Beauty is an aesthetic quality that satisfies or pleases the senses and mind. It is associated with qualities such as harmony of form, color, proportion, authenticity and originality. It also refers to a person’s or object’s moral character.
It is an important part of human culture, especially in western civilization. It is often a factor in choosing romantic partners and is also considered by many people as a mark of good character.
One of the most contentious issues in philosophical aesthetics is whether beauty is objective or subjective. It is often referred to as the’mystery of beauty,’ but there are several approaches and theories developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions that attempt to explain it.
The classical conception of beauty treats it as an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony and symmetry. This is the dominant Western conception and is found in architecture, sculpture, literature and music.
Another approach to the question of beauty is that it is an abstract and enduring quality that exists independent of the specific object being praised. This view of beauty was first developed by ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato.
This conception of beauty was later criticized as being subject to personal prejudices and biases by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant. They believed that if beauty were perceived as being merely a subjective experience, it would no longer be an objective value, but instead something that was completely relative to individual experiencers, and thus susceptible to a variety of prejudices and misunderstandings that could sully or degrade the quality of its praise.
It is therefore crucial that the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective be conducted in a way that recognizes both sides of the issue. It is only in a more dispassionate and scientific way that we will be able to understand the nature of the concept.
Aristotle’s theory of beauty, based on his examination of works of art, is an example of this dispassionate and scientific approach to the concept of beauty. In his Poetics, he says that “to be beautiful, a living creature and every whole made up of parts, must present a certain order in its arrangement of parts.”
He further says that beauty requires “a certain magnitude of the thing,” and the magnitude is determined by the relationship of the parts to each other. This is a much more dispassionate and scientific conception of the concept of beauty than Plato’s and it has served as a basis for some of the major theories developed in Western philosophical aesthetics.
There are a number of other approaches to the question of beauty, including those that focus on non-naturalist realists, the ‘objective’ model and the’subjectivist’ perspective. The ‘objective’ model, for example, arose from the belief that if there were a single essence of beauty that could be attested to through the experience of seeing a work of art, then this essence must have some properties that distinguish it from any other artifact.