The word beautifull refers to a person or thing that is pleasing to the eye. A field of wildflowers, a sunset, or an abstract sculpture could all be considered beautiful. But beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder; it is also in the heart of the perceiver. The philosopher Plotinus wrote that beauty induces “wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and trembling that is all delight.” These sentiments are a good summary of what is meant by the term beautiful.
The ancient treatments of beauty, like Plato’s and Aristotle’s, are conventionally more concerned with the pleasures a beholder can experience from a work of art than with the objective qualities a work must possess. This is because beauty, unlike other concepts such as truth and goodness, is not localized in the response of a particular beholder and can therefore be described as a general experience of pleasure.
In the modern era, philosophers who focus on beauty have tended to treat it as an object of practical activity. Some, such as Hume and Kant, have taken the view that beauty is a kind of pleasure in which we have an innate interest as humans. Others, such as Santayana, argue that beauty is something we acquire by cultivating certain intellectual and emotional skills.
Still others, such as Aristotle and later Aquinas, hold that beauty is a property that a work of art or craft must possess in order to be useful. The idea is that a work of beauty must have some “natural or essential harmony” of its parts and a “due proportion and consonance.” It must be clear to the viewer how the piece serves a useful function.
Moreover, the work of art or craft must have an “inner radiance” or a “sparkle” that gives it added appeal and makes it more pleasurable to the beholder. This inner radiance is an expression of the artist’s creativity. It is what distinguishes a work of art from mere craft or industry.
As a result, many of the features that are traditionally seen as defining the beautiful—such as proportion, symmetry, and clarity—are actually just elements of the way a work of art or craft is used. This approach avoids the charge of philistinism because it does not simply describe how the work is used, but rather, how it is used especially well or with a special satisfaction.
But the political entanglements of beauty call into question various aspects of this traditional philosophy. The purity and transcendence associated with the classical conception of beauty seem irrelevant when beauty becomes a matter of market values or even concrete dimensions of oppression. Nevertheless, philosophers such as Hume and Kant understood that it would be a mistake to reduce beauty to mere subjectivity. They knew that if we were to treat beauty as an intrinsically subjective state, it would cease to be a value of any importance, and might become meaningless.