A History of Beauty

“Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”

Beauty has many faces. It has the power to sway human behaviour perhaps more than any other property. Depending who you ask, and is commensurate with purity, vanity, innocence, power, deception. It can guide us to truth or corrupt us completely. Offer us solace or promote envy and bitterness.

While famously wars have been fought and towers toppled over a beautiful face, we can detect more humble traces of beauty’s power around us every day. People make and appreciate art, sing, listen to music, garden, hike mountains and swim in lakes, decorate and dance because of the beauty they find in these pursuits.

As a core dimension of human experience, beauty has been analysed and inspected from all angles and throughout time. How can there be anything more to say about beauty? Is it even possible to say anything at all when perhaps its power derives from the mystery that enfolds it?

Certainly, many people have tried.

⬤ Ideal Beauty

According to Plato, Beauty is objective in so far as it is a Form – pure, essential and non-embodied. Plato maintains that in addition to being able to identify a beautiful person or a beautiful painting, we also have a general conception of Beauty itself, and we are able to identify the beauty in a person or a painting only because we have this conception of Beauty in the abstract. In other words, the beautiful things we can see are beautiful only because they participate in the more general Form of Beauty. This Form of Beauty is itself invisible, eternal, and unchanging, unlike the things in the visible world that can grow old and lose their beauty.

This is described as “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades.” It is the very essence of beauty, “subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness.” And every particular beautiful thing is beautiful because of its connection to this Form.

As a Form it is perfect but our ability to know and understand the Forms is incomplete. Beauty when it is embodied is mere shadow of the perfect form. Beauty is a higher value along with Good and Truth. For Plato, mathematics is beautiful. This is the beginning of ideas about symmetry, ratios etc.

However, Plato was suspicious art as a copy or shadow of the beautiful, and wished to ban artists from his Republic. Only philosophy is the true way to access Beauty in its abstract sense, so art is a distraction.

⬤ The ascent to beauty

While Plato comments on beauty’s ontological status, he also notes that participatory role of the subject and beauty’s role in moral education and connection to love. In perhaps his most famous passage on beauty, Plato introduces Diotima, a “prophetess” who educates Socrates about the nature of love. In her view, love drives the individual to seek beauty, first earthly beauty, or beautiful bodies. Then as a lover grows in wisdom, the beauty that is sought is spiritual – this “” is also known as the “ladder of love”, a metaphor for the ascent one might make from loving the earthly body, via an appreciation of more abstract beauties such as laws and institutions to wisdom and beautiful souls to the ideal form of Beauty.

Diotima’s ladder says that by getting to know and appreciate the beautiful in life we will come to realise there is a more abstract and satisfying form of beauty which is to do with understanding the laws and principles that govern life, unity and symmetry and finally acquaintance with ideal Beauty in a manner that seems to be closets to divine revelation. One we have appreciated this, then we will not be tempted or swayed by earthly beauty again.

⬤ Formal beauty

Aristotle revived an idea espoused by the Pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras, that beauty could be explained by non-aesthetic properties such as form, harmony or proportion. Pythagoras gave us the terms “harmony” and “symmetry” both of which are to be central to his (theory of beauty. According to Aristotle, beauty could be measured: in the Metaphysics he says: “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree,” he says in Metaphysics. However, it is important to note that Aristotle’s theory of aesthetics is a lot more complex than this definition of beauty (as explained in his Poetics) which we will revisit in the section on Functional Beauty, but it is here he makes his other famous statement about beauty: “Beauty is a matter of size and order”

Aristotle and Plato together influenced key medieval philosopher’s such as St Thomas Aquinas. Beauty is the same as truth – they differ in aspect only. An experience of beauty is a way of seeing its truth and recognising its goodness. Like Aristotle he thinks harmony, order and symmetry are important to beauty. He adds his own notion of clarity to the list.

Formalism continued to be an influential mode of thought in the arts, as seen in the 18^th-century painter Hogarth’s declaration in The Analysis of Beauty that all beauty was embodied in a sinuous line, which he believed could be seen in beautiful objects everywhere from musical instruments, to corsets, to table legs.

