW, I prefer Mozart, but appreciate the others, particularly the Brandenburg concertos by Bach.
Again…subjective.

John

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I am demanding DEFINITION, not proof. Proof would be the next step.

Definition of what exactly?

 

[Pallas_Athene]

Definition of what exactly?

Of what constitutes a “beautiful picture” or a “superb meal” or a “great musical score” or a “wonderful smell” or a “pleasing touch”. Or “inherent greatness” in a poem… whatever.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Of what constitutes a “beautiful picture” or a “superb meal” or a “great musical score” or a “wonderful smell” or a “pleasing touch”. Or “inherent greatness” in a poem… whatever.

The definition of anything that is beautiful is the experience that inspires our emotions with the harmonic appreciation of the world around us or the world within us. These beautiful things may be detected in the natural world (a beautiful sunset) or in the world of created objects (the Lincoln monument).

This should not be news to you, so I’m wondering why you needed this definition of the beautiful.

 

[Mongo]

All that you have mentioned are subjective tastes. They have nothing to do with the intervention of a deity. They are purely, in my estimation, human interaction with what they see, hear. touch, taste…thus subjectivity.
BTW, I prefer Mozart, but appreciate the others, particularly the Brandenburg concertos by Bach.
Again…subjective.

John

So is it just personal taste that Mozart sounds better than nails on a chalkboard?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

So is it just personal taste that Mozart sounds better than nails on a chalkboard?

Or is it just a metaphysical bias that you prefer “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog” to “Amazing Grace”?

 

[GodMadeMe]

Salvete, omnes!

It has been a common belief that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, i.e., that it is subjectively rather than objectively determined.

However, in Luke 12:27, Jesus Christ Himself seems to state that the lilies of the field more fbeautiful than Solomon in his greatest glory of raiment ever was.

So, if Christ Himself said that the lilies were objectively more beautiful than Solomon in his most glorious raiment, how are we to say tha beauty, at least comparative beauty, is subjective and “in the eye of the beholder”? If Jesus Christ, Who is All-Knowing and Who is God Incarnate, says that one thing is more beautiful than another, how can we say that beauty is determined subjectively by each individual and not objective by God Himself?

Is this perhaps a case of only one instance wherein one thing is comparatively more beautiful than another? Maybe all people do, or, at least, are supposed to, consider the specifi lilies to which Christ refers as objectively more beautiful than was Solomon in his finest raiment. However, what ifthere are some people who would disagree, i.e., who subjectively consider Solomon is the more beautiful? Would they be wrong here and should they correct their wrong perceptions? What does this say for other things we may subjectively consider more or less beautiful, or even ugly? Should we always have to correct our standards to God’s standards of beauty? If so, how do we discover ever what every one of those standards are?

Is perhaps Christ not objectively saying here that Solomon is more beautiful but that most, if not all, people of His time considered the lilies more beautiful than Solomon in finest attire? He may have been saying that the lilies neither toil nor spin, but you all still consider them to have greater beauty than Solomon ever had.

However, we must also consider that, in this passage, Christ doesn’t just say that Solomon was apparently less glorious than the lilies; He seems to emphasize the truth ofthis by saying something along the lines of one of those “truly, I say unto you” statements to modify His assertion. This would, once again, seem to support some objective, even divinely-determined, standard of beauty.

Is Christ here perhaps being more subtle in His comparison than we might initially think? I mean that, perhaps He is saying that, after all the labor and toil that went into the making of Solomon’s attire, he was not so beautiful as are the lilies who, compared to Solomon, did nothing to make themselves so beautiful.

What are your thoughts on beauty as objectively determined by God vs. as subjectively determined by men in light of the above passage in question? Would you agree or disagree with any of my proposals above? Why or why not? Or, rather, would you posit some other entirely different interpretation/understanding of this passage in light of our question of beauty’s objectivity/subjectivity?

Is there indeed any Church teaching on beauty and how it should be understood? Anything absolutely and positively authoritative?

Thoughts? Opinions? Assertions? Other information we should consider?

Gratias maximas!

