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What Is Beauty? (Philosophy)

The concept of beauty has been a major theme in Western philosophy for centuries. It is a subject that has captivated the minds of ancient Greek, Hellenistic, medieval, and modern philosophers alike. Beauty is often discussed in relation to other fundamental values such as goodness, truth, and justice, and has been a source of inspiration and contemplation for thinkers throughout history.

So, what is beauty? How do we define it? The meaning of beauty can be elusive, as it encompasses a range of diverse interpretations and perspectives. Beauty is not solely confined to physical appearance, but also extends to art, nature, and the experiences that evoke a sense of aesthetic pleasure.

Beauty can be seen as a quality that brings delight and evokes positive emotions. It is both a subjective experience, influenced by personal preferences and individual perception, and an objective characteristic, rooted in the qualities that make something aesthetically pleasing. The interplay between subjectivity and objectivity in defining beauty is a topic of ongoing philosophical discourse.

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Key Takeaways:

Beauty is a central theme in Western philosophy.
It encompasses subjective and objective aspects.
Beauty is not solely confined to physical appearance.
It can be experienced through art, nature, and aesthetic pleasure.
Philosophers have explored different perspectives on the meaning of beauty.

Table of Contents

The Objectivity and Subjectivity of Beauty

One of the most debated topics in the philosophy of beauty is whether it is subjective or objective. Some argue that beauty is purely subjective and dependent on individual perception, while others believe there are objective qualities that make something beautiful. Ancient and medieval philosophers generally viewed beauty as objective, while philosophers like Hume and Kant emphasized the subjective nature of beauty. However, there is also a recognition that beauty is often experienced and appreciated in similar ways by different individuals.

Objective Beauty

In the realm of objective beauty , proponents argue that there are inherent and measurable qualities that determine the beauty of an object or work of art. These qualities may include symmetry, proportion, harmony, and balance. According to this perspective, beauty can be objectively evaluated based on these criteria, and certain objects possess inherent beauty regardless of individual perception.

Subjective Beauty

On the other hand, the subjective nature of beauty suggests that beauty is determined by personal taste, cultural influences, and individual experiences. Beauty is seen as a subjective experience that varies from person to person. What one person finds beautiful, another may not. This interpretation acknowledges that beauty is influenced by personal preferences, emotions, and perceptions.

Beauty perception is influenced by various factors, including cultural background, aesthetic education, and personal experiences. Different cultures and societies often have their own unique standards of beauty, shaping individuals’ perceptions and influencing societal expectations.

Objective Beauty	Subjective Beauty
Based on measurable qualities such as symmetry, proportion, harmony, and balance	Determined by personal taste, emotions, cultural influences, and individual experiences
Sees beauty as inherent and independent of individual perception	Acknowledges that beauty is subjective and varies from person to person
Often associated with classical conceptions of beauty	Emphasizes individuality and personal preferences

While the debate between objective and subjective beauty may never be definitively settled, it is clear that both perspectives contribute to our understanding of aesthetics. Beauty can be appreciated and experienced in multiple ways, encompassing both objective qualities and subjective interpretations.

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Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Throughout history, philosophers have proposed various conceptions of beauty. These philosophical perspectives provide different insights into the nature of beauty and how it is understood. Let’s explore three significant conceptions: the Classical conception, the Idealist conception, and the Hedonist conceptions of beauty .

The Classical Conception of Beauty

Influenced by the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the Classical conception of beauty emphasizes objective qualities such as proportion, harmony, and symmetry. According to this perspective, beauty is not merely subjective but can be objectively recognized and appreciated. The Classical conception suggests that there are inherent standards of beauty that exist beyond individual preferences and cultural biases.

The Idealist Conception of Beauty

The Idealist conception, exemplified by thinkers like Plotinus, approaches beauty from a metaphysical standpoint. It attributes beauty to the realm of Forms, emphasizing the participation of objects in these abstract entities. In this conception, beauty is seen as a transcendental quality that transcends the physical world. The Idealist perspective suggests that beauty lies in the inherent essence and perfection of an object, beyond its physical appearance.

The Hedonist Conceptions of Beauty

Contrasting the Classical and Idealist perspectives, Hedonist conceptions of beauty focus on the pleasure and sensory experiences associated with beauty. According to Hedonism, beauty is subjective and dependent on individual pleasure and desire. This perspective suggests that beauty can be found in experiences that elicit aesthetic enjoyment and sensory gratification.

Each of these philosophical conceptions offers a unique lens through which to understand and appreciate beauty. The Classical conception highlights the objective qualities of beauty, the Idealist conception delves into its metaphysical dimension, and the Hedonist conceptions explore the subjective pleasure of beauty. By considering these different perspectives, we gain a more holistic understanding of the diverse ways in which beauty is conceptualized and experienced.

The Politics of Beauty

Beauty is not only a philosophical concept but also holds political significance. Throughout history, beauty has been tied to social hierarchies and power dynamics. The association between beauty and aristocracy has been prevalent, with the upper classes often being seen as the epitome of beauty. This dynamic reinforces societal inequalities and perpetuates exclusivity in defining beauty standards .

A feminist critique of beauty challenges these traditional beauty standards and explores how they are influenced by social construction and gender norms. It questions the narrow definitions of beauty that have been imposed on women and emphasizes the importance of embracing diverse forms of aesthetic expression. This critique aims to dismantle the oppressive beauty ideals that contribute to unrealistic expectations and the objectification of women.

Furthermore, beauty has been used as a tool of colonialism, with Eurocentric ideals being imposed on non-Western societies. This cultural imperialism has led to the erasure of indigenous beauty standards and the marginalization of non-European aesthetics. It is essential to recognize and celebrate the beauty diversity across different cultures and to challenge the dominance of Eurocentric beauty ideals.

However, beauty can also be a form of resistance. Challenging dominant narratives and celebrating diverse forms of aesthetic expression can empower individuals and communities. By embracing their unique beauty, marginalized groups can assert their identities and challenge the oppressive beauty standards imposed upon them.

In order to understand the politics of beauty, it is crucial to acknowledge the ways in which beauty is intertwined with systems of power, privilege, and oppression. By questioning and challenging societal beauty norms, we can strive towards a more inclusive and equitable understanding of beauty.

Beauty in Society

Beauty is deeply intertwined with society and its cultural norms. Across different cultures and societies, beauty standards vary, reflecting the unique values and preferences of each. These beauty standards often dictate what is considered desirable and attractive within a given society.

In some cultures, certain physical features or characteristics are regarded as more beautiful than others. For example, in Western societies, there is often an emphasis on thinness and youth as beauty standards. On the other hand, in some African cultures, fuller figures may be prized as a symbol of beauty and fertility.

These cultural beauty norms shape individuals’ perceptions and influence societal expectations. They can affect self-esteem and self-worth, as individuals strive to meet the prescribed beauty standards. Furthermore, the portrayal of these beauty ideals in media and advertising can perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards and narrow definitions of attractiveness.

However, it is important to recognize that beauty is subjective and can vary widely based on cultural context. What is considered beautiful in one culture may not align with the beauty standards of another culture. Embracing diverse beauty norms and celebrating different forms of aesthetic expression is essential in promoting inclusivity and breaking free from restrictive beauty standards.

Region	Beauty Standards
North America	Thin body, youthful appearance
South Asia	Fair skin, long dark hair
East Asia	Pale skin, double eyelids, small face
Africa	Fuller figures, natural hair
South America	Curvaceous body, voluptuous features

Table: Cultural Beauty Norms in Different Regions

The Importance of Beauty

Beauty is not just a superficial concept; it holds significant importance in our lives and has a profound impact on our well-being. The presence of beauty can evoke a variety of positive emotions and inspire us to look at the world with fresh eyes.

When we encounter something beautiful, whether it’s a work of art, a breathtaking landscape, or even a well-designed product, it has the power to captivate our senses and uplift our spirits. Beauty stimulates our imagination and creativity, encouraging us to think beyond the ordinary and explore new possibilities.

Moreover, beauty has the ability to bring us joy and create a harmonious environment. When we surround ourselves with aesthetically pleasing elements, such as a well-decorated space or a beautifully arranged garden, it can enhance our mood and overall sense of well-being.

It’s also worth noting that beauty can be found in the simplest of things in our everyday lives. From the delicate petals of a flower to the symmetrical patterns on a butterfly’s wings, beauty surrounds us in countless forms. Taking the time to appreciate these small moments of beauty can bring us a deeper sense of connection to the world around us and foster a greater appreciation for life itself.

The Impact of Beauty on our Well-being

Research has shown that exposure to beauty can have various positive effects on our well-being. This includes reducing stress levels, improving cognitive function, and enhancing our overall quality of life. When we engage with beauty, whether by visiting an art museum, spending time in nature, or enjoying a well-curated space, it can provide a sense of tranquility and inner calm.

Beauty has also been found to promote social connections, bringing people together through shared aesthetic experiences. It serves as a common ground for individuals to connect, appreciate, and discuss the beauty they see, fostering a sense of community and human connection.

The Importance of Beauty in Everyday Life

Benefits of Beauty	Examples
Emotional well-being	A beautiful sunset that evokes a sense of peace and wonder.
Inspiration and creativity	A stunning piece of artwork that sparks new ideas and perspectives.
Sense of harmony	A well-designed interior that creates a welcoming and harmonious atmosphere.
Connection to nature	The beauty of a serene forest, providing a sense of tranquility and grounding.
Enhanced well-being	Walks in beautiful gardens that boost mood and reduce stress.

By recognizing and embracing the importance of beauty in our everyday lives, we can cultivate a greater appreciation for the world around us and seek out opportunities to engage with beauty in various forms.

Beauty and Subjectivity

Beauty is a concept that can be both objective and subjective, but ultimately, it is the subjective experience that holds the most significance. Each individual has their unique perception and interpretation of beauty, making it a deeply personal and subjective matter. What one person finds beautiful may not necessarily be the same for another, and that’s the beauty of it. It allows for diverse expressions and interpretations, encouraging individuality and personal preferences.

Subjectivity in beauty means that there are no fixed or universal standards that determine what is beautiful. It is a fluid and ever-evolving concept that varies from person to person. Beauty is not confined to physical appearances or societal norms; rather, it encompasses a vast array of elements, including emotions, experiences, and aesthetics.

This subjectivity opens the door to a world of individual choice and interpretation. It allows individuals to appreciate and find beauty in things that resonate with their own personal experiences and values. Whether it’s a visually captivating artwork, a melodious piece of music, or the serene beauty of nature, beauty perception is a deeply personal experience.

