Isla del Sol in Bolivia

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Does this imply that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ that there is no objective property that we recognize and about whose nature and value we can agree?  My answer is simply this:  everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded.  It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find.  Art, nature, and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the center of our lives.  If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire.  But to imagine that we can do this, and  still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives.  It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action.  The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it.  It may express their pleasure and their taste:  but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.      

Roger Scruton in Beauty:  A Very Short Introduction

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