Yet that desire for possession is fleeting and incomplete. He notes that in sex, a person seeks to unite with, and even possess the other person who inspires him or her. Scruton’s reflections on the intersection of beauty and sexuality are especially helpful here. Our inability to resolve those disputes is no more proof of beauty’s inherent subjectivity than is our inability to resolve matters of politics, philosophy, or religion. That humans even bother to debate matters of aesthetic judgment also suggests an objective standard to which we might appeal.
Moreover, beauty is the prerogative only of rational beings, which would imply beauty has to do with reason rather than solely with feelings. Hence beauty consists in due proportion for the senses delight in things duly proportioned.” Later in the Summa, Aquinas expands on this by adding that beauty results “from the concurrence of clarity and due proportion.” ( Summa II-II Q. 5) says that “beautiful things are those which please when seen.
This aligns well with how beauty has been understood in the Catholic tradition. Scruton adds: “We call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form.” In other words, humans cannot help but take beauty seriously, and when we do, we become, however temporarily, absorbed in its aesthetic purpose. British philosopher Roger Scruton observes in his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction that beauty is “rationally founded,” and that “people associate beauty with their highest endeavors and aspirations, are disturbed by its absence, and regard a measure of aesthetic agreement as essential for life in society.” Others would say that beauty lies solely in the eye of the beholder, or in an inclusive spirit, that everything is beautiful. Perhaps some might say “I know it when I see it,” recycling the phrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to describe pornography. What is beauty? The answer is not self-evident. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” In a follow-up tweet, Peterson warned that progressives are desperately trying to “retool the notion of beauty.”
Popular psychologist and writer Jordan Peterson was having none of it, responding on Twitter: “Sorry. Sports Illustrated last month featured on its front cover plus-size model Yumi Nu. Yet the Baltimore satirist might be surprised to learn that American culture now celebrates the harshest of curves and the clumsiest of distributed masses, given the increased ubiquity of “plus-size” models. I presume I speak for most members of the male sex when I say that Mencken, as was often the case when he was trying to be curmudgeonly, is dead wrong. Mencken wrote exactly 100 years ago: “The female body, even at its best, is very defective in form it has harsh curves and very clumsily distributed masses compared to it the average milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design.” He added that the female body “suggests a drunken dollar-mark,” and that it lacks “genuine beauty.”
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