The Beholder Does Not Define Beauty
The concept of subjective beauty is an Enlightenment subversion
In yesterday’s discussion about the correct rating of a Hollywood celebrity, a number of people erroneously asserted that beauty is subjective, and that the concept of a perfect “10” depended entirely upon the individual opinions of men. This is an assertion that is not only false and ignorant, but it is more than wrong, it is a fundamental category error as well as a philosophical inversion.
There is a oft-cited phrase about beauty being “in the eye of the beholder” which presumably is the foundation for this belief in subjective beauty. But the phrase is not derived from classical philosophy nor is it a Biblical proverb, as some might imagine, it is an Enlightenment concept. Here are a few of the first expressions of it, one of which is attributed to William Shakespeare in Love’s Labour Lost, published in 1588:
Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues
Ben Franklin articulated a similar sentiment in his Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1741:
Beauty, like supreme dominion
Is but supported by opinion
As did Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1742:
Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
Notice that the Humian redefinition of beauty not only asserts its quality depends upon the observer, but insists that its entire existence is only in the observer’s mind; beauty has no independent or intrinsic quality of its own. Which, of course, tends to contradict the way in which scientific researchers have recently quantified the link between perceived female beauty and the Golden Ratio of ~1.618.
