Relation to the world· Aestheticsdifficulty
Beauty
Is beauty in things themselves or in the eye of the beholder?
If beauty belongs to things, we can train our eye, argue, be wrong; if it lies only in us, taste is beyond dispute and every judgement is as good as any other. What is at stake is the very possibility of a shared beauty, beyond mere preference.
Objective beauty
2Beauty is a real property of things, grounded in harmony, proportion, or perfection of form. Some works are beautiful in themselves, whether or not we know how to appreciate them.
Explore this position →Platoexplicit
Beauty is neither a matter of taste nor an attribute of things: there exists a Form of the Beautiful, eternal and absolute, which neither comes to be nor perishes, and in which beautiful things participate. This is aesthetic objectivism at its purest, the terminus of the erotic ascent of the .
Symposium, 210e-211b · Greater Hippias, 287c-289d
Show more (1)
Platonismexplicit
Platonism holds an objective beauty: the is a reality in itself, eternal and self-identical, of which sensible beauties are only pale participations. Beauty does not depend on the beholder's taste but on an essence that reason can contemplate.
Plato, Symposium, 210a-211d, the ladder of beauty · Plato, Greater Hippias
Subjective universality (Kant)
named middle1Beauty is not a property of the object, yet it is not a mere matter of personal taste either. When I call something beautiful, I voice a subjective pleasure while claiming that everyone ought to feel it too. The judgment of taste is subjective in its source, universal in its claim.
Explore this position →Kantexplicit
The judgment of taste is subjective (it rests on no concept of the object) yet legitimately claims universality. This is exactly the axis's named median position, subjective universality.
Critique of the Power of Judgment, §6-§9
Subjective beauty
2Beauty does not exist in things but in the mind that contemplates them: to call an object beautiful is to express the pleasure it gives us. Tastes vary across individuals and cultures, and none of them is the true one.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (2)
Humeexplicit
Beauty is no quality of things but exists in the mind that contemplates them: it reduces to a sentiment of pleasure, like moral worth. Hume does not infer sheer arbitrariness: a standard of taste emerges from the verdict of experienced, delicate critics, which tempers the subjectivism without overturning it.
Essays, "Of the Standard of Taste"
Romanticisminferable
Beauty no longer obeys objective proportions or the canons inherited from Antiquity: it is born of the expression of an inwardness and is measured by the emotion it arouses. Above all, Romanticism shifts the centre of aesthetics toward the , that grandeur of the boundless, the formless and the fearful, which exceeds all measure and opens onto the infinite.
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful · Schiller, On the Sublime
The beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept.Kant · Critique of the Power of Judgment, §9
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.Hume · Essays, "Of the Standard of Taste"
A beauty that always is, neither coming to be nor passing away, neither increasing nor diminishing; nor again beautiful in one part and ugly in another.Plato · Symposium, 211a