Beauty

Do we judge a person's palate by whether they appreciate sophisticated beauty? Or do we judge beauty by whether it is appreciated by people with sophisticated palates?

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This question seems to raise an aesthetic version of what has come to be known as the 'Euthyphro Question' (from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro), where it is asked if what is holy is holy because the gods love it, or if the gods love what is holy because it is holy. If one answers that what is holy is holy because the gods love it, one endorses a version of the view that values are created, or even subjective; if one answers that the gods love what is holy because it is holy, one endorses a version of the view that values are discovered, or even objective. (There are, of course, a range of alternatives between these poles, but let's stick to them, since they bring out the issue most sharply.) By parity of reasoning, it might seem that if one believes that the capacity to appreciate beauty reflects the sophistication of one's aesthetic judgment, then it would seem that beauty is independent of the perceiver, discovered by perceivers, and maybe even is objective; if one believes that beauty is constituted by the judgments of perceivers, then it would seem that beauty depends on perceivers and maybe even is subjective. Now it seems to me that one interesting thing about beauty is that while it is akin to other values, in that judgments of beauty can be justified and hence are, in a certain sense, objective; on the other hand, only if one experiences the thing in question, and has a subjective experience of it, is one in a position to judge whether it is beautiful. This may even reflect a difference between aesthetic value and other kinds of value (such as moral or epistemic value). The line that I've presented here is very loosely derived from the position elaborated by Kant, in the first part of his Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the nature of aesthetic judgments.

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