Q&A: The Nature of “Beauty”
The Nature of “Beauty”
Question
Hello Rabbi Michi,
Many times I use the word “beautiful” to judge some object or other: there is beautiful music, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful person, and so on. I ask myself: what is shared by all these objects that I call “beautiful”? What characterizes “the beautiful”?
Thank you
Answer
What they share is that they arouse in us a certain kind of feeling called beauty—just as a collection of actions arouses in us a sense of good or evil.
Of course, one can discuss whether this is merely a feeling, in which case ethics and aesthetics are subjective, or whether it has a source in reality itself. I tend toward the second view (for otherwise there is no meaning to the claim that something is beautiful or good, aside from describing my own feelings. It is very worthwhile to read the beginning of C. S. Lewis’s book—the one from Narnia—The Abolition of Man, which describes this beautifully).
Now you could ask what it is in reality itself that arouses this feeling in me. I do not know how to give a criterion for that (other than the experiential one), but that does not imply that it is only a feeling and not something in reality itself. The good and the beautiful are basic concepts and do not require definition.
Moreover, I argue that even between two people or groups who disagree on matters of morality or aesthetics, the definition of the concepts beautiful and good themselves is still shared; otherwise there is no disagreement between them. This sharpens my claim even further: it is impossible to give objective criteria for the good and the beautiful, because in objective reality different actions sometimes arouse the same feeling in different people. My claim is that both of them see the same thing in those actions, and that is what arouses in them the feeling of beauty or goodness. Very elusive, but I do not know how to say anything sharper than that (this is what leads people to doubt the objectivity of morality and aesthetics. But I argue that elusiveness and subtlety are not evidence of subjectivity).
Discussion on Answer
Rabbi Michi,
Is it possible to say that person A sees beauty in a certain object while the second does not, because the first has refined and advanced aesthetic taste, whereas the second lacks aesthetic taste? Likewise, person A sees a certain act as good and the second does not, because the first is morally refined while the second is morally deficient, and therefore he can also be blamed for his mistaken perception (which is in fact an unrefined one)?
In other words: the way one sees depends on the person’s refinement, not on the object.
I think there are quite a few flaws in that video. The patterns he finds (like the golden ratio) may be culture-dependent. Symmetry, for example, is really not a necessary criterion for beauty—quite the opposite: something symmetrical is usually simplistic and childish. You need some deviation from symmetry in order to create something more sophisticated. Throughout the video there is no argument at all in favor of an objective aspect of beauty. At most there is something intersubjective, and even that, as I said, may be society-dependent. Not to mention evolutionary and utilitarian explanations of beauty, which essentially cannot explain the feeling of beauty as a special kind of pleasantness. There is value in feeling pleasure from useful sights, but why should it be a special kind of pleasure unique to aesthetics?
Something along these lines was asked by the well-known Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (it’s unbelievable that he doesn’t appear on the list of American philosophers on Wikipedia—indeed, there isn’t even an entry on him at all. That’s a truly outrageous bias, when every atheist clown appears there): why does evolution instill fear in us of something that threatens us? It would have been simpler to create a mechanism that just starts running away directly, without passing through feelings. (That, of course, is an expression of the difficulty of why a mental dimension arose in us at all, in addition to the question of how it arose.)
Shai,
Of course. After all, my claim was that there is an objective dimension to beauty and to goodness. The meaning of that is that somewhere out there there is something specific that produces in us the feelings of beauty and goodness. So how do two observers see it differently (which is why there are disagreements)? Apparently they are constituted differently (their instruments of observation are different). That difference can stem from several factors: 1. Simply a different genetic makeup. 2. One is more refined than the other. 3. One person’s vantage point is better for “seeing” the idea clearly. 4. They live in different environments, and the idea of the good or the beautiful is implemented differently in different cultural and social environments (and that is not relativism at all—quite the opposite).
There’s a nice video on this: