Beauty

Plato's treatment of beauty is closely connected with his theory of Ideas or Forms. In the Hippias Major, Socrates examines several candidates for what beauty is and finds each in turn inadequate: beauty is not a beautiful girl, nor gold, nor what is fitting. The inquiry points toward the conclusion that beauty must be a Form, eternal and intelligible, by participation in which all beautiful things are beautiful.

In the Symposium, Diotima describes the ascent of the lover from a single beautiful body to bodily beauty in general, then to the beauty of souls, of laws, of knowledge, and finally to "the beautiful itself," which is "eternal, without diminution and without increase, or any change." This ascent is identified with eros; the love of beauty and the desire for wisdom tend, on this account, toward the same end.

The Phaedrus assigns beauty a special privilege among the Forms: unlike justice and temperance, beauty has earthly reflections clear enough to awaken recollection in the soul. The perception of a beautiful face or form induces, Plato suggests, something akin to divine madness, which is the beginning of the soul's recovery of its vision of the intelligible world. Beauty is thus, among the Forms, uniquely suited to draw the soul upward from the perceptible to the intelligible.

Whether the ascent from beautiful particulars to Beauty itself requires the lover to leave individual objects of affection behind, or whether genuine love of one beautiful person may serve as the first rung of the ladder, is a question on which different readers of Plato have differed. Plotinus will tend toward the view that the soul must ultimately turn away from matter altogether; Augustine will redirect the ascent toward a personal God rather than an impersonal One.

Aristotle approaches beauty through the structural properties of things rather than through a doctrine of transcendent Forms. In the Metaphysics, he identifies the "chief forms of beauty" as order (taxis), symmetry (symmetria), and definiteness (to horismenon), observing that these are the very properties which the mathematical sciences are particularly suited to demonstrate. Beauty is thus an intelligible property of objects, apprehensible by reason as well as by sense.

In the Poetics, these criteria are applied to the construction of tragedy. A tragedy is beautiful, in the relevant sense, when it is a well-ordered whole of suitable magnitude, in which the parts are arranged by necessity or probability. Aristotle specifies that the work must be neither so small as to be imperceptible in its order, nor so large that the order is lost to view. Beauty here is a function of form achieved in a particular medium and apprehended by an audience.

Aristotle's criterion that the living creature and every whole made up of parts must "present a certain order in its arrangement of parts" applies to natural objects as well as to works of art. He explicitly regards the same standard as applicable to both. The question of whether art imitates nature, and whether the beauty of artificial things therefore derives from the beauty of natural things, is developed further in his account of mimesis, and discussed more fully under the idea of Art.

By locating beauty in the structural properties of things rather than in a Form beyond them, Aristotle provides an account that does not require any ascent from the perceptible to the intelligible. Aquinas will draw on both Aristotle's structural criteria and the Augustinian tradition of divine radiance, combining them into a definition that attempts to hold the formal and the theological dimensions of beauty together.

Plotinus takes up the question of beauty in Ennead I.6, beginning with a criticism of the view that beauty consists in symmetry or due proportion. Against this position, he urges that simple things, such as a single color, a ray of light, or a pure musical tone, are beautiful, and these have no parts between which proportion could hold. Some other account of beauty is therefore required.

The account Plotinus offers is that beauty is the presence of Form. When matter is given form and rendered intelligible, the resulting object is beautiful; when formless or disordered, it is ugly. Beauty is thus, strictly speaking, not a property of matter but the sign of Form present in matter. The degrees of beauty correspond, on this view, to degrees of participation in Intellect: the further a thing recedes from matter and approaches pure Form, the more beautiful it is.

The practical implication Plotinus draws is that the soul which aspires to perceive beauty must itself become beautiful. This requires a withdrawal from sensation and a turning toward the soul's own inner form. The comparison he employs is that of the sculptor: one who aims at inner beauty must chisel away what is excessive, straighten what is crooked, and bring to light what is noble. The soul works upon itself as the craftsman works upon stone. The relation of this account to the theory of beauty in nature and in art is treated more fully under the ideas of Soul and Form.

Plotinus draws together what are in Plato separate discussions: the beauty of the perceptible world, the beauty of the intelligible world, and the beauty of the soul. Augustine will take over much of this tradition but alter its destination: for Augustine, the ascent from beauty to Beauty leads not to an impersonal Intellect but to a God who may be personally addressed, and who is also the source of all created beauties.

Augustine's treatment of beauty is inseparable from his theology of creation and his account of rightly ordered love. All created things are beautiful in some degree, since they are made by a God who is Beauty itself; but their beauty is derivative and partial. The error Augustine identifies in his own earlier years, as well as in the pagan philosophical tradition generally, is that of resting in created beauty rather than following it back to its divine source.

