Beauty Doesn’t Stand Still

David Schildknecht writing in the World of Fine Wine (issue 78, 2022) notes the difficulties in coming up with a standard by which to assess beauty:

Attempts to posit criteria have notoriously foundered, and even that most brilliant of thinkers David Hume, while insisting that “men […] must acknowledge a true and decisive standard”
of taste—and, by implication, beauty—“to exist somewhere,” fails to demonstrate that this insistence is other than dogmatic,
or to chart a route from the refinement of sensibility to an objective standard.

David is right that philosophy has no “true and decisive standard” to offer despite the gallons of ink and terabytes of data devoted to the topic. And narrowing the general topic of beauty to the more specific case of wine doesn’t really help:

Moreover, the very limited range of descriptors characteristically offered by philosophers and wine authorities alike as paradigms of aesthetic appreciation—“harmony,” “elegance,” “balance,” and “complexity”—are themselves far from unproblematic. And even to the extent that any of these slippery concepts might be firmly grasped—“balance,” for example, is
subject to very different interpretations—that alone would not suffice to free them
from a dependency on the nose and palate of the beholder.

In Beauty and Yeast I summarized the character of a beautiful wine as follows:

… in a beautiful wine, the rhythm of its elements stages a conversation and directs our attention to the variations that have significance and generate fecundity [emergent properties]. For the most beautiful wines, identities are destabilized, and a sensation without category emerges on the back of fecundity….In the experience of beauty, it is not a stable, delineated object that attracts but something not yet fully present, a shifting play of presence and absence that points to something just beyond our ability to track it, a swelling and contracting tide of meaning where foreground and background continually shift, and the feeling of something just beyond the horizon is palpable.

No true and decisive standard there. Part of the seduction of beauty is the inability to capture it in a tidy formulation. Anything that is so captured will not be beautiful.

David closes his piece with this decisive point:

What’s more, we might benefit from challenging the assumption that arguments concerning  aesthetic merit presuppose “a true and decisive standard.”

Indeed. Until we internalize this point we will not understand beauty. Our sensory mechanisms are designed to attend to variation; failure to do so will get you killed. And our taste mechanisms are designed to adapt to repeated stimuli so we experience them less intensely. To survive we can’t afford to waste attention on familiar stimuli. Our perceptual sensibilities are continuously changing, and assuming a stimulus isn’t painful, we take pleasure in the degree of variation from a background of normalcy.

It’s also a plain fact that standards of beauty change and of course are vastly different from culture to culture.

We don’t need and will never discover a fixed standard for beauty. Such a quest is incompatible with the very nature of the object about which we inquire.

It’s fine to adopt practices to reduce certain biases when evaluating aesthetic objects such as wine. But that commendable goal should not be confused with the search for a fixed standard immune to changes in perspective that come from our very complex interactions with a world in flux that can be viewed from many points of view.

If you’re bothered by changing standards and fundamental disagreements about aesthetic merit, the world of wine (or any other aesthetic object) is not for you.