Beauty

6. Subjectivism and relativism regarding beauty

Subjectivist theories of beauty, while relieved of the commitment to the identity and ‘knowability’ of beauty, raise important problems involving the rationality of aesthetic preference. If a judgment of beauty, taken as avowing or expressing an aesthetic pro-attitude, can be counted unjustified if based on error or ignorance regarding its object, then aesthetic subjectivism can impute fault without implying that beauty is a property of anything. Is it amenable to principles of rationality beyond that point? Can it justify favouring consistency in aesthetic attitudes over time or the subsumption of particular attitudes under attitudes of wide scope? If people generally concur in an error-free aesthetic attitude regarding a thing, does that fact give one a reason for suspicion about one’s own dissenting but equally error-free attitude?

Relativism holds that beauty varies with cultures or ‘taste-publics’ without collapsing into personal preference. A version close to the dispositional account in §4 could be obtained by relativizing the beauty-disposition to the maximal discrimination-capacities attainable in distinct cultures, especially if some neural explanation of the difference could be found – following the analogy of sensory colour, which is vulnerable to the same relativization if different cultures are found to have different but equally acute colour-sensibilities. Typically, however, relativists tend towards a notion of aesthetic taste so malleable as to leave no chance of a quasi-realist account – without, it must be observed, offering anything like compelling evidence. An alternative explanation of cultural difference as a specialization-phenomenon is at least as plausible. On this (realist) view, cultures develop special competences in distinct ranges of beauty, without there being any incompatibility among the values most reliably assessed by the respective cultures.