If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how can we even speak of beauty? It must be, at least in part, an objective phenomenon: that is to say, we need an objective understanding of subjectivity. If I find a sunset beautiful, but my friend doesn’t, how can she actually know what I’m talking about if I say “that sunset is beautiful”? She clearly does not have the same qualitative appreciation of it, so that sentence is essentially gibberish to her. The only reason she understands it is that she was at some point taught what the word means. But how is that possible if it is in the eye of the beholder?
A Note on Beauty
September 13, 2008 · 4 Comments
Categories: Aesthetics · Philosophy
Tagged: beauty, eye of the beholder, objectivity, subjectivity
4 responses so far ↓
the scôp // September 15, 2008 at 10:39 pm |
Kant in Critique of Judgment calls this the “subjective universal” which results only from the “pure disinterested.” I don’t know if your questions will be answered by this work (mine were not), but it does consider your thesis and might result in a profitable internal discourse.
Mr. Contrarian // September 16, 2008 at 12:07 am |
Thanks for the tip. Critique of Judgement is on my “to read” list. Funnily enough, I could have sworn I thought of something called the “universal subjective”, thinking it was an original idea.
Roop Rai // September 17, 2008 at 6:05 pm |
lol Mr. C …. it’s amazing how all ur ideas resonate with the famous philosophers of the past.
Mr. Contrarian // September 17, 2008 at 9:49 pm |
Damn them. They keep stealing my ideas before I come up with them.