Beauty is a perceptual experience that gives pleasure and meaning to the senses. It can be found in objects, people and ideas, including those that challenge or excite us. But it is most easily found in a person or object that makes you feel comfortable with yourself and at ease with the world around you. A feeling like this can be described as being “at home” with yourself and your place in the universe, and it is what we often refer to when talking about a beautiful person or a beautiful thing.
For the ancient Greeks, beauty was a concept that included both what could be called physical or material beauty and what might be called spiritual or intellectual beauty. The Greeks thought that beautiful objects and objects of art were pleasing to the eye because they reflected or imitated certain proportions and relations between parts that are inherent in the nature of those things. These proportions were based on geometrical laws, such as the golden ratio. The ancients compared these geometrical laws to human features, such as the proportion of a head to a body or the symmetry of a face. They believed that a good ruler was one who followed these proportions.
This philosophy of beauty and its connection to the natural order was influential for centuries. Aristotle expanded on Plato’s ideas, making beauty a result of a harmony between the object and the beholder. He also believed that the object of beauty must be useful, so that a person who uses or admires it can be benefited from its use or function. He also compared the parts of a beautiful object to musical instruments, so that they are ordered and adjusted to play well together.
Some eighteenth-century philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated purely as a subjective state. They saw that controversies and disagreements arise about whether certain objects or works of art are beautiful, and they pointed out that reasons can be given to support the claims of those who believe the objects are. Moreover, they understood that if the judgment of beauty is merely a matter of personal preference or desire, it loses its significance as an objective value for all persons and societies.
Other philosophers, such as Santayana and Schopenhauer, treated beauty as a kind of objectified pleasure. This treatment of beauty avoids philistinism by enriching the concept of pleasure to include not only hedonic pleasure, but also pleasure in the act of using a work or experiencing it as especially pleasurable and satisfying. This approach is sometimes referred to as aesthetic utilitarianism.