Beauty, we know, has a perennial appeal. In a certain sense, it doesn't require further explanation as to why we love it.

Beauty leaps out of the otherwise neutral fabric of reality.

It brings a kind of complexity to what can seem otherwise monochromatic.

Roger Scruton, an English public intellectual writes, beauty can be consoling, disturbing,

sacred, profane. It can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an

unlimited variety of ways, yet it is never viewed with indifference. Beauty

demands to be noticed. It speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are

people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

Now, on this we can agree.

But beyond this, there is little agreement to be had.

Beauty and the discussion of beauty, or kind of aesthetics more broadly,

is vexed with a lot of problems, a lot of interminable disputes. So can beauty, for one, be objectively described?

Is it a mere matter of taste?

Is beauty just in the eye of the beholder?

Now, I think that most everyone,

excluding perhaps professional philosophers, would agree that some things are more

beautiful than others. We all have a kind of intuitive sense or a common sense that there is

a spectrum, some things being more so, some things being less so. So we're going to operate on that.

A kind of good way of proceeding in to mystic philosophy or

theology is just to admit the evidence of the senses. We don't have to kind of leap an epistemological

boundary or chasm. We can just say, you know, yes, and then let's think about it. Let's think about

it well. Let's think about it in a way that corresponds to reality.

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