The Nature of Beauty (Part 1)

One of my favorite questions to ask a musician or artist is: "Is the beauty you try to create in your art objective or subjective?"  In other words, "Is the beauty you're trying to create simply in the eye of the beholder?"  The answer to this question carries with it some assumptions that I'm unsure whether people have thought much about.  I do believe there is a subjective experience of beauty, but I'd like to make a brief case for the position that beauty at its core is an actual property of objects or events.  That is, it is an objective reality.  But first, what does it even mean for beauty to be objective?

It means that beauty is something that exists in the object, not in our perception of the object.  It means beauty can be there whether any one sees it or not.  It means that people can perceive beauty correctly or incorrectly (now this is where toes get stepped on, but be patient).  It means there are some aesthetic standards fitting to the object, to the event, or to the art that make something beautiful or not.  So what reasons would compel us to think about beauty like this?  Here are a few:

Beauty seems to be something that an observer discovers, not something an observer creates.  The difference between discovering and creating is simply this:  I discover something that is already there.  But when I create something, it wasn't there before I created it.  When I look at a waterfall or a sunset, when I listen to a moving poem or song, it seems like we want to say I'm experiencing for the first time the beauty that was already there.  For example, I could have listened to a piece of music twenty times and felt nothing, maybe even disliked it.  But on the 21st time perhaps I sensed something wonderful about it (notice the language: 'about it') that I came to discover.  So when was the music beautiful?  This is an argument from intuition, but it would seem strange to say the music became beautiful at the 21st listening of it.  It seems much more natural to say I discovered its beauty on the 21st time I listened to it.  If that's true, beauty at its core is a property of an object not of a 'beholder.'

There are things to learn about creating beautiful art.  This seems obvious, but this is a powerful argument for objective beauty.  We have entire universities, schools, and departments dedicated to the training of young artists and musicians,  People hire tutors and instructors, we have libraries of books and research all for this expressed purpose.  The fact is however, training in the arts so that people refine their ability and sense for how to create beautiful art is a contradiction in a world where 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.'  You cannot improve your art if there is no objective standard of what constitutes improvement. In fact, in this world artistic refinement and improvement does not actually exist.  This seems quite counter-intuitive.  If there is something to actually learn about creating beautiful art, than there is something non-subjective about beauty.

Things do not get more beautiful the more people like them.  For example, say we uncovered a new painting from Rembrandt last year.  Would we ever say things like: This painting had no beauty for 400 years, but now this year it has become beautiful? (because now the 'beholders' can see it).  We just don't talk like that, because our language betrays that we don't really think beauty works like that.  What we would say is:  The beauty of this painting lay hidden for centuries.  And now the beauty that was hidden in the painting has been uncovered.  Beauty is a property of objects, not of the people that perceive it.

Different levels of expertise are possible in art.  Do we not say that this person is an expert composer or she is a top film writer, etc?  According to what standards could someone know more than another about what is beautiful in the various arts?  Only if there are objective features to beauty, could someone then be more gifted than others in perceiving and producing beautiful things.

Disagreements about beauty are not meaningless.  It is one thing to say people need to be more open-minded in how they evaluate poetry, music, films, or other art.  It is another thing to say those evaluations are meaningless.  A world without objective beauty must see any disagreement about beautiful art as saying nothing more than: "I like this, You don't like this."  If you move beyond this, to give actual reasons why the person should like it, or should not like it, you're trying to use objective features of the art to evaluate its aesthetic value.  But there are no objective features that have aesthetic value in this world!  They must be committed to the position that beauty cannot be measured by anything objective.  But any artist knows that these evaluations whether given or received are not meaningless even if these evaluations could be mistaken.

God is beautiful whether anyone perceives Him that way or not (Psalm 27:4, 96:6). It is a theological fact that God was beautiful and majestic before creation ever existed.  That is, before there was anyone to perceive him.  And he has remained such even in the midst of a creation that largely doesn't see him as beautiful and supremely desirable.  God's aesthetic features don't change in value based on the perceivers (beholders) that might view him differently.

Why does this all matter?  Philosophers have a tough time knowing how to characterize the sort of thing beauty is.  Think of all the things we call beautiful: Stories, paintings, music, waterfalls, a women's hair, the design of a home, self-sacrifice, a gentle disposition (1 Peter 3:3-4), etc.  How can all these things have the same property?  If they do, what kind of property would it be?  The trend toward entirely reducing the reality of beauty to a subjective experience is partly motivated by the fact that naturalism doesn't have the ontological resources to account for objective beauty.  In fact, the existence of objective beauty is a reason itself to find naturalism's account of what exists unsatisfactory.