The experience of beauty is the experience of a particular meaning which gives the sensation of beauty. We do not create this meaning. However there are some forms of beauty that are the object of what we find personally meaningful and thus we find something analogous to the idea of beauty; this is Abstract beauty, the beauty in that which is meaningful to a particular individual. However, we couldn’t consider something abstractly beautiful without reference to a real experience of beauty. This is to say that even if some beauty is subjective, there is a real objective standard by which we come to experience the sensation of Beauty. The sensation of the experience we call Beauty is not made up by our minds but rather it is something we discover in our experiences.

We discover meaning in things without which the very idea of ugly or beautiful would have never of occurred to us in the first place.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

We discover meaning in things.

 

[oldcelt]

So is it just personal taste that Mozart sounds better than nails on a chalkboard?

Surely, though I know no one who likes squeaking chalkboards…but I know many who do not like Mozart.

John

 

[yppop]

Hi,
Just a few of my thoughts about beauty.

When discussing the senses as related to beauty, combing sight and sound with the senses of taste, touch, and smell is not a good choice. There are important differences. All animals, mammals at least, have all five senses, but only humans have enhanced sight and sound. God’s gift of the language instinct as the foundation for thought, and with it the mind, allows humans to raise sights and sounds to two other modalities of reality, namely rational and transcendental reality.

Animals sense signs and signals. Because we are animals, we too sense signs and signals, but because we can also sense symbols we are human. Taste, touch, and smell form images to which meanings can be attached, thus one sound may be the sign to heighten one’s alertness and another sound may be a signal to action. Although there are many different sensations of taste, touch, and smell, these senses do not allow the fine discrimination that sight and sound do.

Sight and sound are digitized: (1) as notes from which humans can create an unlimited number of musical compositions; or (2) as letters and phonemes from which humans can create and unlimited number of written and spoken words, stories, books, etc.; and (3) as forms from which humans can create unlimited number of representations of nature: painting, architecture, sculpture, music, etc. Given that observation, we can now identify what is subjective and what is objective beauty.

Beauty is an object of desire because it pleases us. Unlike other objects of desire that please us, such as food and drink, health and wealth, friendship and knowledge, beauty need not be possessed in order to please us. Pleasure from beauty derives simply from beholding or contemplating it.

Mortimer Adler in his book, “Six Great Ideas” points out that beauty can be enjoyable or admirable and often both. By enjoyable beauty he means that each person decides what subjectively pleases them. By admirable he means that a thing can be judged objectively beautiful when it meets a set of standards set by the “experts” in the particular field that includes the thing being judged. Objective beauty then can be defined as that which adheres to those standards, in other words a thing is beautiful if its beauty can be explained. It doesn’t matter if the object of contemplation is African art, Japanese music, or Moslem architecture; if we judge it against the appropriate set of standards that we have taken the time to understand, then one can learn to behold and contemplate that which is beautiful in that particular art. Taste, touch and smell are purely subjective; there is no way to establish standards, even though oenophiles try and have succeeded in inflating prices based on their own tastes.

We can discuss the standards by which objective beauty is judged ad infinitum without ever coming to agreement. But if we consider a partial list it would include properties such as form, symmetry, balance, proportion, scale, unity, and emphasis. This list can be reduced to two categories: form and emphasis. Beauty is only one of a number of emphases’ that an artist strives for. Art can be produced in order to evoke an emotional, intellectual, social, and other subjective responses. Art can attain masterpiece status without being beautiful.

It is form that is at the heart of beauty, namely that which is produced with elements that portray symmetry: balance, proportion, scale, and unity. And this applies to both sight (painting, architecture, sculpture, and poetry) and sound (music, voice, and poetry) but not those senses without form (taste, touch and smell). So where is God is this?

