A Case for Beauty
June 15, 2009 Posted by Roger Overton
Last week Amy posted over at the STR blog on the need for Christians to defend God’s goodness and beauty, and rather conveniently I was at the same time thinking about this post. We all know that postmodernism has deeply affected the public understanding of truth in our time. At this point, Christians have ample resources to be able to respond to relativistic claims regarding truth and morality. Postmodernism’s attack on the objectivity of beauty has been just as brutal, but has not generated the same degree of response. Even many Christians believe that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
In their book, The Love of Wisdom, Steven Cowan and James Spiegel argue for the truth of aesthetic objectivism. What follows is a summary/adaptation of their arguments.
According to aesthetic subjectivism, no one thing can be objectively better (more beautiful) than another thing. However, this goes against our common sense. In first grade I finger-painted a penguin next to an igloo and won first place in my class. On one hand, such a determination would not be possible without some objective standard for beauty. If all art is truly as beautiful as any other, everyone is the class should have received first place ribbons, but I was the only one who did.
On the other hand, I have since matured in my artistic abilities. In high school I oil-painted a rather decent version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Granted my version is only a simpleton’s rendition of Munch’s masterpiece, but my first grade finger-painting pales in comparison. If aesthetic subjectivism is true, we have no right to say my copy of “The Scream” is superior to my finger-painted penguin (trust me, the penguin is not that great).
Can you tell which natural occurrence is beautiful?
A non-art example is to compare what has been dubbed “The World’s Ugliest Dog” with the spectacle of The Northern Lights. The vast majority of people would agree that the dog is, in fact, ugly and that The Northern Lights are beautiful. The argument is not that because the vast majority of people believe one thing is more beautiful than another objective beauty is therefore true. Rather, we are simply saying that the subjectivist perspective cannot account for what appears to be a common-sense distinction and this is, therefore, one indication that “aesthetic qualities (whether good or bad) are public facts about the world, not merely private preferences.”
Along the same lines, we can look to the history of art to add the argument. Critics throughout cultural history have agreed about the greatness of certain works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Michelangelo’s David. “If aesthetic subjectivism is true, then the convergence of opinion by hosts of art critics is mere coincidence.”
Another argument rests in our shared experience of debating the quality of particular works of art. How often, after seeing a movie with a group of friends, do we find ourselves arguing over the merits of the movie? Has anyone ever given you a reason to change your mind or opinion about some aspect of a movie? “To debate an issue is to try to convince someone of the truth of a view. And to admit one was wrong in a judgment about an artwork is to acknowledge that aesthetic truth is independent of one’s preferences. Only aesthetic objectivism can make sense of these things.”
Cowan’s and Spiegel’s final argument rests on the shared used of certain concepts and terms such as “beautiful,” “sublime,” “gaudy,” and “elegant.” If aesthetic qualities are completely subjective, we would not be able to use these terms to communicate anything of meaning to those around us. When we refer to The Northern Lights as beautiful, those who hear us understand that we believe there is something objectively pleasurable about the spectacle.
As Christians, we must embrace the objective value of beauty if we are to believe that God is in any way beautiful. If aesthetics subjectivism is true, one would be just as correct to call God ugly as they would be to call Him beautiful. More on God and beauty later…
Related posts:
- Beauty in the Bible
- Creating Beauty Is Not So Easy
- More Than One True Meaning?: A Case For 'Multi-Objectivism'
- The Virtuous Case for Christ & C.S. Lewis
- Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye?
- Liberal Feelings vs. Judeo-Christian Values
Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Roger's Posts
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June 17th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Great stuff, Roger. I like your tie of beauty to the created order. I think you’re on to something there.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:57 am
[...] The A-Team Blog: A Case for Beauty by Roger Overton Last week Amy posted over at the STR blog on the need for Christians to defend God’s goodness and [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Hey Roger:
Excellent post, and I think a timely one because our culture is getting uglier day by day, precisely because of this lack of understanding of the relationship of beauty to objective truth. A culture that does not accept objective truth in general will tend to reject it in its art as well. The result is cultural and artistic expression that is progressively less beautiful. This is a topic I would like to take up on my blog as well sometime.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Why are people praising this post? Ideology? Because it certainly isn’t the soundness of the argumentation.
