When most people think of beauty, they tend to focus on outward appearances such as facial symmetry, proportionate limbs and healthy skin and hair. Nevertheless, there is more to attractiveness than that. Evolutionary psychologists say that attractive faces actually reflect underlying good qualities. They can also tell us how a person might behave as a friend, romantic partner or mate.
There have been many philosophical treatments of beauty over the centuries. These have ranged from ancient attempts to find a logical definition of beauty (e.g. Plato’s Symposium, Plotinus’ Enneads) to the more recent feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of beauty (see Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993).
One major dispute in philosophical treatment of beauty concerns whether it is objective or subjective. Some philosophers, especially those of the eighteenth century, thought that if beauty is only subjective then it ceases to be a high value and becomes no different from any other pleasure that might entertain, amuse or distract.
On the other hand, others argued that it is not possible to determine what beauty is without examining the reactions of those who judge it. Those who believe that beauty is objective might argue that the ability on the part of observers to judge beauty, often called “taste” or “sense of taste”, can be trained so that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. In this way, they claim that beauty is not merely subjective but a property that can be found in the world around us.
It is also possible to argue that the experience of beauty can be interpreted as an expression of the innate human desire for perfection. This interpretation of beauty is often attributed to Plato and Augustine of Hippo, but it was also used by the eighteenth-century philosophers Hume and Kant in their treatments of art and aesthetic experience.
In the twentieth century, there was a revival of interest in something like the classical philosophical sense of beauty in both art and philosophy, largely centered on the work of artist Dave Hickey and some feminist-oriented reconstruals or appropriations of beauty. The 1990s saw a further revival, in particular with the work of Luce Irigaray and some other feminist-oriented theorists who developed some new approaches to the antinomy of taste.
The question of what is beautiful has always been controversial, because it touches on some of the most basic issues in the philosophy of mind and body. While most people can agree that certain physical characteristics of a person are considered beautiful, such as a well-formed nose or a pleasing smile, it is not easy to find agreement on the meaning of any other kind of beauty. Moreover, there is evidence that the perception of what is beautiful can change over time with changes in culture or historical periods. For example, the waist-to-hip ratio of women in Western cultures has fluctuated over time and some formerly conventionally beautiful bodies now appear rather ugly.