When someone says that a person is beautiful, they are usually referring to their physical appearance. However, beauty is more than skin deep; it is a combination of qualities that includes confidence, poise, joy, honesty, kindness and patience. It is these inner qualities that makes a person shine from within.
This is why when people say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” they mean that everyone will have different opinions on what makes a person beautiful. For example, a person might be considered beautiful by some for their kindness and patience while others may consider them ugly because they are not as nice or patient. In fact, many people don’t even realize that the words they use when describing a person’s beauty are subjective.
The philosophical definition of beauty varies, but most philosophers believe that it is the innate ability to elicit pleasure in another person. This pleasure can be caused by many things, including a person’s smile, music, or physical attributes. Many philosophers also believe that a person can be both beautiful and ugly, and that both have an effect on how we view them.
Beauty has long been associated with moral and political questions. For example, it became a topic of debate in the French revolution when the people revolted against their aristocratic rulers and their Rococo style paintings which were seen as hedonist expressions of wealth. The concept of beauty has also been associated with capitalism (ironically, since the object of capitalist consumption is often ugly and detrimental to human well-being).
A classic conception of beauty was formulated by the Italian Renaissance, which defined it as harmony between the whole and its parts. This is why a person’s face is beautiful when it has symmetry, for example. The classical conception of beauty was eventually replaced by a utilitarian account which identified beauty with a good’s capacity to satisfy our desires. This definition of beauty became especially popular in the 17th century with the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, who linked happiness to the satisfaction of our desires.
In the late twentieth century, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like its classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy. This was in part due to a concern for the nature of happiness and social-justice oriented philosophy, but it was also related to a reassessment of the ‘use’ versus ‘beauty’ dichotomy sparked by the work of Dave Hickey and Irigaray.
A hedonist approach to beauty is also found in ancient writings such as that of Diogenes Laertius and Aristippus of Cyrene, who identify beauty with pleasure. More traditionally, Plato’s Symposium and Plotinus’s account in the Enneads associate beauty with a response of love and desire, and locate it in the realm of the Forms. This contrasts with Hume’s treatment, which identifies beauty with the satisfaction of use and emphasizes that the value of a thing is always relative to its context of use, and not to its intrinsic properties.