Disputandum de Gustibus: Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

Subjectivism with regard to beauty is the idea that beauty is a result of our individual feelings about something. Aesthetic judgment, on this view, is a relation between some object and an individual and since each individual is different, so too will be their aesthetic judgements. As these individual feelings can differ from person to person, what it is for something to be beautiful changes as well. That is, claims about whether or not something is beautiful cannot be true or false. An objectivist, however, would say that these feelings are instead a result of a real thing called beauty which exists within and as a part of the beautiful object. An object is beautiful because it contains in it the quality of beauty and this beauty is not conditioned by any individual, rather it exists regardless of the individual. On this view, one can be mistaken about whether or not something is beautiful and such claims do have truth value. While I do not propose an absolute solution to the question of if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I do propose that both the purely objectivist and purely subjectivist view are flawed and ultimately mistaken in their accounts of beauty and that the proper answer to this question will in some sense allow for both an objective and subjective nature to beauty.

David Hume describes an account of subjectivism with regard to beauty in his essay “of the Standard of Taste.” The basis of Hume’s argument that beauty is subjective is the claim that we come to understand beauty through feeling as opposed to thought. For Hume, when we take an object to be beautiful, it is because we first have a feeling and this feeling is itself aesthetic judgment. Hume argues that this feeling invoked in us by our perceiving the object must be prior to any expressions of like or dislike towards the object. This feeling is what we then come to call beauty. The purely objectivist’s error, according to Hume, is to mistake this feeling for something caused by an inherent quality of the object. Hume says beauty is not some quality of the object; it is instead what he calls an impression. This impression is nothing more than a feeling created by

our perception of the object. When we try to say something is objectively beautiful, we are only recognizing the tendency of that object to produce a certain response in us: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.” (Hume, 136). The problem with taste is an epistemic one. Taste, since it is just a feeling we have that stems from our perception, does not represent anything actually in the object itself, and therefore does not refer to its cause. Hume says feelings often appear to us as being caused by objects which are not their true causes because, as a product of the human mind interacting perceptually with the world, taste cannot speak to its actual causes. All I can ever really say about an aesthetic experience is how I feel, given my individual perception, about an object and this claim has nothing to do with the object itself and everything to do with my perception. This is why, for Hume, beauty is subjective. Hume argues that two different people will feel different things in response to the same object and therefore will make two different claims about the object’s aesthetic beauty. For Hume, both claims will be equally valid, neither claim being more correct or true than the other. Since they are just expressions of sentiment and not facts, aesthetic judgements do not have truth values.

While subjectivism is, for many people like Hume, a compelling perspective, subjectivism immediately runs into the problem of forcing beauty to have no real value. If beauty is truly subjective, I am not really expressing anything when I call something beautiful other than an essentially baseless opinion. I could say something about how I feel about an object, but I would not be saying anything about the object itself. In this sense, nothing can actually be beautiful in itself because what it is to be beautiful ceases to be anything at all. Furthermore, there are many ways in which we don’t act like beauty is subjective. When we are asked why we like a work of art, we don’t just say something like “because I like it.” Instead, we often try to give reasons for why we like it. We’ll often point to facts about the work and claim they are aesthetically relevant which would suggest an objective basis for our aesthetic judgment. A further difficulty with subjectivism arises when we think about certain things which, in the vast majority of people, evoke a feeling of beauty. If beauty were entirely subjective, it would be extremely hard to explain why most of us agree on the beauty of so many things like flowers or sunsets. We would be shocked and somewhat appalled if someone were to say that a rose or a sunset were ugly and this reaction suggests an objectivism about beauty. In fact, most of us go so far as to feel upset when people disagree with our aesthetic judgements. We might even say things like “you’re wrong,” which implies not only that we are right about whether or not something is beautiful, but that one can be right or wrong about whether or not something is beautiful to begin with.

In noticing these problems with a purely subjectivist perspective one might be compelled to turn to pure objectivism. Unlike Hume, Plato serves as an example of an objectivist perspective, the opposing view to subjectivism. For Plato, beauty is a form and exists objectively. While Plato describes beauty as associated with a response of love or desire for something,

objects are only beautiful when and because they partake in the objective form of beauty. For Plato, the presence of this objective beauty in an object is what causes feelings of pleasure in us whereas for a subjectivist like Hume, it is these feelings which cause or essentially are the object’s beauty.

A purely objectivist view, however, presents its own set of problems. To say that there is such a thing as a true beauty which exists in the real world completely independently of our perception or feelings would be to say that something could still be beautiful even if there were absolutely no humans to observe it. However, there is a sense in which we all understand something’s being beautiful as inextricably involving its being observed by a person. The objectivist view also seems to suggest that beauty, as an inherent quality of the object, could be measured or detected using something like scientific instruments. Even if we were able to measure beauty scientifically, it is difficult to see what this would even mean as your scientific measurement of the object, if it is different from my aesthetic judgment of it, would not alter my pleasurable experience or perception of the object as beautiful. There is a way in which I would simply never be convinced that something I experience as beautiful is in some sense objectively ugly, even if scientific measurement were to prove me wrong, because there is some sense in which I take my perception of this object’s beauty to be what it is for it to be beautiful. Furthermore, it seems impossible to properly describe what we mean when we say something is beautiful without also describing some kind of feeling of pleasure evoked in us. The objectivist might say that this feeling is directly caused by something called beauty which is an actual property found in the object, but then it would be hard, on this account, to explain why this feeling of pleasure is evoked differently in different people in response to the same thing. If we have to, in some sense, describe beauty in terms of how it makes us feel in order to describe it at all, then this seems to suggest that beauty is in fact present as long as I feel that it is and the vast variety of different tastes would seem to show that beauty is subjective.

