Can be beauty be objective?

**~~Shayne~~** · February 05, 2010, 07:41 AM

Disperse with the notion of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, attraction.. maybe. Can the concept of beauty ever be considered objective? There is obviously something we measure beauty against, and not the social norms that have conditioned our perceptions of what we all throughout the world consider 'beautiful'. Consider a man confined to a room for the entirety of his existence, and a beautiful women was to enter the room, or an object of beauty was to manifest in the room. Would this man know beauty, how would he know? There must be some objective form of beauty, no?

Any thoughts on this people?

**~~removeduser_487563287433~~** · February 05, 2010, 07:44 AM

No, it can't. It's purely relative. And you seem to be defining it purely on the basis of sexual attraction. What if the man in the room is a homosexual?

**~~Arch-hereticK~~** · February 05, 2010, 08:00 AM

"Beauty" is the combination of sexuality, the cultural construct and subjective positive experiences.

Judgments of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things."

**~~Shayne~~** · February 05, 2010, 08:01 AM

@ Ferrets, no I specifically wrote to separate beauty and attraction. I believe they are distinct. you have just implied they are not. can a homosexual not find a women beautiful? I know many who do.

**Tankbuster** · February 05, 2010, 10:23 AM

Beauty is a label, a concept. We humans apply these labels to certain impulses we receive, whether that be a beautiful woman (in that case the impulses come from biological triggers) or a beautiful landscape (in which case it's more of the awe-inspiring element to it).

However the fact of the matter is that you even if all humans were inclined to find the same things 'beautiful', that still doesn't make it more than the label we apply than our reaction to a certain stimulus.

Beauty is a fantastic thing. But it's not objective in any way, and why should it?

**Amorphos** · February 05, 2010, 11:45 AM

I think it can be and definitely is, if you take 5 beautiful women different men would like different beauties. However if you put someone who looks like a tree [FOS] next to them, then they will all think the others are better looking. You always get variables, some insane men will say silly things like ‘I like them like that’, some prefer the girl next door type to a model, some like shapely women some like skinny. Most will think a skinny or shapely woman is beautiful or ugly regardless of size.

Take any image of a beauty and open it in a photo editor, then use the warp or distort tools, stretch or distort the image, make the distance between the lips and the nose greater, give her bushy eyebrows etc, usually anything you do will be worse than what you began with.

**Mega Tortas de Bodemloze** · February 05, 2010, 12:00 PM

Disperse with the notion of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, attraction.. maybe

Meh..

. Just go ahead and strip me of any oratory at all...

beauty being objective...

All I got is this...

To me, look for a person that looks like the got hit in the face with a shovel. {butt ugly as it were}. Now see what manevestations seap to the surface.....honesty, passion{ate}, intensity, forthright, and so on down the line. The heart of it is that you would be drawn to certain qualities in a person and value these above all.

Is not overvelhming attraction to inner worth beauty in it self? After all external beauty is ephemeral but what lies in the soul is beyond time and measure.

**Djûn** · February 05, 2010, 12:30 PM

Well, Kant seems to offer a somewhat subjective objectiveness in the Critique of Judgement, realating to the idea that a statement is made (in this case about beauty) with the belief that it ought to be agreed upon by others. If we were to only accept that such opinions are purely subjective then one necessarily removes any reason for having critics or ratings of any form of aesthetics.

**Amorphos** · February 05, 2010, 12:41 PM

Is not overvelhming attraction to inner worth beauty in it self? After all external beauty is ephemeral but what lies in the soul is beyond time and measure.

I don’t think that’s the point of the thread [more about physical beauty] although it is a good point. I disagree though ugly people arent always nicer, beautiful people arent always cought up in their own superficiality.

Kant seems to offer a somewhat subjective objectiveness in the Critique of Judgement, realating to the idea that a statement is made (in this case about beauty) with the belief that it ought to be agreed upon by others.

