Beauty is a positive aesthetic value that distinguishes landscapes, sunsets, human faces and works of art from ugliness. It is a central topic in aesthetics, one of the main areas of philosophical inquiry. Beauty, art and taste are also the focus of many psychological studies, as well as some political theories.
Most philosophers, from Plato to Kant, associate beauty with pleasure, though the way they treat the subject is quite different. The ancient Greeks, for instance, considered it a fundamental principle, an essential property of objects, that was not localized in the response of the beholder and could therefore be shared by a larger group. They treated it as a combination of proportion and symmetry, expressed in mathematical ratios like the golden section (see Classical aesthetics).
The eighteenth century empiricists, such as Locke, took pleasure to be only one of several qualities that can make an object beautiful or ugly. They also argued that colors, including blue, are not in the object but rather in the perceiving mind and that our experience of beauty may vary from one person to another.
For some time, the idea that beauty depends on harmony between parts was dominant. It was not until the late 19th century that a theory of beauty emerged that attempted to distinguish it from the pleasure theory. Santayana, in The Sense of Beauty (1896), thought that beauty rested on the fact that things seem to us to be harmonious when they have certain proportions and relations.
However, this account makes the concept of beauty rather vague. It is hard to know what kind of harmony is involved, since a thing can be harmonious for a number of reasons and the concept itself is rather ephemeral, shifting from season to season, from person to person. The idea that beauty involves something beyond simple pleasure seems to have appealed to writers and artists from gothic mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe (“Nothing exquisite is without some strangeness”) to snowy-quiffed fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (“I don’t like standard beauty — I prefer it to be unique”).
As for its association with moral values, the political associations of beauty have been remarkably varied and problematic. They have ranged from criticism and even destruction to adulation. In some cases, they have been imposed by force, such as in the Nazis’ ideal images of athletes (see Leni Riefenstahl).
Beauty continues to be an important issue, whether in terms of how people perceive the world around them or in terms of how they organize their lives. It has been deemed both liberating and enslaving, and it appears in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be just as disruptive as it has been regarded as reinforcing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioral models. As such, it seems to be the perfect topic for a discussion of the philosophy of art and culture. This weekend’s readings include Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and bell hooks’ Appalachian Elegy.