When we talk about beauty, it often involves a discussion of appearance. However, if we think about it deeper, beauty can be more than skin deep. True beauty is a combination of qualities that shine through from the inside out like confidence, poise, joy, patience, truthfulness, kindness, and persistence. When you hear someone describe another person as beautiful, they may be talking about a mix of these qualities or the way they carry themselves and make you feel when you are around them.
For most of human history, philosophers have treated beauty as an objective quality. They have looked for laws that govern it, such as harmony or symmetry. They have tried to find a definition of beauty that can apply to all objects, irrespective of their cultural or historical contexts. They have also attempted to understand the experience of beauty, trying to find out what exactly it is that makes something beautiful.
Early treatments of beauty, such as those by Aristotle and Plato, focused on the idea that a beautiful object or work of art is a harmonious whole. They believed that this is a kind of beauty that is good for us because it creates pleasure in our minds. They believed that the pleasure we experience from a harmonious whole is different than the pleasure we experience in enjoying individual parts of a whole.
By the eighteenth century, philosophers such as Hume and Kant began to see that something was lost if beauty were only treated as an object of subjective experience. For example, they recognized that there are times when a person’s sense of beauty might be disputed because the reason for their opinion might not be obvious.
They also saw that if we only treated beauty as a pleasure, it would be difficult to explain why some experiences of beauty are pleasant while others are not. For example, a color might be beautiful to one person but unpleasant to another because of the way they are perceiving it.
In recent years, some philosophers have begun to question the traditional concepts of beauty. They have pointed out that beauty is entangled with power and politics, and that it can be used as a tool of oppression. These entanglements can challenge the notion of beauty as an intrinsic good, but they can also provide useful insights into the nature of beauty.
In the twentieth century, artists have mostly abandoned the pursuit of beauty as their primary goal for making art. This abandonment has been caused by a number of things, including the belief that there are more pressing concerns to be addressed in society. Nevertheless, many philosophers continue to argue that beauty is still a valuable concept to study. The pursuit of beauty in the arts can help to shape our culture and give us a sense of what is important in life. It can also teach us about the value of being true to ourselves. For these reasons, it is important to continue a conversation about what beauty is and how we can make the world a more beautiful place.