2.1

Beauty requires two things: something to deem “beautiful” and someone to deem it so. So I think that beauty is found in interactions. Beauty is definitely not an objective quality of something. Something (or someone, or some aspect of something) can be thought beautiful by a majority if subjects, in which case, that thing might seem to be objectively “beautiful”, but it is only beautiful insofar as individuals find it so. This is not to say that what I find beautiful is in a vacuum and is not influenced at all by what my friends and my culture tell me is beautiful. I am very much influenced by social factors and my own experiences (most of which involve other people as well) in what I find beautiful.

Subjectivity, though, does not make the property of beauty “unreal”. When I have a certain kind of profound pleasant experience sparked by some visual object, that experience is “really” happening, and I might subsequently describe that object as “beautiful”. But no one experiences the world as anyone but him or herself. Evidence that “beauty” is subjective can be found in individual and communal experiences: one person could feel very different feelings sparked by two very different visual objects but could claim that they are both beautiful, and a group could all have experiences of the same visual object but feel differently about it and disagree on whether or not that thing is “beautiful”. In the first instance, beauty seems to be able to differ from itself, in the same way that “redness” can be embodied in a rose or a fire truck. But unlike “redness”, in the second example, beauty seems to unveil itself to some people and not others, even when those people come from the same culture and speak the same language. Naming something as “beautiful” is a judgment with a more complex, less comprehensive, and less communicable set of standards than the judgment of something’s color.

Saying that beauty “is in the eye of the beholder” does capture its intense subjectivity. But it is not the case that a viewer has much control over his or her experience of something as “beautiful”. Each person’s context is going to strongly influence what exactly about their environment stimulates certain strong feelings that translate into an experience of beauty. Largely, this could be because our context dictates what kind of sights we are accustomed to, and so dictates (only to a degree) what kind of sights strike us and strike us in an attractive way.

There are so many factors that could make someone experience something as beautiful. A grandparent might experience their pinched, chubby newborn grandchild as “beautiful” for sentimental reasons, a girl might find a boy she loves most beautiful when he shows some side of his personality that she especially likes, and a person with an affinity for tragedies might find the end of Romeo and Juliet to be the most beautiful close to a story. All of these examples could be beautiful to different people for so many different reasons, that one person’s experience of beauty is extremely difficult to compare to another person’s. I don’t think this is a problem, but it just speaks to how personal such an experience of “the beautiful” can be.