Is beauty a belief? We could all agree that an ugly person is beautiful, but we would all be wrong, simply distorting the meaning out of all context.

**Djûn** · February 05, 2010, 12:46 PM

Originally Posted by Quetzalcoatl

Is beauty a belief?

Never claimed that it was. What I said was that one makes a judgement such as 'she is beautiful' or 'steak is delicious' with the belief that it ought to be agreed upon. At least according to Kant.

Originally Posted by Quetzalcoatl

We could all agree that an ugly person is beautiful, but we would all be wrong, simply distorting the meaning out of all context.

But then how does one know that an 'ugly' person is indeed 'ugly'? If all people agree that an 'ugly' person is beautiful, then why does she remain the former?

**~~Arch-hereticK~~** · February 05, 2010, 12:50 PM

Originally Posted by Dune.

Never claimed that it was. What I said was that one makes a judgement such as 'she is beautiful' or 'steak is delicious' with the belief that it ought to be agreed upon. At least according to Kant.

But then how does one know that an 'ugly' person is indeed 'ugly'? If all people agree that an 'ugly' person is beautiful, then why does she remain the former?

"Beauty" , like all abstract concepts, are decided upon by the majority.

It has and will change.

**Amorphos** · February 05, 2010, 01:00 PM

Never claimed that it was. What I said was that one makes a judgement such as 'she is beautiful' or 'steak is delicious' with the belief that it ought to be agreed upon.

Ah I see, sorry I got you wrong.

That belief is probably based on the fact that one expects there to be agreed upon things in a more objective sense.

But then how does one know that an 'ugly' person is indeed 'ugly'? If all people agree that an 'ugly' person is beautiful, then why does she remain the former?

How would we define what is ugly if we remove the comparative? I think if we can agree that beauty is objective, then the argument is void, we would just have a lot of people who’s views are incorrect.

**Armatus** · February 05, 2010, 01:00 PM

Originally Posted by Shayne

Disperse with the notion of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, attraction.. maybe. Can the concept of beauty ever be considered objective? There is obviously something we measure beauty against, and not the social norms that have conditioned our perceptions of what we all throughout the world consider 'beautiful'. Consider a man confined to a room for the entirety of his existence, and a beautiful women was to enter the room, or an object of beauty was to manifest in the room. Would this man know beauty, how would he know? There must be some objective form of beauty, no?

Any thoughts on this people?

Are you referring to this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

**Phier** · February 05, 2010, 01:21 PM

Beauty is most definitely objective when it comes to people.

There are ratios, and acceptable proportions and symmetry which have been measured and can create a 'beautiful' face.

One of the more interesting things about beauty is the more 'average' a face is in terms of proportions the more beautiful it is considered by others. When someone says 'a face has character' they are normally talking people out of the normal proportions, and they are not beautiful.

Thats not to say that society doesn't play a part as well, especially on the finer points, and being genetically driven there can be discrepancies, but the fact that their hasn't been a major shift in what is beautiful since written history should be an indicator there is more than just subjective nature.

**Amorphos** · February 05, 2010, 01:44 PM

On this image I have made slight differences, although they don’t make her ugly [and some people may not think she is pretty] they alone are enough to make her less beautiful. There is a relationship between distortion and disproportion that think creates ugliness. You can have asymmetric beauty in say architecture, but not in humans, so beauty I would think is relative to the nature of the object. I also wonder if there is a more universal hierarchy, can a building or a monkey be as beautiful as a woman? To a monkey maybe but we cannot know, they may think humans are far more aesthetically attractive but not as a mate.

**Nietzsche** · February 05, 2010, 11:43 PM

Obviously the Idea of Beauty exists. Things are beautiful. So there is an argument for the basis of objective beauty. What that quality is may certainly be culturally or individually relative, but the Idea of Beauty remains. For a thing to be beautiful there must be a model or quality of Beauty, thus that model or quality forms the principle Idea of Beauty.

So, in short, my response is yes. Thank you Plato.