Q&A 1: Aesthetics

            The common claim that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ has some merit. Different people clearly have different opinions about what they find beautify and not everyone agrees. As this is a matter of taste nobody can clearly be in the wrong; you must simply take my word for it that I prefer Mozart to Bach. However the claim misses a large part of the aesthetic reality: there is wide agreement in general about just what is beautiful or aesthetically pleasurable and if someone disagrees wildly with us we tend to think something is wrong with them. For example while people often disagree about what kind of music is best nobody seems to like the screeching of nails on a blackboard. If someone were to seriously argue that they prefer it to regular music most people would think they were either joking or something was wrong with them.

            I think a fundamental reason we have such wide similarities in taste is that we are all fundamentally similar as human beings. Just as most people have eyes that detect light the same way and ears that detect sound the same way we all have brains that process these stimuli in the same basic manner. The brain is after all just another organ, albeit an incredibly complicated one. Just as all liver’s process chemicals in the same basic manner (baring illness or birth defect or the like) all brains share some fundamental properties. While we are a long way from understanding a brain at the same level as a liver we know there are wide similarities between people. I think it is not unreasonable to think that beauty is as hardwired into us as language or sight. Clearly a person’s development and experiences shape their perception of beauty in ways they do not a liver’s function, but just as a child growing up speaking Chinese will have differences from a child raised speaking English the underlying mechanics of language acquisition and use are similar. I think it is the case that a child raised on heavy metal will have different tastes than a child raised on classical music (ignoring any other influences on musical preferences which are surly manifold) but the underlying appreciation will be similar because they are both humans, and given proper education in the other’s genre they could come to appreciate it as well.