Beauty Not Only in the Eye of the Beholder by Orlando Bartro
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
That’s a slogan—immediately, I’m suspicious.
A slogan is easy to remember and easy to apply; it’s a shortcut for thinking.
Of course, the experience of visual beauty requires an eye, but the slogan is asserting more than that.
The slogan is asserting that beauty doesn’t exist as an objective reality, but only designates a certain reaction—an “ah!” feeling—in the beholder, regardless of the stimulus.
That is, the slogan affirms that beauty doesn’t exist, but only as an opinion or experience.
But if this were true, then Beethoven was wasting his time when he was making numerous drafts of his symphonies, throwing out many pages.
If there was no such thing as objective beauty, then Beethoven could have written any musical notes whatsoever. He could have written the notes randomly or dropped a cat on his keyboard.
A physicist once said, “Beauty must be real in itself; otherwise, how can we explain our attraction to flowers?”
His argument went like this: It’s strange that people are attracted to flowers and think of them as beautiful. A flower has no business attracting human beings. It only wants to attract bees! And yet, the same beautiful bloom that attracts bees attracts people. And therefore, the flower is showing us that beauty isn’t limited to only one kind of eye. Thus, the physicist concluded that beauty is one of nature’s strategies, and it exists independently of perception, though linked with it.
It’s an interesting and surprising argument. It implies that insects can perceive and respond to beauty! It’s certainly strange that flowers attract both human beings and bees.
In any case, I agree with the physicist that beauty is an objective reality to which our senses respond.
And that’s why Beethoven revised his symphonies, and that’s why Shakespeare revised his plays, and that’s why Leonardo da Vinci continually repainted the Mona Lisa.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical and surreal novel about a man lost in a Mansion of Left Turns who meets yet another woman he never knew, generally available for $4.91 at Amazon. Here is the link: