For many people, beauty is the way a person looks or the appearance of something. It may also refer to a feeling or emotion such as love, happiness, and peace. Others think beauty is the qualities a person has or the values she demonstrates. It can even be the way a person treats her friends or other people. It is true that physical appearance is an important aspect of beauty but a person’s character, values, and spirit are more important.
Beauty is a concept that has been the subject of much philosophical debate. Some philosophers, like Hume and Kant, thought that it could be objective while others thought it was completely subjective. The latter group of philosophers were concerned that, if beauty is nothing more than a subjective state, it becomes impossible to judge whether something is beautiful or not, so it loses its status as a paramount value and ceases to be recognizable at all.
In contrast to this, Renaissance and Humanist philosophers argued that beauty was a result of a rational order, harmony, proportion, and symmetry, which could be discerned by the eyes. A mathematical formula called the golden ratio became associated with this notion of beauty, which was reflected in classical architecture and other artistic works of the day.
Other philosophers, such as Plotinus and Schopenhauer, focused on the pleasure that beauty induces in the viewer. This pleasure can be a sense of wonder and, sometimes, ecstasy. It can also be a sense of desire and longing, or a pleasant trembling. These feelings are not just an emotional reaction but an actual pleasure experienced in the body, and they are one of the reasons that ancient treatments of beauty tend to be so awe inspiring.
More recently, the idea of beauty has been entangled with political issues. For example, a work of art that is perceived as beautiful is often associated with hedonistic expressions of wealth and decadence, such as the Rococo paintings of Fragonard. Beauty has also been linked to the promotion of an ideal of unattainable perfection that leads to self-image problems and mental health issues. In addition, it has been seen as a way to justify slavery and other kinds of oppression.
In view of these entanglements, it is no surprise that many twentieth-century philosophers chose to ignore the question of beauty altogether or to treat it as a mere empirical question, a claim that can be confirmed or disproved with observations. However, a number of writers have tried to revive the philosophy of beauty in a more honest and responsible manner. For example, Ananda Coomaraswamy has argued that a person can be described as beautiful when she performs a practical activity particularly well or with a sense of awe. This avoids philistinism by enriching the concept of “use,” so that it can encompass both performing an activity for its proper purpose and doing it especially well.