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.

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.)

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.