The Confessions gives the most direct statement of this position. Augustine addresses God as "Beauty so ancient and so new" and confesses that for many years he sought in sensible things what could only be found in God. The implication is that created beauties are signs pointing beyond themselves; rightly understood, they direct the soul toward God rather than toward themselves. The account of how the soul moves from created to divine beauty connects with the discussion of ordered and disordered love in the chapter on Love.

In On Music and elsewhere, Augustine develops an account of beauty in terms of number and proportion. Rhythms, harmonies, and proportions in music and architecture participate in the divine order because they reflect the numerical principles by which God has made all things. This aspect of Augustine's thought is taken up by Aquinas, who draws on Augustine's identification of beauty with proportion and radiance when developing his own three conditions for beauty.

Whether beautiful things, rightly used as signs pointing to God, are merely means to be left behind once their end is reached, or whether the contemplation of created beauty is itself a participation in divine beauty, remains a question on which readers of Augustine have differed. Aquinas will attempt to address it by attributing claritas, the shining of form, directly to the divine nature, and deriving its presence in creatures from their participation in that nature.

Aquinas defines beauty as pulchrum est quod visum placet, that which, being seen, pleases. The pleasure in question is cognitive rather than appetitive: it belongs to the order of knowing rather than to that of desire. On this account, beauty differs from goodness in that goodness satisfies appetite, whereas beauty satisfies the perceiving or knowing faculty when it apprehends form. The beautiful is thus said to add to goodness a relation to the cognitive power.

Three conditions are required for beauty, according to Aquinas. The first is integrity or perfection: the thing must be complete, without defect or privation. The second is proportion or consonance: the parts must bear a right relation to one another and to the whole. The third is claritas, variously translated as radiance, brightness, or clarity: the form of the thing must shine through in a way that makes it immediately apprehensible. These conditions are presented as objective properties of things, not merely as descriptions of subjective responses.

Aquinas attributes beauty preeminently to the Second Person of the Trinity, following Augustine's identification of the Son as the perfect Image and Splendor of the Father. Beauty is therefore not only a property participated by creatures but a divine attribute. The question of how this theological grounding connects with the analysis of beauty in terms of proportion and clarity is treated more fully in Aquinas's commentary on the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius, where the transcendentals of the good, the true, and the beautiful are discussed together.

The three conditions Aquinas identifies remained influential throughout the medieval period and into the modern. When Hume denies that beauty is a quality in things themselves, his position may be read as a rejection of the claim that any such objective property could account for the variety and disagreement actually found in aesthetic judgment. The question of whether Aquinas's conditions are genuinely objective, or whether they are derived from a prior theological commitment, is one that modern aesthetics has approached from several directions.

Spinoza's treatment of beauty follows from his critique of final causes and of the tendency to project human preferences onto nature. In the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics, he argues that because men believe everything in nature is arranged for their benefit, they call things "beautiful" when those things affect them favorably and "ugly" when they produce contrary impressions. The vocabulary of beauty and ugliness does not describe properties of objects; it describes what happens in a particular human body when it encounters a particular configuration of matter. "If the motion by which the nerves are affected by means of objects represented to the eye conduces to well-being, the objects by which it is caused are called beautiful; while those exciting a contrary motion are called deformed." Beauty is, on this account, a relational term naming a physiological effect, and its apparent reference to the object is an instance of the more general human tendency to attribute to nature an order and a purpose that nature does not possess.

This does not mean that the experience of beauty is unreal or negligible. Spinoza allows that human beings are inevitably affected by objects in these ways, and that such effects enter into the calculations of good and evil by which men orient themselves in the world. What he denies is that beauty picks out anything in the nature of things beyond the fact of that effect. The same object will be beautiful to one person and ugly to another not because they are perceiving the same property differently but because their bodies are differently constituted. In Part IV, discussing human bondage to the passions, Spinoza connects the attachment to beauty with the way in which passive affects bind the mind to particular objects and prevent the clear understanding that alone constitutes genuine freedom. The relation between aesthetic response and the order of the passions is treated more fully in the chapters on Desire and Emotion.

Spinoza's account is more radical in its consequences than the empiricism that Hume would later develop. Hume, while agreeing that beauty exists in the mind rather than in things, still looks for some standard of taste by which qualified critics can converge in their judgments, and attributes to those judgments a kind of intersubjective authority. Spinoza's framework offers no such recovery. If beauty tracks only the variable constitutions of individual bodies, no standard of taste is possible except in the pragmatic sense that certain objects tend, given the average constitution of human bodies, to produce the effect called beauty more reliably than others. Whether this residual form of intersubjective agreement is sufficient to ground aesthetic criticism, or whether Spinoza's naturalism dissolves the very idea of a standard of taste, is a question the tradition has continued to examine.