⬤ Beauty and taste

Hume breaks away from centuries of tradition by declaring beauty to subjective, proposing that feeling, not thought, informs us that an object is beautiful or ugly as exemplified by this quote: “The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration”. He is saying that the feeling is the beauty of the object and it is the virtue of desirable human action.

Taste is a “productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.” That new creation is “beauty and deformity, virtue and vice”. This is the first mainstream association of beauty and colour as secondary qualities of an object.

So for Hume beauty is a descriptive quality that originates in the thinking mind of an observer, who judges and thereafter deems something to be “beautiful.” Different individuals with different minds—shaped by different experiences and carrying different preconceptions—make different evaluations of what is and what is not “beautiful.” In the most extreme cases, Hume says, what is “beautiful” to one person might appear “deformed” to another.

“Truth is disputable; not taste: what exists in the nature of things is the standard of our judgement; what each man feels within himself is the standard of sentiment. Propositions in geometry may be proved, systems in physics may be controverted; but the harmony of verse, the tenderness of passion, the brilliancy of wit, must give immediate pleasure.”

Hume then has to deal with the problem of disagreement about beauty. A pure subjectivist would have to allow that a car park is a beautiful as a cathedral, as long as the perceiver genuinely perceives this to be the case. But Hume believes that some perceivers are better than others – more well-trained and sensitive. Therefore, as we come to know our own tastes more truly, and are educated in the arts, we will come to have more valuable judgments about the nature of beauty.

⬤ Beauty and judgement

Kant argued that while the process of judging beauty is subjective, it has universal underpinnings. Kant’s initial concern was with the epistemology of beauty – that is how we make judgments of beauty, describing the features which distinguish judgments of beauty from judgments of other kinds, notably cognitive judgments (which include judgments ascribing goodness to things), and what he calls “judgments of the agreeable”.

Kant is a beauty hedonist insofar as he says judgments of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure. When we judge that a natural object or a work of art is beautiful, on Kant’s view, we are indeed making a judgment about an object, but we are asserting that the object has a certain effect on us (and that it should have the same effect on all who view it). He says it is “disinterested pleasure”- it is not based on desire or liking a thing. The disinterested character of the feeling distinguishes them from other judgments based on feeling. In particular, it distinguishes them from (a) judgments of the agreeable, which are the kind of judgment expressed by saying simply that one likes something or finds it pleasing (for example, food or drink), and (b) judgments of the good, including judgments both about the moral goodness of something and about its goodness for particular non-moral purposes.

Kant also maintained that our experience of beauty is an experience of freedom. The effect produced by the “beautiful” object is to set our understanding and imagination in “free play” with one another, and it is the pleasure generated by this free play that leads us to judge the object to be beautiful.

For Kant there is a universality to beauty – in making a judgment of beauty about an object, one takes it that everyone else who perceives the object ought also to judge it to be beautiful. That doesn’t mean there is necessarily a right or wrong answer about what is beautiful but that it is a particular quality of the beauty experience that makes it feel right to the perceiver and this rightness ought to extend to other people (even if people disagree in actuality). This makes a judgement of beauty a stronger claim than matters of mere taste, which is something Kant is keen to distinguish from.

Like Kant, Hutcheson attempts a hybrid view of hedonic and objective accounts of beauty. But 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 idea of “compound ratio of uniformity and variety” are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure.

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 (a “compound ratio” of uniformity and variety), and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centred in the human experience of pleasure.

In contrast to Kant, Schiller understands beauty to be a property of the object itself. It is the property, possessed by both living beings and works of art, of appearing to be free – beauty is “freedom in appearance, autonomy in appearance”. Schiller insists that freedom itself is something transcendent and so can never actually manifest itself in the realm of the senses. We can never see freedom at work in, or embodied in, the world of space and time. In the case of beautiful objects, therefore “it is all that matters is…that the object appears as free, not that it really is so.”

Hegel thinks that beauty is an objective property of things. In his view, however, beauty is the direct sensuous manifestation of freedom, not merely the appearance or imitation of freedom. It shows us what freedom actually looks like and sounds like when it gives itself sensuous expression (albeit with varying degrees of idealization). Since true beauty is the direct sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit, it must be produced by free spirit for free spirit, and so cannot be a mere product of nature. Nature is capable of a formal beauty, and life is capable of what Hegel calls “sensuous” beauty but true beauty is found only in works of art that are freely created by human beings to bring before our minds what it is to be free spirit. Hegel connects back to Aristotle and Plato in that he thinks harmony, symmetry et al are important to “formal beauty”.

