Theorem:
Beauty is in the mind of the beholder and doesn’t exist objectively.
Proof:
Under certain conditions something can be beautiful but when those conditions are changed, it is not considered beautiful anymore. All humans can agree or disagree on beauty based on the conditions they’re in. Moreover they can change their opinion of the fact, and so beauty does not exist objectively (see my third theorem). If it does not exist objectively and it exists, then it must exist only subjectively. I extend this using my second theorem. If no human considers a given thing beautiful, then its beauty does not exist objectively. If no human considers anything beautiful, then beauty doesn’t exist objectively, period.
I will now elaborate on what I mean by “conditions”. We often say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” when we want to answer the question of what or where beauty is. If taken literally, this sentence is absurd. Beauty really is something that must be perceived by more than one of our senses, if not all. A more appropriate statement would be that beauty is in the mind of the beholder, not just in the eye. I don’t mean to merely play with words here, just to emphasize that for something to be beautiful there must be an interaction between senses and this interaction is highly dependent on the conditions surrounding us, that is, our state of mind at the time of perception.
If you look at a painting for example, and you find it beautiful, I don’t think that this is a conclusion you make purely on what you see but rather it is a biased perception due to the state of your mind at the time. Maybe the room you’re in has an effect on your perceptions. Maybe you know something about the history behind the painting. Maybe your mind is in a state where you’re more prone to thinking of that painting as beautiful. If you’re sad, you are more likely to find beauty in sadness and vice versa. Perhaps the opposite is true. The point is that if the mind’s state so greatly dictates our perception of beauty, then beauty must not exist objectively for it will never be discovered by a biased observational tool (the mind). If beauty is perceived by the mind and the mind can change states, then our perceptions will change and if our statement of something yields a paradox, then it must be a subjective thing, according to my third theorem.
Let me clarify by way of a few examples. Let us take an extreme, somewhat comical, case to illustrate the point. If you saw Brad Pitt kill your parents right in front of your eyes, you will not find him beautiful anymore, if you are a normal human being. There are a few assumptions here but they are easy to substitute. One is that you found Brad Pitt beautiful before the incident and the other is that you didn’t resent your parents. You can easily replace Brad Pitt with someone you find beautiful and parents with someone your really love and care about. This can be extended even further to material things. The point is that we are able to change our minds on whether something is beautiful or not and this ability is what makes it impossible to think of beauty as something objective. Therefore beauty does not exist objectively and if it is said to exist, then it must only exist subjectively.