![Rozeta Paryż notre-dame chalger](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Rozeta_Pary%C5%BC_notre-dame_chalger.jpg)
Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of
aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...
, one of the major branches of philosophy. As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with
ugliness
Unattractiveness or ugliness is the degree to which a person's physical features are considered aesthetically unfavorable of an aesthetic kind.
Terminology
Ugliness is a property of a person or thing that is unpleasant to look upon and results ...
as its negative counterpart. Along with
truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...
and
goodness it is one of the
transcendentals
The transcendentals ( la, transcendentalia, from transcendere "to exceed") are the properties of being, nowadays commonly considered to be truth, beauty, and goodness. The concept arose from medieval scholasticism. Viewed ontologically, the t ...
, which are often considered the three fundamental concepts of human understanding.
One difficulty in understanding beauty is because it has both objective and subjective aspects: it is seen as a property of things but also as depending on the emotional response of observers. Because of its subjective side, beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder".
It has been argued that the ability on the side of the subject needed to perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as the "sense of taste", can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. This would suggest that the standards of validity of judgments of beauty are ''intersubjective'', i.e. dependent on a group of judges, rather than fully ''subjective'' or fully ''objective''.
Conceptions of beauty aim to capture what is essential to all beautiful things. ''Classical conceptions'' define beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. ''Hedonist conceptions'' see a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude towards them or of their function.
Overview
Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of
aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...
, one of the major branches of philosophy.
Beauty is usually categorized as an aesthetic property besides other properties, like grace, elegance or the
sublime.
As a positive aesthetic value, beauty is contrasted with
ugliness
Unattractiveness or ugliness is the degree to which a person's physical features are considered aesthetically unfavorable of an aesthetic kind.
Terminology
Ugliness is a property of a person or thing that is unpleasant to look upon and results ...
as its negative counterpart. Beauty is often listed as one of the three fundamental concepts of human understanding besides
truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...
and
goodness.
Objectivists or
realists see beauty as an objective or mind-independent feature of beautiful things, which is denied by ''
subjectivists''.
The source of this debate is that judgments of beauty seem to be based on subjective grounds, namely our feelings, while claiming universal correctness at the same time.
This tension is sometimes referred to as the "antinomy of taste".
Adherents of both sides have suggested that a certain faculty, commonly called a ''sense of taste'', is necessary for making reliable judgments about beauty.
David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment phil ...
, for example, suggests that this faculty can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run.
Beauty is mainly discussed in relation to ''concrete objects'' accessible to sensory perception. It has been suggested that the beauty of a thing
supervenes on the sensory features of this thing.
It has also been proposed that
abstract objects
In metaphysics, the distinction between abstract and concrete refers to a divide between two types of entities. Many philosophers hold that this difference has fundamental metaphysical significance. Examples of concrete objects include plants, hum ...
like stories or mathematical proofs can be beautiful.
Beauty plays a central role in
works of art
A work of art, artwork, art piece, piece of art or art object is an artistic creation of aesthetic value. Except for "work of art", which may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature ...
and nature.
An influential distinction among beautiful things, according to
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
, is that between ''dependent'' and ''free beauty''. A thing has dependent beauty if its beauty depends on the conception or function of this thing, unlike free or absolute beauty.
Examples of dependent beauty include an ox which is beautiful as an ox but not beautiful as a horse
or a photograph which is beautiful, because it depicts a beautiful building but that lacks beauty generally speaking because of its low quality.
Objectivism and subjectivism
Judgments of beauty seem to occupy an intermediary position between objective judgments, e.g. concerning the mass and shape of a grapefruit, and subjective likes, e.g. concerning whether the grapefruit tastes good.
Judgments of beauty differ from the former because they are based on subjective feelings rather than objective perception. But they also differ from the latter because they lay claim on universal correctness.
This tension is also reflected in common language. On the one hand, we talk about beauty as an objective feature of the world that is ascribed, for example, to landscapes, paintings or humans. The subjective side, on the other hand, is expressed in sayings like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
These two positions are often referred to as ''
objectivism
Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievemen ...
'' (or
realism
Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to:
In the arts
*Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts
Arts movements related to realism include:
*Classical Realism
*Literary realism, a move ...
) and ''subjectivism''.
''Objectivism'' is the traditional view, while subjectivism developed more recently in
western philosophy
Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ' ...
. Objectivists hold that beauty is a mind-independent feature of things. On this account, the beauty of a landscape is independent of who perceives it or whether it is perceived at all.
