Q&A: Objective Beauty and Ugliness
Objective Beauty and Ugliness
Question
Hello Rabbi,
People usually say, "There’s no arguing about taste and smell"—that aesthetics is not objective. Even so, I think it is: most people would agree that there is such a thing as beauty and ugliness. No one would compare a beginning poet to Alterman, or a child’s painting to da Vinci, etc. So is there such a thing as beautiful and not beautiful?
Answer
In my opinion, this is similar to ethics. Here too there is beauty and lack of beauty, but it is hard to give criteria. Of course, it depends on culture and environment, but given a particular culture and environment, there is beauty and lack of beauty. That is the objective dimension in aesthetics. I once compared this to logic, which also determines validity given foundational assumptions (axioms). It seems to me that this was in the series on poetry.
See column 143