The nature of beauty is one of the most profound, elusive, and controversial subjects in philosophy. Throughout history, philosophers, artists, and scientists have sought to understand the concept of beauty through a variety of perspectives, including those of art, science, religion, and ethics.
Philosophers have debated whether beauty is objective or in the eye of the beholder for centuries, and the answer has varied depending on what philosophical viewpoint is being taken. Traditionally, empiricists (such as Locke and Hume) have associated beauty with pleasure in the experiencer. Beauty, they argue, is a quality that emerges from the interaction of the perceiver and the object of his or her perception. The experience of pleasure is therefore the source or locus of beauty, while the objects that produce that pleasure are merely phantasms in the mind of the perceiver.
Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, viewed beauty as an objective property of things themselves. Aristotle developed a theory of beauty that focused on instantiating definite proportions in the parts of an object, sometimes expressed mathematically as ratios such as the golden section. This classical view of beauty was Christianized by Thomas Aquinas, who linked it to the Second Person of the Trinity. He argued that to be beautiful something must have integrity or perfection, i.e. it must follow its own internal logic. A cubist painting of a woman, for example, might not be considered beautiful because it does not conform to the rules of realism (it may have, say, three eyes).
More recently, philosophers have turned to biology, evolution, and psychology in an attempt to understand what makes certain things beautiful. For example, the field of evolutionary psychology suggests that certain characteristics we find attractive are those that signal health and vitality and thus make us good candidates for reproduction.
Likewise, studies of the neural basis for aesthetic appreciation have revealed that there are universal tendencies in what humans find beautiful, such as a preference for symmetry in faces. Scientists also have uncovered that the brain’s medial orbital frontal cortex is activated when people view certain types of art and music.
Despite these findings, many contemporary philosophers reject the idea of objective standards for beauty. They argue that if beauty is simply defined as whatever pleasures the experiencer gets from an object, it loses its value as a paramount human value. In addition, philosophers such as Arthur Danto argue that the political associations of beauty over the past few centuries have tended to discredit the concept, especially when used in the context of power and oppression. For these reasons, some philosophers have begun to reject the notion of beauty as a worthy goal for the arts. Nevertheless, the notion of beauty persists in popular culture and has re-emerged as an issue in some social justice movements. Thus, it will likely remain an important topic for philosophical discussion in the future.