Disagreements may be explained by an inability to perceive this feature, sometimes referred to as a "lack of taste". Subjectivism, on the other hand, denies the mind-independent existence of beauty.
Influential for the development of this position was
John Locke's distinction between
primary qualities, which the object has independent of the observer, and
secondary qualities
Secondary may refer to: Science and nature
* Secondary emission, of particles
** Secondary electrons, electrons generated as ionization products
* The secondary winding, or the electrical or electronic circuit connected to the secondary winding ...
, which constitute powers in the object to produce certain ideas in the observer.
When applied to beauty, there is still a sense in which it depends on the object and its powers.
But this account makes the possibility of genuine disagreements about claims of beauty implausible, since the same object may produce very different ideas in distinct observers. The notion of "taste" can still be used to explain why different people disagree about what is beautiful, but there is no objectively right or wrong taste, there are just different tastes.
The problem with both the objectivist and the subjectivist position in their extreme form is that each has to deny some intuitions about beauty. This issue is sometimes discussed under the label "
antinomy of taste".
It has prompted various philosophers to seek a unified theory that can take all these intuitions into account. One promising route to solve this problem is to move from subjective to ''intersubjective theories'', which hold that the standards of validity of judgments of taste are intersubjective or dependent on a group of judges rather than objective. This approach tries to explain how genuine disagreement about beauty is possible despite the fact that beauty is a mind-dependent property, dependent not on an individual but a group.
A closely related theory sees beauty as a ''secondary'' or ''response-dependent property''.
On one such account, an object is beautiful "if it causes pleasure by virtue of its aesthetic properties".
The problem that different people respond differently can be addressed by combining response-dependence theories with so-called ''ideal-observer theories'': it only matters how an ideal observer would respond.
There is no general agreement on how "ideal observers" are to be defined, but it is usually assumed that they are experienced judges of beauty with a fully developed sense of taste. This suggests an indirect way of solving the ''antinomy of taste'': instead of looking for
necessary and sufficient conditions
In logic and mathematics, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between two statements. For example, in the conditional statement: "If then ", is necessary for , because the truth of ...
of beauty itself, one can learn to identify the qualities of good critics and rely on their judgments.
This approach only works if unanimity among experts was ensured. But even experienced judges may disagree in their judgments, which threatens to undermine ideal-observer theories.
Conceptions
Various conceptions of the essential features of beautiful things have been proposed but there is no consensus as to which is the right one.
Classical
The "classical conception" defines beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object ''as a whole'' and its ''parts'': the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole.
On this account, which found its most explicit articulation in the
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance ( it, Rinascimento ) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Europe and marked the trans ...
, the beauty of a human body, for example, depends, among other things, on the right proportion of the different parts of the body and on the overall symmetry.
One problem with this conception is that it is difficult to give a general and detailed description of what is meant by "harmony between parts" and raises the suspicion that defining beauty through harmony results in exchanging one unclear term for another one.
Some attempts have been made to dissolve this suspicion by searching for ''laws of beauty'', like the
golden ratio
In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0,
where the Greek letter phi ( ...
.
18th century philosopher
Alexander Baumgarten
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (; ; 17 July 1714 – 27 MayJan LekschasBaumgarten Family'' 1762) was a German philosopher. He was a brother to theologian Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–1757).
Biography
Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the ...
, for example, saw laws of beauty in analogy with
laws of nature and believed that they could be discovered through empirical research.
As of 2003, these attempts have failed to find a general definition of beauty and several authors take the opposite claim that such laws cannot be formulated, as part of their definition of beauty.
Hedonism
A very common element in many conceptions of beauty is its relation to
pleasure.
Hedonism makes this relation part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure.
This account is sometimes labeled as "aesthetic hedonism" in order to distinguish it from other forms of
hedonism. An influential articulation of this position comes from
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known wit ...
, who treats beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it".
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
explains this pleasure through a harmonious interplay between the faculties of understanding and imagination.
A further question for hedonists is how to explain the relation between beauty and pleasure. This problem is akin to the
Euthyphro dilemma
The Euthyphro dilemma is found in Plato's dialogue ''Euthyphro'', in which Socrates asks Euthyphro, "Is the pious ( τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" ( 10a)
Although it ...
: is something beautiful because we enjoy it or do we enjoy it because it is beautiful?