⬤ Romantic beauty

The Romantic movement which originated in Germany towards the end of the 18^th century, began in part as both a development of and reaction to, Kant’s idealism. Fichte was also an a vitally important source for the Romantics.

A golden thread running through Romantic thought is the idea that the character of art and beauty and of our engagement with them should shape all aspects of human life and that when it came to beauty, distinctions between the arts, science and technology were insubstantial. Friedrich Schlegel summarised this position, saying: “The Romantic imperative demands [that] all nature and science should become art [and] art should become nature and science.”

Edmund Burke initiated a crucial element of Romantic aesthetics when he differentiaed between the sublime and the beautiful; with the beautiful being that which is well-formed and attractive and the sublime embodying destructive power. This represented a significant move away from formal conceptions of beauty as based on proportion or harmony.

Burke explains how sensation, imagination, and judgment determine the experience of pleasure and pain, and how pleasure and pain are represented by the aesthetic concepts of beauty and sublimity. This introduces a specifically hedonic concept of beauty. Burke defines beauty as any quality which inspires the individual to feel affection toward that which is perceived as beautiful. Beauty has a positive social quality, in that it inspires love or affection toward whomever is perceived as beautiful.

According to Burke, beauty is not caused by symmetry, or by balanced proportion. Objects which differ in their degree of symmetry may be perceived as being equally beautiful as those that do. Disproportion is not the opposite of beauty. Ugliness is the opposite of beauty.

Burke also says that beauty is not caused by perfection, because imperfect qualities may be perceived as beautiful. Indeed, qualities may sometimes be perceived as more beautiful because they are imperfect. Beauty may be perfect or imperfect. This move away from symmetry and harmony as the basis for beauty id significant as it was so important in Greek and Renaissance ideas. Instead, this connects up with Romanticism and the Gothic and the entailing ideas of the wild, sublime and picturesque as forms of beauty (although Burke himself at points contrasted the beautiful to the sublime rather than taking them to mean the same thing).

⬤ The cult of beauty

Romanticism continued to influence thinking about beauty throughout the 19^th century. Wordsworth, Coleridge and others pursued the Romantic ideal of wholeness and unity with the Absolute, even if this was via the fragmentary nature of human experience (in some ways prefiguring the phenomenological movement. The Pre-Raphealistes took on this mantle, looking to nature as the source of all beauty in reaction to the industrialisation of the time. John Ruskin set down many of these ideals, and William Morris transfigured them into a socialist context, believing that beauty through art and craftsmanship, could transform the lives of the working class.

Towards the end of the century, Nietzsche claimed that aesthetics are at the heart of ethics. Part of what it is to experience something as beautiful is to experience it as beneficial in the highest degree. Art and beauty are necessary for survival. Nietzsche thought that one’s own life should be the subject of aesthetic imagination – that we should sculpt our lives to be beautiful. Like Plato, Nietzsche thinks that the arts and beauty are in tension with the truth. However, he thinks this is a good thing about beauty. The truth revealed to us by modern science – “that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation” is unbearable and beauty is the only coping mechanism that will get us through. Truth is one value and beauty is another and if we can’t live up to the demands of truth then cleaving to beauty will get us through. So this is really the exact opposite of the conclusion that Plato came to, where he said sensory beauty was essentially a falsehood and a distraction from our true ethical calling.

Beauty’s supremacy reached it apotheosis in the work of Art Nouveau, personified by the sublime ornateness of Gustav Klimt and his portraits of languorous, gilded women. From here it is a short step to the beliefs of Freud, who saw beauty in terms of sexual drive, saying in Civilization and its Discontents: “Yet civilization could not do without it. The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty, and, as usually happens, lack of success is concealed beneath a flood of resounding and empty words. Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either. All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally attributes of the sexual object.”

Beauty’s hedonic power was echoed by George Santayana in The Sense of Beauty, who said “Beauty is pleasure objectified”. The connection between beauty and pleasure remained influential throughout the 20^th century.