If I like it, is it beautiful?

Why there's no link between liking something and finding it beautiful.

The idea “If I like it, it’s beautiful” is composed of two separate questions: “What does it mean to like something?” and “What does it mean for something to be beautiful?”. I’ll address these in sequence.

People, generally, tend to apply the term “I like it” quite broadly. I think the best definition is that it indicates a positive view of something. Therefore, we can effectively rewrite the question as: If I view something positively, it’s beautiful.

Now, what does it mean for something to be beautiful? The way that I see this is quite complex, so it’s going to require a few base concepts defined first:

Concept 1: The subjectivity-objectivity line

When trying to standardize anything, people commonly look to the idea of objective truth or reality. This, however, faces many philosophical problems. Primarily, though, the issue is that it presumes that reality is real, which we cannot prove to be the case.

However, this does not mean that the concept of objective truth can be discarded entirely, just that it itself is unreachable. For example, whether marmite tastes nice is one of the most subjective things around, however simultaneously the concept of time is subjective, yet objective enough for society to run on it.

Effectively, we have a disjunct between subjectivity and comparative objectivity, where we can consider things subjective if they are so commonly disagreed upon that society couldn’t really run on them and objective if they are commonly enough agreed upon such that society could run on them.

(Note that while it does at first seem like the concept of politics breaks this argument, modern democracy only really looks at the opinion of the largest minority and so only a fraction of the total people have to like a political group for it to come to power.)

Concept 2: The fragmented nature of beauty

This subjectivity-objectivity line allows us to break the concept of beauty down into two separate parts that lie on either side of the subjectivity-objectivity line. In essence, beauty consists of two distinct things: appearance and resultant emotion. Appearance lies on the objectivity side of the subjectivity-objectivity line and resultant emotion lies on the subjectivity side of the subjectivity-objectivity line.

The nice thing about this is that it allows the traditional idea of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” to coexist with the idea that there are some principles that govern beauty. (i.e. If we can’t observe it, it can’t be beautiful)

Simultaneously, it also defines that the principles that we would like to define as governing beauty are simply an attempt to project ourselves onto others, which is an endeavour inherently doomed to failure.

We can now rewrite the question as: “If I view the (non-sight-exclusive) appearance of something positively, it creates a positive resultant emotion”. This is a much more answerable question because what we have established in the rephrasing is that it is overwhelmingly subjective.

This now answers our question of “If I like it, it’s beautiful.” Quite simply, no. Whether something is beautiful is strictly linked to emotion, which I like to describe as the most varied and directly personal thing that there really is.

However, that is not to say that emotional overlap is impossible. Far from it. Just that establishing a direct link between anything on the objective side of the line, like appearance, and something on the subjective side of the line, like emotion, is equivalent to expecting everyone to feel the same.

George Baskerville, 19th of January 2025

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