IB Philosophy 2.3.3 Beauty and Taste Notes

How Do We Define Beauty?

Objectivism, Subjectivism, and Kant's Synthesis

1. The objectivist tradition holds that beauty is a real property of objects, independent of the observer. Plato argued that beauty is a Form: an eternal, unchanging ideal that beautiful things participate in to varying degrees.
2. In the Symposium, Diotima describes a "ladder of love" ascending from appreciation of a single beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, beautiful souls, beautiful laws, and beautiful knowledge, until finally reaching the Form of Beauty itself, pure, eternal, and unmixed with anything mortal. This ascent shows that for Plato, particular beauties are mere stepping stones toward philosophical truth.
3. The subjectivist tradition counters that beauty is not in the object but in the eye of the beholder. The 18th-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson held that beauty produces a distinctive inner sensation of pleasure in the observer, making beauty fundamentally about the perceiver's response rather than the object's properties.
4. Different observers with different sensory constitutions will naturally disagree. If beauty were objective, we would expect universal agreement, yet aesthetic preferences vary enormously across individuals and cultures.
5. This final topic in Unit 2 brings together the threads of aesthetic experience (2.3.1) and aesthetic judgement (2.3.2) by asking the most fundamental question in aesthetics: "How do we define what is beautiful and what is ugly?" This question has occupied philosophers since antiquity and remains unresolved, making it one of the richest topics in the IB syllabus.
6. The classical tradition following Plato and Aristotle identified beauty with objective properties such as proportion, symmetry, harmony, and order. The golden ratio in architecture and visual art, the mathematical structure of musical harmony, and the symmetrical human form were all cited as evidence that beauty obeys objective principles discoverable by reason.
7. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgement (1790), attempted to bridge objectivism and subjectivism. As examined in 2.3.2, Kant argued that aesthetic judgement involves a free play of imagination and understanding that grounds a claim to universal validity.
8. What 2.3.3 adds is Kant's distinction between two kinds of beauty, and a direct contrast with Hume's empiricist approach to taste.

Ugliness, Everyday Beauty, and Moral Connections

1. Kant distinguished free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) from dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). Free beauty is appreciated without any concept of what the object should be (a flower, an abstract pattern); dependent beauty requires knowing what the object is meant to be (a beautiful horse, a well-designed building).
2. This distinction allows Kant to account for both purely formal and functional beauty.
3. The concept of ugliness has received less philosophical attention than beauty, but it is equally important. Karl Rosenkranz (Aesthetics of Ugliness, 1853) argued that ugliness is not simply the absence of beauty but a positive aesthetic category: it reveals what beauty conceals, the material, the bodily, the chaotic.
4. Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1820) exemplifies how ugliness can achieve aesthetic power: the painting's grotesque distortion and violence produce a visceral response that beautiful art cannot, forcing the viewer to confront the dark underside of human nature.
5. The relationship between beauty and moral goodness has been debated since Plato. The ancient Greeks captured this in the concept of kalokagathia (roughly: 'beautiful-and-good'), which held that physical beauty and moral virtue belong together.
6. A beautiful person was expected to be a good person too. Kant challenged this by insisting that aesthetic judgement is disinterested: beauty pleases without reference to moral goodness, practical utility, or personal desire.
7. Contemporary aesthetics has expanded the concept of beauty beyond traditional fine art. Everyday aesthetics, developed by philosophers such as Yuriko Saito, examines beauty in ordinary objects and experiences: a well-prepared meal, an elegantly designed tool, a tidy room.
8. Saito argues that by confining beauty to fine art, traditional aesthetics ignores the vast majority of our aesthetic lives. Her philosophical move is to show that the same capacities, attention, sensitivity, and judgement, that we bring to galleries operate whenever we notice the satisfying curve of a well-thrown ceramic bowl or the jarring ugliness of suburban sprawl.
9. This challenges the assumption that beauty requires an artist's intention, connecting beauty to craft, design, and everyday life, not just to galleries and concert halls.
10. For IB students, the question of how to define beauty requires engagement with both Kant and Hume (examined in the next section), as well as an ability to use cross-cultural examples that challenge or support universalist and relativist positions. The strongest exam responses will avoid taking a simplistic position and instead analyse the tension between the subjective experience and the claim to universal validity.