Hume's position on beauty follows from his general empiricism. "Beauty is no quality in things themselves," he writes; "it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." On this view, beauty cannot be demonstrated, reasoned about, or perceived as one perceives a physical property; it is a sentiment aroused in a perceiver by certain objects, and therefore varies with the constitution of different perceivers.

This account might seem to make all aesthetic judgments equally valid, but Hume recognizes that in practice some judgments are evidently more sound than others. The essay "Of the Standard of Taste" addresses this difficulty directly. Although beauty is a sentiment, not every sentiment is of equal authority. Hume proposes that the standard of taste consists in the convergent verdicts of qualified critics: persons of delicacy, extensive practice in comparing works of art, freedom from prejudice, and good sense. These qualities of the judge, rather than any property of the object, provide whatever measure of objectivity aesthetic judgment can possess.

Hume also observes that where the organs are sufficiently fine and the judge is free of all adventitious factors, agreement tends to emerge over time, as the enduring reputations of Homer and Virgil attest. This convergence is offered as evidence that, even on a subjectivist account, some degree of intersubjective reliability in taste is possible. Whether the qualities Hume attributes to the ideal critic can themselves be specified without reference to some standard independent of sentiment is a question his essay raises without fully resolving.

Hume's position that beauty is a sentiment rather than a quality of things was taken up and reconsidered by Kant, who sought to explain how an aesthetic judgment based in feeling could nonetheless claim universal assent. The problem of whether the standard of taste can be grounded without appealing to any objective property of beauty, and what constitutes genuine critical authority in aesthetics, are discussed further under the ideas of Opinion and Custom and Convention.

Kant's treatment of beauty in the Critique of Judgment attempts to account for two features that characterize aesthetic judgment as he finds it: its basis in feeling, and its claim to universal agreement. Neither a thoroughgoing subjectivism, which would make beauty merely a private sentiment, nor a straightforward objectivism, which would make it a demonstrable property, adequately captures both features. Kant's solution is to distinguish the judgment of taste from both empirical judgments about pleasant sensation and theoretical judgments about objective properties.

The judgment of taste, for Kant, is disinterested: it does not rest on any interest in the existence of the object, whether sensory or practical. It is also without concept: it cannot be derived from any general rule, and cannot be demonstrated by argument. Yet it claims universal assent, speaking "with a universal voice" rather than reporting a merely private sensation. Kant explains this by reference to the free play of imagination and understanding that occurs when the form of an object suits our cognitive faculties without being subsumed under any determinate concept. Since this play of faculties rests on conditions shared by all human perceivers, the pleasure it produces can be demanded of others, though not demonstrated to them.

Kant also distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime, which is treated in the second part of the Analytic. The beautiful "consists in limitation," while the sublime involves the representation of limitlessness. In addition, Kant holds that natural beauty tends to engage a specifically moral interest in a way that artistic beauty does not, since nature's beautiful products appear to display an order analogous to design. Whether the beauty of nature and the beauty of art are, on these grounds, fundamentally different is a question Hegel will take up from a different direction.

Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment as claiming subjective universality without objective concept has set the terms for much of the subsequent discussion of beauty. Hegel will depart from Kant's emphasis on natural beauty and the formalism of the aesthetic judgment, treating artistic beauty as the more philosophically significant form and connecting it with the self-expression of Spirit.

Hegel's treatment of beauty in the Lectures on Aesthetics is primarily a philosophy of art rather than a general theory of the beautiful. He defines beauty as "the sensuous shining (das sinnliche Scheinen) of the Idea." Beauty, on this account, is not a formal property like symmetry or proportion, nor a subjective response like Kantian disinterested pleasure, but the appearance of Spirit in sensuous material: the Idea making itself visible in stone, sound, color, or word. Hegel ranks artistic beauty above natural beauty on the grounds that art is a product of Spirit and therefore more adequate to the expression of spiritual content.

On this basis, Hegel develops a historical account of the arts. In the symbolic stage, represented by ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian art, Spirit gropes for a sensuous form adequate to its content and does not find one. In the classical stage, represented by Greek sculpture, form and content achieve a balance: the ideal human body becomes a fitting vehicle for the expression of divine meaning. In the romantic stage, represented by Christian and modern art, Spirit's content has become too inward for any sensuous form to contain, and art accordingly loosens its hold on the beautiful as a central category.

This historical account leads to Hegel's observation that art, considered in its highest vocation, "is and remains for us a thing of the past." This remark requires qualification: Hegel does not predict the disappearance of art, but holds that art has, in the modern period, ceased to be the primary medium through which a culture expresses its deepest self-understanding. That function has passed, on his account, to religion and then to philosophy. The relation of this thesis to the broader question of beauty's place among the transcendentals is treated more fully under the ideas of Form and Being.

