The Puzzle of Beauty

Shahidha Bari | Aeon | 26th May 2019

Defining beauty is an old debate. Is it the property of an object or an expression of individual subjective judgement? Kant argued that beauty was a subjective judgement that had “universal validity”. Contemporary ideas include the notion of a “mutual realisation that unfolds between us and the object of our attention. Beautiful things … have the effect of ‘radically decentering’ us.”