Furthermore, beauty subjectivity encourages the celebration of diversity and uniqueness. It emphasizes the importance of appreciating and respecting different perspectives and aesthetics. The subjective nature of beauty fosters an inclusive environment where everyone’s unique perception and interpretation can coexist harmoniously.

The Diversity of Beauty Perception

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

This popular phrase captures the essence of beauty subjectivity . Beauty perception is not limited to one standard or definition; it encompasses a multitude of viewpoints. Different people find beauty in different places, objects, or experiences. What one person considers beautiful may not resonate with another.

In essence, beauty is a reflection of personal taste and experiences. It is influenced by cultural backgrounds, upbringing, education, and individual preferences. Beauty perception is deeply rooted in our unique perspectives, and it embraces the richness of diverse interpretations.

Here is an example to illustrate the diversity of beauty perception:

Person	Perception of Beauty
Sarah	Mountains
Michael	Cityscape
Lisa	Flowers
David	Abstract Art

As shown in the table above, different individuals have distinct perceptions of beauty. Sarah finds beauty in the majestic mountains, while Michael appreciates the bustling cityscape. Lisa is captivated by the delicate beauty of flowers, and David is drawn to the abstract forms and colors of art. Each person’s perception is equally valid and unique, showcasing the subjective nature of beauty.

Ultimately, beauty subjectivity gives us the freedom to explore and appreciate the multitude of aesthetic experiences that the world has to offer. It invites us to embrace our own personal preferences and celebrate the diversity of beauty perception.

Embracing Beauty Subjectivity

In a world where beauty standards often dominate media and societal norms, it is essential to remember that beauty is subjective. Recognizing the subjectivity of beauty allows us to break free from rigid expectations and embrace our own unique perspectives.

By embracing beauty subjectivity, we empower ourselves to define and appreciate beauty on our terms. We can find beauty in the small moments of everyday life, in the simple joys that bring us happiness. From a breathtaking sunset to a heartfelt smile, beauty is all around us, waiting to be acknowledged and cherished.

While objective aspects of beauty may exist, such as symmetry or harmony, it is the subjective experience that truly matters. It is the personal connection and emotional response that beauty elicits within us. By embracing beauty subjectivity, we open ourselves up to a world of discovery and appreciation.

By celebrating the diversity of beauty perception, we foster inclusivity and respect for different viewpoints. We can learn from one another and gain new insights into what is beautiful. This understanding cultivates a greater appreciation for the multiplicity of aesthetics and encourages us to challenge traditional beauty norms.

Beauty subjectivity invites us to question societal standards and redefine beauty in our own terms. It encourages us to celebrate individuality and embrace diverse forms of aesthetic expression. In doing so, we create a more inclusive, accepting, and beautiful world.

The concept of beauty is a fascinating and complex subject that has intrigued philosophers and society alike for centuries. From ancient Greece to modern times, beauty has been the focus of philosophical debates, with varying perspectives on its nature and significance.

Beauty encompasses both subjective and objective aspects, with different conceptions and interpretations. While there are cultural norms and societal values that influence our understanding of beauty, personal preferences and individual perception also play a crucial role. It is this blend of subjectivity and objectivity that makes beauty such a captivating and enigmatic concept.

Beauty holds great importance in our lives, as it shapes our perception of the world and has a profound impact on our well-being. It is through beauty that we find inspiration, evoke emotions, and experience aesthetic pleasure. Whether it is found in art, nature, or everyday experiences, beauty has the power to uplift our spirits and create a more harmonious environment.

Understanding beauty requires a nuanced understanding of its philosophical underpinnings and its diverse manifestations in society. By exploring the rich history and different perspectives on beauty, we can gain a deeper appreciation for its significance in our lives and broaden our horizons. In the realm of beauty, there is always room for exploration and contemplation, as it continues to inspire us and enrich our understanding of the world around us.

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Is beauty subjective or objective, what are the different philosophical conceptions of beauty, how is beauty tied to society and politics, are beauty standards the same across different cultures, what is the importance of beauty in our lives, is beauty a subjective experience, related posts.

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What is Beauty? Plato, Beauty, and Knowledge

Plato’s theory of knowledge – his epistemology – can best be understood through thinking about beauty. We are born with all knowledge, he says, but when our soul became trapped in our body at birth, we forgot this knowledge. Learning, then, is similar to remembering. And here on earth, beauty is the easiest way for us to first do that.

We can all recognize individual beautiful things… flowers, sunsets, music, people. Recognizing these things is the first rung on the ladder to the knowledge of Beauty, which for Plato is the Ideal Form of Beauty. Recognizing these individual beautiful things is the world we all live in most of the time, and staying here is like being trapped in a cave – not ever able to know true reality.

The question then, is whether there is something in common that makes all of these things beautiful?

The next step is recognizing what all beautiful things share in common. What they have in common is the Ideal Form of Beauty. The top rung of the ladder, true wisdom, is knowing Beauty itself.

What’s important here is that beautiful things can be observed by our senses – we can literally see something that is beautiful. This is located in and is part of the world. Knowledge of Beauty can only be known by the mind, by understanding. It doesn’t exist in the world as we understand it. But seeing an imitation of the true Form of Beauty can lead us to that understanding of Beauty.

Beauty is the easiest of these Forms we can come to understand, because it’s the easiest to observe in the world. But similarly we should strive to understand other concepts like Justice or Goodness.

Beauty, though, is the easiest place to start down this road toward Knowledge.

The most important question is: what do all of these beautiful things have in common? To know that is to know Beauty.

Although I don’t share Plato’s metaphysical (dealing with the nature of reality) ideas about Ideal Forms really existing, I do think that the way he elevates beauty is important. For me, developing an appreciation of beauty is a way to think about how the world could be, to reflect on the good life, and to help inspire us.

Let our first step on this path toward knowledge be beauty. What is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Share a picture along with your explanation in the comments.

For Further Reading:

What is beauty?

Whilst in philosophy in particular, and academic discourse in general, it is advisable to avoid sweeping statements, I believe it is fair to say that the issue of defining beauty is one that has occupied the mind, not just of scholars, but of many people over several millennia. For example, for Plato, an ideal from of beauty is not found in the natural world: in individual things such as objets d’art, people, animals and so on, but in the Realm of Ideal Forms which it shares with other forms such as Justice. Plato acknowledged that everything that belongs in the material world is made of substances that time will eventually erode. However, he also held that everything is made after a timeless mould that is eternal and immutable; that is, everything in the physical world is but an inferior copy of an ideal form which exists in, which for him, is the ‘real’ world.

However, rather than continuing with a detailed and long-winded history of the issue of the question of beauty over the centuries, let me give you my own understanding of this concept as I have come to see it.

In Philosophy the rubric under which the issue of beauty is discussed is aesthetics. The term aesthetics derives from the Greek word aisthanomai , which means to perceive, to feel and it is in this ancient term that we find the essence of the meaning of that which we know as ‘beauty’. That is, it is the appreciation by the mind of the quality we recognize as beautiful in phenomena (i.e. things in the world outside the mind) transmitted to the mind through the senses. The question, of course, that arises from this description is: ‘what is it in the mind that allows it to make this judgment call?’

It seems to me that it is this instinct, this sense of balance or proportionality, that was in Keats’ mind when he said that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty! – that is all/Ye know and all ye need to know’. That is, at its most refined, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Beauty

Introduction, anthologies and reference works.

The Sensuous and Desire
Beauty and Art
Beauty and Disinterest
Beauty and Nature
Beauty Contested
Beauty Experienced
Beauty and Evaluation
Beauty and Aesthetic Form
Beauty and Autonomy
Beauty and the Form of Perfection
Aesthetic Judgement and Community
Beauty and Truth
Beauty and Value Theory
Beauty and Morality
Beauty Naturalized

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Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

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Feminist Aesthetics and Feminist Philosophy of Art
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Beauty by Jennifer A. McMahon LAST REVIEWED: 26 April 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 31 July 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0038

Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found, and how it was to be included in a life were prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments―metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical―and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul that we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment that can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgement by which we exercise the social, comparative, and intersubjective elements of cognition, and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation between mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavors while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation, or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterizes beauty theory prior to the 20th century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. However, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary-inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics, and psychology. Although during the 20th century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning, and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. This work has been funded by an Australian Research Council Grant: DP150103143 (Taste and Community).

Anthologies on beauty that bring together writers who, while they may discuss art, do so in the main only to reveal our capacity for beauty, include the excellent selection of historical readings collected in the one-volume Hofstadter and Kuhns 1976 and the more culturally inclusive collection Cooper 1997 . Recent anthologies on beauty can take the form of a study of aesthetic value, such as in Schaper 1983 , or more specifically on the ethical dimension of aesthetic value, such as in Hagberg 2008 . Reference works in philosophical aesthetics today tend to focus on the philosophy of art and criticism. They typically include one chapter on beauty, and in this context Mothersill 2004 treats beauty as an evaluative category for art; and in keeping with this approach, Mothersill 2009 recommends a historically informed understanding of the concept beauty derived from Hegel. A recent trend toward environmental aesthetics brings us back to beauty as a property of the natural world, as in Zangwill 2003 , while McMahon 2005 responds to empirical trends by treating beauty as a value compatible with naturalization. The comprehensive entry “ Beauty ” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is divided into four parts. It begins with Stephen David Ross’s brief but excellent summary of the history of concepts that underpin beauty theory and philosophical aesthetics more broadly. It is followed by Nickolas Pappas’s dedicated section on classical concepts of beauty, and then Jan A. Aertsen’s section on medieval concepts of beauty. The entry concludes with Nicholas Riggle’s discussion of beauty and love, which introduces contemporary themes to the topic. Guyer 2014 analyzes historical trends in approaches to beauty theory in a way that sets up illuminating contrasts to contemporary perspectives.

“Beauty.” In Abhinavagupta–Byzantine Aesthetics . Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In the course of setting out the historical foundations to the concept beauty, we are provided with an excellent summary of the key concepts that still dominate or underpin philosophical aesthetics, including pleasure, desire, the good, disinterest, taste, value, and love. Available at Oxford Art Online by subscription.

Cooper, David. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings . Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Introductions are provided to some of the classic readings on beauty followed by an extract from the relevant work. They are discussed in terms of their relevance to understanding art rather than value more generally.

Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics . 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Guyer traces the development of key concepts in aesthetics, including beauty, within a context of broader scaled trends, such as aesthetics of truth in the ancient world, aesthetics of emotion and imagination in the 18th century, and aesthetics of meaning and significance in the 20th century.

Hagberg, Garry I., ed. Art and Ethical Criticism . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444302813

A series of papers on the ethical dimension of art, the authors draw out the ethical significance of a particular art/literary/musical work or art form. It is worth noting that the lead essay by Paul Guyer argues that 18th-century writers on beauty did not hold any concepts incompatible with this approach.

Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Well-chosen readings from classic works, with commentary provided, marred occasionally by the editors’ anachronistic emphasis on art. The readings provide a good introduction to various conceptions of beauty as a general value.

McMahon, Jennifer A. “Beauty.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 307–319. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

A historical overview drawing out the contrast between sensuous- and formal/value-oriented approaches to beauty, culminating in the contrast between Freud’s pleasure principle and the constructivist approach of cognitive science.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment: Remapping Aesthetics.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics . Edited by Peter Kivy, 152–166. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

DOI: 10.1002/9780470756645

Setting out the change in focus in philosophical aesthetics between the 19th and 20th century, Mothersill then proceeds to analyze beauty with a view to its significance for understanding aesthetic value in relation to art.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty.” In A Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper, 166–171. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Mothersill considers the contributions made by key historical figures before settling on Hegel’s historicism as providing the most helpful insight for the present context. Available online.

Schaper, Eva, ed. Pleasure, Preference and Value . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

A series of essays by prominent philosophers on the nature of aesthetic value, which are very useful as an introduction to the study of value theory, including essays on taste, pleasure, aesthetic interest, aesthetic realism, and aesthetic objectivity.

Zangwill, Nick. “Beauty.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics . Edited by Jerrold Levinson, 325–343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

An introduction to the tradition of analytic approaches to value theory, beauty is analyzed into its components and relationships, and its status considered in terms of subjectivity and objectivity.

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[81.177.180.204]
81.177.180.204

Are there objective standards of beauty? Or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Must art be beautiful to be great art? What is the role of the experience of beauty in a good life? John and Ken take in the beauty with Alexander Nehamas from Princeton University, author of Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.

Listening Notes

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? John defines beauty as that which brings enjoyment to the person who looks or contemplates. John defines subjective properties as properties that require subjects of the right sort to make a difference. When we say something is beautiful, are we recommending to others that they should take delight in it? Beauty may be intersubjective, but is it objective? Can we argue rationally about whether something is beautiful? Ken introduces Alexander Nehamas, professor at Princeton. Is beauty both skin deep and in the eye of the beholder? Nehamas distinguishes between surface beauty and deep beauty.

Kant thought that if we think something is beautiful then we want everyone to agree with us. Ken proposes the idea that perception is a skill. Would the world be better off if everyone agreed on what is beautiful? Nehamas thinks the world would not be better off because what we find beautiful is a reflection of our personality and individuality. What can we learn about ourselves from what we find beautiful? Nehamas thinks that it illuminates our style. Is taste a function of education and economics?

Is natural beauty ever better than constructed beauty, like in art or music? Do beauty and happiness go together? What is the relation between beauty and the sublime? Nehamas says that the sublime is our reaction in the face of something so overpowering that it consumes or obliterates us. There is a saying that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, but is that correct? John thinks it is false. Why does beauty matter?

Roving Philosophical Report (Seek to 04:55): Amy Standen asks people on the street what they think is beautiful.

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Alexander Nehamas, Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University

Related Blogs

The experience of beautiful things, beauty and subjectivity, beauty: skin-deep, in the eye of the beholder and valuable, beauty that haunts, related resources.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
entry on aesthetic judgment
entry on 18th century French aesthetics
entry on Kant's aesthetics
The website for the American Aesthetics Association
A nutritionist discusses beauty
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
The Wikipedia entry on aesthetics
A collection of quotes by mathematicians on beauty
John Keats's poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" which contains the line about beauty and truth mentioned in the show
Peggy Zeglin Brand's Beauty Matters
Umberto Eco's History of Beauty
Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment
The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics
Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics
Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture
George Dickey's Evaluating Art
Eddy Zemach's Real Beauty
Jerrold Levinson's Pleasures of Aesthetics
Noel Carroll's Philosophy of Art
The Oxford Reader on Aesthetics

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Guest blog by Alexander Nehamas

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Thursday, July 11, 2024 -- 7:21 AM

If we could all agree on what constitutes beauty, would the world be a better place? Nehamas believes that nothing would be better for the world since our perception of beauty is a mirror of our unique selves. retaining wall blocks nz

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How Do Philosophers Think About Beauty?

Philosophical Theories & Ideas
Major Philosophers

Ph.D., Philosophy, Columbia University
M.A., Philosophy, Columbia University
B.A., Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy

“Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite,” said the U.S. historian George Bancroft (1800–1891). The nature of beauty is one of the most fascinating riddles of philosophy . Is beauty universal? How do we know it? How can we predispose ourselves to embrace it? Nearly every major philosopher has engaged with these questions and their cognates, including the great figures of ancient Greek philosophy such as Plato and Aristotle .

The Aesthetic Attitude

An aesthetic attitude is a state of contemplating a subject with no other purpose than appreciating it. For most authors, thus, the aesthetic attitude is purposeless: we have no reason to engage in it other than finding aesthetic enjoyment.

Aesthetic appreciation can be carried on by means of the senses: looking at a sculpture, trees in bloom, or Manhattan’s skyline; listening to Puccini’s "La bohème;" tasting a mushroom risotto ; feeling cool water in a hot day; and so on. However, senses may not be necessary in order to obtain an aesthetic attitude. We can rejoice, for instance, in imagining a beautiful house that never existed or in discovering or grasping the details of a complex theorem in algebra.

In principle, thus, the aesthetic attitude can relate to any subject via any possible mode of experience—senses, imagination, intellect, or any combination of these.

Is There a Universal Definition of Beauty?

The question arises of whether beauty is universal. Suppose you agree that Michelangelo’s "David" and a Van Gogh self-portrait are beautiful: do such beauties have something in common? Is there a single shared quality, beauty , that we experience in both of them? And is this beauty the very same that one experiences when gazing at the Grand Canyon from its edge or listening to Beethoven’s ninth symphony?

If beauty is universal, as for example, Plato maintained, it is reasonable to hold that we do not know it through the senses. Indeed, the subjects in question are quite different and are also known in different ways (gaze, hearing, observation). If there is something in common among those subjects, it cannot be what is known through the senses.

But, is there really something common to all experiences of beauty? Compare the beauty of an oil painting with that of picking flowers in a Montana field over the summer or surfing a gigantic wave in Hawaii. It seems that these cases have no single common element: not even the feelings or the basic ideas involved seem to match. Similarly, people around the world find different music, visual art, performance, and physical attributes to be beautiful. It’s on the basis of those considerations that many believe that beauty is a label we attach to different sorts of experiences based on a combination of cultural and personal preferences.

Beauty and Pleasure

Does beauty necessarily go along with pleasure? Do humans praise beauty because it gives pleasure? Is a life dedicated to the quest for beauty one worth living? These are some fundamental questions in philosophy, at the intersection between ethics and aesthetics.

If on the one hand beauty seems linked to aesthetic pleasure, seeking the former as a means to achieve the latter can lead to egoistic hedonism (self-centered pleasure-seeking for its own sake), the typical symbol of decadence.

But beauty can also be regarded as a value, one of the dearest to humans. In Roman Polanski’s movie The Pianist , for instance, the protagonist escapes the desolation of WWII by playing a ballade by Chopin. And fine works of art are curated, preserved, and presented as valuable in themselves. There is no question that human beings value, engage with, and desire beauty -- simply because it is beautiful.

Sources and Further Information

Eco, Umberto, and Alastair McEwen (eds.). "History of Beauty." New York: Random House, 2010.
Graham, Gordon. "Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics." 3rd ed. London: Taylor and Francis, 2005.
Santayana, George. "The Sense of Beauty." New York: Routledge, 2002.
Intrinsic vs. Instrumental Value
Philosophical Quotes on Beauty
Moral Philosophy According to Immanuel Kant
Three Basic Principles of Utilitarianism, Briefly Explained
What Is the 'Ladder of Love' in Plato's 'Symposium'?
Humpty Dumpty's Philosophy of Language
Understand the Philosophical Theories of Nominalism and Realism
What Is Philosophy?
What Does Nietzsche Mean When He Says That God Is Dead?
Psychological Egoism
Would You Kill One Person to Save Five?
Philosophy of Food
Stoics and Moral Philosophy - The 8 Principles of Stoicism
Top 10 Beatles Songs With Philosophical Themes
An Introduction to Virtue Ethics
10 Tips for Understanding Philosophical Texts

Beauty as a Philosophical Concept Essay

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Beauty can be considered one of the most powerful and most disputable forces that have always inspired people, moved them, and preconditioned serious changes in societies. The importance of the given phenomenon can be evidenced by the fact that there have always been multiple attempts to determine beauty and introduce a sample that could be followed (Sartwell). However, all these attempts failed because of the changeable and relative character of this notion. Every period in the history of humanity has its own vision of beauty. Ancient Greek statues, drawings of the renaissance, or modern photos try to express this idea and emphasize the visual appeal. However, beauty is not just lines and forms, as it includes many other dimensions.

Attempts to determine this phenomenon also resulted in the appearance of the idea that a truly beautiful person should combine both physical attraction and a rich inner world to be appreciated by peers. In such a way, the term becomes broader, as only shapes of the body cannot suffice and provide a clear answer to the question. In other words, beauty can also be found in the character of a person, his/her actions, beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts.

That is why one can conclude that the concept of beauty is one of the most sophisticated ideas that remain disputable even today. Considering the information provided above, it can be determined as a set of shapes of the body, forms, and lines, along with the inner qualities and peculiarities of the character that are considered attractive at the moment by the majority of society members. However, this definition remains extremely simple and relative as it does not take into account other dimensions and millions of meanings peculiar to this very phenomenon.

Sartwell, Crispin, “ Beauty .” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Web.

