Beauty

« preference as a socio-psychological phenomenon and as a variably rational or nonrational part of life.

Generally, subjectivists in aesthetics, like those in ethics, retain the usual value terms but reinterpret them as avowing, expressing or soliciting preferences.

In contrast, aesthetic realists seek to identify the property or state of affairs that beauty consists in and to explain how it can be known. Many issues are common to aesthetic realism and subjectivism.

For instance: (1) What is the range of things to which terms of beauty can be meaningfully applied? Some take beauty to be a transcendental, in the medieval sense of being a category that is applicable to everything.

Others deny that it applies to certain classes.

Flavours, scents, bodily sensations, thoughts, theories, abstractions, virtues and even natural objects are excluded by one thinker or another.

Some allege that the proper referent of terms of beauty is never a physical object but an appearance or ‘semblance' .

(2) To what extent can aesthetic value be subsumed under the beautiful? Are the sublime, the pretty, the cute, the witty and the tragic species or degree- ranges of beauty, or are they distinct values? (3) To what extent may things of different types be meaningfully compared in respect of beauty? Parrots of a given species may be judged beautiful relative to one other, but can they be ranked against horses or houses? If not, can the beautiful be a single category of appraisal? (4) How determinate can judgments of beauty be when many factors enter into the case? On the face of it we stand on firmer ground in judging that a musical work is beautifully tender or sprightly than when we pass a summative judgment on the total ensemble of its qualities.

This has an obvious impact on comparisons: Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth symphonies are replete with beautiful aspects and moments, but can we sum these so exactly as to say which work is more beautiful? 3 Beauty as an intrinsic property The simplest form of realism about beauty takes it to be an intrinsic or nonrelational property with strong de facto and de jure ties to love.

ForPlato andPlotinus it is a supersensible abstract Form, better exemplified by abstractions than by concrete particulars, and supremely exemplified by itself.

Acquaintance with beauty begins in commerce with particulars, but only pure thought, on the model of mathematical and moral intuition and demonstration, can elevate the opinions gained through acquaintance to the level of knowledge.

Though their theoretical framework does not by itself entail particular normative principles, Platonically-minded thinkers usually favour Apollonian values of order, clarity, harmony and balance as opposed to Dionysian values of profusion, sensuality and vehemence. A basic question left unanswered by theories of this type concerns the nature of the property of beauty. NeitherPlato nor Plotinus offer to identify the property of beauty, and in their writings it tends to acquire a mystical air, due to the obscure nature of its purer exemplars (the Forms) and the extreme breadth of its range.

The latter makes it difficult to imagine how any nonrelational property could account for all the indicated sorts of beauty, and the difficulty is compounded by suggestions of a single, universal rank-ordering.

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