Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder?

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Beauty as a concept, is a topic under aesthetics. It is one of the controversial topics in philosophy during the ancient and medieval era. Philosophers today still examine this concept to see if beauty can be properly defined.

The problem with this concept is whether beauty is subjective — in the eye of the beholder’ or whether it is objective.

Aristotle once argued that a poorly-made golden shield is less beautiful than a perfectly-made toilet. Suggesting that beauty is a quality that is found in perfection irrespective of what it is. 

David Hume, an empiricist maintains that beauty is a subjective matter and something that resides within the minds of those who contemplate it. He argues:

"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others." Source

Hume position perfectly supports the 'in the eye of beholder argument' which suggests that when the question of what is beautiful and what is not is raised, the judgement is personal and true for each judge.

If Hume or those who think beauty is personal and in the eye of the beholder are to be taken seriously, it follows then that the word 'beauty' is meaningless and simply an expression of individual personal appraisal. Logically, it follows then that when you say something is beautiful, you are not making a universal claim that is verifiable by all or acceptable by all but rather, you are simply expressing your feelings of what you consider beauty - a personal expression.

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To argue on the other hand that beauty is entirely objective and independent of the perceivers is to argue that beauty is beauty irrespective of the perceivers.  

St Augustine asks whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). This suggests that a thing that delight us is beautiful. This answer seem wrong because anything can delight us and has nothing to do with beauty. I might be delighted by horrific killings or seeing other people suffer, can it be said that this is beautiful because it delights me? I don't think so.

What is beauty? Can beauty be known or perceived without being a thing in the eye of the beholder? Should beauty be determined by the perceiver alone? That is, can there be a beauty even if no one perceives it? Perhaps, a rose can be beautiful somewhere without being perceived by any human being but is this rose truly beautiful without a perceiver? Can beauty or beautiful things exist without people to call them beautiful? 

It is true that there are some natural things we call beautiful which logically suggests that nature itself can produce beauty; if this is so, can we say there are beautiful things out there independent of our perception?

The problem with tying beauty with the beholder is that it makes it irrelevant. Irrelevant in the sense that there is no beauty at all but simply what we perceive. I can call something 'A' beauty while you can call same thing ugly. It is a matter of our perceptions and in the end the idea of beauty becomes vague.

Nothing is truly beautiful if it is tied to our perception. Beauty as a concept ought to go beyond what we perceive because we are not always sincere with our judgements and tend to use sentiment (the main problem we have with judging anything) to determine a beautiful thing.

How best can we determine beauty or beautiful things without necessarily tying them to the beholder because tying beauty to what the beholder sees makes the idea vague.

        

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