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Brainiac Beauty: Philosophers and Beauty—What Some Philosophers Have to Say About Beauty That Is Relevant to Empirical Aesthetics (Or Possibly Just Interesting)

First Online: 23 November 2019

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Rhett Diessner 2

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The first great philosophical work on Beauty, in the Western Canon, is Plato’s Symposium wherein he charts the stages of loving beauty: stage one, we fall in love with one particular beautiful body; stage two we love all beautiful bodies; stage three, the human soul ( psyche ) is more beautiful than the human body; stage four, a love of social order; stage five, loving knowledge and wisdom; and final stage six, loving the divine Beauty itself. Aristotle defines all of the human virtues as being beautiful, and that the telos (the purpose) of the virtues is to manifest moral beauty . Kant and Schopenhauer emphasized disinterest , having no goal concerning the object of beauty other than to appreciate it. Iris Murdoch focused on the ability for natural and artistic beauty to help us unself and become better human beings. Unity-in-diversity is shown as the most common definition for beauty by philosophers. Beauty experiences have both subjective and objective aspects. The feeling of beauty happens inside us, but there is something real about the beauty stimulus. It is the dialectic, the relationship , between the inner and the outer that creates an experience of beauty.

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Kant can be notoriously difficult to understand. I have read several of his works; and then read explanations of his theories, and I still only partially “get it.” If you are interested in Kant and are thinking about performing empirical aesthetics, I recommend reading this first: Hayn-Leichsenring, G. U., & Chatterjee, A. ( 2019 ). Colliding Terminological Systems—Immanuel Kant and Contemporary Empirical Aesthetics. Empirical Studies of the Arts . https://doi.org/10.1177/0276237418818635

Note, as described in the next chapter on Evolution and Beauty, that story-telling may actually be the one instinct for art that humans have. It’s the best candidate for a naturally selected adaptive trait. All other art may be a by-product of evolution.

If you are an ontological materialist, and the concept “soul” seems superstitious to you, that’s alright, after all, this is a myth I am describing.

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Psyche and Eros Interlude One

The most beautiful story/myth in the world.

One of the most beautiful stories I have ever encountered is the ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. Experiencing the myth as a story can arouse many of the major aesthetic emotions, including a variety of prototypical, pleasant, cognitive, and negative aesthetic emotions, and has the tension and resolution of a classic dramatic work (cf. Menninghaus et al., 2019 ; Schindler et al., 2017 ).

It’s a beautiful narrative story Footnote 2 about beauty: about loss, love, loss, and gain. The word “psyche” (ψυχη) is importantly homonymous. In Greek it means “soul” or “spirit” (cf. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary , 1961/1976, p. 1832), but also “butterfly.” These two metaphors dominate this myth: (a) Psyche, as the most beautiful being in Greece (the world), is a metaphor for the soul; and (b) Psyche, as butterfly, is the metaphor of transformation, as we make our way from being a little worm in a womb into an immortal being soaring on divine wings to our eternal abode. Footnote 3

The Psyche Myth, as described here, is based on Apuleius’ classic text, The Metamorphoses , also known as the Golden Ass , a book of 11 chapters, written in Latin in the second century CE. In that text, a person named Lucius is metamorphosed into a donkey, and experiences a series of adventures. The oldest extant copy of the myth is from the eleventh century CE, written in Latin and is housed in Florence, Italy (Kenney, 1990 ).

Although “Psyche” is a Greek word, it is retained throughout Apuleius’ original Latin text. The name of Eros, the god of love, is written by Apuleius in its Latin form, “Cupido.” Nonetheless, as this is a Greek myth, I will refer to him as Eros. It is worth noting that in paintings and sculptures of Eros/Cupid, from the time of ancient Greece and Rome, through the present day, he is shown as either a beautiful, virile young man, or as a weak, pudgy, child. In the Psyche and Eros Myth he is most definitely depicted as a young man who has the beautiful body of a Greek god (well … he is a Greek god). The great existential psychologist Rollo May (cf. 1969 , Ch. 3, “Eros in Conflict with Sex”) makes a case that the young man Eros represents a psychologically healthy approach to sex and love, whereas the weak, pudgy baby represents a cultural deterioration of love into something banal, childish, and insipid. This problem arises when a culture does not differentiate between two kinds of erotic love: one physically passionate but empty, and the other spiritually ardent and rich.

I will include a story-telling portion of the Psyche and Eros Myth between each chapter of this book, and then will explain how I use the Myth in my PSYC 101 Introduction to Psychology class in Chap. 8 : Aesthetics and Pedagogy.

Dramatis Personae of the Psyche and Eros Myth:

Aphrodite/Venus: She is the mother of Eros (Fig. 2.1 ).

Psyche: the most beautiful being in the world (Psyche means Soul in Greek; Fig. 2.2 ).

Eros: the god of Love (AKA Cupid or Amour).

“The Birth of Venus,” Sandro Botticelli 1483–5, Uffizi Gallery. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Botticelli_Venus.jpg

Psyche on the Rock by Max Klinger. (Photo credit Rhett Diessner)

Check out this sculpture by Antonio Canova (greatest Romantic Period sculptor) of Eros (and Psyche); it is on display in the Louvre, Paris: http://musee.louvre.fr/oal/psyche/psyche_acc_en.html .

The first time I went to the Louvre, my main goal was spend time with that sculpture. It was glorious.

Our story begins …

Beauty as the Royal Daughter

A king and queen, somewhere in ancient Greece, had three daughters. Two of the daughters were quite attractive, but “The loveliness of the youngest, however, was so perfect that human speech was too poor to describe or even praise it satisfactorily … [all] were struck dumb with admiration of her unequalled beauty (Kenney, 1990 , IV.28.2–3).” This youngest daughter was named Psyche.

Venus Is Jealous and Then Envious of Psyche

The fame of Psyche’s beauty spread, and soon everyone left Venus’ (Aphrodite’s) temples empty, and even began to offer their prayers to Psyche (Kenney, 1990 , IV.28–IV.29.4). This caused jealousy and great anger in Venus and she decided to punish Psyche, thus revealing her envy of Psyche’s adoration by the populace. By way of punishment she asked Eros, her son, to cause Psyche to fall in love with the most degraded and wretched man on earth.

Will Eros obey her?

To be continued … (You will find the next installment of the story at the end of Chap. 3 ).

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Diessner, R. (2019). Brainiac Beauty: Philosophers and Beauty—What Some Philosophers Have to Say About Beauty That Is Relevant to Empirical Aesthetics (Or Possibly Just Interesting). In: Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32333-2_2

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Question of the Month

What is art and/or what is beauty, the following answers to this artful question each win a random book..

Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words alone are not enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.

What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood home furnishing store; but these we might not refer to as beautiful; and it is not difficult to find works of artistic expression that we might agree are beautiful that are not necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants – the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist’s most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and bright, or dark and sinister. But neither the artist nor the observer can be certain of successful communication in the end. So beauty in art is eternally subjective.

Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri

Works of art may elicit a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the work of art may be direct or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are bounded only by the imagination of the artist. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.

Now a theme in aesthetics, the study of art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance between works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art rise like islands from a current of more pragmatic concerns. When you step out of a river and onto an island, you’ve reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you to treat artistic experience as an end-in-itself : art asks us to arrive empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we experience the work of art. And although a person can have an ‘aesthetic experience’ of a natural scene, flavor or texture, art is different in that it is produced . Therefore, art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself . The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or trivial, but it is art either way.

One of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly broad. An older brother who sneaks up behind his younger sibling and shouts “Booo!” can be said to be creating art. But isn’t the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger movie just one of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertising or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an end and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, ‘communication’ is not the best word for what I have in mind because it implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined by the artist’s intentions.

Mike Mallory, Everett, WA

The fundamental difference between art and beauty is that art is about who has produced it, whereas beauty depends on who’s looking.

Of course there are standards of beauty – that which is seen as ‘traditionally’ beautiful. The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a point. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to name just three. They have made a stand against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its only function is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).

Art is a means to state an opinion or a feeling, or else to create a different view of the world, whether it be inspired by the work of other people or something invented that’s entirely new. Beauty is whatever aspect of that or anything else that makes an individual feel positive or grateful. Beauty alone is not art, but art can be made of, about or for beautiful things. Beauty can be found in a snowy mountain scene: art is the photograph of it shown to family, the oil interpretation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.

However, art is not necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: it can make you think about or consider things that you would rather not. But if it evokes an emotion in you, then it is art.

Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks

Art is a way of grasping the world. Not merely the physical world, which is what science attempts to do; but the whole world, and specifically, the human world, the world of society and spiritual experience.

Art emerged around 50,000 years ago, long before cities and civilisation, yet in forms to which we can still directly relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which so startled Picasso, have been carbon-dated at around 17,000 years old. Now, following the invention of photography and the devastating attack made by Duchamp on the self-appointed Art Establishment [see Brief Lives this issue], art cannot be simply defined on the basis of concrete tests like ‘fidelity of representation’ or vague abstract concepts like ‘beauty’. So how can we define art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modern city sophisticates? To do this we need to ask: What does art do ? And the answer is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One way of approaching the problem of defining art, then, could be to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact. Art need not produce beautiful objects or events, since a great piece of art could validly arouse emotions other than those aroused by beauty, such as terror, anxiety, or laughter. Yet to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of art from this understanding means tackling the concept of ‘emotion’ head on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to do this. But not all of them: Robert Solomon’s book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent start, and this seems to me to be the way to go.

It won’t be easy. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great height when all he said was that literature, poetry, patriotism, love and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally important to maintaining broad standards in civilisation. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years old, and science, which is a mere 500 years old. Art deserves much more attention from philosophers.

Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd

Some years ago I went looking for art. To begin my journey I went to an art gallery. At that stage art to me was whatever I found in an art gallery. I found paintings, mostly, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as art. A particular Rothko painting was one colour and large. I observed a further piece that did not have an obvious label. It was also of one colour – white – and gigantically large, occupying one complete wall of the very high and spacious room and standing on small roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that it was a moveable wall, not a piece of art. Why could one piece of work be considered ‘art’ and the other not?

The answer to the question could, perhaps, be found in the criteria of Berys Gaut to decide if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function only as pieces of art, just as their creators intended.

But were they beautiful? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Beauty is frequently associated with art. There is sometimes an expectation of encountering a ‘beautiful’ object when going to see a work of art, be it painting, sculpture, book or performance. Of course, that expectation quickly changes as one widens the range of installations encountered. The classic example is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a rather un-beautiful urinal.

Can we define beauty? Let me try by suggesting that beauty is the capacity of an artefact to evoke a pleasurable emotional response. This might be categorised as the ‘like’ response.

I definitely did not like Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of course, in its construction. But what was the skill in its presentation as art?