Beauty is not objective because it doesn’t predict anything except how we subjectively feel. Same goes for morality. Not so for physics or chemistry or biology or mathematics. These fields make predictions that are independent of subjectivity. There’s zero evidence for the objectivity of aesthetics or morality, and plenty of evidence for it being subjective.
Moreover, our experience of beauty is easily explained by subjectivism.
First of all, we tend to agree on what is pretty because we’re the same species or come from the same culture. Easy.
Second, if you and I see a movie together, and you notice that a character reminds you of a local pedophile, but I don’t notice this, then you may dislike the movie while I like it. When you later tell me about your observation, and I recognize your observation as having merit (that similarity *would* be objective), then my recognition of that fact will adversely affect my liking of the movie. This is because we share genetic and cultural aesthetic preferences, in this case, a dislike of pedophiles. Again, an easy explanation.
And, finally, would I understand what beautiful meant if there were no objective beauty? Yes, if we shared the same subjectivity. But we don’t even need to share that much. If you think something is beautiful, you’ll get pleasure from looking at it, right? That’s an objectively verifiable condition, supported by statements from you like “I like to look at aurorae,” and by observations like pupil dilation. Same goes for gastronomic taste. I know what you mean by delicious even when we don’t agree on what is delicious because deliciousness has implications for behavior. (If there were no correlation between deliciousness and behavior, then we really wouldn’t know what the term meant.)
The same arguments apply to morality.
(BTW, a lot of postmodernism is rubbish, but that doesn’t make you right.)
July 4th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Hi Doctorlogic,
I understand that people are praising this post because they believe the arguments are sound. I don’t think it’s fair to accuse them of being motivated purely by ideology simply because you disagree with their conclusions.
Since you’re an empiricist, we’ll probably be arguing past each other here, but I’ll give it a shot.
I should clarify that my case is not that everything we call beautiful is objectively beautiful. There is a subjective beauty that we often confuse with the objective sense. The subjective beauty is much like my love for mint chocolate chip ice cream. There’s nothing universally desirable about the flavor because not everyone has the same tastes. I am arguing, however, that there are some things that are beautiful regardless of taste. If someone fails to recognize beauty in such a case, it is not because beauty is entirely subjective, but because their perception of beauty is skewed. Likewise, not everyone understands the truthfulness of complex mathematical solutions, but their failure to understand does not make the solutions any less true.
First, we’re not all from the same culture. Part of the argument is the regardless of culture, the majority of people agree about what is beautiful and what is ugly. Many Westerners find Eastern art beautiful. You attribute this to us all being human, but that doesn’t strike me a sufficient explanation. We all have different tastes on subjective matters, but beauty seems to be rather universal.
I’m not sure that predictability is a sufficient or necessary condition for objective truth, but beauty is predictive when certain standards are followed. Beauty tends to strike a balance between complexity and simplicity, unity and distinction, originality and resourcefulness, etc. Much like a mathematician must follow certain rules to arrive at the appropriate solution, so an artist must follow certain standards to create something that is objectively beautiful. Simply because we cannot accurately describe every aspect of what those standards are (though we have some understandings), does not mean the standards or objective beauty do not exist.
In regards to the second argument, you’re confusing the objective and subjective qualities. Whether one likes a movie is different from whether a movie is good or bad. I like the movie Constantine, but I do not consider it to be a very good movie. How you might feel about a pedophile in a movie has no bearing on whether it is aesthetically good or not. What most people argue about after a movie is whether the effects, plot or acting was good. There are standards for what make these things good or bad independent of our perception of them.
For the third argument, you’re assuming that the effect defines beauty. Beauty does effect pleasure in us, but something is not beautiful because is effects pleasure. This again is similar to mathematics. We know that 2 + 2 = 4 because we can see that the law of addition was successfully applied to the problem. But 2 + 2 does not equal 4 because we perceive that it does, it equals 4 regardless of our perception.
I do want to thank you for pointing out some things I should have clarified in the original post. I’m glad we can at least agree that a lot of postmodernism is rubbish, even if it’s for different reasons.
July 27th, 2009 at 6:52 am
[...] few weeks ago I posted on a philosophical case for objective beauty. I promised to return to the subject and address what the Bible says about beauty. The Bible never [...]