Aesthetic attitude can be carried out through the senses: hearing a good piece of music, viewing an exquisite painting, or feeling the cool water on your skin. But these are not necessary. Aesthetic attitude can also relate to the imagination, to learning a complicated theorem, or to any other mode of experience. In the following paragraphs, we will examine different approaches to beauty and how to find it in your life.
Throughout the history of art, many ancient treatments of beauty have praised and admired the pleasures of beauty, describing the experience of aesthetic pleasure in ecstatic terms. Plotinus wrote that ‘beauty’ involves symmetry, definiteness, and shape. It is a state of delight that can be experienced with pleasure. In this sense, beauty is an ideal state of being. But it cannot be achieved simply through the power of the human senses.
The Romans adopted many of the Greek practices and developed a science of cosmetics. Ovid, the Roman poet, wrote the first beauty manual. The ancient world already knew about makeup, so upper class women began to smear wax on their wrinkled skin and tint their gray hair. They also replaced their eyebrows with fur. And there’s no telling what the future holds! The history of beauty goes back to ancient Greece. The Greeks and Romans discovered and practiced many of the practices that we take for granted today.
The ideal beauty is based on arbitrary standards and varies from culture to culture. Even though most of us agree that certain women are beautiful, the exact standards of beauty are highly complex. In fact, the decision of what we regard as beautiful has a lot to do with class. And it’s no wonder that cosmetic surgery and facials can cost thousands of dollars. What’s more, if the procedure is not free of side effects and is not affordable, it’s more likely to cost us dearly.
Despite the widespread use of the word “beautiful” in contemporary culture, the concept of beauty remains a controversial topic. Whether or not beauty is a universal trait based on cultural preference is still debated. In a sense, beauty is something that unites the world. Whatever the context, what’s beautiful is an experience that is shared among all cultures. It’s also subjective. So, how do we define beauty?