I was having a fun dinner conversation with some friends today; it started off with typical small-talk and pleasantries passed back and forth until we got to an interesting debate on the nature of objective Beauty.
My friends all subscribe to the post-modern take on capital B Beauty and capital T Truth —i.e. that these things do not exist— and I (as per usual) took it upon myself to come to the rescue and prove that both Beauty and Truth do and ought to exist. The conversation was interesting but didn’t go anywhere after a while as we ended up repeating our points using examples across various artistic mediums, and we devolved to making analogies to swimming races and Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle. Suffice it to say, no one changed their mind. When I got back home I felt a nagging annoyance at the poor articulation of some of my ideas. I initially wasn’t able to coherently express what I defined as Objective Beauty and that made it difficult to defend. But then I realized: I have a blog where I can refine my ideas and write them down. So here it is, my treatise/rant defending Beauty that I hope comes across as at least palatable if not convincing. My hope is that y’all can dispute and poke holes in any of my claims and then I could follow up with a post either saying “I’m wrong for reasons xyz” or (more likely given how stubborn I am) saying “I’m still right.”
First, let us define subjective beauty. A quick google search reveals that beauty is a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. While I like this definition somewhat, I want to tweak it to capture a broader range of mediums. Firstly, the definition above would not apply for poems, speeches, or some really nice math proofs because their beauty is not captured by aesthetic senses. Secondly, there are various mediums where the technical form is pleasing but the subject matter isn’t: a broad set of art that deals with concepts of war, pain, and suffering would fall into this category but we would still consider them to be beautiful. With these two tweaks in mind, my definition of subjective beauty is as follows: beauty is a combination of characteristics pertaining to the quality of the medium which is pleasing. Note that this definition is inherently subjective because of the implication that there is someone who is pleased by the medium. A dog will not find Shakespeare as pleasing as his owner.
Can we measure subjective beauty? Yes and no. The best we can do is ask for a set of greater-than and less-than relations between any two works of art. For example, we can ask Alice if she finds Harry Potter to be more beautiful than the Bible and then we can create a ranking system for all the various things in her life. But these relations are malleable and some are very temperamental. Other things she likely can’t even answer: “what is more beautiful? A Chicago skyline or a Kendrick song.” While she can rank all her Kendrick songs and also various skylines of cities, she likely can’t tell which is prettier between the two. Thus the best we can do in terms of beauty measurement is estable a set of relations between various things that are part of the same medium. The more specific we are with the medium the more accurate and stable the relations are: it is easier to compare only rap songs than it is to compare all forms of music. We cannot for example assign a beauty score of 8/10 to a work of art and then use that score to compare against a completely different medium.
Now, as to the more difficult topic of defining Objective Beauty. I’m sorry for being anthropocentric, but I will restrict the definition to only apply to humans. Animals don’t get to vote on this one. Objective Beauty is a combination of characteristics pertaining to the quality of the medium which is pleasing to the average unbiased human being.
Note that unbiasedness is fundamental in this definition. A mom will likely find her child’s scribbles more pleasing than Monet because of her love for her daughter; a feeble-minded follower of public opinion might find a Black Square more pleasing than a random Da Vinci because the square is more expensive; and an unoriginal architect might find a new building design less pleasing simply because he never encountered it in university. This makes True comparital measurement of Beauty impossible; we are all influenced by bias in some way even if we try to disentangle ourselves from its clutches.
While it’s discouraging to admit that we likely will not reach the point of 100% accurate measurement of Objective Beauty, we can still come up with some good ways to approximate it. Simple methods of approximations work best. We could take a random sample of people from across the globe and then ask them all to compare two different items. If we have overwhelming agreement that Monet’s Sunrise is more pleasing than 3-year-old Bob’s stick figure, then we can be much more confident (99.9%) that Claude’s work is more Objectively Beautiful than Bob’s. If we ask the same random people to compare the Taj Mahal against the John Hancock Building we might get a 50/50 split which would lead to the conclusion that they are relatively equal in Objective Beauty.
The approximation method has its drawbacks. The more similar the artistic medium the higher the confidence that our comparison is valid; it is easier to compare skyscrapers to skyscrapers than a skyscraper to a Frank Loyd Wright House. We will also suffer from various sampling biases that we use. If we oversample a population from Africa comparing the physical beauty of an Asian and an African we might conclude that the African is more attractive, but if we oversample a population from Asia then we would get the opposite conclusion. However, if both populations choose the same person we can be much more confident that they are indeed more attractive. To adjust for this we could either restrict beauty comparison within age and geographical groups or use some other striation statistical approach which is harder but doable. Also, since we are all biased by the people we respect and tend to follow their opinions, we could restrict sampling to a group that has no prior knowledge of the various mediums in order to lower the bias rate. Once again, harder but doable.
There comes a point where so many more people prefer one subject over another that we get a miniscule p-value of <.0000001 that we might be wrong, and in that instance I think we can safely conclude that one thing has more Objective Beauty than the other.
You might now be asking: Josh, this is all an interesting thought exercise, but why does any of this matter? I’ll provide two reasons. Firstly, this prevailing post-modern take on beauty discourages mastery and technical skill with various mediums. Subjectivism inherently leads to two tracks: either you follow public opinion and create unoriginal copies of things judged beautiful in the past which stifles creativity or you end up giving up on technical skills because all the effort you put into mastering oil painting has been supplanted by a guy who threw his feces on a canvas and is crowned a genius by people who want to funnel money into art. If you’re really lucky, you actually end up being the fecal guy. When we muddle Objectively Beautiful things by lowering them to the level of Objectively Unbeautiful things we are committing a crime against creators and the Truth. That brings me to my second point: a subjectivist view of Beauty comes hand in hand with a subjectivist view on Truth and Morality. They are all the heads of the post-modern hydra. Once we start questioning the Objective status of Truth we get immediate consequences of destabilizing various Truths such as “You should not harm the innocent” and “Theft is wrong”. This doesn’t happen overnight; morality is eroded slowly as we start to sympathize with the perspective of the robber as much as the robbed. We lose our sense of moral exceptionalism which has defined the West over the last few centuries. And, slowly, we crumble as Rome did, whispering our way out of the great stage of history.