Identity theorists solve this problem by denying that there is a difference between beauty and pleasure: they identify beauty, or the appearance of it, with the experience of aesthetic pleasure.
Hedonists usually restrict and specify the notion of pleasure in various ways in order to avoid obvious counterexamples. One important distinction in this context is the difference between ''pure'' and ''mixed pleasure''.
Pure pleasure excludes any form of pain or unpleasant feeling while the experience of mixed pleasure can include unpleasant elements. But beauty can involve mixed pleasure, for example, in the case of a beautifully tragic story, which is why mixed pleasure is usually allowed in hedonist conceptions of beauty.
Another problem faced by hedonist theories is that we take pleasure from many things that are not beautiful. One way to address this issue is to associate beauty with a special type of pleasure: ''aesthetic'' or ''disinterested pleasure''.
A pleasure is disinterested if it is indifferent to the existence of the beautiful object or if it did not arise owing to an antecedent desire through means-end reasoning.
For example, the joy of looking at a beautiful landscape would still be valuable if it turned out that this experience was an illusion, which would not be true if this joy was due to seeing the landscape as a valuable real estate opportunity.
Opponents of hedonism usually concede that many experiences of beauty are pleasurable but deny that this is true for all cases.
For example, a cold jaded critic may still be a good judge of beauty because of her years of experience but lack the joy that initially accompanied her work.
One way to avoid this objection is to allow responses to beautiful things to lack pleasure while insisting that all beautiful things merit pleasure, that aesthetic pleasure is the only appropriate response to them.
Others
G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the founders of analytic philosophy. He and Russell led the turn from ideal ...
explained beauty in regard to
intrinsic value as "that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself".
This definition connects beauty to experience while managing to avoid some of the problems usually associated with subjectivist positions since it allows that things may be beautiful even if they are never experienced.
Another subjectivist theory of beauty comes from
George Santayana
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana (; December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952), was a Spanish and US-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Born in Spain, Santayana was raised ...
, who suggested that we project pleasure onto the things we call "beautiful". So in a process akin to a
category mistake
A category mistake, or category error, or categorical mistake, or mistake of category, is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternativ ...
, one treats one´s subjective pleasure as an objective property of the beautiful thing.
Other conceptions include defining beauty in terms of a loving or longing attitude towards the beautiful object or in terms of its usefulness or function.
In 1871, functionalist
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended ...
explained beauty as result of accumulative
sexual selection
Sexual selection is a mode of natural selection in which members of one biological sex choose mates of the other sex to mate with (intersexual selection), and compete with members of the same sex for access to members of the opposite sex ( ...
in "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex".
In philosophy
Greco-Roman tradition
The classical Greek noun that best translates to the English-language words "beauty" or "beautiful" was
κάλλος, ''kallos'', and the adjective was καλός, ''kalos''. However, ''kalos'' may and is also translated as ″good″ or ″of fine quality″ and thus has a broader meaning than mere physical or material beauty. Similarly, ''kallos'' was used differently from the English word beauty in that it first and foremost applied to humans and bears an erotic connotation.
The
Koine Greek
Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...
word for beautiful was ὡραῖος, ''hōraios'', an adjective etymologically coming from the word ὥρα, ''hōra'', meaning "hour". In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with "being of one's hour".
[Euripides, ''Alcestis'' 515.] Thus, a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful. In Attic Greek, ''hōraios'' had many meanings, including "youthful" and "ripe old age".
Another
classical term in use to describe beauty was ''
pulchrum'' (
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
).
Beauty for ancient thinkers existed both in
form
Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens.
Form also refers to:
*Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter data
...
, which is the material world as it is, and as embodied in the spirit, which is the world of mental formations.
Greek mythology
A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the origin and nature of the world, the lives and activities ...
mentions
Helen of Troy as the most beautiful woman.
Ancient Greek architecture
Ancient Greek architecture came from the Greek-speaking people (''Hellenic'' people) whose culture flourished on the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese, the Aegean Islands, and in colonies in Anatolia and Italy for a period from about 900 BC unti ...
is based on this view of symmetry and
proportion.
Pre-Socratic
In one fragment of
Heraclitus's writings (''Fragment 106'') he mentions beauty, this reads: "To God all things are beautiful, good, right..." The earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in the works of early Greek philosophers from the
pre-Socratic
Pre-Socratic philosophy, also known as early Greek philosophy, is ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were mostly interested in cosmology, the beginning and the substance of the universe, but the inquiries of thes ...
period, such as
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos ( grc, Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, Pythagóras ho Sámios, Pythagoras the Samian, or simply ; in Ionian Greek; ) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His politi ...
