Z
Variable Constant
This was in response to comments apparently made by Bubblefish in another thread. Specifically, he made the claim that the statement, "Angelina Jolie is a beautiful woman," is an objective statement. He has further claimed that beauty is at the same time BOTH objective and subjective.
Since I have him on 'ignore', I have no idea where else he may have taken his claims.
However...
I think the issue of beauty deserves further discussion. It's interesting to note that philosophers have been steadily moving away from an objective point of view on beauty since the late 16th-early 17th century. Plato, of course, envisioned beauty as an ideal, a thing which existed apart from perceived objects, and to which perceived objects could be compared. For Plato, beauty was absolutely objective.
As our world has reduced in relative size, and more populations have met and exchanged ideas, the thought of an objective standard of beauty has begun to fade away. In Plato's time, all he knew were his own people, and perhaps a few exotic strangers or near neighbors. In other words, he shared the same preferences as those around him, by and large, and those who didn't share his preferences were simply wrong.
But globalization and the Internet, if nothing else, should dispel this idea of 'objective beauty', 'objective good', etc.
I think it's possible to demonstrate that beauty cannot be objective through logic. Let's see....
I'm no good at crafting proper formal arguments, but I'll make a semi-formal structure here, and hope someone else can clean it up a bit:
If we are given that beauty is an objective concept, then we mean that a thing is considered beautiful if it possessive certain objective qualities (Rome mentions symmetry, for example). Objective qualities are those which hold true for all observers. Let us say that a set of given objective qualities which determines beauty is called an aesthetic (NOTE: I'm not sure if this is the right term or not, but let's use it here as such - or someone can correct me with the proper term).
Let us also say that an objective statement is one that can stand independent of viewpoints. "Bob thinks squares have four corners" possesses a viewpoint, but if we remove this, it becomes "Squares have four corners", which is an objective statement.
Now, we know that, according to Rome's aesthetic, Angelina Jolie is a beautiful woman.
However, according to the aesthetic of the Pai Dong, along the Thai-Burma border, Angelina Jolie is not a beautiful woman. For one thing, her neck is entirely too short.
In order to make these both, according to these definitions, objective statements, we must remove reference to the perceptors involved.
Hence, we are reduced to two statements.
Angelina Jolie is a beautiful woman.
Angelina Jolie is not a beautiful woman.
Both statements are now objective and true.
However, both statements now contradict each other.
One resolution is to clarify, by adding back in the subjective portions; but doing so renders both statements subjective once again!
Another resolution is to declare one or the other aesthetic to be wrong. However, this seems like thought-police activity to me... By what right does one person declare their aesthetic superior to any other?
A third solution is to examine the aesthetic for common factors, and make a supercedent meta-aesthetic. However, this might end up coming up with no common factors - which would lead us to understand that beauty is dependent entirely upon the observer! - or, worse, reduce us to one or two common factors - factors probably also shared by women considered ugly (such as, they have hair and teeth and the usual number of eyes), reducing the meaning of beauty to meaninglessness.
So claiming that beauty is objective leads to a contradiction of statements, as seen above, with a few unsatisfactory choices for resolving the contradiction.
Since I have him on 'ignore', I have no idea where else he may have taken his claims.
However...
I think the issue of beauty deserves further discussion. It's interesting to note that philosophers have been steadily moving away from an objective point of view on beauty since the late 16th-early 17th century. Plato, of course, envisioned beauty as an ideal, a thing which existed apart from perceived objects, and to which perceived objects could be compared. For Plato, beauty was absolutely objective.
As our world has reduced in relative size, and more populations have met and exchanged ideas, the thought of an objective standard of beauty has begun to fade away. In Plato's time, all he knew were his own people, and perhaps a few exotic strangers or near neighbors. In other words, he shared the same preferences as those around him, by and large, and those who didn't share his preferences were simply wrong.
But globalization and the Internet, if nothing else, should dispel this idea of 'objective beauty', 'objective good', etc.
I think it's possible to demonstrate that beauty cannot be objective through logic. Let's see....
I'm no good at crafting proper formal arguments, but I'll make a semi-formal structure here, and hope someone else can clean it up a bit:
If we are given that beauty is an objective concept, then we mean that a thing is considered beautiful if it possessive certain objective qualities (Rome mentions symmetry, for example). Objective qualities are those which hold true for all observers. Let us say that a set of given objective qualities which determines beauty is called an aesthetic (NOTE: I'm not sure if this is the right term or not, but let's use it here as such - or someone can correct me with the proper term).
Let us also say that an objective statement is one that can stand independent of viewpoints. "Bob thinks squares have four corners" possesses a viewpoint, but if we remove this, it becomes "Squares have four corners", which is an objective statement.
Now, we know that, according to Rome's aesthetic, Angelina Jolie is a beautiful woman.
However, according to the aesthetic of the Pai Dong, along the Thai-Burma border, Angelina Jolie is not a beautiful woman. For one thing, her neck is entirely too short.
In order to make these both, according to these definitions, objective statements, we must remove reference to the perceptors involved.
Hence, we are reduced to two statements.
Angelina Jolie is a beautiful woman.
Angelina Jolie is not a beautiful woman.
Both statements are now objective and true.
However, both statements now contradict each other.
One resolution is to clarify, by adding back in the subjective portions; but doing so renders both statements subjective once again!
Another resolution is to declare one or the other aesthetic to be wrong. However, this seems like thought-police activity to me... By what right does one person declare their aesthetic superior to any other?
A third solution is to examine the aesthetic for common factors, and make a supercedent meta-aesthetic. However, this might end up coming up with no common factors - which would lead us to understand that beauty is dependent entirely upon the observer! - or, worse, reduce us to one or two common factors - factors probably also shared by women considered ugly (such as, they have hair and teeth and the usual number of eyes), reducing the meaning of beauty to meaninglessness.
So claiming that beauty is objective leads to a contradiction of statements, as seen above, with a few unsatisfactory choices for resolving the contradiction.
