Blog 2 - Final "Is There an Objective Beauty?"

After reading the philosophers for this section on beauty, I am ready to concede that the beauty that we talk about on a daily basis is subjective and even that subjective opinion is generally socially constructed. However, I still wonder if there is a form of beauty that does not pertain to the subject. This objective form of beauty is a hard concept to even begin to understand. It is so difficult because so much of our understanding of beauty is subjective and socially constructed. It may be easier to grasp this form of the beautiful by comprehending what our subjective and socially constructed views are. From there, we can proceed to establish definitions of taste. With an unbiased gaze and a more nuanced understanding of taste, we might be able to begin to create a definition of objective beauty.

            Mary Devereaux argues that forms of representation take on a male gaze. This means in part that a neutral vision of beauty is impossible. She also argues that the expectations of the viewer are disproportionally effected by male needs, beliefs, and desires. In this sense, not only do male viewers have a specifically male perspective of the beautiful, but also all those (which includes a fair amount of females) that have accepted the masculine gaze and the male socially constructed understanding of beautiful. Certainly the subjective form of beauty has changed from generation to generation at least slightly, but that does not mean that male gaze is any less present. I agree with Devereaux that this observation permeates the majority of people’s beliefs about beauty. This also means that our ability to talk about and describe beauty is coded in the masculine gaze and language. In order to discuss beauty we use words that are used and have been used for a long time to describe the masculine understanding of beauty. What is beautiful and the words to label something beautiful are tainted by the male gaze.

            Perhaps this is rather white masculine of me, or simply naïve of me, but if we were able to strip ourselves of the masculine gaze and any other such gaze we could see the beautiful, not as a subjective concept, but something objective. This may in fact not be possible, because it may be well impossible to strip oneself of one’s subjectivity and therefore not be able to have an unbiased gaze. On the other hand, stripping the male gaze may be impractical due to the lack of some actual and relevant concept of beauty that this gaze produces. This concept of beauty might be so disingenuous that it no longer really means anything or has no value. This would entail some definition of beauty similar to ‘beauty is some property of object-ness.’ The fact that something has the property of being an object necessitates that it has the property of beauty as well. While this definition may seem useless and futile, perhaps this is the starting point to build up an objective understanding of beauty.

            I am not sure that I can at this point take this concept of objective beauty any further myself. However, I think that Immanuel Kant’s judgments of taste can add more to the restriction and clarification of objective beauty. Of course, Kant would never agree to the use of his judgments of taste in a discussion of objective beauty because he argues that all claims about beauty are subjective. Despite this, his explanation of the three judgments of taste - the agreeable, beautiful, and good – might add some level of clarification to an objective beauty. The agreeable is that which is sensational/feeling and therefore irrational. This would include the taste of some food, i.e. ‘sugar tastes good.’ The good is a taste that is based on the concept of that object and consequently rational. Food as a concept is necessary for you and therefore good to eat. Both of these judgments of taste are useful and interested pleasures. For Kant, the beautiful falls into a concept of disinterested pleasure. The beautiful does not have anything at stake, whereas judgments of the good and the agreeable do. I think that it is in this disinterested state of pleasure that the objective understanding of beauty may reside. In combination with the stripped gaze in the section above, beauty is therefore a property of an object that exhibits a disinterested pleasure and that one can only see through an unbiased gaze.