Tom MacWood --
I wrote: "I'm not enough of a scholar to know if there is any such thing as a universal, 'hard-wired' consensus about beauty -- or any 'fundamental laws of balance, of harmony and fine proportion.' If you think there is and/or are: What is it? What are they?"
You answered, somewhat more in-your-facially than I expected: "Does one have to be a scholar to explore aesthetics or to discover why they find something beautiful? To say it is beyond the average person, or even the above average person, seems like a cop out to me - don't we know why we find certain music exhilirating or a story interesting or a film provoking? It's not Einstein's theory of relativity...."
I agree with you: The question of why something is or is not beautiful (to you, or to me, or to that fellow behind the tree -- a tree which he or you or I may, or may not, find beautiful, more or less) is not Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Here is my completely unscholarly hypothesis: It is an infinitely (yes, infinitely!) more difficult question, and it can never (yes, never!) be reduced to an equation, to anything so absolute as e = m times c-squared.
You ask: "Don't we know why we find certain music exhilirating or a story interesting or a film provoking?" I answer, again, from my non-scholarly perspective: No. I do not believe we know why WE find certain music exhilarating or a certain story interesting or a certain film provoking. My guess -- note: guess -- is that a person finds something (a golf course, a woman, a song, a movie, a piece of writing, whatever) sublimely beautiful -- or quite beautiful, or marginally beautiful, or not beautiful at all, or downright ugly -- because of some mysterious combination of genetics and experience. Mysterious, and unquantifiable -- but, in any event, individual.
Isn't it remotely possible that when it comes to aesthetics, there is no "WE"? That there is you, and there is I, and there is every other person on Earth, and that each of our views of beauty are peculiar to each of us? That, to me, is a beautiful possibility! You may -- or may not, of course -- agree.
My hunch -- note: hunch -- is that there are, in fact, no "fundamental laws of balance, of harmony and fine proportion," and that Doctor MacKenzie was so much in love with his own views of things, and so taken with the sound of his own charmingly, disarmingly arrogant voice, that he came to consider his views "fundamental laws."
I'm perfectly happy to discuss which golf courses (and women, and movies, and songs, and books, and writings) I have found most beautiful, and to tell you what I found beautiful about them (insofar as words will allow me to do so). But as to WHY I found beautiful WHAT I found beautiful: I think that's beyond me. I'd have to study my genetic map and witness my own life from my mother's womb forward -- and even I don't have time for that!
Call this a copout, but when it comes to beauty (and to academic investigations thereof), I think I'll side with E.B. White's view: "Beauty can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."
Well, OK, all right: Mr. White did say that about humor, not about beauty. But if the shoe fits...steal it! (Is that funny? Yes? Why? Would everyone find it funny? No? Does that mean that there are, in fact, no fundamental laws of humor?)
I close with a few more choice words from Mr. White:
Wife: "It's broccoli, dear."
Husband: "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."