Throughout history, philosophers, poets and artists have struggled to capture the concept of beauty. More recently, scientists have added a new dimension to our understanding of beauty by incorporating the concepts of evolution and biology.
In evolutionary terms, beauty is a signal that indicates health and fertility. Traits such as large eyes, a clear complexion, and youthful limbs are often regarded as beautiful because they can indicate the person’s fitness for reproduction. These traits are known as Costly Signals because they require a significant amount of resources to display, and so provide a good indication of the potential for genetic fitness. However, we are not limited to only assessing the attractiveness of others, and may also find beauty in the things that surround us – such as a scenic landscape or a beautiful building.
For many philosophers, the notion of beauty has been tangled up with the idea of pleasure. In the early modern period, empiricists argued that beauty was an object of sensation, and that the pleasure we experience when we perceive beauty is a direct result of the way the object appears to our senses. This view, which is similar to the one held by the ancient hedonist Diogenes Laertius, is still prevalent today, and was influential in the development of aesthetic theory in the nineteenth century.
Other philosophers, like Schiller, have taken a more relativist approach to the idea of beauty. For him, beauty, or play or art (he uses the words cavalierly, almost interchangeably) is a process of integrating the natural and spiritual realms, or at least making them compatible. This is more akin to Plato’s ‘ladder of beauty’ than to the transcendence of physical reality espoused by the likes of Heraclitus and Descartes.
The classical conception of beauty, embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture and literature, is an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole according to proportion, harmony and symmetry. This was a primordial Western conception of beauty and is reflected in the work of many artists – from Plato in the Symposium to Plotinus in the Enneads.
It is conventional in ancient treatments of beauty to pay tribute to the pleasures that it induces, sometimes in quite ecstatic terms. For example, Plato and Plotinus both use words such as awe, wonderment, delight, trembling and love in their descriptions of beauty.
Aristotle’s Poetics and the Metaphysics both equate beauty with the pleasure of the intellect in the experience of the object of beauty. This is a view that was influential in the eighteenth century, and it was also the view adopted by some empiricists such as Locke and Heraclitus.
While the concept of beauty continues to be a source of great interest, it is important not to confuse it with superficialities such as glamor and sex appeal. Research suggests that we are far more than skin deep and that looks can have a profound impact on how we interact with the world. For example, studies have shown that people are more likely to show favouritism to those with a pretty face. And as the couturier Coco Chanel showed, it is possible to transcend conventional ideas of beauty.