The word beauty often brings to mind images of department store aisles lined with makeup and models or the princess in a fairy tale. However, the concept of beauty encompasses much more than surface impressions. Beauty is defined by Webster as a feature or quality of a person, object, or idea that gives pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction to the senses and intellect. Beauty has become one of the central themes of philosophical inquiry, especially within aesthetics. It is an important concept to examine because it provides us with a way of describing our experiences with art, nature and people.
The classical conception of beauty argues that an object is beautiful in the way that it organizes its parts into an integrated, harmonious whole. This account of beauty, which is rooted in Aristotle’s Poetics, emphasizes harmony, proportion, and symmetry as the essential qualities. This view of beauty has shaped the form of many classical and neo-classical works of art, architecture, music, and literature.
In the eighteenth century, philosophers such as Hume and Kant argued that the classical conception of beauty was not completely objective. They saw that when the judgment of beauty is left entirely up to individual experiencers, a number of different controversies will arise over whether a particular thing is beautiful or not. They also argued that, if a thing has an intrinsic quality of beauty, it can be recognized as such by a group of observers even if the individual experiencer does not feel that it is beautiful himself or herself.
Another issue with the classical conception of beauty is that it tends to treat beauty as a subjective state rather than a real property or attribute of things. This raises the suspicion that it may not be possible to define a general law of beauty, or even a specific principle, like harmony. Some philosophers have sought to dissolve this suspicion by treating beauty as a concept that requires some sort of ‘use,’ such that an object is considered beautiful if it satisfies its use in a particular way. Others, like Ananda Coomaraswamy, have argued that this treatment of beauty risks turning the concept into mere philistinism by exchanging an undefined, subjective feeling for an actual concrete use.
By the late 1980s, there was revived interest in the topic of beauty and critique of its role in society, particularly within feminist philosophy. For example, the hedonistic expression of beauty associated with Rococo art seemed to be at odds with the exploitation and poverty that capitalism engenders. This entangled beauty with issues of morality, ethics, and politics, calling into question its traditional status as a form of pure, transcendent perfection. The term beauty has since come to be used more broadly to describe a broad range of experiences, from the pleasures experienced in daily life to the emotions provoked by music or dance. It has also been used to refer to certain aspects of the world, such as landscapes or sunsets, and even whole movements in art and fashion.