27.10.2026
S: Kant said that personal preference cannot determine whether an artwork has any artistic or aesthetic value. What personal preference dictates cannot be agreed upon with others and it has no authority. However, if you say something is beautiful, then everyone else ought to agree with you. In other words, beauty requires universal assent.
A: What do you think of that?
S: I think it is preposterous to think that beauty exists just because everyone agrees on it. It is acquiescence to the dominant and submission to the corrupt and capricious rule of others. Yet this is how the Western world works and he was a Western philosopher.
A: Example?
S: Look at human attraction.
A: What about it?
S: In human attraction, what is the key driver? Is it personal preference, or is it reliance on an objective standard of attractiveness or beauty?
A: Surely it is personal preference.
S: And you think that explains the ugliness and corruption, the sheer caprice of human attraction?
A: You don’t think so?
S: Not at all. I speak from my own experience. Human attraction in this culture does not rely on truly personal attraction. It relies upon the idea that everyone else ought to agree with you. It relies on the many crushing the personal will and determination of the individual. It is a power play.
A: How so?
S: Human attraction in this culture is built up on your status. Whether it is symbolised by height, occupation, wealth, ethnicity or the dominant look in beauty, since beauty is also associated with status in this culture. The more status you have, the more attractive you are. This is because the universal agreement is that this is what is valuable.
A: Why say this?
S: It is my personal experience and observation. Let me tell you a personal story. In Punjabi culture, I am known as handsome. They call me handsome, that is the name that they have given me. But in British culture, as a lifetime of rejected love would tell, with only a few that have given me love, it would appear that I am not attractive in this culture. Why? Because one culture says I am handsome and the other does not. One culture says I am attractive and one does not. It is a conspiracy fabricated by culture. There is no question of personal preference.
A: You would go with someone for their status?
S: There is a confusion for the lover of the beautiful and the confusion of personal preference. While height, ethnicity, occupation, wealth, all these mean nothing to me, the question is, has the man fallen for the construction of beauty by the dominant? Of beauty as status that is universally agreed upon? There is no way of knowing.
A: What makes you choose someone, in this question of personal preference over universal assent?
S: If you talk about looks and the first approach, when you first get to know someone, there is no type. Each one is beautiful in their own way. But you ask me this question, what is my beauty? What is beauty to me? And I do not pigeon hole or force beauty into a single category. I do not make these fussing distinctions. I look at all of the serpentine angles of beauty which strike me with their anguish filled venom and their aching teeth.