So I began to reach a definition of art. A work of art is that which asks a question which a non-art object such as a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, but they invariably involve a judgement, a response to the invitation to answer. The answer, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the ‘Who am I?’ which goes towards defining humanity.

Neil Hallinan, Maynooth, Co. Kildare

‘Art’ is where we make meaning beyond language. Art consists in the making of meaning through intelligent agency, eliciting an aesthetic response. It’s a means of communication where language is not sufficient to explain or describe its content. Art can render visible and known what was previously unspoken. Because what art expresses and evokes is in part ineffable, we find it difficult to define and delineate it. It is known through the experience of the audience as well as the intention and expression of the artist. The meaning is made by all the participants, and so can never be fully known. It is multifarious and on-going. Even a disagreement is a tension which is itself an expression of something.

Art drives the development of a civilisation, both supporting the establishment and also preventing subversive messages from being silenced – art leads, mirrors and reveals change in politics and morality. Art plays a central part in the creation of culture, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and so it cannot be fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, however, art can communicate beyond language and time, appealing to our common humanity and linking disparate communities. Perhaps if wider audiences engaged with a greater variety of the world’s artistic traditions it could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.

Another inescapable facet of art is that it is a commodity. This fact feeds the creative process, whether motivating the artist to form an item of monetary value, or to avoid creating one, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create art, comment on it, and even define it, as those who benefit most strive to keep the value of ‘art objects’ high. These influences must feed into a culture’s understanding of what art is at any time, making thoughts about art culturally dependent. However, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded role of the art critic also gives rise to a counter culture within art culture, often expressed through the creation of art that cannot be sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its meaning, and the meaning of art to society.

Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk

First of all we must recognize the obvious. ‘Art’ is a word, and words and concepts are organic and change their meaning through time. So in the olden days, art meant craft. It was something you could excel at through practise and hard work. You learnt how to paint or sculpt, and you learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the birth of individualism, art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the artist. His or her personality became essentially as important as the artwork itself. During the era of Modernism, the search for originality led artists to reevaluate art. What could art do? What could it represent? Could you paint movement (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you paint the non-material (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could anything be regarded as art? A way of trying to solve this problem was to look beyond the work itself, and focus on the art world: art was that which the institution of art – artists, critics, art historians, etc – was prepared to regard as art, and which was made public through the institution, e.g. galleries. That’s Institutionalism – made famous through Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.

Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the later part of the twentieth century, at least in academia, and I would say it still holds a firm grip on our conceptions. One example is the Swedish artist Anna Odell. Her film sequence Unknown woman 2009-349701 , for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and by many was not regarded as art. But because it was debated by the art world, it succeeded in breaking into the art world, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.

Of course there are those who try and break out of this hegemony, for example by refusing to play by the art world’s unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Factory was one, even though he is today totally embraced by the art world. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much like Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn’t use galleries and other art world-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects directly to private individuals. This liberal approach to capitalism is one way of attacking the hegemony of the art world.

What does all this teach us about art? Probably that art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. We will always have art, but for the most part we will only really learn in retrospect what the art of our era was.

Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden

Art periods such as Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern and post-Modern reflect the changing nature of art in social and cultural contexts; and shifting values are evident in varying content, forms and styles. These changes are encompassed, more or less in sequence, by Imitationalist, Emotionalist, Expressivist, Formalist and Institutionalist theories of art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Arthur Danto claims a distinctiveness for art that inextricably links its instances with acts of observation, without which all that could exist are ‘material counterparts’ or ‘mere real things’ rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art can be seen to possess ‘family resemblances’ or ‘strands of resemblance’ linking very different instances as art. Identifying instances of art is relatively straightforward, but a definition of art that includes all possible cases is elusive. Consequently, art has been claimed to be an ‘open’ concept.

According to Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), capitalised ‘Art’ appears in general use in the nineteenth century, with ‘Fine Art’; whereas ‘art’ has a history of previous applications, such as in music, poetry, comedy, tragedy and dance; and we should also mention literature, media arts, even gardening, which for David Cooper in A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) can provide “epiphanies of co-dependence”. Art, then, is perhaps “anything presented for our aesthetic contemplation” – a phrase coined by John Davies, former tutor at the School of Art Education, Birmingham, in 1971 – although ‘anything’ may seem too inclusive. Gaining our aesthetic interest is at least a necessary requirement of art. Sufficiency for something to be art requires significance to art appreciators which endures as long as tokens or types of the artwork persist. Paradoxically, such significance is sometimes attributed to objects neither intended as art, nor especially intended to be perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or utilitarian artefacts. Furthermore, aesthetic interests can be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously affect artistic authenticity. These interests can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading as art. Then it’s up to discerning observers to spot any Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).

Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire

For me art is nothing more and nothing less than the creative ability of individuals to express their understanding of some aspect of private or public life, like love, conflict, fear, or pain. As I read a war poem by Edward Thomas, enjoy a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a M.C. Escher drawing, I am often emotionally inspired by the moment and intellectually stimulated by the thought-process that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared by thousands, even millions across the globe. This is due in large part to the mass media’s ability to control and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a performance or production becomes the metric by which art is now almost exclusively gauged: quality in art has been sadly reduced to equating great art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. Too bad if personal sensibilities about a particular piece of art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.

So where does that leave the subjective notion that beauty can still be found in art? If beauty is the outcome of a process by which art gives pleasure to our senses, then it should remain a matter of personal discernment, even if outside forces clamour to take control of it. In other words, nobody, including the art critic, should be able to tell the individual what is beautiful and what is not. The world of art is one of a constant tension between preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.

Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia

What we perceive as beautiful does not offend us on any level. It is a personal judgement, a subjective opinion. A memory from once we gazed upon something beautiful, a sight ever so pleasing to the senses or to the eye, oft time stays with us forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac’s house in France: the scent of lilies was so overwhelming that I had a numinous moment. The intensity of the emotion evoked may not be possible to explain. I don’t feel it’s important to debate why I think a flower, painting, sunset or how the light streaming through a stained-glass window is beautiful. The power of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don’t expect or concern myself that others will agree with me or not. Can all agree that an act of kindness is beautiful?

A thing of beauty is a whole; elements coming together making it so. A single brush stroke of a painting does not alone create the impact of beauty, but all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect flower is beautiful, when all of the petals together form its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating scent is also part of the beauty.

In thinking about the question, ‘What is beauty?’, I’ve simply come away with the idea that I am the beholder whose eye it is in. Suffice it to say, my private assessment of what strikes me as beautiful is all I need to know.

Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois

Stendhal said, “Beauty is the promise of happiness”, but this didn’t get to the heart of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking about? Whose happiness?

Consider if a snake made art. What would it believe to be beautiful? What would it deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and detect the world largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson’s organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its human form even make sense to a snake? So their art, their beauty, would be entirely alien to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would be foreign; after all, snakes do not have ears, they sense vibrations. So fine art would be sensed, and songs would be felt, if it is even possible to conceive that idea.

From this perspective – a view low to the ground – we can see that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. It may cross our lips to speak of the nature of beauty in billowy language, but we do so entirely with a forked tongue if we do so seriously. The aesthetics of representing beauty ought not to fool us into thinking beauty, as some abstract concept, truly exists. It requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on certain combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of nothing more than preference. Our desire for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs developed in such a way. A snake would have no use for the visual world.

I am thankful to have human art over snake art, but I would no doubt be amazed at serpentine art. It would require an intellectual sloughing of many conceptions we take for granted. For that, considering the possibility of this extreme thought is worthwhile: if snakes could write poetry, what would it be?

Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon

[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]

The questions, ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is beauty?’ are different types and shouldn’t be conflated.

With boring predictability, almost all contemporary discussers of art lapse into a ‘relative-off’, whereby they go to annoying lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If art is just whatever you want it to be, can we not just end the conversation there? It’s a done deal. I’ll throw playdough on to a canvas, and we can pretend to display our modern credentials of acceptance and insight. This just doesn’t work, and we all know it. If art is to mean anything , there has to be some working definition of what it is. If art can be anything to anybody at anytime, then there ends the discussion. What makes art special – and worth discussing – is that it stands above or outside everyday things, such as everyday food, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or exceptional dishes, paintings, and music.

So what, then, is my definition of art? Briefly, I believe there must be at least two considerations to label something as ‘art’. The first is that there must be something recognizable in the way of ‘author-to-audience reception’. I mean to say, there must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or enjoy. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the art actually is – in other words, the author doesn’t have to tell you it’s art when you otherwise wouldn’t have any idea. The second point is simply the recognition of skill: some obvious skill has to be involved in making art. This, in my view, would be the minimum requirements – or definition – of art. Even if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to make anything at all art. Otherwise, what are we even discussing? I’m breaking the mold and ask for brass tacks.

Brannon McConkey, Tennessee Author of Student of Life: Why Becoming Engaged in Life, Art, and Philosophy Can Lead to a Happier Existence

Human beings appear to have a compulsion to categorize, to organize and define. We seek to impose order on a welter of sense-impressions and memories, seeing regularities and patterns in repetitions and associations, always on the lookout for correlations, eager to determine cause and effect, so that we might give sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. However, particularly in the last century, we have also learned to take pleasure in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our artistic ways of seeing and listening have expanded to encompass disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an ever-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who continue to define art in traditional ways, having to do with order, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who try to see the world anew, and strive for difference, and whose critical practice is rooted in abstraction. In between there are many who abjure both extremes, and who both find and give pleasure both in defining a personal vision and in practising craftsmanship.

There will always be a challenge to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions around the appropriateness of our understanding. That is how things should be, as innovators push at the boundaries. At the same time, we will continue to take pleasure in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned machine, a successful scientific experiment, the technology of landing a probe on a comet, an accomplished poem, a striking portrait, the sound-world of a symphony. We apportion significance and meaning to what we find of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our art and our definitions of beauty reflect our human nature and the multiplicity of our creative efforts.

In the end, because of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will always be inconclusive. If we are wise, we will look and listen with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry smile, always celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievements.

David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire

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What Is Beauty?

Table of Contents

The concept of beauty is studied in sociology, philosophy, psychology, culture, and aesthetics.

It is regarded as a property of an object, idea, animal, place, or a person, and it often interpreted as balance and harmony with nature.

Beauty as a concept has been argued throughout the entire history of civilization, but even today, there is neither single definition accepted by many people nor shared vision.

