A woman who is passionate about life, shows compassion, pursues learning, keeps a sense of adventure and believes she is worthy. She has a great inner beauty that shines through her outer beauty and creates an energy that many people find beautiful.
She is a friend and encourager, and a source of strength and joy for others. She is also a person who enjoys the outdoors and who never lets anything get in the way of her happiness or joy.
Her sense of wonder is contagious, and her enthusiasm makes others want to know more about her. She is a strong believer in God and works hard to live according to His way of life. She adores her children, and she is always willing to help others.
The pleasures of beauty were often associated with joy and ecstasy, particularly in ancient treatments of the concept. Augustine’s De Veritate Religione, for instance, refers to things as ‘delightful’ or ‘beautiful’ because they give pleasure, and Plato and Plotinus, in the Symposium and Enneads, connect beauty to desire.
Several classical accounts of beauty, for example those of Plato and Aristotle, treated it as an objective quality, a matter of definite proportions or relations among parts. This was a view shared by the Pythagorean school, which held that particular mathematical proportions, ratios and shapes were the basis of aesthetic excellence.
Though such conceptions were widespread in antiquity, the eighteenth century saw a sharp reversal of that trend. Hume and Kant, in particular, argued that if beauty was entirely subjective, it would have no higher status than any other type of enjoyment. In fact, if it were completely subjective, they said, a value such as beauty would be nothing more than an unworthy distraction.
Although the concept of beauty has had a number of important and interesting turns, it remains a topic of debate in philosophy. In some recent philosophical contexts, the idea has been reconstructed and reappropriated in ways that make it more liberating than enslaving (Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993).
A new, less reductive approach to beauty emerged in the 1990s. A variety of artists and philosophers, including Dave Hickey and Peg Zeglin Brand, made efforts to revive the idea as a central theme in art and philosophy.
It was not long before the concept of beauty became a subject of intense critical scrutiny within feminist philosophy. This was due in large part to the growing recognition that, as a cultural norm, beauty is deeply problematic for women and is often related to racial and gender stereotypes.
In addition, there were concerns that the subjectivity of beauty tended to be trivialized in theory. This led some artists to conclude that they were better off pursuing more urgent and serious projects, rather than beauty.
As a result, it was not long before the twentieth century relegated beauty to a more minor role in both art and philosophy. A revival of interest in the concept occurred late in the century, however, as it was used by social-justice oriented philosophers and activists.