Beauty is a concept that has fascinated philosophers for millennia. It is at once a concept of a natural, objective property of objects as well as an emotional response that is influenced by the opinions and reactions of observers. In the case of art, it can be a feeling of pleasure that comes from a particular work and from a general appreciation of music, painting, or architecture. The question of whether there are objective standards of beauty or if it is purely subjective has given rise to the saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. The idea that beauty depends on the individual has been reinforced by scientific research into the way our brains respond to sensory stimulation, with findings that show different people have unique neural responses to the same stimulus.
One of the first philosophical attempts to clarify the notion of beauty was the classical conception developed by Aristotle. This was that a thing can be beautiful only if it is composed of beautiful parts: the parts must be in the right proportion to each other and form a harmonious whole. For this reason, Aristotle considered a work of art such as a sculpture or painting to be beautiful only if it has perfect symmetry.
Other philosophers have made a variety of attempts to refine or extend Aristotle’s view. The empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that beauty is not an intrinsic property of an object but rather a subjective sensation in the perceiver. This was based on the fact that colors are not apparent in themselves, but depend on the brains of the observer to be perceived. The fact that the color of an object can change with the condition of the eyes, such as when a person has jaundice and everything takes on a yellow cast, was used by the empiricists to support their argument.
The philosopher George Santayana took a similar approach, though in a more generalized manner. He argued that all meaningful claims are either empirical, in which case they can be verified or disproved by observations, or theoretical, in which case the truth of a statement can only be determined by an appeal to some other theory or evidence. He therefore held that statements about beauty are not empirical but are a kind of theory or hypothesis and therefore can be true or false.
Another attempt to understand beauty was made by the philosophers in the Romantic period of the nineteenth century. The poet and philosopher Shelley, for example, interpreted beauty in terms of the feelings of love and desire that it evokes. In a later essay, he contrasted this with the vain pursuit of money and fame, which he described as a form of death.
In recent times, there has been a revival of interest in something like the classical sense of beauty in both art and philosophy. This has been fueled partly by the emergence of the field of evolutionary psychology, which provides explanations of why we perceive certain characteristics as attractive, such as those that signal health and vitality or fertility.