Yes, that’s about the size of this argument. Reality is what it is (i.e. what I say it is) and if you don’t accept that then you’re wrong, though I’ll refuse to say why you are wrong.
I reckon it’s a massive great bridge across a river that we hangs things off using fishing line. If the fish bite, the thing being hung is evidently beautiful, because the fish must have the same appreciation of inherent beautiful properties that we do. Therefore, if you disagree with this test of things being beautiful, you are more stupid than a fish.
I’m curious as to whether or not those of you who dispute my position have taken the past few days to explore the topic further. I posted some reference points that deal with the topic from an objective empirical standpoint and would encourage you to assess the merit of their positions. Take the abstract of the Møller paper for example:
“Sexual selection arises from the advantages that individuals have over others of the same sex and species in mating competition for reproduction. This process may give rise to extravagant sexual characters that are directly detrimental to survival, but beneficial to mating success. Current theoretical and empirical findings suggest that mate preferences are mainly cued in on health including developmental health. Beautiful and irresistible features have evolved numerous times in plants and animals due to the immense selection pressures mainly caused by females, and such preferences and beauty standards provide evidence for the claim that human beauty and obsession with bodily beauty equals similar tendencies throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. The beauty, cosmetics and plastic surgery industries are therefore only surface phenomena that supports this evolutionary interpretation. Human beauty standards reflect our evolutionary distant and recent past and emphasize the role of health assessment in mate choice. Given these findings, it is extremely unlikely that human sexual behavior or mate preferences will change to any significant degree during the future, even in the presence of totalitarian measures.”
Philosophy without science is as husband without a wife - incomplete. Did our forerunners labor in vain? Does their toil not deserve to bear fruit? It seems irreverent to me to attempt to hold the fruitful knowledge they worked to bear in utero in the name of empty disputations. The fathers of philosophy pursued answers; do their children only pursue questions?
I don’t have a problem with the Zhuangzian notion that what is good for one thing might not be good for another – birds sleep in trees, but where a human to try and to this, they would probably fall off. Dogs routinely eat their own faeces, whereas such a thought is disgusting to an adult human.
But, I don’t see this as conflicting the Mencian notion that ‘Cook Ding could prepare a dish that was pleasing to all palates.’ That is because, as much as we like to talk about our ‘individuality’ as human beings, ultimately humans are all quite similar. Our inherited allotment varies very slightly from human to human, so it makes sense that while our tastes aren’t necessarily identical, they are all close enough that they can be brought into line.
Now, some people will try to overcome this allotment, but that isn’t anything new. The idea of trying to overcome our inborn nature is as old as the notion of morality.
But these new traits are transsubjective, held between people through an understanding rather than coming from our own instincts. People can be trained to like just about anything by such mechanisms (though there are limits. Starving people, for example, will still shy away from things like green bread – though I would be curious to see what would happen if Green Bread were advocated by some couture group), but that doesn’t suggest that those initial leanings aren’t there.