QuestionsIs beauty in the eye of the beholder?Ask a toad what beauty is
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?It is all relative

Ask a toad what beauty is

The toad argument

Voltaire 1694 · 1778Crush intolerance with reason and irony.
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What it claims

The beauty that speaks to the senses, the imagination and the mind is "often merely relative": there is no beauty in essence, the same for all beings.

Why

Each being finds beautiful what pleases it, and what changes with the viewer is not a property of things themselves.

The same idea through history
Voltaire1764In the article "Beau" of the Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire mocks the philosophers' "beauty in essence": the toad, other peoples and even a tragedy that delights Paris and bores London show that beauty changes.
Charles Darwin1871Darwin explains the sense of beauty by sexual selection and notes that each people admires what it is used to: the same idea, with a biological explanation.Pierre Bourdieu1979Bourdieu shows that, within one society, taste changes with education and social class.
In short

"Ask a toad what beauty is" is an argument by Voltaire (Philosophical Dictionary, article "Beautiful", 1764, 1764) on the question "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" (answer: it is all relative). Its claim: The beauty that speaks to the senses, the imagination and the mind is "often merely relative": there is no beauty in essence, the same for all beings. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Philosophical Dictionary, article "Beautiful", 1764
Valid with an implicit premise

One day Voltaire goes to see a tragedy with a philosopher. "How beautiful that is!" says the philosopher. Voltaire asks why, then points out that a medicine that cures would deserve the same word. The philosopher ends up admitting that the beautiful is what causes admiration and pleasure. Later the two friends see the same play in England, well translated: the audience yawns. Voltaire draws his lesson, with a toad as witness: ask a toad what beauty is, and it will answer that it is its female. Beauty changes with the species, the country and the custom. But Voltaire adds a limit in the same article: there is a beauty that speaks to the heart, and that one is unanimous.

P1Beings do not find the same things beautiful: the toad admires its female, and the same tragedy, even well translated, delights a French audience and makes an English audience yawn. What is fashionable in Paris is not so in Peking.
P2To call something beautiful, it must cause admiration and pleasure: this is what the philosopher of the anecdote ends up admitting.
P3 · implicit premiseWhat is defined by the pleasure of the one who looks, and changes from one spectator to another, is not a property that belongs to the things themselves.
So the beauty that speaks to the senses, the imagination and the mind is "often merely relative": there is no beauty in essence, the same for all beings.

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 P3, the computer finds a case where the beautiful is defined by pleasure and varies from one being to another, and yet is a real property of things: for example if some viewers saw better than others, as some hear music better. This is the objection of Plato and of the defenders of a standard of taste.
With P3 the argument is valid: if the beautiful is defined by pleasure (P2), if this pleasure changes with the being who looks (P1), and if what depends on the one who looks is not in the things (P3), then beauty is not a property of things.
Analogy. People taste the same soup: one finds it too salty, the other bland. Nobody looks for the soup's flavour "in itself": we say that taste depends on each person's tongue. Voltaire says the same of beauty, with a toad added.

Objections

3

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

Plato 380 BC · attacks premise 3

The beautiful things of this world are beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, at one time and not at another, for some and not for others. But the Beautiful itself is not like that: it is always the same, with no ugly part, no relation or point of view. That beautiful things change their face does not prevent there being a Beautiful that does not change, in which they take part.

Voltaire replies
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Voltaire 1764 · Voltaire on Plato's speech (anticipated reply)
Voltaire first quotes Plato on the beautiful, then writes that he is willing to believe nothing is finer than this speech, but that it does not give very clear ideas of the nature of the beautiful. As for the philosophers who look for a beauty "in essence", they answer him with jargon.
The debate goes on (our summary) Voltaire answers the speech of the Phaedrus that he quotes, not the passage of the Symposium quoted here: he did not answer the argument "beautiful things vary, the Beautiful itself does not". The deeper disagreement remains: can a beauty that can be neither shown nor measured be what we mean when we say "it is beautiful"?
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. Relativists say the Beautiful itself explains nothing of what we feel; Platonists say that without it we could not even compare two beauties.
Immanuel Kant 1790 · attacks premise 2

As for what is merely pleasant (Canary wine), everyone may say "it is pleasant to me" and it would be absurd to quarrel. But whoever says "it is beautiful" does not speak for himself alone: he cannot call something beautiful if it merely pleases him. He demands the agreement of others, as if beauty were a property of the thing. The diversity of tastes therefore only shows that we often confuse the pleasant with the beautiful.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1790, after the author's death (1778).
Pierre Bourdieu defender of the argument · 1979
Kant's "pure" aesthetic, Bourdieu says, is rooted in an ethic, or rather an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world. That Kant demands everyone's agreement does not prove that taste is universal: it may come from his readers, professors of philosophy, sharing the same condition.
see the argument
The debate goes on (our summary) Kant writes twelve years after Voltaire's death. Voltaire does accept that the tragedy "causes admiration and pleasure", and in the moral case he does expect everyone to agree; the disagreement is whether this claim to agreement also holds for the beauties that speak to the senses.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. Everyone sees that tastes vary; the question is whether saying "it is beautiful" claims, rightly or wrongly, to hold for everyone.
Voltaire (in the same article) 1770 · attacks the conclusion

There are actions that the whole world finds beautiful, and great moral maxims that all peoples admire alike. The beautiful that only strikes the senses, the imagination and the mind is thus often uncertain; the beauty that strikes the heart is not. Even the wicked man recognizes the beauty of the virtues he dares not imitate.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Voltaire in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) This passage is a limit Voltaire himself puts on his thesis. Mind the dates: the toad and the tragedy are in the 1764 edition of the Philosophical Dictionary; the part on moral beauty was added in 1770 (Questions sur l'Encyclopédie). Relativists can answer that the agreement about courageous acts comes from morality, not from aesthetics.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. If moral beauty is granted to be universal, the relativist thesis is limited to the beauty of the senses; if one says it is not beauty at all, the thesis stands.