People think that something or someone is beautiful when it gives them feelings of attraction, placidity, pleasure, and satisfaction, which may lead to emotional well-being.

If speaking about a beautiful person, he or she can be characterized by the combination of inner beauty (personality, elegance, integrity, grace, intelligence, etc.) and outer beauty or physical attractiveness.

The interpretation of beauty and its standards are highly subjective. They are based on changing cultural values.

Besides, people have unique personalities with different tastes and standards, so everyone has a different vision of what is beautiful and what is ugly.

We all know the saying that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

That’s why writing a beauty definition essay is not easy. In this article, we will explore this type of essay from different angles and provide you with an easy how-to writing guide.

Besides, you will find 20 interesting beauty essay topics and a short essay sample which tells about the beauty of nature.

What is beauty essay?

Let’s talk about the specifics of what is beauty philosophy essay.

As we have already mentioned, there is no single definition of this concept because its interpretation is based on constantly changing cultural values as well as the unique vision of every person.

…So if you have not been assigned a highly specific topic, you can talk about the subjective nature of this concept in the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder essay.”

Communicate your own ideas in “what does beauty mean to you essay,” tell about psychological aspects in the “inner beauty essay” or speak about aesthetic criteria of physical attractiveness in the “beauty is only skin deep essay.”

You can choose any approach you like because there are no incorrect ways to speak about this complex subjective concept.

How to write a beauty definition essay?

When you are writing at a college level, it’s crucial to approach your paper in the right way.

Keep reading to learn how to plan, structure, and write a perfect essay on this challenging topic.

You should start with a planning stage which will make the entire writing process faster and easier. There are different planning strategies, but it’s very important not to skip the essential stages.

Analyzing the topic – break up the title to understand what is exactly required and how complex your response should be. Create a mind map, a diagram, or a list of ideas on the paper topic.
Gathering resources – do research to find relevant material (journal and newspaper articles, books, websites). Create a list of specific keywords and use them for the online search. After completing the research stage, create another mind map and carefully write down quotes and other information which can help you answer the essay question.
Outlining the argument – group the most significant points into 3 themes and formulate a strong specific thesis statement for your essay. Make a detailed paper plan, placing your ideas in a clear, logical order. Develop a structure, forming clear sections in the main body of your paper.

If you know exactly what points you are going to argue, you can write your introduction and conclusion first. But if you are unsure about the logical flow of the argument, it would be better to build an argument first and leave the introductory and concluding sections until last.

Stick to your plan but be ready to deviate from it as your work develops. Make sure that all adjustments are relevant before including them in the paper.

Keep in mind that the essay structure should be coherent.

In the introduction, you should move from general to specific.

Start your essay with an attention grabber : a provocative question, a relevant quote, a story.
Then introduce the topic and give some background information to provide a context for your subject.
State the thesis statement and briefly outline all the main ideas of the paper.
Your thesis should consist of the 2 parts which introduce the topic and state the point of your paper .

Body paragraphs act like constructing a block of your argument where your task is to persuade your readers to accept your point of view.

You should stick to the points and provide your own opinion on the topic .
The number of paragraphs depends on the number of key ideas.
You need to develop a discussion to answer the research question and support the thesis .
Begin each body paragraph with a topic sentence that communicates the main idea of the paragraph.
Add supporting sentences to develop the main idea and provide appropriate examples to support and illustrate the point .
Comment on the examples and analyze their significance .
Use paraphrases and quotes with introductory phrases. They should be relevant to the point you are making.
Finish every body paragraph with a concluding sentence that provides a transition to the next paragraph .
Use transition words and phrases to help your audience follow your ideas .

In conclusion, which is the final part of your essay, you need to move from the specific to general.

You may restate your thesis , give a brief summary of the key points, and finish with a broad statement about the future direction for research and possible implications.
Don’t include any new information here.

When you have written the first draft, put it aside for a couple of days. Reread the draft and edit it by improving the content and logical flow, eliminating wordiness, and adding new examples if necessary to support your main points. Edit the draft several times until you are completely satisfied with it.

Finally, proofread the draft, fix spelling and grammar mistakes, and check all references and citations to avoid plagiarism. Review your instructions and make sure that your essay is formatted correctly.

Winning beauty essay topics

Are beauty contests beneficial for young girls?
Is it true that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder?
Inner beauty vs physical beauty.
History of beauty pageants.
How can you explain the beauty of nature?
The beauty of nature as a theme of art.
The beauty of nature and romanticism.
Concept of beauty in philosophy.
Compare concepts of beauty in different cultures.
Concept of beauty and fashion history.
What is the aesthetic value of an object?
How can beauty change and save the world?
What is the ideal beauty?
Explain the relationship between art and beauty.
Can science be beautiful?
What makes a person beautiful?
The cult of beauty in ancient Greece.
Rejection of beauty in postmodernism.
Is beauty a good gift of God?
Umberto Eco on the western idea of beauty.

The beauty of nature essay sample

The world around us is so beautiful that sometimes we can hardly believe it exists. The beauty of nature has always attracted people and inspired them to create amazing works of art and literature. It has a great impact on our senses, and we start feeling awe, wonder or amazement. The sight of flowers, rainbows, and butterflies fills human hearts with joy and a short walk amidst nature calms their minds. …Why is nature so beautiful? Speaking about people, we can classify them between beautiful and ugly. But we can’t say this about nature. You are unlikely to find an example in the natural world which we could call ugly. Everything is perfect – the shapes, the colors, the composition. It’s just a magic that nature never makes aesthetic mistakes and reveals its beauty in all places and at all times. Maybe we are psychologically programmed to consider natural things to be beautiful. We think that all aspects of nature are beautiful because they are alive. We see development and growth in all living things, and we consider them beautiful, comparing that movement with the static state of man-made things. Besides, maybe we experience the world around us as beautiful because we view it as an object of intellect and admire its rational structure. Nature has intrinsic value based on its intelligible structure. It’s an integral part of our lives, and it needs to be appreciated.

On balance…

We have discussed specifics of the “what is true beauty essay” and the effective writing strategies you should use to approach this type of academic paper. Now it’s time to practice writing.

You should write whenever you have a chance because practice makes perfect. If you feel you need more information about writing essays, check other articles on our website with useful tips and tricks.

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The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, there were signs of revived interest by the early 2000s.

This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

2.1 the classical conception, 2.2 the idealist conception, 2.3 love and longing, 2.4 hedonist conceptions, 2.5 use and uselessness, other internet resources, related entries.

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone's particular experiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species of philosophy’:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in The Critique of Judgment (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective . Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

However, if beauty is entirely subjective—that is, if anything that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as James Kirwan, for example, asserts)—then it seems that the word has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or learn from someone else why it is.

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one's experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard other people's taste, even when it differs from our own, as provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response, even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the beholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In De Veritate Religione , Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato's account in the Symposium and Plotinus's in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus's account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I, 6])

In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept, or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception ( see below ) treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE), was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [Ennead 1, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ of the mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One argument for this was the variation in color experiences between people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with jaundice much of the world takes on a yellow cast. In addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable as a value at all across persons or societies.

Hume's “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant's Critique Of Judgment attempt to find ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy of taste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective: de gustibus non est disputandum (about taste there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of good taste or of tastelessness. Some people's tastes appear vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people's taste is too exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the Canon was held to be, that if people did not experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume's account focuses on the history and condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with regard to assessing people's taste entail that judgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary prejudices. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived] from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section 34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture of a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one cares about that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the experiences of others.

By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is a disinterested judgment. It does not respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatment Kant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal range of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance, which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in its sheer representation in one's experience:

Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by mere observation (intuition or reflection). … We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful , and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's dialogue The Moralists , where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort of thing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautiful ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example, may be beautiful in themselves without a reference group or “concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in the form or design of the object, or as Clive Bell put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting) (Bell 1914). By the time Bell writes in the early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person's judgment from another's (though in fact there may be). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a ‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to the universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer, Hanslick, Bullough, and Croce, for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as ‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that it is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the object itself were having subjective states.

We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes subjective states (indeed, one's own) to a thing which in many instances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying that Santayana's treatment of the topic in The Sense of Beauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck from Hume's and Kant's treatments was the subjectivity, not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again possibly in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue more real and more serious projects. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto's book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there has been a revival of interest in beauty in both art and philosophy in recent years, and several theorists have made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore's: “To say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.

Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a community that centers around it—a community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are present. For example, Kant's treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible with one another many of these views are: for example, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely with uselessness.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated: nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics : “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies, is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid's Elements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and, again, by the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos (late fifth/early fourth century BCE).

The Canon was not only a statue deigned to display perfect proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of “the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. For having taught us in that treatise all the symmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the statue itself, like the treatise, the Canon ” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of ‘symmetry’ in classical texts is distinct from and richer than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in the Sophist (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as symmetrical.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius gives as good a characterization of the classical conception as any, both in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying unity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis , and arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis , and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and Distribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia . Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result. Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of details in their context. This is attained when the details of the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical correspondence. Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot, palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that “There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection—for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful” (Summa Theologica I, 39, 8).

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “What we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725, 29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in the Mathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton's Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725, 38).

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime :

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke 1757, 84–89)

There are many ways to interpret Plato's relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in The Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically in The Symposium —perhaps the key Socratic text for neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato, 558–59 [Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal: ‘And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for the good—which is to say that Love is a longing for immortality” (Plato, 559, [Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment. … And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. … Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man's life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [Symposium 210a–211d])

Beauty here is conceived—perhaps explicitly in contrast to the classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole—as perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout. All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus, 21 [Ennead 1.6])

And Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22 [Ennead 1.3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a richly-appointed church:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959, 14)

This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and finally what makes even the maker of such things as us (that is, God). Shaftesbury's character Theocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. … Whatever appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. … Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738, 228–29)

Schiller's expression of a similar series of thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct and guide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity. Beauty … makes of man a whole, complete in himself. (1795, 59–60, 86)

For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are we—who exist simultaneously on both these levels—free. This is quite similar to Plato's ‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—is more concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including the tripartite dialectical structure of the view—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from finitude to the infinite, formulations that—while they are influenced by Schiller—strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus, and Plato.

Both Hegel and Shaftesbury, who associate beauty and art with mind and spirit, hold that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, “the beauty of art is born of the spirit and born again ” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. “The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certain persons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one, comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts” (Croce 1928, 230).

Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (Burke 1757, 83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or ataraxia , as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world.

There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho's famous fragment 16: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I say it's whatever you love best” (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at Phaedrus 236c, Socrates appears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greater insight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

Plato's discussions of beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In the former, love is portrayed as the ‘child’ of poverty and plenty. “Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato, 556 [Symposium 203b–d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the infinite.

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho's fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing” and characterizes longing as intense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas writes

I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don't stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction. (Nehamas 2007, 77)

Thinkers of the 18 th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a typical formulation, says that “By beautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical formal elements or in terms of the viewer's pleasurable response. He begins the Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears to assert that objects which instantiate his “compound ratio of uniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider, is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify'd by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolute beauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities of the beautiful thing, and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come apart from Hutcheson's particular aesthetic preferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus's, for example. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as its object.

Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature :

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740, 299)

Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon talking about the ‘sentiment of beauty,’ where sentiment is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or ideas, though beauty is a matter of cultivated or delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant's Third Critique and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of pleasure.

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extreme expression of this orientation—is the assertion of the positivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless or without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus is contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no reasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. “ Taste is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from practical concerns: “Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends.“ (Bullough 1912, 244)

On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use. ‘Beauty’ is perhaps one of the few terms that could plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene took a rather direct approach.

Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty? Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes Laertius, 94)

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of thinkers. Xenophon's Memorabilia puts the view in the mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates : In short everything which we use is considered both good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use. Aristippus : Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing? Socrates : Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill. (Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue Alciphron , though he begins with the hedonist conception: “Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley 1732, 174, see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of object it is, and again a beautiful ox would make an ugly horse. “The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole” (Berkeley 1732, 174–75, see Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing, and assess its suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of ‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as well as serves its purpose.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not more beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009) returns to a modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched by many and varied examples. "We call something beautiful," writes Scruton, "when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form ." (Scruton 2009, 26)

Despite the Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one loves is not merely to place one body part on another, "but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising - it is a move from one self toward another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being." (Scruton 2009, 48)

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The question “What is Beauty?” is one of the fundamental problems of philosophy. It emerges at the very beginning of philosophy, for example, with Plato. Plato’s approach is a good beginning point to thinking about this question. Deborah Modrak gives us the following definition: “Plato posits an ideal exemplar to beauty to ground the definition of beauty….it would be insinuated from the vicissitudes of the sensible objects to which the word “beauty” applies.” This, in other words, means that in our everyday life we encounter numerous things that we may consider beautiful. For example, another human being or a painting, or a stretch of nature that lies before us. Plato essentially asks the question: what is common to all these things? He tries to explain them by asking for a shared quality or characteristic of beauty as his starting point.

This is an interesting approach, because it tries to look for a starting point that links together all the appearances of beauty. But perhaps when we ask the question “what is beauty?” we can think of another starting point. For example, Plato begins from seeing all these different “sensible objects” which are examples of beauty. But why, we can ask, do we consider these things to be beautiful? I think that this is slightly different than Plato’s question. Plato sees the beautiful sensible things and tries to trace them to a concept of beauty that explains all the examples of beauty. But what about the particular relationship of the one who perceives the beautiful thing and the beautiful thing? Perhaps this is the fundamental relationship?

Let us consider another example to explain this difference. For example, I may see a stretch of farmland and idyllic grass and hills and say “this is beautiful.” You, in contrast, may say, “no, this is boring, I like ultra-modern architecture and impressive buildings, that is beautiful.” In other words, what is beauty is now transformed from a question of some ultimate source of beauty which makes things beautiful, like in Plato, to relationships between the perceivers of beauty and the objects which they consider to be beautiful. In Plato, we only have a concept of beauty. We do not have the key concept of this relationship, which is the relationship between the person who states something is beautiful and the beautiful thing.

This is an important distinction, because it accounts for all the different examples of beauty in the world that people may mention when they are asked the question “what is beauty?”. In other words, this type of theory accounts for our differences in opinion of what is beautiful. This is similar to the position of aesthetic relativism. Dabney Townsend explains this point of view as follows: “pure aesthetic relativism accepts that aesthetic experience depends only on individual response.” (266) This is similar to the idea that the relationship between the individual and the beautiful object is central to determining what is beautiful. Namely, from this perspective we can account for differences in beauty. Beauty and judgments of beauty are not like judgments of scientific measurement. We get different results. And to explain these results, we have to understand the importance of the individual making the judgment about the beautiful thing. It is through this account that we can explain the diversity of beauty and also the difficulty of an answer to the question.

Works Cited

Modrak, Deborah. “Method, Meaning, and Ontology in Plato’s Philosophy of Language.” In Cameron & R.J. Stanton (eds.) Linguistic Content . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. pp. 16-32.

Townsend, Dabney. Historical Dictionary of Aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Beauty — What Is Beauty: Inner and Physical

What is Beauty: Inner and Physical

Categories: Beauty Physical Appearance

About this sample

Words: 1078 |

Updated: 23 November, 2023

Words: 1078 | Page: 1 | 6 min read

Works Cited

Aristotle. (1999). Poetics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (pp. 1453-1492). Modern Library.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press.
Eagan, D. J. (2017). The Social Psychology of Facial Appearance. Springer.
Etcoff, N. (2000). Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. Anchor Books.
Kant, I. (2009). Critique of Judgment. Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249-291.
Platon. (2005). The Symposium. In S. R. Slings (Ed.), Plato Complete Works (pp. 461-512). Hackett Publishing Company.
Scruton, R. (2009). Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Sontag, S. (1978). The Double Standard of Aging. Saturday Review, 5-7.
Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. Harper Perennial.

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What Is Hara Hachi Bu? Dietitians Share The Benefits Of Eating Until You’re 80 Percent Full

The Japanese eating philosophy may help boost health and longevity.

hara hachi bu involves eating until you're 80 percent full, according to dietitians

Growing up, your parents may have taught you that not finishing your food was against the rules—however, it may actually benefit your health to leave a portion, experts say.

Although hara hachi bu has been practiced for hundreds of years within Japanese culture, it gained popularity in August 2023 when the docu-series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones debuted on Netflix. The show follows author and explorer Dan Buettner on a trip to the world’s “Blue Zones” where people live longer than average—including Japan, which has the highest number of centenarians (people who live to be 100 or older) in the world.

There, he witnessed locals practicing “hara hachi bu” at mealtime. “This idea teaches each Japanese generation that our portion size is small,” says Asako Miyashita, RDN, a New York-based dietitian who grew up in Japan. In Live to 100, it is believed that this cultural practice may be part of the reason that Okinawa has such a high percentage of centenarians.

If you’re curious about “hara hachi bu,” its connection to the Okinawa diet and longevity, and how to practice it on your own, here’s what experts want you to know.

Meet the experts: Asako Miyashita , RDN, is a dietitian nutritionist based in New York. Kouka Webb , RD, is a Japanese-British dietitian based in New York City.

What does "hara hachi bu" mean?

To break it down, “hara hachi bu” directly translates in Japanese to “belly 80 percent full,” or eating until you’re 80 percent full, says Kouka Webb, RN, a New York-based dietitian born and raised on “hara hachi bu” in Japan. Although the idea was born over 300 years ago, it is still a common saying in Japan today, Webb says.

“This phrase dates back to the Edo Period in 1713 when Japanese philosopher and botanist Ekiken Kaibara published his book, Yojokun: Life Lessons From A Samurai ,” Miyashita says. The prefix “yojo” in “yojokun” stands for “self-healing ability,” which aligns with the book’s focus on listening to what your body tells you, according to Miyashita. The book introduces the idea of “hara hachi bun me,” which means to stop eating at 80 percent full.

The philosophy can help with gastrointestinal issues and encourage a healthier mindset, Miyashita says. And “hara hachi bu” clearly worked for Kaibara, because he lived to be 83, which was rare in the Edo Period—the life expectancy was less than 50 years old, Miyashita says.

As Buettner learned from traveling to Okinawa, many older residents say the phrase “hara hachi bu” out loud before they eat a meal—a ritual Miyashita says her family did during her childhood. The phrase serves as both a pre-meal blessing and a reminder to stop eating before you are too full.

Benefits Of The “Hara Hachi Bu” Approach

It can work as a long-term weight loss strategy, however, that’s not its intended purpose.

“Hara hachi bu” is not a diet, but a lifestyle that can help promote a sustainable approach to eating, says Webb. “It encourages mindful eating and portion control without the need for strict calorie counting or eliminating certain food groups,” she adds. A mindful eating approach can be an important component of weight management and treating obesity, per a 2018 review in the journal Current Obesity Reports . It’s also more sustainable than, say, a highly restrictive diet, she says. If you’re planning on using “hara hachi bu” as a way to lose weight, you may want to consult with a doctor or dietitian first or enroll in a nutrition course beforehand, Miyashita says.

It may help your body digest food better.

Overeating can cause indigestion and stomach pain, per Cleveland Clinic . When you eat until you’re 100 percent full (and beyond that), you slow down digestion, absorption, and metabolism, Miyashita says. “This puts strain on organs such as the stomach, intestines, pancreas, kidneys, and liver,” she says.

“By eating until 80 percent full, people may experience less discomfort and reduce strain on the digestive system,” Webb says. “Eating until you’re 80 percent full is associated with a lower risk of acid reflux , bloating, and gastrointestinal issues.” Hara hachi bu can also help to regulate blood sugar levels, Webb adds. Why? Eating excess calories can lead to weight gain and obesity, both of which are risk factors for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes , she says. Because hara hachi bu encourages smaller portion sizes (and, in turn, fewer calories), it may help prevent those rapid blood glucose spikes that occur when consuming large meals, she says.

It can help you eat more mindfully.

Women are two to three times more likely to experience anxiety and mood-related disorders and may be more likely to eat in response to stress, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology found.

If you catch yourself reaching for more snacks on stressful days, “hara hachi bu” may support you in developing a healthier relationship with eating.

“‘Hara hachi bu’ can help distinguish between physical hunger and emotional eating ,” Webb says. “Mindful eating can reduce stress and improve an overall sense of well-being.” Feeling satisfied rather than overly full can reduce negative feelings and promote a more positive relationship with food , Webb adds.

It may lower your risk of chronic diseases.

“Eating until 80 percent full is associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases such as cancer, stroke, and heart disease ,” Webb says.

