Short response 2

It seems to me that beauty cannot exist without a beholder; that is, I do not believe there is a property in artworks that makes them beautiful without a human to experience it. Consider the traditional styles of painting; beauty is often something that can be described mathematically. Is beauty inherent in the mathematical relationships? No. It is rather that these particular mathematical relationships are those which happen to generally elicit responses consistent with experiencing great beauty. Music is much the same, being a series of mathematic relationships that give pleasure to our ears. This gives rise to yet another point: different humans will call different things beautiful; they will not all agree. The problem of taste is one that suggests beauty is a subjective concept, not an objective one. It is true that we can often generalize about beauty; many people will agree that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is beautiful, or that a Mozart aria is beautiful, or that the Mona Lisa is beautiful. But many will also disagree. Consider the importance of cultural conditioning, by which I mean the conditioning we receive as we grow and live within a society. Cultural conditioning can mean the difference between knowing that one is supposed to view the Mona Lisa as a woman, and as a beautiful woman, and not knowing that. Recognition is an important part of beauty in many cases.

But we’ve all seen something for the first time (I imagine) and without recognizing it, recognized beauty in it. Why is that? I might appeal again to mathematics, or more plausibly, some sharing of a quality with other objects we do not quickly infer to be similar to the unfamiliar one at hand. So where does that beauty come from? Beauty is the name we have given as a linguistic society, sharing the same words and beyond that the same linguistic history, to a pleasurable feeling that arises in a multitude of contexts. Consider the fact that beauty is quite often applied to other humans, and not just works of art in the traditional sense. This makes it a term applied entirely out of evolutionary mechanisms, the drive towards procreation. This is not, it seems, what is at work when viewing a wonderful painting or a staggering piece of architecture, but the two feelings are, presumably, subsumed under one kind. If so, then could not artistic beauty by linked back to evolutionary mechanisms? Scientists might be able to tell us a story, one day, about how different things become encoded as positive on genes (e.g. why a person has a preference for blond hair over brown, for tall people over short, for warmth over cold, red over blue, beets over sprouts). The mystery to me is not ‘what is beauty’ but ‘why do we find beauty in the things we deem beautiful?’ Answering this question would tell us why each beholder finds beauty in the things they behold. Of course, if beauty were somehow an external, objectively identifiable quantity, what would it be? Something like phlogiston, or ether? It cannot be the math alone, because the math doesn’t appeal to everyone; we’re too different even within our (genetically) narrow species to claim that beauty is the objective and people who disagree are somehow failing to pick up on a truth. Beauty has a reason. I’d like to know what it is!