If beauty pleases us, then it is a subjective experience that sciences argues is an “emergent” property of the brain. What is not mentioned by the materialistic scientist is the implication that an emergent property exists somewhere other than the neurons. The “somewhere else” can only be it an immaterial memory, a spiritual substance, that stores all the subjective experiences such as color, harmony, joy, sunsets, aroma of roses, the taste of a ripe pear, the feel of a baby’s cheek, and all the multitude of God’s soul enticing gifts right along with those soul challenging gifts such as pain, distress, desperation, anxiety, and fear. The possibility of both the pleasing and the troubling awakens you each morning to the miracle of life.

What we awaken to is a universe consisting solely of incrementing configurations of three basic elements of objective reality, electrons, quarks, and photons. God has provided us with the tools and abilities to reconfigure selected configurations (Art) of the basic elements that, when we behold the results, invoke the subjective experiences in the immaterial memory one of which is beauty.

God has also provided specific configurations which when contemplated enhance the experience of objective beauty, such things as symmetry, balance, proportion, scale, unity. To behold beauty in that that pleases is subjective engagement of the soul. To find beauty objectively through contemplation of specific forms that God provided is an objective engagement of the mind. Beauty is pleasing both subjectively and objectively but is wondrously pleasing when both experienced and contemplated. God has provided both objective and subjective beauty for us to behold transcendentally and contemplate rationally.
yppop

 

[Mongo]

Surely, though I know no one who likes squeaking chalkboards…but I know many who do not like Mozart.

John

So your saying there are principles of beauty then? If nails on a chalkboard isn’t simply an alternate preference to Mozart then there must be a standard of beauty. There should be no difference between nails and mozart’s piano. I may not like Bach, but there is a profound difference between that and nails on a chalkboard.

Whether someone dislikes Mozart is irrelevant. All it says is that everyone has a perspective. It could be simply that they haven’t really heard Mozart, even though they have ‘listened’. Others don’t have the ear to listen to what is actually being played because they have never really payed that much attention to what is being played. They don’t hear all that is going on. So what sounds like garbage to a musician may sound perfectly fine to a layman.

Or it could be simply that they have a preference for the music of Beethoven, but preference really doesn’t say anything about beauty.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Hi,
Just a few of my thoughts about beauty.

When discussing the senses as related to beauty, combing sight and sound with the senses of taste, touch, and smell is not a good choice. There are important differences. All animals, mammals at least, have all five senses, but only humans have enhanced sight and sound. God’s gift of the language instinct as the foundation for thought, and with it the mind, allows humans to raise sights and sounds to two other modalities of reality, namely rational and transcendental reality.

Animals sense signs and signals. Because we are animals, we too sense signs and signals, but because we can also sense symbols we are human. Taste, touch, and smell form images to which meanings can be attached, thus one sound may be the sign to heighten one’s alertness and another sound may be a signal to action. Although there are many different sensations of taste, touch, and smell, these senses do not allow the fine discrimination that sight and sound do.

Sight and sound are digitized: (1) as notes from which humans can create an unlimited number of musical compositions; or (2) as letters and phonemes from which humans can create and unlimited number of written and spoken words, stories, books, etc.; and (3) as forms from which humans can create unlimited number of representations of nature: painting, architecture, sculpture, music, etc. Given that observation, we can now identify what is subjective and what is objective beauty.

Beauty is an object of desire because it pleases us. Unlike other objects of desire that please us, such as food and drink, health and wealth, friendship and knowledge, beauty need not be possessed in order to please us. Pleasure from beauty derives simply from beholding or contemplating it.

Mortimer Adler in his book, “Six Great Ideas” points out that beauty can be enjoyable or admirable and often both. By enjoyable beauty he means that each person decides what subjectively pleases them. By admirable he means that a thing can be judged objectively beautiful when it meets a set of standards set by the “experts” in the particular field that includes the thing being judged. Objective beauty then can be defined as that which adheres to those standards, in other words a thing is beautiful if its beauty can be explained. It doesn’t matter if the object of contemplation is African art, Japanese music, or Moslem architecture; if we judge it against the appropriate set of standards that we have taken the time to understand, then one can learn to behold and contemplate that which is beautiful in that particular art. Taste, touch and smell are purely subjective; there is no way to establish standards, even though oenophiles try and have succeeded in inflating prices based on their own tastes.

