In the classical era, beauty was seen as a matter of harmonious proportions. This conception was used as a model by many masters and students, and it became an important concept in western aesthetics.
The earliest philosophers, such as Plato, believed that beauty was objective and unchanging. They argued that the physical world is a shadow of another realm, which is true and perfect.
This philosophy of beauty was influenced by the notion that pleasure is the source of beauty, rather than a result of it. The sense of pleasure experienced when viewing a painting or a sculpture was considered the basis of its aesthetic value.
However, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant viewed that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. If it was entirely based on the individual experience of the observer, it would be no more than an object of personal liking and could not be recognized as a universal value.
As a consequence, some of the early eighteenth-century philosophers began to treat beauty as an objective value. They emphasized its importance as a form of value, and they regarded it as more important than any other kind of value.
Moreover, they recognized that beauty has a tendency to attract people. They also viewed it as a value that was difficult to disprove, and so they were reluctant to abandon it entirely in favour of a more subjective approach.
The most important difference between the eighteenth-century approach and that of contemporary philosophers is that the latter tended to conceive of beauty as an abstract, intangible quality that depends on the subjective response of the perceiver. The former, by contrast, viewed it as an intrinsic property of objects and as the foundation of their value.
In the nineteenth century, a more neo-Platonic idea of beauty was developed, which focused on the process by which an object gives pleasure to its spectators. It was called the ‘process of pleasure,’ and it tended to distinguish aesthetic enjoyment from pure pleasure, which is often associated with pleasure in itself.
A good example of this is the process of eating. The taste of a food may be a subjective response to the taste sensation itself, but it has an objective quality, which is the satisfaction that comes from satisfying your appetite.
It can be difficult to describe the process by which we find beauty in a work of art or music. There are many different ways to understand how a piece of art is beautiful, and it can even vary between people and cultures.
Whether or not it’s true to say that all works of art are beautiful is a difficult question, and one that has puzzled philosophers for ages. It is a complicated topic, and one that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Some of the reasons why this debate is so confusing are that different cultures and different individuals have different experiences of beauty. For example, some people think picking flowers in Montana over the summer is beautiful, while others feel that a picture of a mother and child is very beautiful. And some people will say that the Mona Lisa is beautiful, while others will not. The key here is to keep an open mind and accept that there are many different ways of looking at beauty.