Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
Or is it?
Prompted by C. S. Lewis and his discussion of Coleridge at the waterfall, I’ve been musing over what beauty is and more importantly for my purposes, where it is. If you have read my essay on idealist philosophy and enchantment you’ll get that I’m talking about whether beauty is an objective quality belonging to things that we can discern in the world around us or if it is something experienced subjectively within us caused by an encounter with a sensed object, whatever that happens to be.
Beauty is a word used indiscriminately to describe a great many things, so it’s important to spend some time thinking about what it might be. First, I think it’s a good idea to set aside, for the time being at least, physical beauty with regard to the human person, especially as it is understood today in our overly sexualized modern west. This is because beauty in this sense is almost always conflated with sexual attractiveness, and the reality is that what is considered sexually attractive varies depending on culture and time period as well as from person to person.
“I think that I shall never see.
A poem as lovely as a tree.” Trees - Joyce Kilmer
There is much beauty in the natural world, but certainly not all of it is beautiful. While words do indeed fail to do justice to the wonders found in nature, not every tree can be considered beautiful, after all. The little seedling growing in a roadside ditch pales in comparison with the colossal redwoods, for example. The same can be said of the arts and architecture. The lopsided coffee cup my child brings home from art class doesn’t really compare with Michelangelo’s Pieta, though it may be just as priceless in my eyes.
So just above we have two examples of things that may indeed qualify as beautiful: a towering majestic ancient redwood and the Pieta. Few people would likely object to adding Niagara Falls and the Parthenon to our list. Perhaps Monet’s Water Lilies belongs on the list, as well as the Matterhorn? Let’s add them, just for the sake of argument. It seems to me that few people would disagree with describing all these different things as beautiful, so what might they have in common?
It’s my belief that all the examples above would provoke a reaction in the vast majority of people best described as awe. These things are awe inspiring, as all truly beautiful things must be. They are objectively beautiful, so to speak. This does not mean that every single person will be awed by them every single time they see them. People can fail to be moved by beauty, just as they can fail to be moved by pathos, but the mere fact that many millions of people seek out the opportunity to experience these things in person and are moved in just this way would seem to support their designation as objectively beautiful.
This would also seem to severely undermine the notion that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder", or, put another way, subjective. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that preference is in the eye of the beholder, because preferences can only be subjective. Perhaps I prefer roses to lilies. That in no way means that roses are more beautiful than lilies. The beauty of the lily inheres in the lily itself and my preference makes absolutely no difference to it. Put another way, Niagara Falls would be beautiful even if I never saw it; it is not made beautiful by the mere fact of my eye perceiving it or my preferring it to something else.
What about people then, can they be beautiful? I think the answer is yes, especially given a specific understanding of what beauty itself consists of. If we adopt an Aristotelian view whereby a thing is beautiful inasmuch as it embodies its form then human beings are beautiful when they actualize all the potential available to the kind of being they are. For example, Michelangelo’s David is awe inspiring because it depicts the full embodiment of the potential of a healthy young man in his prime. Of course, the number of human beings who would meet this standard is vanishingly small and do note that the realization of this type of beauty is unrelated to sexual attractiveness, although of course such people would probably be considered to be desirable.
This may seem to be more than a little unfair, especially since we are all going to age and our potential will necessarily decrease over time. I think that sentiment comes from a misunderstanding of what beauty is and isn’t. Beauty is not desirability. It is not a preference. Rather, beauty is a quality found in tangible things capable of inspiring awe in most people. It inspires awe because we quite naturally respond in such a way when perceiving something which completely embodies its potential to be the kind of thing or being it is. It is not permanent. If Niagara Falls stopped flowing they would no longer be beautiful. Mount St. Helens as a crater is not beautiful. A rose will wither on the vine or in a vase. Sunsets fade.
I don’t think I’ve said anything novel or earth shaking here but I do hope you enjoyed musing along with me. I also hope I’ve made something of a case against the truism that beauty is subjective, or merely “in the eye of the beholder.”