Is beauty in the object, the beholder, or a jury of experts?
Weighing a grapefruit is objective; liking its taste is personal. Calling it beautiful sits awkwardly between the two, grounded in feeling yet claiming everyone should agree. Philosophers call this tension the antinomy of taste, and one popular escape route says beauty is settled by trained judges rather than by any single viewer.
Beauty is usually described as the quality that makes something pleasurable to perceive, whether a landscape, a face or a painting. Alongside truth and goodness it is often counted among the three fundamental concepts of human understanding. The traditional position, objectivism, holds that a view is beautiful whether or not anyone looks at it, so disagreement reflects a lack of taste. Subjectivism arrived later in Western thought, helped by John Locke's split between qualities an object has in itself and powers it has to produce ideas in us.
Each extreme sacrifices an intuition. If beauty is purely subjective, genuine disagreement becomes hard to explain; if purely objective, its link to feeling vanishes. David Hume suggested that the sense of taste can be trained and that expert verdicts converge over time, which points toward an intersubjective standard set by a community of judges. Ideal-observer theories refine this, asking how a seasoned critic would respond. The weak spot is that experienced critics still sometimes disagree.
The classical conception, most fully spelled out in the Italian Renaissance, locates beauty in proportion: parts fitting together into a harmonious whole, as with symmetry in the human body. Critics complain that 'harmony' merely swaps one vague word for another. Alexander Baumgarten hoped empirical research would uncover laws of beauty, and some pinned hopes on the golden ratio, but as of 2003 no general definition had emerged.
Hedonist accounts tie beauty to pleasure. Thomas Aquinas described it as what pleases simply in being apprehended, and Kant traced the pleasure to a harmonious play between understanding and imagination. Such views must allow mixed pleasure, since a tragic story can be beautiful, and must distinguish disinterested enjoyment of a view from delight at its real estate value. Kant also separated free beauty from adherent beauty, the kind tied to function, as with an ox that is handsome as an ox but not as a horse. G. E. Moore defined beauty through intrinsic value, letting unseen things count as beautiful.
Source: Beauty
