Relation to the world· Aesthetics

Subjective beauty

Axis: Beauty — Is beauty in things themselves or in the eye of the beholder?

Beauty 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.

Who holds this position

Movements 1

Show inferred positions (1)

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

Philosophers 1

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"

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

↓ What it implies

↑ What grounds it

Source of knowledge

If all knowledge comes from sense experience, beauty is not a property of things but the pleasure they arouse in us. Empiricism grounds subjective beauty: Hume holds that beauty is no quality in things themselves, but a sentiment in the mind that contemplates them.

↓ What it implies

Purpose of art

If beauty is nothing but the pleasure a form gives, then art has no end other than that pleasure itself, without having to serve truth or a cause. Subjective beauty grounds art for art's sake: the work is sufficient unto itself, and subordinating it to an external end would only debase it.

Hierarchy of tastes

If beauty is only a sentiment that varies across individuals and cultures, then no taste is truer than another. Subjective beauty supports the equality of tastes: there is no disputing about tastes, and no one is entitled to impose their own as the norm.

Practices

Standing before what is greater than oneself: the test of the sublimeHabitInspired by Romanticism

Before the immense, worry shrinks and the soul breathes.

The Romantics sought out the high mountain, the sea, the storm or the night sky to feel the : that mixture of vertigo and exaltation before what overwhelms us. To expose oneself willingly to something vaster than oneself dislodges the self for a moment from its worries and reopens the sense of the infinite that busy life covers over. A salutary counterpoint to a world where everything is on our scale and under control.

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