Beauty & Making · ages 7–10
Is beautiful the same for everyone?
One person loves a painting, another walks past it. Who is right?
Two ideas about beauty have been fighting for centuries. One says beauty is in the eye of the beholder - just taste, and everyone’s taste is theirs. The other says there is something actually there: harmony, proportion, a fitting-together that most people sense.
Both have backing. Tastes vary wildly across time and places. And yet some things - a face with even features, a golden sunset, a well-made chair - are beautiful to nearly everybody.
A helpful middle: beauty may not be a personal opinion and it may not be a fact like ‘the cat is on the mat’. It may be something in between - a real thing that requires you to learn how to see it. Which is why looking at art more makes more art look good.
Try it
Choose something you think is ugly. Look at one small part of it - a corner, a colour, a shape - for a full minute, like a detective. Write down three good things about that part. Ugly things often hide the interesting bits.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Can someone's taste be wrong?
- Is nature beautiful, or do we just say so?
- Why do we decorate things that work perfectly well plain?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
It's all just opinion, so nothing can be wrong.
Then a three-year-old's scribble and a painting that took a lifetime are equally good, and nothing could ever be improved. Most people who say this stop saying it about music.
If taste is learned, then it's not really yours.
Nor is your language. Learning does not make a thing less real, it makes it richer — and you can learn to disagree with what you were taught.
Nature is beautiful even if nobody sees it.
How would you check? Every example you have is one somebody looked at.
What other philosophers think
- Immanuel KantWhen you say something is beautiful you expect other people to agree with you, in a way you never do for 'I like the taste'. So beauty is neither a private opinion nor a plain fact.
- David HumeBeauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists in the mind that contemplates them. Then he immediately insisted some judgements are still better than others.
- PlatoThought beautiful things are reminders of a beauty that is not in any object at all.
- John DeweyArgued art is not the object on a wall but the experience of making and noticing — which is why looking longer changes what you see.
If you want to go further
- Critique of Judgement — Immanuel Kant1790. The argument that beauty asks for everyone's agreement — the hardest position to hold here.
- Of the Standard of Taste — David HumeShort essay. Says taste is subjective, then explains why some judges are better.
- Art as Experience — John Dewey1934. For the idea that art happens in the noticing, not the object.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.