why beauty is objective

· 2 min read

Trying to grapple with David Deutsch’s idea on why beauty is objective.

  1. Beauty is not random or merely personal preference. When we look at a beautiful flower, a stunning piece of music, or an elegant mathematical proof, we’re not just having arbitrary reactions. There’s something about these objects themselves that creates the experience of beauty.

  2. Beautiful things have “hard-to-vary” qualities Take a beautiful melody. Change one note randomly, and it usually becomes less beautiful. This suggests beauty depends on specific relationships between elements that can’t be arbitrarily changed without diminishing the beauty.

  3. Artists go through conjecture criticism cycles When artists create, they don’t just make random choices. They recognise when something “doesn’t work” and make specific improvements. This process looks remarkably like problem-solving, suggesting they’re working toward objective standards.

  4. We’ve made progress Our understanding of beauty has grown more sophisticated over time. We can appreciate more complex forms of beauty and explain why certain things are beautiful in increasingly precise terms The virtual worlds we create in video games, or the complex music we now create are much more deeper and more beautiful than the drawings on the wall of a cave

If we take the opposite view: beauty is in the eye of the beholder :

  • All aesthetic judgments would be equally valid
  • Artists wouldn’t need to refine their work
  • We couldn’t make progress in aesthetic understanding
  • Changing elements randomly wouldn’t typically reduce beauty

Since none of these consequences hold true, beauty must have an objective component that exists independent of our personal preferences. Beauty isn’t objective in the same way that weight or temperature are objective, but it’s also not merely subjective like a personal preference for chocolate over vanilla. Instead, beauty emerges from specific relationships and solutions to problems that can be recognised across different minds and cultures, even if our perception of it continues to evolve.