Beautifull is a word that appears to be derived from the suffix “-ful,” which is typical for English words that end in two Ls—fulfill, happy, loving, etc. Unlike the –ing forms of such words, which are inflected to indicate a state, Beautifull is uninflected and seems to be meant to describe something in its own right. It has also been suggested that the suffix Beautifull is an allusion to a biblical passage in which Jesus describes himself as “the chief of all beautiful things” (Mark 10:29).
Beautiful is often defined by what it makes us feel: the joy, pleasure, and excitement it can invoke. However, there is much more to beauty than a simple feeling. Beauty is a complex phenomenon that involves many different cognitive processes, and it has long been associated with moral and political significance.
In philosophy, there are a variety of approaches to beauty. One of the most common, dating back to Aristotle, is a classical, rational approach that looks at the structure and form of an object and its components in order to evaluate whether it is indeed beautiful. This approach focuses on integrity, harmony, and proportion—particularly, but not exclusively, the golden section of a sculpture or the perfect symmetry of a musical composition.
More recently, some philosophers have tended to focus more on the subjective experience of beauty, and less on its structural or conceptual properties. For example, in his essay On the Nature of Beauty (1818), G.E. Moore argues that beauty is a sensation of pleasure that is created by the way an object causes certain emotions in the observer. This view is largely rejected by later philosophers, however, such as Hume and Kant. Hume and Kant both believed that beauty requires a more logical and objective evaluation than merely a response to an object’s ability to give rise to feelings of pleasure.
While it is true that the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus all link beauty to an emotional reaction, they do so in different ways. For instance, Plato and Aristotle both insist that a thing can only be truly beautiful if it has a “compound beauty,” or a combination of parts that work together to create a comely whole.
In contrast, Plotinus in the Enneads focuses on the beauty of particular objects in their relation to the Form that they are a part of: “The beauty of the thing lies in its symmetry with regard to all other things; it is a delight in them all and in the unity of the whole; it induces wonderment and a delicious trouble and love and a trembling” (Plotinus 23 [Ennead I, 3]). In this view, beauty can only be a pleasure if it is a kind of perfection or wholeness. It cannot be a mere pleasure of the senses, because it must involve a certain intellectual activity.