, who conceived of beauty as useful for a moral education of the soul.
He wrote of how people experience pleasure when aware of a certain type of formal situation present in reality, perceivable by sight or through the ear
and discovered the underlying mathematical ratios in the harmonic scales in music.
The
Pythagoreans
Pythagoreanism originated in the 6th century BC, based on and around the teachings and beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras established the first Pythagorean community in the ancient Greek colony of Kroton, ...
conceived of the presence of beauty in universal terms, which is, as existing in a cosmological state, they observed beauty in ''the heavens''.
They saw a strong connection between
mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the
golden ratio
In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0,
where the Greek letter phi ( ...
seemed more attractive.
Classical period
The
classical concept of beauty is one that exhibits perfect proportion (Wolfflin).
In this context, the concept belonged often within the discipline of mathematics.
An idea of spiritual beauty emerged during the
classical period,
beauty was something embodying divine goodness, while the demonstration of behaviour which might be classified as beautiful, from an inner state of morality which is aligned to the
good
In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions. Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil and is of interest in the study of ethics, morality, ph ...
.
The writing of
Xenophon
Xenophon of Athens (; grc, Ξενοφῶν ; – probably 355 or 354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian, born in Athens. At the age of 30, Xenophon was elected commander of one of the biggest Greek mercenary armies o ...
shows a conversation between
Socrates
Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...
and
Aristippus. Socrates discerned differences in the conception of the beautiful, for example, in inanimate objects, the effectiveness of execution of design was a deciding factor on the perception of beauty in something.
By the account of Xenophon, Socrates found beauty congruent with that to which was defined as the morally good, in short, he thought beauty coincident with
the good
In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions. Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil and is of interest in the study of ethics, morality, ph ...
.
Beauty is a subject of
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
in his work
Symposium.
In the work, the high priestess
Diotima describes how beauty moves out from a core singular appreciation of the body to outer appreciations via loved ones, to the world in its state of culture and society (Wright).
In other words, Diotoma gives to Socrates an explanation of how love should begin with
erotic attachment, and end with the transcending of the physical to an appreciation of beauty as a thing in itself. The ascent of love begins with one's own body, then secondarily, in appreciating beauty in another's body, thirdly beauty in the soul, which cognates to beauty in the mind in the modern sense, fourthly beauty in institutions, laws and activities, fifthly beauty in knowledge, the sciences, and finally to lastly love beauty itself, which translates to the original Greek language term as ''
auto
Auto may refer to:
* An automaton
* An automobile
* An autonomous car
* An automatic transmission
* An auto rickshaw
* Short for automatic
* Auto (art), a form of Portuguese dramatic play
* ''Auto'' (film), 2007 Tamil comedy film
* Auto (play), ...
to
kalon''.
In the final state, ''auto to kalon'' and truth are united as one.
There is the sense in the text, concerning love and beauty they both co-exist but are still independent or, in other words, mutually exclusive, since love does not have beauty since it seeks beauty.
The work toward the end provides a description of beauty in a negative sense.
Plato also discusses beauty in his work ''
Phaedrus'',
and identifies Alcibiades as beautiful in ''
Parmenides''.
He considered beauty to be the Idea (
Form
Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens.
Form also refers to:
*Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter data
...
) above all other Ideas. Platonic thought synthesized beauty with
the divine
Divinity or the divine are things that are either related to, devoted to, or proceeding from a deity.[divine< ...](_blank)
.
[(ed. 4th paragraph - ''beauty and the divine'')] Scruton
Scruton is a village and civil parish in the Hambleton district of North Yorkshire, England. It is west of Northallerton. According to the 2001 census the village had a population of 442, decreasing to 424 at the 2011 census.
History
The nam ...
(cited: Konstan) states Plato states of the idea of beauty, of it (the idea), being something inviting desirousness (c.f
seducing
Seduction has multiple meanings. Platonically, it can mean "to persuade to disobedience or disloyalty", or "to lead astray, usually by persuasion or false promises".
Strategies of seduction include conversation and sexual scripts, paralingual ...
), and, promotes an
intellectual
renunciation
Renunciation (or renouncing) is the act of rejecting something, especially if it is something that the renunciant has previously enjoyed or endorsed.
