Beauty is familiar enough that we rarely question our ability to recognise it. Yet when we try to explain why one thing strikes us as beautiful, and another does not, our certainty often gives way to hesitation. We can recognise the difference before we can explain it. What exactly are we recognising?
In the first essay of this series, I argued that liberalism has paid too little attention to culture. Exploring beauty is one way to address that neglect, and the question matters to artists and audiences regardless of their politics.
Liberalism’s reluctance to prescribe what people should value makes aesthetic objectivity an awkward subject. It is easier to say that beauty is simply a matter of taste. Yet our ability to cultivate taste suggests that there may be something to discover, even if our knowledge of it remains incomplete.
Shaftesbury understood beauty as order grounded in harmony, proportion, balance, and unity of design. On this account, beauty belongs to the relations within the object rather than being created by the observer’s approval. Taken literally, this is too simple. Perfect symmetry can become monotonous. Irregularity can be beautiful. Burke’s sublime showed that aesthetic value can arise from vastness, obscurity and terror. Beauty cannot be reduced to pleasant regularity. However, whenever people try to explain beauty, the same concepts recur. In fact, modern research has found recurring relationships between aesthetic preference and features such as symmetry, complexity, proportion, and contour, while also showing that familiarity, expertise, and context alter our responses.
None of this proves that beauty is objective. Recurring preferences may tell us more about human psychology than about beauty itself. Still, many aesthetic judgments concern relationships that exist independently of whether a particular observer happens to like them. Parts can reinforce one another or clash. A narrative can establish expectations and fulfil them, deliberately frustrate them, or simply lose control of them. A building can relate scale, material, ornament and light successfully or poorly.
Hume approached the question from the other direction, starting with the observer rather than the object. Accepting that aesthetic judgment involves sentiment but refusing to treat all judgments as equally authoritative. After all, experience sharpens perception. More examples reveal distinctions, and familiarity with the subject makes previously invisible features visible. To become a critic capable of judging well therefore requires practice, sensitivity, comparison, and freedom from irrelevant prejudice. Hume eventually located the standard of taste in the convergence of such qualified judges across time. Something attractive remains here even for someone unwilling to accept Hume’s underlying subjectivism. A novice may hear only noise where a musician hears counterpoint; a spreadsheet may look like an ugly grid of cells to one person, while someone who understands Excel sees an elegant formula or a complex problem solved with simplicity and ingenuity. Expertise reveals what the untrained eye could not previously see.
This suggests an important distinction between beauty and taste. Taste may be the faculty through which we recognise beauty, rather than the source from which beauty originates.
Kant deepens the puzzle. A judgment of beauty begins in subjective experience. When I say that I enjoy strawberries, I may simply be reporting a preference. But when I call a building beautiful, I usually speak as though others ought at least to be capable of seeing what I see. He connected this experience with a free harmony between imagination and understanding. Beauty seems ordered in a way that invites understanding even though no explicit concept exhausts that order. This explains why aesthetic disagreement feels different from disagreement over personal preference.
Perhaps the difficulty lies partly in the limits of our knowledge. We may recognise beauty more reliably than we can formulate the rules by which we recognise it. Aesthetic knowledge may therefore resemble other forms of knowledge that are real and useful even when they cannot be fully articulated.
What, then, is beauty?
Since absolute knowledge eludes us, a definitive formula remains impossible. We can only attempt a working heuristic. Beauty appears to be an objective quality arising from specific structural relations that integrate a thing’s features into a discoverable order. We call these relations ‘fitting’ as a conceptual placeholder for the complex coherence our perception recognises and our traditions preserve. One way to observe this coherence is to ask whether altering a part would weaken the character of that particular whole.
Order should not be confused with symmetry, regularity or the absence of tension. A beautiful whole may depend on asymmetry, contrast, disruption, dissonance or conflict. A storm or a ruin can be beautiful. A musical passage may require dissonance for resolution to have force. Apparent disorder can belong to a larger order.
This helps explain how apparently opposing qualities can both contribute to beauty. Symmetry and asymmetry can both work. Simplicity and complexity too. Repetition can create structure while variation gives it life. Efficiency can itself be beautiful when unnecessary elements disappear, and each part contributes clearly to the whole.
Proportion, rhythm, balance, coherence, contrast, economy, complexity, unity, and variation may therefore be less like separate ingredients of beauty than different ways of achieving fitting order.
Nor must that order be immediately obvious. It may require familiarity, technical knowledge or cultivated taste before it becomes perceptible. Disagreement alone therefore does not establish subjectivity. Someone may fail to perceive relationships that another person has learned to recognise, but such expertise confers no authority over anyone else’s taste.
Hayek’s work on dispersed knowledge offers an additional useful analogy. Artistic traditions can preserve discoveries about aesthetic choices long before anyone can fully explain them. They can also preserve mistakes, which is why artists must inherit and test. Scruton was right to argue that transgression alone establishes no artistic merit. But a tradition closed to experimentation becomes equally sterile.
Political liberalism does not require us to deny aesthetic standards. It requires those standards to remain open to criticism, experimentation, persuasion and discovery. If beauty is objective, no ministry follows from the premise.
A liberal theory of beauty can therefore begin with a hypothesis rather than a canon. Beauty arises from fitting relations that form a discoverable order. Human beings have spent millennia discovering such relations through art, craft, criticism, tradition and experimentation. No individual possesses the entire pattern, and cultivated taste does not guarantee agreement. It does, however, allow us to see more.
The task is to become better at recognising beauty, and then to try to create more of it in your own life.
