"Universal Beauty"

Look at that gorgeous sunset! The sun paints the landscape golden, orange, and even hints of red as it goes over the horizon, making a scene everyone will instantly recognize as beautiful.

Everyone? Not so fast.

There’s this idea that we humans have some kind of hard-wired aesthetic within us—something that Plato called his ideal forms. Whenever nature presented us with something that looked closer to those forms, we recognized that and, therefore, viewed that object as beautiful.

Writing about 2100 years later, a titanic French philosopher named Voltaire revisited Plato’s argument about the nature of reality.

Voltaire regarded his ideas as a useful starting point, but he ultimately rejected Plato’s ideas about ideal forms, and Voltaire insisted that evidence was the ultimate arbiter of truth, not philosophical ideals.

Voltaire is right, you know—there’s no such thing as an ideal form for anything, at least in the way Plato envisioned it. Sure, if you get down to the smallest levels, every electron is completely identical, but it’s a real stretch to claim that that’s what Plato meant. Instead, he was talking about an ideal version of every animal, plant, and inanimate object anywhere.

That being said, there are a few things that actually are baked into the human cake. One example is our desire for symmetry. We prefer hand axes that look the same on both sides, thank you very much. This bilateral symmetry mirrors our own anatomy, so it seems pleasing to us when we see it in nature.

Small stones were used by our ancestors to chip away at those bigger stones, until they were left with something symmetrical that fit in the palm of the hand.

So, not only do we find symmetry in nature beautiful; we’re also drawn to make things that are symmetrical. Take the Taj Mahal, widely considered to be one of the most beautiful structures in the world—at least partly thanks to its bilateral symmetry.

That’s because the pond is placed perfectly in front of the structure, so that if you stand at the right place, you get this wonderful doubling from left to right, and from top to bottom, all at once. The vertical mirroring imitates and complements the horizontal mirroring, giving us a wonderful feeling of things being in balance.

Still, there is no guarantee that everyone will see something as beautiful simply because it’s symmetric. In fact, there’s no such thing as universal beauty.

Instead, what we have is called collective subjectivity. This is when society as a whole decides whether something is beautiful, like the art that ends up on the walls of most museums (let’s pretend the 20th century didn’t happen for now), or Beethoven’s music.

Depending on your temperament, you might be more or less inclined to agree with society’s verdict. Many folks tend to like Beethoven because others in the group like Beethoven, but that is certainly not always the case. Collective subjectivity almost certainly catapulted a lot of 20th century visual art to the top of the museum heap.