In religion, renunciation often indicates an abandonment of pursuit of material comforts, in t ...
(c.f.
denouncing) of desire.
For
Alexander Nehamas
Alexander Nehamas ( el, Αλέξανδρος Νεχαμάς; born 22 March 1946) is a Greek-born American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature and the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humani ...
, it is only the locating of desire to which the sense of beauty exists, in the considerations of Plato.
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
defines beauty in
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
as having order, symmetry and definiteness ''which the mathematical sciences exhibit to a special degree''.
He saw a relationship between the beautiful (''to kalon'') and virtue, arguing that "Virtue aims at the beautiful."
Roman
In ''
De Natura Deorum
''De Natura Deorum'' (''On the Nature of the Gods'') is a philosophical dialogue by Roman Academic Skeptic philosopher Cicero written in 45 BC. It is laid out in three books that discuss the theological views of the Hellenistic philosophies ...
''
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...
wrote: "the splendour and beauty of creation", in respect to this, and all the facets of reality resulting from creation, he postulated these to be a reason to see
the existence of a God as creator.
Western Middle Ages
In the
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
,
Catholic philosopher
This is a list of Catholic philosophers and theologians whose Catholicism is important to their works. The names are ordered by date of birth in order to give a rough sense of influence between thinkers.
Ancient (born before 500 AD)
*Ignatius o ...
s like
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known wit ...
included beauty among the
transcendental attributes of
being. In his
Summa Theologica
The ''Summa Theologiae'' or ''Summa Theologica'' (), often referred to simply as the ''Summa'', is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a scholastic theologian and Doctor of the Church. It is a compendium of all of the main th ...
, Aquinas described the three conditions of beauty as: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony and proportion), and claritas (a radiance and clarity that makes the form of a thing apparent to the mind).
In the Gothic Architecture of the
High and
Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European history lasting from AD 1300 to 1500. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Europe, the Renai ...
, light was considered the most beautiful revelation of
God
In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...
, which was heralded in design.
[Stegers, Rudolf (2008). ''Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual''. Berlin: De Gruyter. p. 60. .] Examples are the
stained glass of Gothic
Cathedral
A cathedral is a church that contains the '' cathedra'' () of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually specific to those Christian denominatio ...
s including
Notre-Dame de Paris and
Chartres Cathedral
Chartres Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres (french: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres), is a Roman Catholic church in Chartres, France, about southwest of Paris, and is the seat of the Bishop of Chartres. Mostly con ...
.
St. Augustine said of beauty "Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked."
Renaissance
Classical philosophy
This page lists some links to ancient philosophy, namely philosophical thought extending as far as early post-classical history ().
Overview
Genuine philosophical thought, depending upon original individual insights, arose in many cultures ...
and sculptures of men and women produced according to the
Greek philosophers
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BC, marking the end of the Greek Dark Ages. Greek philosophy continued throughout the Hellenistic period and the period in which Greece and most Greek-inhabited lands were part of the Roman Empire ...
' tenets of ideal human beauty were rediscovered in
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
Europe, leading to a re-adoption of what became known as a "classical ideal". In terms of female human beauty, a woman whose
appearance
Appearance may refer to:
* Visual appearance, the way in which objects reflect and transmit light
* Human physical appearance, what someone looks like
* ''Appearances'' (film), a 1921 film directed by Donald Crisp
* Appearance (philosophy), or p ...
conforms to these tenets is still called a "classical beauty" or said to possess a "classical beauty", whilst the foundations laid by Greek and Roman artists have also supplied the standard for male beauty and female beauty in western civilization as seen, for example, in the ''
Winged Victory of Samothrace
The ''Winged Victory of Samothrace'', or the ''Nike of Samothrace'', is a votive monument originally found on the island of Samothrace, north of the Aegean Sea. It is a masterpiece of Greek sculpture from the Hellenistic era, dating from the be ...
''. During the Gothic era, the classical aesthetical canon of beauty was rejected as sinful. Later,
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
and
Humanist
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "human ...
thinkers rejected this view, and considered beauty to be the product of rational order and harmonious proportions. Renaissance artists and architects (such as
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari (, also , ; 30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian Renaissance Master, who worked as a painter, architect, engineer, writer, and historian, who is best known for his work '' The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculp ...
in his "Lives of Artists") criticised the Gothic period as irrational and barbarian. This point of view of
Gothic art
Gothic art was a style of medieval art that developed in Northern France out of Romanesque art in the 12th century AD, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, and much of Northern, Southern and ...
lasted until Romanticism, in the 19th century. Vasari aligned himself to the classical notion and thought of beauty as defined as arising from
proportion and order.
