Axis: Beauty — Is beauty in things themselves or in the eye of the beholder?
Beauty 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.
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
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
Foundations and implications
↑ What grounds it↓ What it implies
↑ What grounds it
Universals
If general properties really exist, beauty is one of them: a perfection of form inscribed in things, which we discover more than we invent. Realism about universals grounds objective beauty: for Plato, beautiful things are beautiful only by participation in Beauty itself, a Form that the sensible world reflects.
↓ What it implies
Purpose of art
If beauty is a reality bound up with the order and essence of things, then the great work is the one that lets that truth be seen, beyond mere pleasure. Objective beauty grounds the idea of an art of truth: for Schopenhauer, art suspends the will and discloses the essence of the world that the concept cannot reach.
Hierarchy of tastes
If some things are beautiful in themselves, then not all judgments of taste are equal: some are more correct, and educating one's eye lets one better perceive what is truly beautiful. Objective beauty supports a hierarchy of taste, where the trained eye of the connoisseur has authority over mere whim.