We can discuss the standards by which objective beauty is judged ad infinitum without ever coming to agreement. But if we consider a partial list it would include properties such as form, symmetry, balance, proportion, scale, unity, and emphasis. This list can be reduced to two categories: form and emphasis. Beauty is only one of a number of emphases’ that an artist strives for. Art can be produced in order to evoke an emotional, intellectual, social, and other subjective responses. Art can attain masterpiece status without being beautiful.

It is form that is at the heart of beauty, namely that which is produced with elements that portray symmetry: balance, proportion, scale, and unity. And this applies to both sight (painting, architecture, sculpture, and poetry) and sound (music, voice, and poetry) but not those senses without form (taste, touch and smell). So where is God is this?

If beauty pleases us, then it is a subjective experience that sciences argues is an “emergent” property of the brain. What is not mentioned by the materialistic scientist is the implication that an emergent property exists somewhere other than the neurons. The “somewhere else” can only be it an immaterial memory, a spiritual substance, that stores all the subjective experiences such as color, harmony, joy, sunsets, aroma of roses, the taste of a ripe pear, the feel of a baby’s cheek, and all the multitude of God’s soul enticing gifts right along with those soul challenging gifts such as pain, distress, desperation, anxiety, and fear. The possibility of both the pleasing and the troubling awakens you each morning to the miracle of life.

What we awaken to is a universe consisting solely of incrementing configurations of three basic elements of objective reality, electrons, quarks, and photons. God has provided us with the tools and abilities to reconfigure selected configurations (Art) of the basic elements that, when we behold the results, invoke the subjective experiences in the immaterial memory one of which is beauty.

God has also provided specific configurations which when contemplated enhance the experience of objective beauty, such things as symmetry, balance, proportion, scale, unity. To behold beauty in that that pleases is subjective engagement of the soul. To find beauty objectively through contemplation of specific forms that God provided is an objective engagement of the mind. Beauty is pleasing both subjectively and objectively but is wondrously pleasing when both experienced and contemplated. God has provided both objective and subjective beauty for us to behold transcendentally and contemplate rationally.
yppop

http://forums.catholic-questions.org/picture.php?albumid=2053&pictureid=17306

 

[Pallas_Athene]

The definition of anything that is beautiful is the experience that inspires our emotions with the harmonic appreciation of the world around us or the world within us.

The world “within” us varies from person to person. Therefore the “harmony” you speak of will be different. As such it is subjective.

The same applies to taste. The food objectively contains certain ingredients, but our reaction to those ingredients varies from person to person. Therefore the “yummy dish” reflects a subjective assessment.

The distance between two points is an objective number. But the question of “is the object near, or far?” depends on your ability to bridge that distance easily, or with great effort, or unable to do it at all. Objective distance, subjective “near” or “far”.

How many more obvious examples do you need?

 

[Peter_Plato]

The distance between two points is an objective number.

Yes, an “objective” number of subjectively determined units.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Surely, though I know no one who likes squeaking chalkboards…but I know many who do not like Mozart.

John

Pity them.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The world “within” us varies from person to person. Therefore the “harmony” you speak of will be different. As such it is subjective.

The same applies to taste. The food objectively contains certain ingredients, but our reaction to those ingredients varies from person to person. Therefore the “yummy dish” reflects a subjective assessment.

The distance between two points is an objective number. But the question of “is the object near, or far?” depends on your ability to bridge that distance easily, or with great effort, or unable to do it at all. Objective distance, subjective “near” or “far”.

How many more obvious examples do you need?

So far you have not offered a single example of a work of art that is considered great just because you (as subject) could confer greatness on it. A work of art is great because it possesses in itself the requisite elements of greatness, not because we simply say this or that work of art is great because you say so and there’s an end to the discussion.

It just amazes me how often you can be told, and ignore, the bottom line: greatness is in the object, recognition of greatness is in the subject. Some subjects just don’t recognize greatness when it slaps them in the face. As for that, Texas cowboys might prefer Gene Autry singing “Home on the Range” to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.”

Pity them.