Age of Reason
![Sandro Botticelli - La nascita di Venere - Google Art Project - edited](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_nascita_di_Venere_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg)
The
Age of Reason saw a rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher
Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty is "unity in variety and variety in unity". He wrote that beauty was neither purely subjective nor purely objective—it could be understood not as "any Quality suppos'd to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes the ''Perception'' of some mind; ... however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception."
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
believed that there could be no "universal criterion of the beautiful" and that the experience of beauty is subjective, but that an object is judged to be beautiful when it seems to display "purposiveness"; that is, when its form is perceived to have the character of a thing designed according to some principle and fitted for a purpose. He distinguished "free beauty" from "merely dependent beauty", explaining that "the first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith."
[Kennick, William Elmer (1979). ''Art and Philosophy: Readings in Aesthetics; 2nd ed.'' New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 517. .] By this definition, free beauty is found in seashells and wordless music; dependent beauty in buildings and the human body.
The Romantic poets, too, became highly concerned with the
nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
of beauty, with
John Keats arguing in ''Ode on a Grecian Urn'' that:
: Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
: Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Western 19th and 20th century
In the Romantic period,
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (; 12 January NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS">New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS/nowiki>_1729_–_9_July_1797)_was_an_NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">N ...
postulated a difference between beauty in its classical meaning and the
sublime. The concept of the sublime, as explicated by Burke and
Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aest ...
, suggested viewing Gothic art and architecture, though not in accordance with the classical standard of beauty, as sublime.
The 20th century saw an increasing rejection of beauty by artists and philosophers alike, culminating in
postmodernism's anti-aesthetics. This is despite beauty being a central concern of one of postmodernism's main influences,
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
, who argued that the Will to Power was the Will to Beauty.
In the aftermath of postmodernism's rejection of beauty, thinkers have returned to beauty as an important value. American analytic philosopher
Guy Sircello
Guy Sircello (1936–1992) was an American philosopher best known for his analytic approach to philosophical aesthetics.
Biography
Guy Sircello was born in Tacoma, Washington, and attended Lincoln High School. His parents were Pete and Teresa Sir ...
proposed his New Theory of Beauty as an effort to reaffirm the status of beauty as an important philosophical concept. He rejected the subjectivism of Kant and sought to identify the properties inherent in an object that make it beautiful. He called qualities such as vividness, boldness, and subtlety "properties of qualitative degree" (PQDs) and stated that a PQD makes an object beautiful if it is not—and does not create the appearance of—"a property of deficiency, lack, or defect"; and if the PQD is strongly present in the object.
Elaine Scarry
Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests inc ...
argues that beauty is related to justice.
Beauty is also studied by psychologists and neuroscientists in the field of
experimental aesthetics and
neuroesthetics respectively. Psychological theories see beauty as a form of
pleasure. Correlational findings support the view that more beautiful objects are also more pleasing. Some studies suggest that higher experienced beauty is associated with activity in the medial
orbitofrontal cortex
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a prefrontal cortex region in the frontal lobes of the brain which is involved in the cognitive process of decision-making. In non-human primates it consists of the association cortex areas Brodmann area 11, 1 ...
. This approach of localizing the processing of beauty in one brain region has received criticism within the field.
Philosopher and novelist
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel ''The Name of th ...
wrote ''
On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea'' (2004) and ''
On Ugliness
''On Ugliness'' ( it, Storia della bruttezza) is a 2007 essay by Italian author Umberto Eco, originally published by Bompiani in 2007. The book is a continuation of Eco's 2004 aesthetic work '' On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea''. Like the pr ...
'' (2007). The narrator of his novel ''
The Name of the Rose
''The Name of the Rose'' ( it, Il nome della rosa ) is the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, and an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in ficti ...
'' follows Aquinas in declaring: "three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason, we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light", before going on to say "the sight of the beautiful implies peace".
Chinese philosophy
Chinese philosophy has traditionally not made a separate discipline of the philosophy of beauty.
Confucius
Confucius ( ; zh, s=, p=Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly zh, s=, p=Kǒngzǐ, labels=no; – ) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. C ...
identified beauty with goodness, and considered a virtuous personality to be the greatest of beauties: In his philosophy, "a neighborhood with a ''
ren'' man in it is a beautiful neighborhood."