Okinawans have far fewer age-related illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, according to a 2024 study on longevity in Okinawa. More research is needed to determine whether hara hachi bu is the sole cause of these health outcomes, however, it’s notable that those who practice it—while adhering to a traditional Japanese diet—tend to have lower rates of disease.

Among Okinawans who follow a traditional Japanese diet (including hara hachi bu), the incidence of prostate, colon, and breast cancers is about 50% lower than the rest of Japan, per a 2009 study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition . In fact, obesity prevalence is only 3 to 4 percent in all of Japan—far less than the United States, where the 41.9 percent obesity rate contributes to chronic disease risk every year.

Potential Risks Of The "Hara Hachi Bu" Approach

Both Miyashita and Webb have seen benefits from their childhood journey with “hara hachi bu,” however, they acknowledge that everyone’s eating habits are different, so this concept will impact others in a variety of ways. “It can be difficult to gauge fullness levels, particularly for people who are not accustomed to mindful eating. This can lead to over or under-eating,” Webb says. “Individuals may misjudge their fullness and consistently eat too little, which can lead to nutritional deficiencies over time.”

Beginners who have a history of eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa, may want to be mindful when trying out a method like “hara hachi bu,” Miyashita says. “People with eating disorders have lower energy intake than that of people without, therefore, ‘hara hachi bu’ could be dangerous because their daily intake exponentially decreased.”

If you want to try the method but have concerns about safety, chat with your medical provider and/or a registered dietitian before experimenting on your own.

How To Practice "Hara Hachi Bu" Safely

This philosophy can benefit all ages, especially if you struggle with portion control, overeating, or just want to practice mindful eating, Webb says. And even if you have a history of disordered eating, you can still take part in this practice, as long as you check with your doctor and/or dietitian first. Because “hara hachi bu” applies to every single meal (even the little mid-afternoon snacks), this change will flow more smoothly if you follow Webb and Miyashita’s instructions step by step:

Prepare your environment for a peaceful meal.

“Choose a quiet place with minimal distractions,” Webb says. It doesn’t have to be your dining table—it could be your bedroom if that’s the most calming environment for you. To allow yourself to fully commit to this new process, it can help to disconnect from tech. “Leave your computer or TV off to avoid further distraction,” Miyashita says. You can also help yourself adapt to smaller meals by choosing smaller dinnerware (think plates, cups, and bowls).

Practice mindfulness to assess your hunger.

Once you’ve hit a six or a seven and start eating, go for non-starchy vegetables first, like broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber, carrots, spinach, tomatoes, zucchini, or bell peppers, to name a few, Miyashita says. Take small bites and chew thoroughly. “I recommend that you chew more than 15 times with each bite,” she adds. To inspire slow eating, perhaps place your utensils on your plate in between each bite. After finishing the non-starchy vegetables, pause and reference the one to 10 scale.

Stop eating when you're 80 percent full.

Or, in other words, an eight on the fullness scale. If you are used to eating until 100 percent fullness or more, it may take you some time to get used to stopping at 80 percent full, Webb says.

It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for your stomach to signal your brain that you are full,” she adds. “It can help to eat slowly as this gives your body enough time to recognize these signals.”

Make sure to chew thoroughly before each new bite as this helps your body acknowledge when you are approaching fullness—then, wait to fill up your fork again until your mouth is totally empty.

“It can also be helpful to visually estimate 80 percent of a portion before eating and pausing to assess your hunger throughout the meal—think 80 percent of a hamburger, ⅘ of your soup, or 80 percent of your fettuccine,” Webb says.

Take a mindful pause before going back for seconds.

Contrary to popular belief, abiding by “hara hachi bu” doesn’t mean you have to eliminate your favorite foods or drastically cut back on portion sizes—it’s more about becoming aware of your body’s cues and taking note of whether or not you’re *truly* full or not each time you eat. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with getting a second plate or eating dessert as long as your body is feeling good.

“If you're still unsure if you're satisfied, wait 15-20 minutes before deciding to eat more,” Webb says.

Keep a food journal.

To document your first few weeks of the “hara hachi bu” process, keeping a food journal can be helpful, Webb and Miyashita agree. Write down what you ate, the dishes you enjoyed, the ones you didn’t, where you were on the “food scale,” and how you feel now (physically and emotionally).

You may find that it’s easier to practice the philosophy at certain times of day, or with certain meals, than others. The idea is to write without judgment and use it as a learning exercise. Then, as you expand beyond the trial phase, you’ll be able to look back on your progress and feel pride for how far you’ve come, Miyashita says.

Meguire Hennes is a freelance lifestyle journalist specializing in fashion news, celebrity style, dating, and wellness (her Libra moon won’t let her settle on one beat). She received a B.A. in fashion studies from Montclair State University, and her words can be found in Bustle, The Zoe Report, Elite Daily, Byrdie, and more. When she’s not debunking a new TikTok wellness trend or praising Zendaya’s latest red carpet look, you can find her in yoga class, reading a cutesy romance novel, or playing Scrabble with her puppy in her lap.

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“the voice of the universe”: cosmic immanence in john elof boodin’s process thought, what it is and why it matters.

1. Introduction

2. functional realism, 3. cosmic immanence and the “rainbow universe”.

Obviously this view [of entanglement and decoherence] is quite the opposite of the classical, commonsense one that objects truly have the shapes and position we see, and that they have them “by themselves”, quite independently of the limitations of our own aptitudes, as well as of the size of the Universe or anything else. Were some simile requested, the best one would probably consist in comparing the quantum objects to rainbows. If you are driving, you see the rainbow moving. If you stop it stops. If you start again, so does the rainbow. In other words, its properties partly depend on you. Taken literally, quantum physics, when thought of as universal, imparts to all objects such a status relative to the sentient beings that we are. ( d’Espagnat 2006, p. 19 )

4. “No Man Liveth Unto Himself”

5. boodin, process thought and whitehead.

It has no meaning to say that a stone has experience of the ground upon which it rests or that chemical elements have experience of the synthesis or analysis which they undergo. I cannot, therefore, accept A. N. Whitehead’s generalization: ‘The direct evidence as to the connectedness of one’s immediate present occasion of experience with one’s immediately past occasions can be validly used to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature .’ I am obliged to translate Whitehead’s statement into our common vernacular. We are organisms characterized by mnemic causation. By habit and memory we conserve our behavior in such a way that we can refer backward to events which are no longer perceptually present and, since we are conative organisms, having instincts and desires, we can by means of imagination anticipate future events. Can we generalize from our experience of nature to a similar connectedness in nature’s activities everywhere? … The trick lies in the phrase, ‘occasion of experience.’ There are occasions of experiencing or having experience of events acting upon our organism. Experience is not a substantive. There are no occasions of experience. There is no continuum of experience. Whether there is a continuum of experiencing is another question. We have a succession of occasions of experiencing events. And we have experience of a great variety of simultaneous events. But whether, temporally or spatially, we can prove a continuum, in either a mathematical or metaphysical sense, is doubtful. The quantum character of nature makes such a supposition improbable. Whitehead implies the substantival conception of experience in his grades of ‘occasions of experience’ of which human nature is an extreme instance. We can grade individuals on some basis, such as complexity. But individuals are not occasions of experience but occasions of experiencing other individuals. The grades are not based on the experiencing but on the character of the individuals. There is no stuff of experience out of which individuals are constituted. Experiencing is a relation, not a substantive. It is the substantival conception of experience which makes the relation of experience to its world so mysterious for Whitehead: ‘The world within experience is identical with the world beyond experience, the occasion of experience is within the world and the world is within the occasion. The categories have to elucidate this paradox of the connectedness of things: the many things, the one world without and within.’ The paradox is of Whitehead’s own making. It disappears if we view experience as relational or prepositional (to use J. Loewenberg’s expression) instead of as substantival. We, as organisms, with mnemic causation, have experience of a variety of things under a variety of conditions. The world is in our experience in the sense that the world enters into relation to our organisms; or, conversely, that our organism establishes relations to the world in the way of perception and interpretation. In this sense, we can say that the structure of the world becomes immanent in our organism and the structure of our organism becomes immanent in the world as selected by our interest. ( Boodin 1943c, pp. 701–2 )

6. A New Synthesis

7. conclusions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

1	is the more generally accepted usage today, but prior to the 1920s this form was unknown. Because Boodin always preferred wholistic, it will be adopted consistently in this essay. Both terms refer to a cosmic order that must be interrelated, the totality of which is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the product of the theories of relativity and quantum physics emerging in the early twentieth century from Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and later carried forward by David Bohm. The metaphor of the universe as a machine is replaced by a looking-glass universe where everything mirrors everything else.
2
3	(1939), but it was developed much earlier over time, as early as 1913, with the publication of “The Existence of Social Minds”, then in 1914 with “Cognition and Social Interpretation”, and then a year later with “Value and Social Interpretation” and “Social Immortality”; in 1918, “Social Systems” appeared, and “The Law of Social Participation” came out in 1921. While not an exhaustive list of its predecessors, these represent its main sources; so much so, in fact, that, of the book’s fifteen chapters, only 2, 9, 10, and 13 are new. Because nearly all of Boodin’s social thought is contained in this book, it will (except where noted) be cited consistently for simplicity’s sake rather than the individual original articles of which it is comprised.
4	, Boodin refers to “overlapping interests”. It was an unfortunate alteration from his original “overlapping souls”, which obscures the more important metaphysical message he seeks to impart ( ).
5
6	( ) offered his first extensive and detailed critique of Whitehead, earning a laudatory foreword from leading process philosopher John B. Cobb Jr. This and other relevant works are listed in the references, though his entire corpus of publications is far too large to include here. For Bracken, the trinitarian God/world connection is the key to understanding process and society in intimate relation.
7	being subjected to a Nazi book burning, and the war destroyed everything they owned, including his 15,000-volume library. But the Bertalanffys survived and emigrated, first to London, then to Canada (holding a number of academic positions there), before finally arriving at SUNY in Buffalo.

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Flannery, M.A. “The Voice of the Universe”: Cosmic Immanence in John Elof Boodin’s Process Thought, What It Is and Why It Matters. Religions 2024 , 15 , 995. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080995

Flannery MA. “The Voice of the Universe”: Cosmic Immanence in John Elof Boodin’s Process Thought, What It Is and Why It Matters. Religions . 2024; 15(8):995. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080995

Flannery, Michael A. 2024. "“The Voice of the Universe”: Cosmic Immanence in John Elof Boodin’s Process Thought, What It Is and Why It Matters" Religions 15, no. 8: 995. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080995

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