The Philosophy of Beauty

Beauty is defined as a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially sight. Often, beauty is defined by cultural and societal standards. This can include a person’s age, weight, height, skin color, body shape, or how well they fit into the fashion industry’s latest trends. This is why it’s so important for women to embrace their individuality and feel confident in the parts of themselves that make them unique.

Philosophical treatments of beauty have had a rich and varied history. Some of the most influential philosophers who have written about it include Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine of Hippo, Rene Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Sigmund Freud. Some of these thinkers emphasized the importance of beauty for a flourishing society while others focused on its negative associations, particularly in relation to gender and race.

In general, ancient treatments of beauty tend to associate beauty with pleasures and happiness. This is reflected in such texts as Plotinus’s “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and delicious trouble, longing and love, and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus, Ennead I, 23). This view of beauty may be influenced by an Aristotelian emphasis on harmony and proportion.

It is also common for such treatments to highlight the ways that beauty can inspire awe and wonder, as well as a desire for understanding. Such descriptions are present in such works as the poem “The Lady of Shalott” by William Shakespeare and the poem “The Blues” by Toni Morrison.

However, by the eighteenth century, some philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, were concerned that something important was being lost if beauty was merely treated as a pleasure. They feared that if it were purely subjective, a standard could not be established, and beauty would no longer be something that is admired across persons or societies.

These concerns led to a revival of interest in beauty and a criticism of its negative associations, particularly in connection with gender and race. This is reflected in such writings as Lena Dunham’s “Not Everybody Is Beautiful,” Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Ugly and Proud,” and Bell hooks’ “Appalachian Elegy.”

Some recent treatments of beauty have sought to expand the concept of beauty beyond pleasure to include other forms of value. For example, Ananda Coomaraswamy argues that a work of art or craft can be beautiful if it embodies certain virtues, such as virtuosity and expressiveness. She suggests that this approach avoids mere philistinism by enriching the idea of beauty to include “a good, in fact, necessary purpose.”

In this way, modern feminist philosophers and anti-racist thinkers have rehabilitated beauty as an impulse that can be just as liberating as it is deemed to be enslaving. Confident young women today pack their closets with mini-skirts and play with feminine stereotypes in ways that make some of their feminist elders uneasy. However, it is equally important to recognize the negative aspects of this kind of beauty and to ensure that those who are enslaved by its negative association with sexism and racism do not find themselves relegated to the margins of society.