[Chang, Chi-yun (2013). ''Confucianism: A Modern Interpretation (2012 Edition)''. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company. p. 213. ] Confucius's student
Zeng Shen
Zeng Shen (505–435 BC), better known as Zengzi (Master Zeng), courtesy name Ziyu (), was a Chinese philosopher and disciple of Confucius. He later taught Zisi (Kong Ji), the grandson of Confucius, who was in turn the teacher of Mencius, thus be ...
expressed a similar idea: "few men could see the beauty in some one whom they dislike."
Mencius considered "complete truthfulness" to be beauty.
Zhu Xi said: "When one has strenuously implemented goodness until it is filled to completion and has accumulated truth, then the beauty will reside within it and will not depend on externals."
[Tang, Yijie (2015). ''Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity and Chinese Culture''. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p. 242. ]
As an attribute to humans
![Nofretete Neues Museum](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Nofretete_Neues_Museum.jpg)
The word "beauty" is often used as a countable noun to describe a beautiful woman.
The characterization of a person as “beautiful”, whether on an individual basis or by community consensus, is often based on some combination of ''inner beauty'', which includes psychological factors such as Personality type, personality, intelligence, wiktionary:grace, grace, politeness, charisma, integrity, wikt:congruence, congruence and elegance, and ''outer beauty'' (i.e. physical attractiveness) which includes physical attributes which are valued on an aesthetic basis.
Standards of beauty have changed over time, based on changing cultural values. Historically, paintings show a wide range of different standards for beauty. However, humans who are relatively young, with smooth skin, well-proportioned bodies, and regular features, have traditionally been considered the most beautiful throughout history.
A strong indicator of physical beauty is "averageness".
When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the "ideal" image and are perceived as more attractive. This was first noticed in 1883, when Francis Galton overlaid photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each. When doing this, he noticed that the composite images were more attractive compared to any of the individual images.
Researchers have replicated the result under more controlled conditions and found that the computer-generated, mathematical average of a series of faces is rated more favorably than individual faces. It is argued that it is evolutionarily advantageous that sexual creatures are attracted to mates who possess predominantly common or average features, because it suggests the Koinophilia, absence of genetic or acquired defects.
[Symons, D. (1979) ''The Evolution of Human Sexuality''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.]
Since the 1970´s there has been increasing evidence that a preference for beautiful faces emerges early in infancy, and is probably innate,
and that the rules by which attractiveness is established are similar across different genders and cultures.
A feature of beautiful women which has been explored by researchers is a waist–hip ratio of approximately 0.70. As of 2004, physiologists had shown that women with Female body shape, hourglass figures were more fertile than other women because of higher levels of certain female hormones, a fact that may subconsciously condition males choosing mates. However, in 2008 other commentators have suggested that this preference may not be universal. For instance, in some non-Western cultures in which women have to do work such as finding food, men tend to have preferences for higher waist-hip ratios.
Exposure to the thin ideal in mass media, such as fashion magazines, directly correlates with body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and the development of eating disorders among female viewers. Further, the widening gap between individual body sizes and societal ideals continues to breed anxiety among young girls as they grow, highlighting the dangerous nature of beauty standards in society.
Western concept
Beauty standards are rooted in cultural norms crafted by societies and media over centuries. As of 2018, it has been argued that the predominance of white women featured in movies and advertising leads to a Eurocentrism, Eurocentric concept of beauty, which assigns inferiority to women of color. Thus, societies and cultures across the globe struggle to diminish the longstanding internalized racism.
Eurocentric standards for men include tallness, leanness, and muscularity, which have been idolized through American media, such as in Cinema of the United States, Hollywood films and magazine covers.
The prevailing Eurocentric concept of beauty has varying effects on different cultures. Primarily, adherence to this standard among African American women has bred a lack of positive reification of African beauty, and philosopher Cornel West elaborates that, "much of black self-hatred and self-contempt has to do with the refusal of many black Americans to love their own black bodies-especially their black noses, hips, lips, and hair." These insecurities can be traced back to global idealization of women with light skin, green or blue eyes, and long straight or wavy hair in magazines and media that starkly contrast with the natural features of African women.
Much criticism has been directed at models of beauty which depend solely upon Western ideals of beauty as seen for example in the Barbie model franchise. Criticisms of Barbie are often centered around concerns that children consider Barbie a role model of beauty and will attempt to emulate her. One of the most common criticisms of Barbie is that she promotes an unrealistic idea of body image for a young woman, leading to a risk that girls who attempt to emulate her will become anorexia nervosa, anorexic.
