What Is Beauty?

The subject of beauty has long preoccupied philosophers, artists and writers. Beauty has even been studied scientifically, in fields such as evolutionary psychology and brain imaging. But what is beauty? Is it something that can be understood, and, if so, how?

A major question that philosophers have debated about beauty is whether it is objective or subjective. In the classical conception, beauty depends on the parts of an object standing in their right relation to each other and forming an integrated harmonious whole. This is a kind of formalist approach that found its most explicit expression in the art of the Italian Renaissance.

David Hume (1711-1776), on the other hand, argued that beauty is a peculiar and individual experience. What pleases one person, he says, may not please another, and what is beautiful for one person is ugly for the other. This view, which became the dominant one until the 1980s, is sometimes called hedonistic, in the sense that the pleasure of seeing or feeling beautiful things is taken as the proper basis for beauty judgments.

But the hedonistic account of beauty was challenged in the eighteenth century by thinkers such as Kant and Hume, who saw that if beauty is only a subjective state, it ceases to be a significant category of value, or to have any meaning at all. It seems trivial to hold that the thing is beautiful because it gives pleasure, or even the highest pleasure.

In the ancient world, it was customary to combine these two approaches. The philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE) thought of beauty as a property of his ideal realm, the Forms, and not in terms of the response of an observer to an object. But Aristotle (384-322 BCE) also held an objective view of beauty, one that was related to the art object and its characteristics.

Aristotle believed that the chief features of beauty are harmony, symmetry and order, which could be verified by mathematical sciences. He formulated a set of proportions, known as the golden ratio, that were considered to be aesthetically pleasing. His model for the perfect man-made work of art was the sculpture known as The Canon, by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE).

In addition to a sense of harmony and proportion, Aristotle also valued the pleasure beauty produces in the eyes of the beholder. Aristotle describes the feelings that are produced by beautiful objects as “awe and a delicious trouble, longing and love, a trembling that is all delight.” These sentiments lent themselves to ecstatic language.