#1002 Is Beauty an Objective Feature of Reality?

Dr. craig’s response

While I know little about aesthetic philosophy, Nourdine, I do believe that aesthetic values, like moral values, are objective and that I know this on the same basis: in aesthetic experience, as in moral experience, I apprehend an objective reality that forces itself upon me and I have, moreover, no defeater of the veridicality of that experience. Just as some things are really good and not merely thought to be good, some things are truly beautiful and not merely thought to be beautiful.

Now it does seem to me that you are right that aesthetic properties are not properties of physical things themselves. If I look at a beautiful chair from the bottom, it does not look beautiful. If I look at beautiful mountain scenery, beauty does not seem to be a property of the rocks and trees, for if viewed too closely, they are not beautiful. Pachelbel’s Canon in D is so beautiful, but obviously beauty is not a property of notes on a page or sound waves through the air. A beautiful waltz or slow Foxtrot performed by Jonathan Crossley and the ballroom goddess Lyn Marriner is incredibly beautiful, but where does the beauty of their performance lodge? What has the property of beauty in cases like these?

We might say that what is beautiful is my visual field, what I am seeing, the appearance of the world to me. That is objective and anyone having a similar visual field should concur in the judgement that what he is seeing is beautiful. But that doesn’t seem to apply to non-visual examples. I’m inclined to think that we are confusing true predications with the ascription of a property, an equivalence which we ought not to accept. We can accept the objectivity of aesthetic truths without thinking that they ascribe aesthetic properties inhering in objects.

I don’t know if these thoughts are on the right track, but I think what is clear is that the alternative to beauty’s being a property inhering in objects is not, as you suggest, that it is just “an emotion in the mind.” On your suggested view beauty is subjective, just as fear is subjective. Yes, it is an objective fact that a person is experiencing fear; nonetheless, fear is a merely subjective state of his consciousness. The object of his fear is not really fearsome, for people may regard it in different ways. Some people, for example, are afraid of snakes, but others like snakes. So fear is just a subjective state of mind. To say that aesthetic values are emotions in the mind seems to me as unacceptable as the claim that moral goodness or badness are just emotions in the mind.