Beauty is inherent to a subject or object. There cannot be a disassociation between the material and its beauty just as color is an accident of a substance. Just because people may have different tastes regarding beauty, doesn’t mean there isn’t beauty or that there’s no space for reason in discerning beauty. Quite the contrary. We can know what is ugly, through our functioning faculties of reason, and correct someone that thinks it’s beautiful by concluding that their faculties of reason (I’m including intellect here) are impaired, sense perception is impaired, and/or they have a disordered will.
Discussion
are you saying that beauty is present in some subjects or objects and not in others?
The opposite! A subject/object’s beauty is an inherent trait by the fact that it exists.
For example we can think of a “good” apple (goodness being convertible with beauty) that is round, symmetrical, and seems ready for consumption. Whereas a “bad” (ugly) apple would be one that is deformed, rotting, pestilent, etc.
but is there beauty in the ugly apple? that's what I'm not getting
Oh I see what you’re saying. When I say beauty I meant it as the spectrum of “how beautiful”. So for example an ugly apple would have very very little beauty because it is created and creation is good. Just like how an evil human being is still a human being that deserves dignity by the very nature of being a human despite being evil.
that makes sense to me, but if you're not too tired to talk about it, I'll come with more thoughts.
it seems to me that you're talking about two different things. one of them is the value of beauty, that is present in every single thing and can't be less or more, it's just there unconditionally. and the other thing is related to how it looks individually and you can measure accordingly to some definitions made previously. is that so?
Hm, I’m not sure that I would say they’re “two different things” but I think I understand what you’re getting at. It seems like you’re leading into Plato’s Theory of forms?