The question of what beauty is has been the subject of intense philosophical inquiry. Generally speaking, though, the concept of beauty is understood as a characteristic that provides a perceptual experience to a particular sensory organ (the eye, the ear or the intellect). Beauty may be appreciated in terms of pleasure, meaning, satisfaction or even moral judgment. It may be found in a landscape, a piece of art or even a person.
Most ancient treatments of beauty emphasized its objective nature. Plato and Plotinus, for example, connect beauty to a response of love and desire but they also locate beauty in the realm of Forms. In his Symposium, Aristotle likewise treats beauty as an object of pleasure but also examines its properties and attributes with greater dispassion. He argues that beautiful objects must have “a magnitude of their own” and that they must be ordered in ways that are consistent with a certain underlying form.
These ancient theories were refined and Christianized by Thomas Aquinas who argued that for an object to be considered beautiful it must possess integrity, that is, it must follow its own internal logic. A realistic portrait of a woman, for example, would not have integrity if it included an extra eye. Moreover, beauty must induce certain pleasures, often described in ecstatic terms, such as wonderment, delicious trouble and longing.
In the eighteenth century, however, most philosophers shifted from an emphasis on pleasure and a concern with forms to a focus on what might be called the innateness of beauty. Some, like Santayana, treated beauty as a pleasure to be apprehended at the level of the senses; others, like Moore, emphasized that it is only in the act of perception that we appreciate the beauty of unified wholes composed of parts.
Still other philosophers, such as Hegel and Kant, developed a theory of beauty that makes it a property of the object itself. It is something that, unlike an object’s function or the pleasure it may give us, cannot be attributed to any subjective state of the mind; it is not in our power to experience beauty. Hegel argued that this made beauty intrinsically valuable because it can never be lost or destroyed. However, it is hard to see how this account of beauty could have much practical value; indeed, it would seem to make it impossible for us to experience the kind of beauty that one might find in a sunset or the birth of a child.