are aesthetics universal?

[zainab]

What were your previous views and how did the article speak to them directly enough to change them?

My previous view was .. that it is all subjective! 

That beauty is entirely relative!

[The Grand Nudger]

Do you think that there's still room for subjectivity and relativity in the presence of universals like the ones posited in the article?

[fredd bear]

If you mean a sense of beauty, I think most cultures have concept of what is beautiful, but it varies a lot even within a culture;

Eg I a can appreciate the stunning beauty in nature as well as say the beauty in Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's, paintings by Renoir, and even Blue Poles.

Psychologists argue that we humans have a hard wired need for order. Order and patterns are common in nature; EG the Fibonacci spiral, based on the Fibonacci sequence. "The golden mean" used by Renaissance artists, expressed by Leonardo Da Vinci in his drawing 'Vitruvian man'.

I can say a sense of aesthetics is probably universal, but I can't prove it.


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I haven't posted details because they contain a lot of maths which I don't understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number


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https://www.leonardodavinci.net/the-vitruvian-man.jsp

[Belacqua]

What were your previous views and how did the article speak to them directly enough to change them?

My previous view was .. that it is all subjective! 

That beauty is entirely relative!

I read the article. It's embarrassingly shallow. Please don't take it seriously. 

There is a tendency in the popular science press to make all kinds of claims which are overblown and not really justified by the careful science that has been done. 

The real science behind the article is that we are hard-wired for responses to certain visual stimuli. It seems not to take into account the fact that art, on the other hand, is more than simple visual stimulus. The fact that we find a Monet painting beautiful is wrapped up in all kinds of cultural issues about how we feel about nature, what we want from a painting, what pre-training we have about what art ought to be doing etc. Many many people who were experienced in art found Monet's paintings ugly when they were first exhibited. Were they lacking in some kind of neurotypical response? 

If a scientist did find some automatic trigger response in humans, in which we find certain visual stimuli appealing, you can be confident that artists could completely ignore that response, or intentionally do the opposite, and make art which appeals for other reasons.

[EgoDeath]

Aesthetics are universal for humans in that every human appreciates aesthetics. Almost every human on this Earth is guilty of ornamentation; every human, no matter how much they protest that they don't care, likes to have a certain style when it comes to clothing/personal aesthetic. Architecture, interior design, etc... Aesthetics are important to almost every human.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that's the sort of universality that the author was going for.  Universality by shared process.   IDK if it's going to describe the totality of aesthetics but it's similarly unlikely to be shallow or misinformed.   We could still  posit human subjectivity and cultural relativity as post qualifiers.  

If beauty were a 100m dash, 99 of those 100 meters could be universal by process, but unless you can take that last 1m step then the x is not beautiful, or is missing something we find relevant to beauty compared to some other peer that possesses it.  The relationship could be reversed, as well.  Most everything could contain the opportunity to employ those adapted processes that release chemical satisfaction, with the only significant disparity being the presence or absence of the subjectively or relatively valued.