A person’s sense of beauty can be a powerful factor in shaping one’s personality and influence the way people perceive and interact with others. It can also affect the person’s emotional, social and mental state. The concept of beauty has been a subject of fascination throughout history. However, not everyone agrees on what is beautiful or how to define it. The well-known expression “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” suggests that the experience of beauty is subjective, and therefore it’s hard to pin down what makes an object or a person beautiful.
The concept of beauty can be found in many aspects of life, from the design and arrangement of a city to the shape of a flower or tree. The concept can also apply to a person’s appearance, from the attractiveness of a smile or a face to their weight and height.
Philosophers have debated the meaning and value of beauty since ancient times. Many philosophers have argued that beauty is an objective phenomenon. They have tried to explain why some objects or people are beautiful while others are not. Some of these arguments have been contradictory, but many of them have shared basic elements.
Until recently, the vast majority of philosophical views on beauty have regarded beauty as an objective quality. For example, Kant’s treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious hedonistic features, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus connects beauty to a response of love and desire.
Other scholars have taken a more esoteric view of beauty. Plato (427-347 BCE) viewed beauty as a property of Forms, which are ideal rather than physical. Unlike Kant, Plato held that beauty was a property of the thing itself, not a feature of an observer’s experience.
In modern times, the idea of beauty has been challenged by feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms. In particular, beauty has become associated with hedonism and consumption, often at a cost to the welfare of other people.
In spite of its tumultuous history, the concept of beauty is still a central issue in philosophy. It has been rehabilitated in recent years by both art critics and social-justice oriented philosophers. The new emphasis on the importance of beauty has contributed to a revival in interest in both classical philosophical and aesthetics. This has been most notable in the 1990s, with a number of different attempts to address the old conflict between objective and subjective accounts of beauty. These have ranged from a new appreciation of the importance of context and the value of the concept of pleasure to feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of beauty. These new approaches have emphasized the role of beauty in morality and political action. However, they have tended to neglect the nature of beauty’s connection to exploitation and oppression. This omission is significant, because it suggests that we need to look more closely at the ways in which beauty is connected with power and wealth.