QuestionsIs beauty in the eye of the beholder?Living form: beauty is neither in the object alone nor in my private pleasure, it speaks to what we have in common
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?Subjective yet universal

Living form: beauty is neither in the object alone nor in my private pleasure, it speaks to what we have in common

Living form; the play drive; man plays only where he is fully man

Friedrich Schiller 1759 · 1805Poet and playwright who reads Kant and makes beauty the place where sensibility and reason are reconciled: man plays only where he is fully man.
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What it claims

To say of a thing that it is beautiful is neither to describe a property it has alone, nor to express a private taste: it is to speak in the name of what we have in common. Aesthetic communication unites society because it applies to what is common to all its members.

Why

The pleasure of the senses stays private, but beauty engages both our natures at once and so speaks to what we have in common.

The same idea through history
Immanuel Kant1790Schiller starts from Kant: the judgment about the beautiful is not knowledge of the object and yet it addresses everyone. He also wants to show what the beautiful does to the whole man, sensibility and reason together.
Friedrich Schiller1793In the letters to Körner known as Kallias, Schiller looks for an objective criterion of the beautiful and finds it in "freedom in appearance". This text is not in our corpus; the argument presented here rests on the Letters.
Friedrich Schiller1795The version presented here. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education, the beautiful is the object of a "play drive" that reconciles sensibility and form, and it is this double nature that makes it communicable to all.
Hannah Arendt1970Arendt takes from Kant the idea of a judgment of taste that addresses everyone, and ties it to the plurality of standpoints.
In short

"Living form: beauty is neither in the object alone nor in my private pleasure, it speaks to what we have in common" is an argument by Friedrich Schiller (Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795 (letters XV and XXVII); Kallias, 1793, 1793) on the question "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" (answer: subjective yet universal). Its claim: To say of a thing that it is beautiful is neither to describe a property it has alone, nor to express a private taste: it is to speak in the name of what we have in common. Aesthetic communication unites society because it applies to what is common to all its members. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795 (letters XV and XXVII); Kallias, 1793
Valid with an implicit premise

How can the beautiful be at once a matter of feeling and a common matter? Schiller answers in two steps. First, the beautiful is found neither in pure life (the pleasure of the senses) nor in pure form (the idea of the intellect): it is a "living form", which exists when the form of the object lives in our feeling and its life speaks to our understanding. It is therefore not a property the object would have alone. Second, the pleasure of the senses remains private, it cannot be generalised, whereas the beautiful engages our two natures together. When we enjoy it, we enjoy it both as individuals and as representatives of the species. That is why whoever says "it is beautiful" neither describes a property of things nor merely expresses a preference: he addresses what is common to all.

P1The beautiful is a "living form". A marble block can become one, a man who lives and has a form is not always one. The form must live in our feeling and the life in our understanding: that is the case wherever we judge a thing beautiful. The beautiful is therefore not a property of the thing alone.
P2The pleasures of the senses we enjoy only as individuals, without the nature of the species in us sharing in them. They cannot be generalised, because we cannot generalise our individuality.
P3Beauty alone can be enjoyed both as an individual and as a species, that is, as representing the species.
P4The perception of beauty makes of man a whole, because it demands the co-operation of his two natures, sensuous and spiritual. Other forms of perception divide him.
P5 · implicit premiseWhat is not a property of the object alone, does not remain a private pleasure, and engages in each person what all have in common, may validly be said in the name of all.
So to say of a thing that it is beautiful is neither to describe a property it has alone, nor to express a private taste: it is to speak in the name of what we have in common. Aesthetic communication unites society because it applies to what is common to all its members.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where the beautiful is not in the object alone, is not a private pleasure and engages our two natures, and yet each person speaks only for himself: what is "common" could vary from one group to another.
Without the hidden premise P5, the first four premises say what the beautiful is not and what it engages in us, without saying that this authorises speaking for all. Schiller suggests it (it is his thesis on aesthetic communication), but does not prove it otherwise than by the analysis of the double nature. That is where his opponents can push back: is the "common" really common?
Analogy. Two people listening to the same fugue do not feel the same thing, and yet they can turn to one another and say "how marvellous". They are not describing a property of the score and they are not comparing two private tastes: each expects the other to recognise in it what she hears. For Schiller, this expectation comes from the fact that the beautiful speaks to what we have in common.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1835 · attacks the conclusion

Hegel hails in Schiller the gesture that goes beyond Kant's subjectivity: the unity of the sensuous and the rational is posited there as the true. But Schiller, he says, mainly strives to bring this unity into actual life through art and aesthetic education; only after him does it become the very principle of knowledge. For Hegel the beautiful is the sensuous manifestation of the Idea itself, not a relation between our faculties.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1835, after the author's death (1805).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Hegel writes about forty years after Schiller, who could not answer. They share the idea that the beautiful reconciles. The disagreement is about where this reconciliation lies: in the double nature of the man who judges (Schiller), or in the Idea that appears in the thing (Hegel).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Schiller: the beautiful is a living relation between form and feeling, which speaks to what we have in common. Hegel: the beautiful is the sensuous appearing of the Idea. The basic disagreement remains: does the beautiful lie in the relation between object and subject, or in what manifests itself in the object?
Pierre Bourdieu 1979 · attacks premise 4

Bourdieu holds that the "pure" aesthetic universalises the dispositions of a particular social condition. Whoever can keep his pleasures at a distance from necessity is a privileged person. What Schiller calls what is common to all would be what is common to those who have the time and the means to play.

Schiller replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1979, after the author's death (1805).
Friedrich Schiller 1795 · Schiller, in advance
Schiller asks himself the question: does such a state of beauty in appearance exist, and where? His answer: it must be found in every finely harmonised soul, but as a fact only in select circles, like the pure ideal of church and state. He thus sees there an ideal, not a general fact.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Schiller thus recognises that the state he speaks of is rare. But he presents it as possible for every soul, and ties aesthetic culture to the education of all. Bourdieu advances that this possibility in principle hides an inequality in fact: those who have the education of forms are those who have leisure.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Schiller: the beautiful is a possibility of all human nature, realised for now in select circles. Bourdieu: the capacity to reach it is a class privilege. The basic disagreement remains: does unequal access to the beautiful remove its claim to universality, or only show that it remains to be realised?
Charles Darwin 1871 · attacks premise 3

Darwin writes that it is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body: the men of each race prefer what they are accustomed to. If the sense of beauty has been shaped by selection and habit, what each person enjoys "as a species" varies from one people to another, and the species does not speak with one voice.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1871, after the author's death (1805).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Darwin writes seventy-six years after Schiller. The two do not quite speak of the same thing. Darwin deals with ideals of bodily beauty, Schiller with what is engaged in us when we judge a form beautiful. The question remains whether Schiller's universal is found under the variety of ideals, or whether there is only variety.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Schiller: the beautiful engages what the species has in common. Darwin: ideals of beauty vary from one people to another and there is no universal standard. The basic disagreement remains: does the universality of the judgment of taste lie in contents, or in the form of the demand?