The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
It's not a tautology because you misread what I said. Yet again. You have a habit of doing that.That's nearly a tautology. Something about the art moved us, namely how it looked resonated with us. But ultimately, if there were no people, then the art would have no one to move, so it wouldn't be moving. That point gives next to no evidence for your claim that there is some fundamental beauty in the world. Meanwhile, we have countless examples of people throughout time valuing works of art differently, with cultural context mattering a lot to how they are valued.
This is what I wrote when explaining myself. You ignored this. Why? Why can't you argue with this? Why can't you try and refute this? Am I wrong here? If so, explain how. Don't just ignore what I say.The subjectivist position would have us believe that there is nothing about the art itself that moves us; rather, it's our own psychology that creates beauty ("beauty is in the eye of the beholder"). In contrast, objectivist position believes that it is something objective about the art - namely, its perfection of being - that elicits such a reaction within us.
Now, unlike you, I will actually attempt to show the errors in your thinking.
I have to really question the logic of this assertion, because it's self-contradictory. First, you concede that "something about the art moved us" and "how it looked resonated with us." In saying this, you have conceded that I'm 100% right, that there is something objectively in the art that moves us. The subjectivist, by contrast, would say that the art itself doesn't move us; rather, our minds have projected something onto the art that wasn't there, and that moved us.Something about the art moved us, namely how it looked resonated with us. But ultimately, if there were no people, then the art would have no one to move, so it wouldn't be moving. That point gives next to no evidence for your claim that there is some fundamental beauty in the world. Meanwhile, we have countless examples of people throughout time valuing works of art differently, with cultural context mattering a lot to how they are valued.
You concede to my position in the first sentence, so you obviously have to use bad and fallacious arguments.
You repeat the same argument "different people think different things are beautiful, so there's no objective beauty." Again, this is an invalid argument. People can disagree about things that are objectively true too, so you can't use that as evidence for beauty not being objective.
You also use an equivocation fallacy when you say "if there were no people, then the art would have no one to move, so it wouldn't be moving." To see how this is equivocation, let's apply this to numbers. What would happen if you were to say "if there were no people, then nobody would know the number, so it wouldn't be knowable"? The answer is that, you'd be making an equivocation between "known" and "knowable." If there were no humans around, numbers wouldn't be known to anyone. But numbers in a world without intellect would still be knowable; that is, the conditional statement "if there were humans around, then they could know numbers" would be true.
Similarly, beauty is a characteristic, a property of being, that would be there even if there was nothing to experience it. Because, again, beauty is not found in what's being moved, but in what's doing the moving. To the Scholastic, beauty is "what pleases when apprehended." It's not the apprehension in itself nor is it our reaction (being pleased). Rather, beauty is the "what" that pleases an intelligent being when the intelligent being apprehends it.
Given this, the subjectivist would have to say that the "what" isn't actually in the thing-in-itself but something projected by our minds onto the object. If they were to say that the thing-in-itself is the "what" that's pleasing us, then they'd be conceding to the objectivist that there is some thing-in-itself that is causing multiple people to be moved. And if such things exist, then beauty cannot be a purely psychological phenomenon.