Beauty is that which pleases the aesthetic senses, notably the sight. It can be found in all sorts of things, from a tree to a piece of art to a person. It is a matter of taste, however, and what one thinks is beautiful may not be so to another.
Traditionally, philosophers have tried to define beauty in terms of an objective standard. The ancient Greeks, for example, saw beauty in harmony and proportion. They believed that a work of art was beautiful when it conformed to a set of definite ratios between its parts, which could be found in nature and in mathematical works such as the golden section.
Plato and Aristotle argued that an object is beautiful when its parts are arranged in a harmonious relation to one another, with a precise proportion. This is the classical conception of beauty, still reflected in many Western cultural traditions and expressed in music, architecture, and sculpture to this day.
The seventeenth century philosopher George Santayana took a different approach to beauty. He characterized it as a pleasure that the beholder takes in an object, and thus the judgment that an object is beautiful is merely an expression of this pleasure. Santayana’s view, influenced by Empiricists such as Locke, did not see beauty as a quality independent of the perceiving mind, but rather as a subjective response to an object.
By the eighteenth century, most philosophers had rejected the notion of an objective beauty. Hume and Kant argued that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but they also emphasized that this view makes no sense unless we treat the object as something which, on its own, has no intrinsic value.
In the nineteenth century, a few philosophers attempted to give a more sophisticated account of beauty, based on the idea that the pleasure one takes in a work of art is actually derived from the concept of beauty itself, and that this concept has an ontological priority over the particular features of the object. Arthur Danto’s essay, The Abuse of Beauty, is a classic discussion of this idea.
In the twentieth century, philosophers largely abandoned beauty as a central theme of their philosophy, perhaps because it was seen as trivial and unimportant. But it has gained renewed interest in social justice oriented philosophy, especially among feminists and those concerned with the harm done by stereotyping. A person’s appearance, especially their face and body shape, is often the first thing that people notice about them. But there is much more to a person than what they look like, and their beauty can be found in the way they speak and their character. They are beautiful if they are compassionate and generous, for example. And they are beautiful if they are happy and healthy, even though they may not appear to be so on the outside. The beauty of a person is in their inner soul, their heart, and the way they care for other people.