BREAKING DOWN AESTHETICS: Is Aesthetics a Subjective or Objective concept?

All of us must have heard the phrase “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.” Many agree that Aesthetics is a matter of subjectivity. However, is there an objectivity in aesthetics?

The concept of Taste and Aesthetics:

The concept from the concept of Taste. The concept of taste is the argument that every individual holds a certain subjective interest or finds pleasure (liking) to aesthetics. What they find “aesthetically pleasing” depends on their taste.

David Hume, A scottish philosopher of the 18th century proposes that feeling, not thought, informs us that an object is beautiful or ugly. ?For David Hume, taste is a subjective feeling with a standard found within the beholders.

Meanwhile Immanuel Kant. A German philosopher of the 18th century proposes the concept of aesthetic judgment meaning a judgment which is based on feeling, and in particular on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The first section of Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”, the “Analytic of the Beautiful”, aims to analyze the notion of a judgment of beauty or judgment of taste.

Kant analyses the notion of a judgment of beauty by considering it under four headings, or “moments”

First Moment: Judgments of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure. The pleasure, however, is of a distinctive kind: it is disinterested, which means that it does not depend on the subject’s having a desire for the object, nor does it generate such a desire. The fact that judgments of beauty are based on feeling rather than “objective sensation”

Second Moment: Judgments of beauty have, or make a claim to, “universality” or “universal validity”. That is, in making a judgment of beauty about an object, one takes it that everyone else who perceives the object ought also to judge it to be beautiful, and, relatedly, to share one’s pleasure in it. However, judgments of beauty cannot, despite their universal validity, be proved: there are no rules by which someone can be compelled to judge that something is beautiful.

The third Moment is a concept of purposiveness and the fourth moment is the idea of necessity. Further information regarding the aforementioned concepts will be given on referenced links.

Karl Amerkis (An American philosopher born in 1947), has argued that in spite of Kant’s claim that judgments of beauty are “subjectively grounded”, they are nonetheless objective in the same sense that judgments of colour and other secondary qualities are objective.

To summarize, For David Hume, taste is a subjective feeling with a standard found within the beholders.? For Immanuel Kant, taste is subjective, but beautiful objects present themselves as having universal appeal.

However Kant believed in the objectivity of taste as a principle or potential, and he postulated his belief on what he called a sensus communis, a sense or faculty that all human beings exercised similarly in esthetic experience. Kant claims that judgments of taste rely on a “subjective principle” which “determines only by feeling rather than concepts”, and that such a principle must be regarded as a “common sense” (sensus communis).

Conclusion:

Though the answer to our question seems to lean towards aesthetics being subjective, I can’t help but wonder how almost all (if not everyone) commonly perceive nature as beautiful. I came across an answer to our question in quora that the objectivity in aesthetics comes from the neurogenetic similarity of us while the subjectivity comes from the taste, linguistic and cultural differences.?

Proportion, Order and Harmony being the core of success and vitality of any artform in Fine arts. Balance, Rhythm and other principles of design contribute to the aesthetic value of any design. Generations of a civilization could perceive something as beautiful if it had been taught and influenced for many years to perceive it in such a way. Music with harmony, a colorful peacock, a rhythm, a skillfully made sculpture etc are commonly agreed to be perceived as beautiful by the people. The common agreement of certain specific traits increasing the aesthetic value of something gets us closer to a set of objective principles which influence a majority to perceive something as beautiful or adds up the aesthetic value of it while aesthetics on a border perspective ultimately remains subjective due to the theory of taste.

These traits bring us closer to the principles of Aesthetics.

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Reference

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-aesthetics/

https://www.artblog.net/post/2018/07/objectivity/#:~:text=Taste%20is%20the%20ability%20to,objective%20because%20quality%20is%20objective .