Against A Particular Aesthetic Relativism

A lot of smart people I know do not think beauty is objective, while I do. These are not your undergraduate relativists, whom believe that beauty is objective, as well as truth and morality. No, these are people who agree truth and morality is objective, even if sometimes they cannot provide a grounding for it, yet also believe beauty is subjective, or relative. 

A thing is objective if the truth of it does not depend on a subject. So, for example, 2+2=4 is objectively true, even if everyone believed it, no one believed it, or there were no persons at all. A thing is relative or subjective if the truth of the thing depends on the subject. So, if we were to ask Person A what Incident X means, and Person B what incident X means, they can give two different answers and both can be true. Ask Sally what the car crash she experienced meant, she may say that it means life is meaningful, while Harry may say, having been in the same car with Sally, that life is meaningless. In their own different contextual background, this may be a rational. In sum, we can say that what this car crash means to Harry and Sally is subjective. 

Beauty is different from more the obvious examples of objective things, like math and morality. I can talk to you about mathematical formulas, abstract in my mind, and follow you through your line of mathematical reasoning. I need not experience you writing any numbers for me on a chalkboard or anything like that. I make judgments just from what you tell me. We can also talk about moral reasoning, and talk about hypothetical situations. Without having actually experienced any particular situation, we can talk rationally about what a good action or a bad action may be. Beauty, however, is not like math and morality in this sense. You cannot talk to me about a particular case of something allegedly beautiful and then upon hearing of this case, make a judgment of my own whether this case exemplifies beauty or not. I can with the case of math and morality, where you can present to me a case secondhand, and upon hearing of it second hand, I can proclaim judgment on that case. It seems a case of beauty is something that must be experienced first hand in order to make a judgment on. 

This distinction may be the reason some people erroneously say beauty is subjective, for it does have one thing in common with things that are really subjective, which is, it needs to be experienced by the subject. They infer that since relative truths require a subject experiencing a phenomenon, and beauty requires a subject experiencing a phenomenon, beauty is then relative. But I argue all things that are subjective require a subject experiencing a phenomenon, but not all things that require a subject experiencing a phenomenon are subjective. 

I think most people would agree that taste in ice cream is relative. Whether Sally likes chocolate and Harry likes strawberry, we do not really say one is right and the other wrong. And it is necessary for Harry and Sally, the subjects, to experience the flavors of chocolate and strawberry. This is a clear case of the necessity of the subject experiencing that flavorful phenomenon. But there are other cases where in order to make a judgment on something, it needs to be experienced first hand, though we wouldn’t say its truth is subjective. Say Sally is blind, and Harry tries to describe to her what yellow looks like. Harry says, bananas are yellow. Sally then gains sight, and looks at banana and finally understands what yellow is, and what not yellow is (like blue). While it was necessary for Sally to experience a yellow banana first hand to say whether or not bananas are yellow, I don’t imagine most of us are prepared to say the color of a banana is subjective, that its truth depends on the subject experiencing it. 

So, it is true that in order for one to make a judgment about beauty, it needs to be experienced first hand, but that is not alone sufficient for it to be subjective.