Philosophy is often said to be concerned with three ‘big’ issues – Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Of these, Beauty, while not the most difficult, certainly presents its own unique problems.

The most common approach to the question of beauty is the subjectivist view. This is popularly expressed as ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. When I say something is beautiful I am only expressing a personal judgement and that is all anyone can do. This view is obviously false to anyone who believes that beauty is more than simply a matter of personal preference, but is difficult to effectively refute.

Lets assume that two people agree that something is beautiful and that we then ask what is it about that thing that makes it beautiful? But as soon as we ask this question (and there is no reason not to ask it) we move from subjective preference to inter-subjective agreement and, importantly, a move to discuss the qualities of the object itself. What is it about that object (a face, a work of art, a sunset, a body, a soul) that makes it beautiful? At whatever point where we specify the features of a thing to be beautiful, we are attending to the features of the thing itself. Beauty is no longer simply personal preference but resides in the object we describe as beautiful.

At this point it will be argued that what we are saying is beautiful in the object simply reflects agreed norms or values about what is beautiful – for example, in a society or a historical period. On this view, ascriptions of beauty are said to be relative to the places or times in which people live. This is the theory of aesthetic relativism. This is a popular theory within the Marxist ideology that all ascriptions of truth, goodness, or beauty are ideologies of a ruling elite. On this theory, to describe something as beautiful is simply to apply a ‘label’ that has been determined by a particular social or cultural elite.

While this view is quite illogical when applied to theories of truth (the statement ‘truth is relative to social conditions’ is either itself true according to social conditions – and thus has no reason to be believed independently of those conditions – or it is true independently of social conditions – it is objectively true – and thus refutes itself), when applied to theories of goodness and beauty it appears to have more plausibility. With regard to beauty, the question is further complicated by the fact that it seems necessary to have a certain degree of knowledge and training (cultural education) to recognise the beauty of a thing.

What can be said in favour of the objectivist position? Initially this is a very strange position, for it can be expressed as the view that beauty is a quality of a thing. But if this is true, then if we were to take this quality out of a work of art (like we might take colour out of a painting), it is impossible to see exactly what has been taken out. A different way of expressing this position is to say that the ‘beauty’ of a thing is its ‘ideal form’, its most typical and exemplary manifestation. This is a position that reaches back to Plato and in more modern terms can be found in the aesthetic theory of John Anderson. Anderson argued that the perception of the ideal form of a thing is an aesthetic perception, a perception of the thing’s beauty. This position can be further developed by arguing, as Brian Birchall argued, that the aesthetic experience is an experience (or phenomenology) that is beyond our normal experiences of the world. In the experience of everyday life we see things in terms of cause and effect, practical application, personal desire, etc. This modality of everyday experience interferes with our perception of the ideal form or essences of things themselves. We need to shift our phenomenological modality to appreciate the thematic essence or beauty of the thing itself.