Obviously, there are some innate trends in what we consider beautiful in potential companions or mates. Weak, sickly people covered with oozing sores are not beautiful to anyone. But that kind of beauty is such a small subset of what we call “beauty” that it takes the value right out of using the word.
Paintings, sunsets, music, snowfall, horses, cars, roaring fires – these all are considered beautiful to some, but not to a significant portion of the population. I don’t think you’ll be able to defend the kind of beauty one sees in a Dodge Charger, for example, as being innate.
Even when it comes to people, the vast majority of characteristics we call beautiful are not innate. I personally find skinny women with long hair beautiful. My wife’s Grandpa, who grew up in the 50s, finds plump, short-haired women beautiful, and absolutely can’t stand long hair or women without some “meat” on them. Some people like blue eyes, some like brown. Have you ever seen those native women in the National Geographic with long, stretched out breasts flapping like loose pancakes around their navels? Those tribal men absolutely love it, because that’s what they know. Same with those long-necked giraffe women and Chinese foot-binding.
Sure, clear skin and a symmetric face, those might be innate. But that’s about all that is “innate” about beauty.
I’ve heard people say in many circles that Madonna is sexy, hot, etc. I think she is hideous and wouldn’t bang her if my manhood depended on it.
Therefore, Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder. You can sift through the philosophical minutia of that concept all you want, and yes, there are common threads of taste, but as soon as one person differs from the majority, the saying becomes reality.
I am not a boob man, I am a leg man. I think Madonna is nasty. I don’t think Pam Anderson is hot in any way. I don’t see beauty in paintings (generally). I don’t find many types of music tasteful. The list can go on forever. Beauty is subject to taste, and taste is subject to our life’s experience.
To say that we are genetically branded to like certain things is like saying “everyone HAS to love chocolate”. I am sure you can find someone somewhere with a disliking for chocolate. When you do, then the rule is validated and this discussion is over.
My point is that we have characteristic examples of beauty in order to explain the meaning of a word. It is possible that the shared background of human experience means there is some sensation of beauty that allows us to do this, but appealing to broad agreement only indicates that we all know the meaning of a word, not that we agree on some kind of objective beauty.
We all know a generic pack of gum costs less than a dollar. Do we all have some innate sense of the value of gum?
Agreed.
But when you say “in many circles” do you mean in the media? Certainly my experience is that the media like to sell her as a hot 50-plus year old, but I’ve never actually spoken to a “man on the street” that still finds her attractive.
In any case, a counterexample like this wouldn’t affect my point. I am not arguing that there is objective beauty; that there’s a Platonic realm of hotties that we can all see and therefore we’ll always agree on who’s hot and who’s not.
Beauty is an instinctive human concept. We don’t need to tell a baby “Find some things prettier than others”, they just do, instinctively. And, unsurprisingly, the choice of what to find pretty also has a strong instinctive component. Really, I can’t understand how anyone can dispute this.
Of course, we can only speak in generalisations. There’s guys out there for whom Madonna is the perfect woman. There’s probably guys out there that find slugs more beautiful than humans. But this is no different than any human concept – there’s always some variety but large-scale consensus – like the fear of heights example I gave earlier.
Right. When I first started to notice girls in 4th grade I got a crush on one particular girl. Not suprisingly, 3/4 of my class also had a crush on the same girl. Just because some kids may not have, I don’t think that invalidates the larger point, which is that a huge amount of use do find the same the same things beautiful, we just disagree about which of those is more beautiful.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me of the debate over whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Are mathematical truths something “out there,” waiting for us to find, or are they products of the human mind? (I vote for the former, with some qualifications.) Likewise, is beauty (including the beauty of a beautiful mathematical proof) something objective, out there for us to find, or something strictly within our own minds?
