Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
Taste, harmony, culture and universality
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Philosophers give 4 main answers: beauty is in things, tastes, but also judges, subjective yet universal and it is all relative. AskPhilosophy presents 14 arguments, from Plato to Roger Scruton, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 4 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Beauty is real: harmony, proportion, the reflection of absolute beauty.
Platon, Plotin, Roger Scruton
Beauty depends on feeling, but some tastes are sounder than others.
Hume, Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke
Beauty is not a property of things, but when I say 'it is beautiful' I speak for everyone.
Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Hannah Arendt
Beauty changes with species, culture, social class: there is no beauty in itself.
Voltaire, Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Pierre Bourdieu…
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
Beauty is in things
Beauty is real: harmony, proportion, the reflection of absolute beauty.
3 argumentsBeautiful things are beautiful through Beauty itself
Beautiful things change and vanish; they are beautiful only by sharing in a Beauty that itself never changes.
Beauty is not symmetry: it is form in matter
Things without parts, like sunlight or lightning, are beautiful: so beauty cannot be the symmetry of parts.
We argue about beauty and educate our taste: so beauty concerns the object, not only the subject
We argue about beauty and educate taste: this makes sense only if the judgement concerns the object and can be more or less sound.
Tastes, but also judges
Beauty depends on feeling, but some tastes are sounder than others.
3 argumentsTastes differ, yet there is a standard of taste: the verdict of true judges
Beauty lies in feeling, yet not all tastes are equal: some qualities naturally produce pleasure for true judges.
An internal sense of beauty: we do not choose what seems beautiful to us, but the basis is common
Beauty strikes us at once and without choice, like a sense, and this sense has a common basis that habit can deflect.
Taste has common principles: what varies from one man to another is degree, not nature
Senses and imagination work the same way in everyone: tastes differ only in knowledge and degree.
Subjective yet universal
Beauty is not a property of things, but when I say 'it is beautiful' I speak for everyone.
3 argumentsThe beautiful pleases all, without concept and without interest
Pleasure in beauty serves no personal interest, so we can expect it of everyone, though no rule says what is beautiful.
Living form: beauty is neither in the object alone nor in my private pleasure, it speaks to what we have in common
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 enlarged mentality: judging the beautiful is thinking in the place of everyone else
To judge the beautiful is to think in the place of others: one cannot prove the judgment, only seek their agreement.
It is all relative
Beauty changes with species, culture, social class: there is no beauty in itself.
5 argumentsAsk a toad what beauty is
Each being finds beautiful what pleases it, and what changes with the viewer is not a property of things themselves.
Nothing is beautiful, man alone is beautiful
Humans find beautiful whatever reflects their own image back: the judgment "beautiful" is about us, not about things.
The sense of beauty comes from sexual selection, and each people has its own ideal
Animals choose what they find beautiful, and each species or people likes different things: there is no universal beauty.
Taste is not a gift: it is a mark of class
Taste varies with education and social position and serves to place the one who judges: calling something beautiful classifies the judge.
Push-pin is as good as poetry
The value of an art is measured by the pleasure it gives; any other ranking among the arts is fanciful.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.