Free Essay

Subjectivity of Beauty

In: Philosophy and Psychology

Submitted By puneetbhakar
Words 496
Pages 2
Is beauty subjective?
In the philosophical domain, the question over subjectivity of beauty has been greatly discussed and debated. If one wishes to look for definite outcome of these debates, we could as well say that beauty has been viewed by majority as objective entity in past but postmodernist views have rendered it as subjective once again.
In the paper we plan to inspect upon the topic from scratch by looking at the following questions. In what sense is something beautiful? How can one firmly criticise that one’s taste is better or worse than the other? How can one defend a particular style in the face of many other contradictory opponents?
We also put forward some of the historical perspective of the debate. For example, Plato’s view of objective beauty. He can considered as one of the pioneers over the topic. He wrote meticulously on the subject, what is beautiful was largely defined by a few individuals who were thought to actually have taste, who thought that only a classical building could represent beauty. They suggested that there was an objective criterion in measuring beauty instead of one that was subject to our moods, emotions, and personality. We then show how this idea fell over how classical beauty was born, dead, and revived.
We also inspect over how objective beauty become obsolete i.e. where did the objective standard of beauty go wrong? Why would anyone rival against the absolute formulas for anything. How does concept of ‘absolute’ so popular in science, fails in art.
Along with attack over objective beauty, we also note down some lacuna creeping in describing beauty in subjective terms only. We put forward an argument in this regard. Believing only over the quotation
i.e. “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” could make everyone lazy. Instead of appreciating beauty through a conscious effort of seeing and noticing the minutest details of the object of beauty, aesthetic relativism offers us an outlet to be lazy, for everything is beautiful if we think it is beautiful. Hence we are likely to overestimate our aesthetic sensibility and assume that our uneducated eyes can assure us automatic possession of beauty without even a second of contemplation.
At last, we inspect into relevance of debate over subjectivity of beauty in modernist and scientific framework. That is to say, we will investigate over why it is necessary to categorise beauty in one of the two classes and not put it grey areas of personnel discretion.
List of papers we included:
1. The journal of philosophy: Beauty and the cognitive significance of art- Theodore M. greene
2. Beauty and value- D. W. gotshalk
3. Beauty is in the eye of beholder- by Susan hackett
4. On beauty- Ben rogers
5. That beauty is a state- Ananda coomaraswamy
We enlist links of some online sites:
y.co.nz/articles/is-beauty-subjective/
-is-objective-subjective/#.VQE8CvmUdpt
-is-subjective-period/
12/subjective-and-objective-standards-of-beauty/

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