I absolutely agree with you. My point is that there probably are some characteristics that definitely 100% correlated to beauty, like clear skin and symmetry, but that everything else varies. That is, I’m looking at this like a combinatorics and dataming problem (I can’t help it, it’s what I know). We have some large but finite set of characteristics that define people an individual continuum of beauty. Some characteristics will result in those people who have them being generally rated higher or lower for some people, while others will result in seemingly random placement on any given person’s scale. Thus, there are necessarily going to be some characteristics that are going to have a high positive correlation with beauty (ie, they’re universally beautiful characteristics), some are going to have a high negative correlation (ie, they’re universally ugly characteristics), but there’s going to be a whole mess of others in the middle that will have positive or negative corelation, but not necessarily particularly high, or even ones that are completely uncorelated at all.
I strongly suspect that, were such a study done, we’d find that some characteristics, like the aforementioned symmetry, would have a very high positive correlation, something like obvious deformities and disease will have a very negative correlation, but most will be somewhere in between. Will thin be positive? I’d suspect so, but not overwhelming, so it’s a more subjective trait. What about something like eye color? Chanes are any corelation it has is roughly equivalent to random data.
Thus, to tie it back to the OP, the part that phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is intended to refer to the cases where the differentiating characteristics have lower correlations. Is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned woman more beautiful than a black-haired, drown-eyed, dark-skinned woman? It depends, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Is a healthy, symmetrical, clear-skinned, reasonably proportioned woman more beautiful than a sick, assymetrical, obviously deformed woman with acne and open sores? Absolutely.
I have no cite but I’m sure that Iread somewhere that the custom of Japanese Royalty blackening their teeth began as a result
of their being wealthy enough to use sugar and as a result suffered from tooth decay,I seem to recall something similar in Europe.
the idea of a “universal” component to beauty has been dead for almost one-hundred years. after a few prior attempts, dada finally killed it. in 1918, one of dada’s founders, tristan tzara wrote:
“a work of art is never beautiful by decree, objectively and for all. hence criticism is useless, it exists only subjectively, for each man separately, without the slightest character of universality.”
this idea has stuck around since then and is alive and well in post-modern thought and its approach to aesthetics. i don’t have any citations handy, sorry.
to continue, culture kills any notion of universal beauty. knowing precedes liking. unfortunately, i have a tough time expounding upon this idea. it’s difficult for me to put into words. i guess the best way i can do this is to say . . . i can only find beauty in things that i know and what i know is largely based/learned from the culture in which i live.
and then this is where one comes in with arguments about clear skin and symmetry, blah-blah-blah. i find these conclusions have been derived apophatically; one has affirmed that clear skin and symmetry are beautiful only after concluding that un-clear skin and asymmetry are not beautiful. if beauty was absolute/universal, clear skin would be beautiful in and of itself (innately). also, while i agree that a symmetrical human face is preferable to an asymmetrical one, this says absolute zero in regard to beauty. this preference does not rise from any sort of intrinsic beauty of symmetry but from the idea that a human face is suppose to be symmetrical.
striking contrast there. i’ll dance around it for a second.
consider picasso’s les demoiselles d’avignon. the women are asymmetrical and obviously deformed. what about the photography of joel-peter witkin (google him, i would link but his work is quite jarring). are these not beautiful?
returning to the above quote. remove the “sick, assymetrical, obviously deformed woman with acne and open sores” . . . is the “healthy, symmetrical, clear-skinned, reasonably proportioned woman” still beautiful?
That research (or similar studies) have been mentioned on dozens of TV shows and pop-psychology books.
Perhaps “beauty standards” of body mass have been influenced by cultures and fashion trends (plump women vs skinny) but there seems to be something hardwired (objective) about beauty that infants can perceive. If cultural conditioning is 100% source of beauty standards, what culture did those infants get exposed to in their first 8-weeks of life outside the womb?
I do find it interesting when looking at the Suicide Girls website you see up at the top “Beauty Redefined” and in the past I believe they used to advertise themselves as having unconventional beauties. Well, it’s a lie. Almost every single Suicide Girl has been conventionally attractive. Oh they might have blue hair, some tattoos, and more piercings than you generally see in public, but, at the end of the day, they’re all conventionally pretty.
Odesio
Whether or not there is an innate component to beauty is still up in the air, according to this thread. But all it takes is one person to disagree with someone else to prove that there is no universal component.
Can we all admit that there is no aspect of beauty that every single human agrees on?
