Quote:
Originally Posted by Fallen Angel
Do you think beauty is subjective i.e. in the eye of the beholder, or is it objective?
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You mean: in the eye of the beer-holder?
On a serious note, I think it is both. The very fact that of two people one will sometimes call some person beautiful and another one will say that the same person is ugly, seems to confirm the thesis that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. On the other hand, almost eveyone will say that, for example, the hunchback of Notre Dame is ugly (independently of whether he is just a poorly requisited actor or not), which would appear to confirm the second thesis, namely, that beauty is the objective thing.
I say both views, taken to their extremes, are pretty naive and false. There are some very general standards for beauty which include regular facial features, lack of mutilations or tokens of disease (like eczemes etc). Then there are other, less universal, standards of beauty, which are mainly culturally specific. I think that these are crucial for determining of who is beautiful and who is not, in a given cultural/societal context. Somewhere large hips are favoured, somewhere not etc. Then in the respective cultural context people as individuals, bearing in mind the general standards, make their own choices of who is for them beautiful and who is not. There certain considerations of inner beauty come into play (the look in her eyes etc.), even the way someone speaks or walks can be beautiful for some person and not beautiful or outright ugly for somebody else. Someone can pay more attention to hips and less to facial features, the other one
vice versa etc. In this sense the beauty
is in the eye of the beholder.
However, there is another issue here, namely, of what beauty isn't. Beauty certainly isn't that what is being aggressively advertised by the media as beauty. It is not dependent on beaty contests and their results. Denis de Rougemont in his book
Love in the Western World (
L'amour et l'Occident,good book, I recommend reading it), referring to the modern contests of beauty (Miss, Queen etc.) and to the attempts to apsolutize their results as standards for beauty, calls it some kind of
vulgar(ized) Platonism, whereby the
idea of beauty has been mistaken for some specific fleshly form thereof, chosen between other forms on the ground of some quite arbitrary criteria.
The modern media seek to impose their "beauties" as the standards of beauty in general, as if they were obligatory for everyone. Very often you hear that the winner of some beauty contest is this or that country is being called
the most beatiful woman of the respective country, which is preposterous and perverse.