As of 1998, these criticisms, the lack of diversity in such franchises as the Barbie model of beauty in Western culture, had led to a dialogue to create non-exclusive models of Western ideals in body type and beauty. Mattel responded to these criticisms. Starting in 1980, it produced Hispanic dolls, and later came models from across the globe. For example, in 2007, it introduced "Cinco de Mayo Barbie" wearing a ruffled red, white, and green dress (echoing the Mexican flag). ''Hispanic'' magazine reports that:
Black concept
In the 1960s the black is beautiful
cultural movement sought to dispel the notion of a Eurocentrism, Eurocentric concept of beauty.
Asian concept
![Indian girl in traditional attire](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Indian_girl_in_traditional_attire.jpg)
In East Asian cultures, familial pressures and cultural norms shape beauty ideals; a 2017 experimental study concluded that expecting that men in Asian culture did not like women who look “fragile” was impacting Asian American women´s lifestyle, eating, and appearance choices.
In addition to the "male gaze", media portrayals of Asian women as petite and the portrayal of beautiful women in American media as fair complexioned and slim-figured have induced anxiety and depressive symptoms among Asian American women who don't fit either of these beauty ideals.
Further, the high status associated with fairer skin can be attributed to Asian societal history, as upper-class people hired workers to perform outdoor, manual labor, cultivating a visual divide over time between lighter complexioned, wealthier families and sun tanned, darker laborers.
This along with the Eurocentric beauty ideals embedded in Asian culture has made skin lightening creams, rhinoplasty, and blepharoplasty (an eyelid surgery meant to give Asians a more European, "double-eyelid" appearance) commonplace among Asian women, illuminating the insecurity that results from cultural beauty standards.
In Japan, the concept of beauty in men is known as 'bishōnen'. Bishōnen refers to males with distinctly Femininity, feminine features, physical characteristics establishing the standard of beauty in Japan and typically exhibited in their popular culture, pop culture Japanese idol, idols. A multibillion-dollar industry of Japanese Aesthetic Salons exists for this reason.
Effects on society
Researchers have found that good-looking students get higher grades from their teachers than students with an ordinary appearance. Some studies using mock criminal trials have shown that physically attractive "defendants" are less likely to be convicted—and if convicted are likely to receive lighter sentences—than less attractive ones (although the opposite effect was observed when the alleged crime was swindling, perhaps because jurors perceived the defendant's attractiveness as facilitating the crime). Studies among teens and young adults, such as those of psychiatrist and self-help author Eva Ritvo show that skin conditions have a profound effect on social behavior and opportunity.
How much money a person earns may also be influenced by physical beauty. One study found that people low in physical attractiveness earn 5 to 10 percent less than ordinary-looking people, who in turn earn 3 to 8 percent less than those who are considered good-looking. In the market for loans, the least attractive people are less likely to get approvals, although they are less likely to default. In the marriage market, women's looks are at a premium, but men's looks do not matter much. The impact of physical attractiveness on earnings varies across races, with the largest beauty wage gap among black women and black men.
Conversely, being very unattractive increases the individual's propensity for criminal activity for a number of crimes ranging from burglary to theft to selling illicit drugs.
Discrimination against others based on their appearance is known as lookism.
See also
* Adornment
* Aesthetics
* Beauty pageant
* Body modification
* Feminine beauty ideal
* Glamour (presentation)
* Masculine beauty ideal
* Mathematical beauty
* Processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure
* Unattractiveness
* Cosmetics
References
Further reading
*
* Liebelt, C. (2022), Beauty: What Makes Us Dream, What Haunts Us. Feminist Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12076
External links
*
*
BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme on Beauty(requires RealAudio)
''Dictionary of the History of Ideas'':Theories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Regensburg University – Characteristics of beautiful faces
''Art and love in Renaissance Italy '' Issued in connection with an exhibition held Nov. 11, 2008-Feb. 16, 2009, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (see Belle: Picturing Beautiful Women; pages 246–254).
Plato - Symposiumin S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, C. D. C. Reeve (ed.)
{{Authority control
Beauty,
Aesthetic beauty
Aesthetics
Concepts in aesthetics
Concepts in ancient Greek aesthetics
Fashion
Physical attractiveness