Beauty is a term which is used to describe an object or person that has particular qualities. It could be a physical feature of someone’s body or a personality trait that they have, but it can also be a quality of the mind and soul.
It’s the ability to stand out from the crowd. It can be a person’s appearance or the way they walk or talk. It can be a certain way they dress or the things they do, but it’s also the way their personality shines through, making you want to get to know them.
There are many different types of beauty. Some are more natural and come from within, while others are externally enhanced. Regardless of the kind of beauty that you are looking for, there is something about it that can make you feel good and confident about yourself.
Using a variety of methods, philosophers have tried to understand the concept of beauty. Some have argued that it consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole according to proportion, harmony and symmetry. This conception is a fundamental Western notion of beauty that is still reflected in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture and literature wherever it appears.
In the West, beauty primarily refers to an object or person that is pleasing in appearance. The idea that this is the case stems from ancient Greek philosophy, which was heavily influenced by religious concepts such as the Platonic ideal of goodness and the perfection of God’s creations.
Aristotle’s Poetics, in its description of the aesthetic ideal of perfect harmony and symmetry, says that “the beautiful must present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (2322 [1450b34]). He then lists the principles of beauty: integritas sive perfectio, debita proportion sive consonantia, and claritas.
One of the most well-known theories of beauty is Euclidean symmetry, which holds that a compound or symmetrical group of objects will be beautiful, as long as the individual parts are arranged in a harmonious manner. This is the basis of the classical conception of beauty, and it has shaped a wide range of philosophical thought, particularly in the Western tradition.
The earliest philosophers were concerned with how to capture beauty’s essence, and they sought to explain what made it special. They often relied on mathematical models and proportions to determine the beauty of a given object or person. These ideas were developed further in medieval philosophy, as a result of which a more sophisticated understanding of beauty emerged.
Despite its centrality to Western culture, the meaning of beauty has been contested by philosophers over the centuries. The Romantic movement, largely influenced by Kant’s’subjective universal’ turn in philosophy, was born out of a desire to identify the concept of beauty as more than a simple aesthetic.
This Romantic understanding of beauty has been criticized, in particular by twentieth-century thinkers, who have worried about the role it plays in a time of wars and wastelands. The American philosopher Arthur Danto, for example, has argued that the abandonment of the’subjective’ conception of beauty has led to an “age of indignation” and a suspicion of things that can pacify or conceal political realities.