about beauty. For what it’s worth, my own experience includes cases of resolved disagreements about beauty (cases in which I have been able to convince someone else that they were wrong in their judgment of beauty as well as cases in which someone else has been able to convince me that I was wrong in my judgment of beauty). I invite the reader to consider their own case as to whether disagreements about beauty can ever be resolved (if there has ever been a case when you didn’t think a painting was beautiful until someone pointed out an overlooked feature, a case when you did think a novel was beautiful until someone pointed out that it was saccharine, and so on). A single case like this will be enough to undercut the premise that disagreements about beauty are always intractable. My diagnosis for why so many have difficulty with disagreement about beauty is that there are indeed no principles of beauty that could be used to adjudicate disagreements of beauty. But it is overhasty to move from a lack of principles of beauty to intractable disagreements about beauty, much less to relativism about beauty. I will further discuss principles of beauty, whether there are any, and what this means for disagreements about beauty in chapter 2.
Arguments against Relativism from Considered Judgments
So much then for arguments for relativism about beauty based on disagreement or the aphorism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But to undercut arguments in not enough. My thesis requires that relativism about beauty is false, not just unsupported. I must provide arguments directly against relativism about beauty. I turn to that now. In order to argue for the negation of a thesis (in this case, that relativism about beauty is not true), it is enough to show that the affirmation of that thesis has deeply counterintuitive implications. That is, if it can be shown that the truth of a thesis would require radical, painful revision to our best, commonsense understanding of the world, then we have enough reason to believe in the falsity of that thesis. (Note that this method for arguing for the denial of a thesis is the inverse of fit with the data: if the affirmation of the thesis does not fit with the data, then we have reason to believe the denial of the thesis. This is also a version of reflective equilibrium, more on that in chapter 3.) This will be my strategy for arguing for the denial of relativism about beauty.
Relativism about beauty has profoundly counterintuitive implications. To see this, we must reemphasize what relativism about beauty would mean. For something to be relative is for claims about that thing to be true merely in virtue of being honestly claimed. That is, for something to be relative is for it to be the case that by claiming “X is true” that X becomes true. Why does this make it relative? Because if another person claims—at the same time and in the same way—that “X is not true,” then it also becomes true that X is not true. There may be some things that are genuinely relative: pleasure and pain are sometimes understood to work like this (though by no means under every theory of pleasure and pain). The thinking goes: if a person thinks they are in pain, then that is just what it is to be in pain. So, by honestly asserting “I am in pain” it ipso facto is true that the person is in pain. In other words, a person cannot be wrong in their honest assertions of their own pain. This is relativism. It is also important to distinguish a claim being relative from a claim being context-sensitive. If one asserts “Today is Monday,” then that claim is sometimes true, sometimes false. This of course does not entail that the fact of the day of the week is relative. Relativism is not that a claim can be true in one context, but false in another. All claims (except necessary truths and contradictions) are like this. For a phenomenon to be relative is much stronger: it is for it to be the case that by claiming “X is true” that X ipso facto becomes true.
We can see this understanding of relativism in the way people usually present relativism about beauty. They say things like: “If I think this painting is beautiful, then it is beautiful (to me). But if you think it is not beautiful, then it is not beautiful (to you).” This can sound like common sense, but simple reflection on the implications for the truth values in question raises many problems. First, and most straightforwardly, this entails that people cannot be wrong in their honest claims about beauty. Even the most outlandish, stubborn, contrarian claim about beauty will be ipso facto true as long as it is claimed honestly. Both “The Taj Mahal is a beautiful building” and “That pile of laundry is the most beautiful thing in existence” are equally true, as long as they are earnestly claimed. This is absurd.10 Sometimes relativism about beauty is presented as though it should make us humble by forcing us to respect other people’s claims about beauty. It does force us to acknowledge that their claims about beauty are true. But it also ensures that our own claims about beauty are always true, inoculating us from any danger whatsoever that our claims could be mistaken. It is hubris to set up a theory of beauty on which it is not possible to be incorrect about one’s claims about beauty. I will again use myself as an example: I certainly have had the experience of realizing that an initial judgment of beauty was incorrect. I had what is, I think, a common experience: upon first hearing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, I judged it to be very beautiful. After multiple hearings and more careful consideration, I came to think that this judgment was somewhat incorrect: while the piece is striking and fun, it possesses a heavy-handedness and gimmicky quality that detracts from its overall beauty. Still a beautiful piece of music, but my initial very high assessment was incorrect. (“Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is perhaps another example like this.) Again, I put it to the reader: if you have ever come to the realization that an initial judgment of beauty of yours was incorrect (even subtly incorrect), then that is enough to dispense with relativism about beauty by showing that it is possible to be incorrect in an earnest claim about beauty.
Relativism entails that a person cannot be incorrect in their earnest claims about beauty. This is counterintuitive once we grapple with the phenomenon of realizing that one’s own judgments were incorrect. This is related to another counterintuitive implication of relativism about beauty: that one cannot improve one’s judgments of beauty. If relativism about beauty is true, then claims about beauty are true merely in virtue of being claimed. This of course means that one could change one’s claims about beauty: at one time one could claim that Object O is beautiful, then at another time one could claim that Object O is not beautiful. Both of these claims would be true in virtue of being earnestly claimed. Thus, both of these judgments would be equally good in terms of being a claim: they would both be true, utterly equally true. In order for a claim to be an improvement over another claim it must be true (or at least closer to the truth or more accurately capturing the truth) where the other is false. But this is not possible for claims about beauty if relativism is true. If relativism about beauty is true, then all claims about beauty are utterly equal. This entails that improvement among claims about beauty—discovering that something is beautiful when it was previously thought that it wasn’t, discovering that a standard of beauty is too narrow, discovering that one was unduly influenced by an irrelevant factor in making a judgment of beauty, and so on—is not possible. This entails that improving one’s ability to assess artworks in terms of beauty—whether music, literature, painting, and so on—is also not possible. It is not an improvement to claim, after careful study, that Bach’s music is beautiful, where before one casually claimed that it was boring and not beautiful. Those two claims—the careful claim after study that Bach’s music is beautiful and the casual claim that Bach’s music is not beautiful—are utterly equally true if relativism is true. This is absurd, the one is clearly an improvement over the other. It is possible, through careful study of the arts, to improve one’s judgments of beauty. It is possible, through careful thinking about biases or blind spots, to improve one’s claims about beauty. Again, I certainly have had the experience of improving my own judgments of beauty and I put it to the reader to reflect on whether any changes in their claims about beauty have been changes for the better. If changes for the better among judgments of beauty are possible, then relativism about beauty is false.
The absurdities of relativism thus far include the impossibility of incorrect claims about beauty as well as the impossibility of improvement among claims about beauty. Along the way I’ve been pointing to another implied absurdity of relativism: that no artwork can be more or less beautiful than any other. This means that there are no genuinely beautiful works of art: that the artworks cataloged in the Museum of Bad Art are equally beautiful