At this point, it would appear that both subjectivism and objectivism are deeply problematic. Furthermore, there appears to be a tension between the idea of beauty being in the eye of the beholder and the way we actually talk about beauty. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, will call this tension the “antinomy of taste.” This tension suggests that there is some sense in which beauty has both objective and subjective features. One attempt at resolving this tension is provided by David Hume in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” wherein he argues that we can determine the answer to the question of which work of art is better by asking what he calls an “ideal critic.” Hume will argue that not only are there individuals who we hold up to be especially good judges of beauty, but that these people’s tastes often tend to align. For Hume, the idea is that while we might not be able to find features of objects which are objectively beautiful, we can identify people who are objectively better at determining what is beautiful. Hume will point out that often the judgements of individuals that we take to be good judges of taste will coincide and the unanimity created by this consensus accounts for works of art which have been historically revered and which remain societally relevant as examples of great works of art. In this sense, Hume believes the test of time is a good one for knowing if something is beautiful as

his idea involves identifying works of art which have been regarded as beautiful by qualified critics across time and cultures. If we can identify the standards by which to assess if someone is a good critic, this is essentially analogous to objective standards of beauty and render such beauty standards irrelevant even if they could be determined. Hume outlines the qualities that such a critic will have to have: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” 278).

While Hume’s discussion of the ideal critic appears to contradict his own subjectivism by implying that there are ways in which we can determine which works of art are, in a sense, objectively better than others, Hume does maintain that beauty is fundamentally subjective. While for Hume we cannot outline criteria to measure or determine if an object is beautiful, and any attempts to do so would be pointless and unproductive, we can outline criteria for what makes someone a good judge of beauty. We cannot judge beauty but we can, in a sense, judge people’s aptitude for judging beauty and through this mechanism, we can use ideal critics over time and across cultures to objectively judge beauty while also recognizing that taste is ultimately subjective. However, Hume’s system appears to run into the problem of circularity. Hume is essentially saying we can tell which works of art are beautiful by asking a good critic, but there is a sense in which good critics are identified by the fact that they like beautiful works of art. Hume might be able to escape the circularity of his argument by proposing that we identify critics using his five standards of good judgment, but this produces a regress problem as it is unclear how we are to determine what constitutes things like “strong sense” or “delicate sentiment.”

Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Practical Reason, also takes aesthetic judgments or what he calls “judgements of taste” to be fundamentally subjective. However, he is also like Hume in pointing out that in order to properly make judgments about beauty, we need to make the judgment completely independently of any desires. Kant calls this “disinterested pleasure” and this idea resembles Hume’s claim that the ideal critic must be “cleared of all prejudice.” It would appear that, in this sense, Kant’s system also allows for the possibility that one can be better or worse at making aesthetic judgements insofar as we can mistake our experience of pleasure for one of beauty. While the ability to be better or worse at judging beauty implies an objective nature to beauty, the idea of “disinterested judgment” also echoes Hume’s theory in another way. Hume, in his argument for subjectivism, argues that we cannot attribute the experience of beauty to any of its true causes. Kant seems to think there is some sense in which we can, but only if we are completely free from desires. However, an objection to Kant is the argument that judgment can never truly be disinterested because we are inevitably conditioned by our individual experiences and contexts. Furthermore, Kant describes a “universalization” which is conceptually contained within the idea of a judgment. Kant says that when we make aesthetic judgements, we are attributing our experience of beauty to something which is external and not idiosyncratic to us and that in making this judgment, we are also claiming that everyone else ought to make the same judgment: “this claim to universal validity so essentially belongs to

a judgment by which we describe anything as beautiful, that if this were not thought in it, it would never come into our thoughts to use the expression at all.” (Critique of Practical Reason). However, for Kant, this kind of universalization, while intrinsic to aesthetic judgements, is nevertheless subjective.

It is clear that there are many ways in which we treat beauty as both a subjective experience and an objective feature of external objects. Most of us accept that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but then simultaneously consider our judgements to be superior to others’ and try pointing to objective facts about an object as evidence of its beauty. While Hume provides a compelling account of subjectivism, arguing that beauty is nothing more than an impression subjectively conditioned by our individual perception, even he is aware of the ways in which we don’t often treat art as subjective and acknowledges a certain kind of objectivity in our aptitude for making aesthetic judgements. Kant is another example of a philosopher who takes beauty to be fundamentally subjective, but wants to account for our objectivist leanings and the nuance in our understanding of beauty. Hume will argue that most of us have objectivist leanings until we begin to think truly philosophically about the question at which point we become subjectivists. Regardless of if Hume is correct about this, it is evident that there is a tension or “antinomy of taste” in our concept of beauty. As much as we want to say beauty is subjective, we don’t act like it is. As much as we want to claim we are right about our aesthetic judgements, we leave room for the validity of differing opinions on beauty. Both Hume and Kant reject the purely objectivist view of philosophers like Plato, but attempt to resolve the tension present in a purely subjectivist approach. Pure subjectivism, while it is compelling, does not accurately and fully capture the nature of beauty. While there are problems in both Hume’s and Kant’s arguments for subjectivism as well as their argued resolutions to the “antinomy of taste,” they are right in taking note of, giving weight to, and at least attempting to resolve the undeniable tension in our concept of beauty. While they disagree on the exact way in which to resolve this tension, both Kant and Hume agree that there is some sense in which beauty is subjective and some sense in which it is also objective. This is what I consider to be their crucial and correct insight: subjectivism, while it is fundamentally correct, does not provide a complete account of the reality of beauty and our experience of it. I propose that neither Hume or Kant successfully provide such a complete account, but that a complete account of the nature of beauty will require an explanation for a way in which beauty is both in some sense subjective and in some sense objective.