The Concept of Beautifull

The concept of beautifull is at the heart of much of Western philosophy and art. But what is beauty and how can we know when something is beautiful? Throughout the centuries, insights on this topic have been gained and refined. At the same time, profundities of previous eras have been lost.

The ancient philosophies were clear and consistent in that they treated the beautiful as something that is, in one way or another, related to goodness and truth. For example, a philosopher of the Renaissance might discuss the virtuosity of an artist in terms of his ability to produce “beautifull” music, or a Romantic poet might praise a work of literature for its ability to convey a spiritual truth. In any event, a consistent focus on these issues ensured that the philosopher’s discussion of the beautiful would remain at the center of his discourse.

However, from the seventeenth century onwards, the emphasis shifted to the subjective aspect of aesthetic experience. It was argued that the experience of the beautiful lures us into a nonpurposive mindset, wherein we can be delivered from our slavery to our own self-serving egos and into a fusion with what the veil of Maya (Schopenhauer) normally occludes from view—our innermost communion with all other forms of existence in the form of human brotherhood. The rapture of experiencing a Beethoven symphony, for example, is celebrated as a kind of liberation from the mundane and the egocentric to the sublime and universal.

It was also argued that beauty evokes an emotional response, typically positive. This can take the form of awe or love, and this is why beauty has often been considered to be so important.

The earliest treatments of this idea also tended to see beauty as having some utilitarian or practical value. Aristotle, for example, regarded beauty as the combination of a number of proportions whose instantiation is reflected in the harmony of a sculpture or in mathematical ratios such as the golden section.

This was the dominant approach to beauty in philosophy and art for centuries. However, eighteenth-century thinkers such as Hume and Kant recognized that something important was lost if beauty were simply treated as a subjective state. They saw that controversies about the beautiful are often raised and can be defended on rational grounds, and that beauty is an aspirational ideal for promoting non-alienated labor and other pursuits essential to the human condition.

A great many modern and contemporary philosophers have approached the question of beauty in a different way. Some have tried to make sense of the different ways that beauty can be described, while others have sought to understand why and how we experience beauty in our lives. In particular, there has been an active interest in the notion of a “noble beauty” and in feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept. These ideas can be found in the articles listed below.