Beauty is a fundamental part of human life, but it can be difficult to know what is and what is not beautiful. There are some things that will always be considered pretty, like facial features, body shape and weight, but there are many other factors that will fade over time.
If you are looking for something to be beautiful, look at the way it makes you feel and think of what makes you happy. For example, if you are feeling sad, a smile or a hug can make you feel better.
It is a good idea to be open and honest about your feelings so you can get help from others in your situation. It is also important to know that you don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. The key is to work on your own qualities, passions and habits that will lead you to be a happier person.
The ancient Greeks understood beauty as a mathematical concept that involved the relation of parts to each other, such as a square and a circle. Euclid formulated this idea in his famous golden ratio and plotted it using the Fibonacci sequence.
In his 18th century, a new confidence in human capability and an emergent sense of inalienable rights marked a turning point in the thinking about beauty. The philosophy of Kant moved away from this strict mathematical and divine understanding and shifted to a more subjective view that sought to capture what beauty is in terms of its effects on our senses.
This subjectivist approach led to the development of a range of philosophical aesthetics that focus on the experience of beauty. Schiller, for example, argues that the act of viewing beauty or art is a means of transcending the natural and sensuous to the realm of the abstract or spiritual.
A common criticism of this view is that it is too much like philism: there is no objective reality for the thing that is beautiful, and therefore there is no reason to think about it. But a more interesting question is whether there is some sort of beauty that is independent of the subject’s experience of it, such as taste.
When you are able to accept this, the subjectivist theory of beauty loses some of its power. The experience of beauty can be a meaningful one, and it is an object of serious contemplation.
But when it is not, the subjectivist perspective can become a distraction from the real subject of beauty: human nature. The question of beauty has a lot to do with our capacity for feeling and loving, as well as for making good decisions.
The human soul is a truly beautiful thing, and it is only when we are able to look at our own soul that we can really see what is truly beautiful about ourselves. This is not something that we can easily do, and it is hard to achieve, but it is a worthwhile pursuit.