A nice summary of Plato's Theory of Forms as it relates to beauty. It isn't all that great out of context, but I think this is a nice place to start.
"The Theory of Forms maintains that two distinct levels of reality exist: the visible world of sights and sounds that we inhabit and the intelligible world of Forms that stands above the visible world and gives it being. For example, Plato maintains that in addition to being able to identify a beautiful person or a beautiful painting, we also have a general conception of Beauty itself, and we are able to identify the beauty in a person or a painting only because we have this conception of Beauty in the abstract. In other words, the beautiful things we can see are beautiful only because they participate in the more general Form of Beauty. This Form of Beauty is itself invisible, eternal, and unchanging, unlike the things in the visible world that can grow old and lose their beauty. The Theory of Forms envisions an entire world of such Forms, a world that exists outside of time and space, where Beauty, Justice, Courage, Temperance, (these three things are what he describes as making up our three-part souls) and the like exist untarnished by the changes and imperfections of the visible world."
And really, he is striving to understand subjectivity. If you are interested in diving into some Plato, you should read more of his theories, such as the composition of the human soul. It's fascinating to see a more intellectual breakdown of abstract ideas such as spirituality.
I hope my post was written in a way that is not
too confusing.
Whoa, a pokemon fandom that appreciates philosophy? Where was PC all my life??
Platonism is one of most powerful and fascinating concept philosophy has ever produced, but I don't subscribe to it. Especially because it always struck me as counter-intuitive, what does it mean to say, for example, that numbers, properties (redness), propositions, geometric shapes and other entities
exist independently? How can painfulness exist outside of a consciousness experiencing pain?
Secondly, platonism seems to not sit well with the (unguided) evolutionary account of origin of consciousness. Evolution has no goals in mind, and the idea that our concepts of beauty developed in an evolutionary process which "matches" with platonic entities entail either:
1. It's a huge coincidence,
2. The platonic entities are causally effacious and they somehow affected evolutionary development on earth.
(1) is a coincidence too huge to warrant consideration, and Plato wouldn't agree with (2). I don't know if there have been counterarguments to these, but these two are the key reasons why I don't agree with Platonism.
Corvidae:
He's blind and was asking me the difference between pink and red. He can't see colours, only general light. So to someone who can't see colour, the differences don't mean anything. In other cultures, different colours have different meanings, too, and other languages use unique words for colours. Even the difference between red and yellow could be subjective (there's certainly nobody saying the exact wavelength where the colours end). It goes for more succinct forms too, like "feminine/masculine design" or things like that. Our culture molds essentially almost everything that we see, and if you can't see, then those have no effect. That's what I learned from him, anyhow. Really insightful stuff.
Oh, that only means "we have difficulty defining properties", not that our perceptions of properties are subjective. We may not have a rigorous definition of what "redness" is, but someone can know that a ball or an apple is red, even though she might use different terminology. Let's consider two persons: X is really good with fashion designing, and so she can tell apart different shades of colors by assigning them different labels. On the other hand, Y is a computer junky and he doesn't know that these different shades of color have different labels. Now Y may not be able to say why pink is pink and red is red very articulately, but he would indeed understand they look different, and if his descriptions of their difference can be translated into fashion terminology, it will end up pretty similar to Y's account of Redness vs. Pinkness.
Also, this is a theory of beauty I found on a philosophy blog against the context-dependence argument against aesthetic objectivity: beauty of an object should not be considered in isolation, but in the context in which it finds itself. As an example, in some cultures long necked women are considered beautiful, but in others they are not. But the reason some cultures find them beautiful is embedded in a cultural context that is endemic to that culture. Once one is able to appreciate that context, he would agree that long-necked women are beautiful.
This is another example: a rose looks beautiful in visible light, but it doesn't look as beautiful (or ugly) in X-ray. Does this entail that the beauty of a rose is subjective? Of course not, the beauty of a rose is understood in its proper context, that of being seen in visible light. So once we include contextuality in our theory of beauty, context-dependence doesn't seem like a good argument for aesthetic relativism.