Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

Objective Beauty Does Not Exist, or Objectively Subjective

12 October 2026 · 3 min read

Objective beauty does not exist.1 You might think it does, you are hallucinating. This is the truth, and no amount of coping will change it. You might think you're ugly and cling to this, because you've spent hours, weeks, months, trying desperately to claw your way to an objective beauty. Well, it was all for nothing. You're ugly, but not because of an objective beauty standard existing and your failing to meet it, no, you're ugly because your soul is ugly, because your heart is black, and because your mind is shallow, people see those things on the face, and thus they turn their heads in shame.

The truth is simple, objective beauty isn't real, it never could be real, true objectivity defies the logic of the universe, if true objectivity did exist, then the Heavens must have fallen, that could be the only explanation.

Why? Well, ask yourself, are people different? Of course they are. Human being can be defined in complexity by smaller and smaller cohorts all the way down to the individual. You might be able to find similarities and commonalities on a wide spectrum as you ascend back up to 'Human' as a ballpark, but the further up you go, the wider and less accurate and more chaotic and random that 'Objectivity' becomes, you start saying things like 'Human males like breasts.' with a million asterisks noting the subjectivity.

Yet, this is obvious, this is Anthropology 1012, this is high school level critical thinking, so why oh why do so many people, people who really should know better, insist that objective beauty exists?

The first reason is an obvious one, they're Abrahamists, or have accepted these beliefs without questioning or investigating where these ontological beliefs came from. This is an easy hand-wave, and is not the point of this essay, their lust for objective beauty rests in their undying belief in a causal undying perfect God, and thus is a religious claim, not a reality one. So let us keep talking about reality.

The truth is, and I've smuggled it in for those who have been paying attention, reality is -objectively subjective-, now I don't mean it is -objectively- subjective, or rather objectively -subjective-, I mean -objectively subjective-, let the wise reader ken what I mean3.

Why does this matter? It matters because if you falsely believe beauty to be objective, you'll kill yourself either trying to rise to the siren call, or kill yourself for failing to meet it. Both sides of this spectrum are kept up by a lie, and not even a noble lie4, it is a lie to sell products. It might sound cliche, but it is also the truth.

The things that you find attractive, rather, that arouse you, those are objective, but your mind is not someone else's mind, your mind might be similar to those with the same genetics or the same environment or the same upbringing, but it is not exactly the same. This is what it means to be objectively subjective; to a person's own lived experience, the beauty that youtheyexperience and feel is objective, that is why for those less inclined to critical thinking, it is much harder for them to understand that their understanding of beauty is not objective and shared by everyone.

The truth is though, understanding this is quite rare, especially these days, the understanding that someone else possesses a totally different, alien, an unknowable mind used to be commonplace in the modern world, but in the post-modern world we've increasingly forgotten this. It was the entire premise of the Protestant reformation5, that the divinity in a person's heart could only known be known by God, and that a Plowman could be elect6 and again, only God could know that.

This is an ancient war, that is all I will say on the subject for now. Just remember, when you believe in objectivity or pure reason or whatever epithet you contrive for it, you are waving the flag of one of the most ancient enemies of the free people of the world in service of what I can only describe as embodied entropy wearing the siren face of its opposite. Just be yourself, be happy7, enjoy life, God is good, God is present in everything, everywhere8, and God loves you. Everything is made in God's beautiful image, and everyone is different so they see beauty and ugliness in different things, that is fine, but it doesn't mean everyone isn't beautiful in their own way.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. David Hume made the same claim in 1757: "Beauty is no quality in things themselves." It exists, he argued, in the mind that contemplates them, and each mind sees a different beauty. His essay Of the Standard of Taste did go on to look for a standard in the agreement of qualified judges, so he was a subjectivist with a limit, not a flat relativist. source ↩
  2. The International Body Project surveyed 7,434 people in 10 world regions and found significant differences in the ideal female figure, though the effect sizes were small. In Mauritania, parts of the Sahel and elsewhere, girls have been force-fed (leblouh) to become voluptuous before marriage, a standard that runs opposite to the thinness norm of the United States. Some researchers hold that variation sits on a shared biological core, so the claim is subjective at the margins, objective at the base; see note 3. source ↩
  3. To ken is her word, explained in What the Ghosts Actually Are: we ken a thing before we know it, and kenning lives in the body, in the hands and the bones, as much as in the head. Seeing that beauty is "objectively subjective" is not an argument you can win with a definition; it is a thing you feel in your own response and recognise in someone else's. ↩
  4. The "noble lie" (gennaion pseudos) is Socrates' proposal near the end of Book III of Plato's Republic (414b–c): citizens are told they were born with gold, silver, bronze or iron in their souls, to bind the city together and make class seem natural. Scholars dispute the translation; some, like Cornford, thought "noble lie" misleading. Her complaint is that selling beauty products is a lie without even that excuse. source ↩
  5. The Protestant Reformation is conventionally dated to 31 October 1517, when Martin Luther is said to have posted his Ninety-five Theses at Wittenberg. Luther stressed that all Christians share one spiritual estate through baptism and faith, and refused to let the pope alone interpret Scripture. This is the root of the claim that nobody else can read another person's heart. source ↩
  6. Calvin taught that God chooses some people for salvation and passes over others by an unconditional decree, regardless of merit or station, and set it out in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition 1536, expanded 1539). If election is by God's decree alone, then a ploughman may be saved and a bishop damned, and nobody on Earth can tell which. That is the unknowable inner life she has in mind. source ↩
  7. She develops this in What Women Really Want or 'Just Bee Yourself': that what draws people is not height, money or technique but someone living from their own centre, which she calls the original face, hamingja or thumos. If beauty is not a fixed ranking, then the one thing left to give is yourself. ↩
  8. In What the Ghosts Actually Are this is the teaching that God is the universe and "the body of God" is the all-ghost, so everything has a ghost, and a feeling of beauty "is its ghost." On that picture a face's beauty is what you are aware of when you meet that face, which is why it differs from person to person. ↩