Objective Beauty Exists

Watch this: "Beethoven is the greatest composer of all. Mozart was a virtuous composer whose harmonic and melodic complexity came to him, as he once wrote, like a cow pisses, but there is something haunting and unknown in Beethoven that makes him the greatest ever. Mozart embodied the elegance of life, Beethoven the despair" (Waylon Fairbanks) You may be asking, who is this Waylon bloke -- well that's me. True, I didn't split the atom, but in the realm of beauty, accomplishment, fame, intellect, even expertise, it doesn't matter. I am not wrong is my statement, and neither is Einstein. Beauty is a psychological matter of perspective. Because perspective is a cognitive reaction to that which is sensed, it is inherently subjective. I find it rather troubling that you started your argument with a subjective quote about one composer being better than another. Mahler in fact preferred Beethoven to Mozart, and even Wagner to Beethoven, and because Mahler was more accomplished musically than Einstein (who was a mediocre violinist), does that make Wagner the greatest? No. Your distinction between attractiveness and beauty is irrelevant, for beauty, even in its derived form, is ultimately human. This is not my opinion either, this is simple neurology. Neurological studies with MRI and CAT technology show that the human mind perceives beauty in the frontal lobes. Humans are the only species that have such enlarged frontal lobes as to rely on them to create meaning, understand complex logic, contemplate, and appreciate things like Mozart's Symphony no. 40 in G minor. However, any time processing is done in the frontal lobe, it is subject to integration from the hippocampus and other memory store houses in the mind. Therefore, it is neurologically impossible for one to assess beauty in anything derived from the senses without integrating experience and preference from other parts of the cerebral cortex. I am not much impressed by your Einstein quotes. I realize that he was one of the most brilliant physicists ever, but he is no more qualified to speak about beauty than anyone else. The core of this debate comes down to meaning. Beauty is intrinsic meaning. This means, if I may clarify, that when something has a quantity of something as abstract as beauty, then that makes the object meaningful. I think it is of human arrogance to claim that objects which we find to have "beauty" are that way because of an inherent meaning beyond human perception. These things around us exist. Beauty is merely an artificial construct that the human mind attaches based on subjective criterion. Beauty is, as the maxim goes, "in the eye of the beholder." Since your argument is based on the rationale that mathematic ratios and theorems dictate beauty, I would like to point out two gaping flaws in this: firstly, nobody has ever proven or discovered a universal theorem that is objectively beautiful (don't give me that golden ratio crap). You're asking everyone reading this debate to rely on faith that there are these mysterious integrals roaming through nature making things lovely, and sorry sir, we debaters rely on logic and reason, not faith, to inform our thoughts. Secondly, you are forgetting that the mathematical sense through which we view the world, itself, is a human construct. Something even as simple as depth perception in painting had to be invented. In a culture that had no word or morpheme for "symmetry", surely symmetry would not be taken into account in looking at a piece of work. You forget linguistic determinism and cultural relativism when you indulge in these two dangerous assumptions. Using your musical analogy, think about this: the chromatic scale in the Western Musical Tradition has 12 tones, which were discovered by Pythagoras. In India, their musical scale has 22 tones because they have notes between what we'd consider a half-tone and whole-tone. We cannot fully comprehend the "beauty" of their music because our Western ears aren't accustomed to it, and visa versa. The objective beauty is an illusion based on what we hear. I cannot help but indulge in another example. You brought up J.S. Bach's fugues. His most noteworthy collection of fugues were "A well-tempered Clavier". When we listen to these masterful fugues, we listen to them on the harpsichord tuned in a system called equal temperament, where the intervals between the 12 notes are equally spaced (if you're a musical person, you'll note that the circle of 5ths doesn't resolve itself). When Bach wrote them, we was using his own system of tuning call "well temperament", where the intervals were not static. This means that the mathematical intervals are different and that the fugues we now hear today sound much different than they did before. We regard them as beautiful because in the 18th century, musicians standardized temperament, so the music we've heard for 300 years has accustomed our year to equal temperament. But if Bach heard his pieces played today, he'd shriek in disgust. "Who tuned that damn harpsichord!" I hope I did not get too technical in this example, but I hope the point is clear, that the music you are citing isn't even objective, so how can its beauty be? Your little piece about Mozart being an amateur mathematician is strangely ad hominem. Like I previously quoted, Mozart said he "wrote music like cows pissed." He could write an opera with one hand while writing a concerto with his other hand, and hold a conversation while writing a symphony. He was genius. His infatuation with math provides no insight into his genius. I would prefer if you didn't write "vote pro" before even hearing my arugment. Thanks