This Reuters video (and I'm sorry about the 30 second commercial that you have to sit through to get to it) depicts "Britain's Most Natural Beauty," where the contest "wasn't just a matter of subjective beauty, but settled with science. Researchers said that the distance between facial features, and the width and length of the face are deciding factors for perfection." Some of the text from the video can be read here, though you'll miss the depressing images of her working in a fish 'n chips shop.
This follows the ancient Greek tendency to equate beauty with harmony, which would make it objective and mathematical. Our modern pluralism argues against that, of course, and I see a parallel in our deliberations about the relativism of humor. As I said on the episode, different kinds of humor are trying to do different kinds of things. Not all of them are at even supposed to be laugh-inducing, and we laugh for multiple reasons, not all of which are even related to something we'd for sure call humor. But given a particular standard, there may well be a logic to it that can be measured, so you can objectively tell if someone's singing in tune, or whether the colors in a painting our outfit are harmonized, or in this case, you can measure the mathematics of the face. Clearly, though, such an exercise doesn't rule out questioning the standard itself by asking whether meeting that standard is necessary or sufficient for beauty or humor. Something that comes close to some fairly natural (or historically rooted, at least) standard could turn out to, on reflection, be not at all what we find most important in art/humor.
We've been long planning an aesthetics episode on George Santayana's The Sense Of Beauty,
I haven’t actually read much regarding the philosophy of aesthetics; I didn’t really think much of it until your podcast on Danto 🙂 It seems plausible to me that beauty could be measured scientifically in a similar manner as morality could – that is to say, it can SORT OF be measured. If, like morality, we have certain genetic predispositions or evolutionary memes/genes that allow our standard of beauty to arise, then it makes sense to relate our conception of beauty back to such a standard.
But of course I do not get a hard on when I do geometry, and while such scientific underpinnings can help us understand its origins, or one of its forms, we are left with a massive gap to be filled with no more than philosophers disagreeing about the importance of this or that phenomenology, this or that intuition, this or that Reason, Idea, God, or Will or what-not.
As I said, I haven’t read anything really on the topic. Most my inspiration comes from here:
It’s interesting that beautiful faces are the most average faces. I once saw a striking visual demonstration of this using digital morphing software, where two or more faces can be merged into one. As the number of faces were added to make a single composite image, that averaged face grew increasingly attractive. As I recall, they kept doubling the number and by the time they got to 64 faces, the composite image looked like Halle Berry.
https://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2006/specials/beauties06/mstbeautwomen/halle_berry.jpg
The male Bowerbirds of New Guinea and Australia build structures and then decorate them. Different species have different aesthetic preferences (e.g. the Satin Bowerbird prefers blue). The females choose mates based on their artistic abilities.
Is discussing beauty as a scientific matter reducing it to a matter of traits that are seen to convey genetic advantages? Does the proliferation of beautiful images (especially of beautiful people) through television, advertising, movies and the internet increase the importance of beauty as a characteristic? Is beauty a characteristic of action or a matter of being? Is there an aesthetics philosophy that can allow Bowerbirds to be artists, unique in their individuality and artistic vision? How important is it for beauty to have some familiarity?
I am not a philosopher of any sort, so I imagine all these questions have been answered by someone at some point, but I always think about Bowerbirds when I think about art and beauty.
http://m.ttbook.org/book/umberto-ecos-ugliness
http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/1973IllusionOfBeauty.pdf
This paper, The Illusion of Beauty…by Nicholas Humphrey, might be a suitable case for treatment.