> I never bought into the "eye of the beholder" on aesthetics. Indeed, but I suspect this has a lot to do with the embrace of materialism, a metaphysical view

> I never bought into the "eye of the beholder" on aesthetics. Indeed, but I suspect this has a lot to do with the embrace of materialism, a metaphysical view that has far-reaching and destructive intellectual consequences. Once you accept materialism, you have a whole world of phenomena that cannot be explained purely in terms of res extensa which leads some people to a kind of crypto-Cartesian position in which this unexplainable excess is swept under the rug of the "subjective". (I say "crypto-Cartesian" because res extensa cannot accommodate this excess explanatorily, so clearly you've got to pass the buck and squirrel away things in this metaphysical time-out zone that you've conveniently constructed to hold all that things you cannot explain according to your officially stated dogmas.) Also, philosophical liberalism encourages a kind of indulgence of the subjective, a kind of alternate reality protected from error and insulated from threatening facts. Desire is one such thing kept in the safety of this interior world. It is not possible to have evil or disordered desires (with some ad hoc exceptions). It is not possible to have bad taste. These are "subjective" matters, and since only objective matters can be debated, then, as the saying goes, de gustibus non est disputandum. "That's just your opinion, man!"