![]() ![]() The ancient Greek thinkers, and later the early church fathers, developed a helpful philosophical concept of three transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful. ![]() Aesthetics is always colored by our own experiences and circumstances, but beauty involves far more than brushstrokes on a canvas or certain physical features on a body.īut if we don’t determine the standard for beauty, who does? The same person who determines the standard for everything else-God. To prefer a realistic Rembrandt painting to an impressionistic Monet painting is an aesthetic preference based on fancy and mood, not a judgment of beauty. That people have different aesthetic preferences does not mean there isn’t an absolute standard of beauty. This conviction is built, in part, on a mistaken tendency to conflate two related but distinct concepts- beauty and aesthetic preference (or what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called aesthetic taste). With such diversity of opinion, how can there possibly be an objective standard? Their reasoning is simple: cultures have vastly different conceptions of both physical and artistic beauty. In today’s quasi-postmodern culture, most people-including many Christians-begin with Option 2. Thus, without humans (a “ beholder”), beauty wouldn’t exist. It is not intrinsic to objects and things but a product of our personal experience of objects and things. Option 2: Beauty is a subjective experience. It is in the world waiting to be discovered, a universal standard not dependent on human judgments or opinions. Option 1: Beauty is an objective reality. ![]() We speak of a person’s outer and inner beauty, but the two don’t always agree. It can refer to something physical (a snow-capped mountain) or immaterial (a child’s innocence). The word “beauty” is used in many different contexts. To determine beauty’s location (in the eye of the beholder or elsewhere), we must first establish what beauty is. ![]()
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