Hegel's identification of beauty with the self-expression of Spirit in sensuous form introduces a historical dimension into the discussion of beauty that his predecessors, for the most part, had not attempted. Tolstoy will reject the connection between art and beauty altogether, proposing an account in which the value of art rests not on beauty but on the quality of the feeling it communicates.

Darwin approaches the question of beauty from natural history rather than from philosophy or theology. In The Descent of Man, he argues that the sense of beauty found among humans and, in simpler forms, among animals is a product of the evolutionary process, specifically of the mechanism he calls sexual selection. Where natural selection operates through differential survival, sexual selection operates through differential reproductive success: traits that are preferred by the choosing sex spread through a population even when they confer no direct survival advantage. The elaborate plumage of certain birds, the ornamental features found across animal species, and much of what humans find attractive in one another can be explained, on this account, as the accumulated effect of aesthetic preferences exercised across many generations. Beauty, in this framework, is not an apprehension of eternal form or a disinterested pleasure in purposiveness without purpose; it is a response shaped by the history of a lineage.

Darwin is careful to note that the human case differs from the animal case in scope and refinement. While lower animals seem to respond only to the beauty of potential mates, human beings appear capable of appreciating beauty in landscapes, music, and the products of art quite independently of reproductive interest. He treats this breadth of human aesthetic response as an acquisition of civilization, dependent on complex cultural associations and not present in equal measure across all human groups. He also documents at length the enormous variation in beauty standards across human cultures, reaching a conclusion superficially similar to Montaigne's. The difference is that Darwin offers a causal account of the variation: different populations have been shaped by different histories of sexual selection operating under different environmental conditions, producing genuine differences in aesthetic response rather than mere differences of opinion. Whether this causal account vindicates or undermines aesthetic objectivism is a question that Darwin's text leaves open, though his general orientation suggests that no transcultural standard of beauty can be derived from nature itself.

Darwin's natural history of the sense of beauty poses a challenge to accounts that treat aesthetic judgment as involving a faculty or a mode of cognition fundamentally distinct from ordinary perception and desire. For Kant, the judgment of taste is disinterested and claims a universality that sets it apart from both sensory pleasure and the satisfaction of appetite. For Darwin, the faculty that produces aesthetic responses is continuous with the responses that guide mate selection, shaped by the same evolutionary pressures, and varying in the same ways. Whether the Kantian analysis of aesthetic judgment can survive being situated within this evolutionary history, or whether that history transforms the philosophical question, is among the issues that the subsequent discussion of beauty and of Science has continued to examine.

Tolstoy's What Is Art? proceeds from a sustained criticism of the role that "beauty" has played in aesthetic theory. He reviews the principal definitions of beauty offered by major writers from the eighteenth century forward, finding all of them reducible either to pleasure or to some conception of the good. Since pleasure is admittedly subjective, and since "the good" is not further defined in such accounts, Tolstoy concludes that beauty as a criterion of art's value provides no criterion at all, and that the tradition of defining art by reference to beauty has obscured rather than clarified the question.

The account Tolstoy proposes defines art as a means of communication: the transmission of feelings the artist has genuinely experienced to others by external signs. The value of a given work depends on three factors: the sincerity of the feeling transmitted; the clarity and precision of the transmission; and the moral quality of the feeling itself. Art that transmits feelings of brotherhood, universal love, and religious awareness is, on this account, good art; art that transmits bad or trivial feelings, however skillfully executed, is bad art.

By these criteria, Tolstoy holds that much of what is conventionally praised as great art fails the test. He includes his own novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina among the works that do not meet his standard, while praising folk songs and simple devotional works that transmit genuine feeling to all people without specialized training. The question of whether sincerity and universality of feeling can serve as independent criteria, or whether they themselves presuppose some further standard, is one that What Is Art? does not fully resolve.

Tolstoy's rejection of beauty as an aesthetic criterion reflects a tendency in the nineteenth century to evaluate art by its moral and social effects rather than by formal properties. Whether the criteria he substitutes, sincerity, universality, and moral quality of feeling, are themselves coherent and applicable without invoking some standard independent of individual sentiment, is a difficulty that readers of What Is Art? have noted since its publication.

James occupies a deliberate middle position between the thoroughgoing subjectivism of Hume and Spinoza and the objective formalism of Kant and Aquinas. In his discussion of aesthetic principles in The Principles of Psychology, he argues that aesthetic judgments express "inner harmonies and discords" between objects and the mind's habituated structures. When a note sounds well with its third and fifth, or when a formal composition strikes the trained eye as right, something genuinely objective about the object is being registered, not merely a private sensation; yet the registration depends on a sensibility that has been formed through practice, association, and cultural development. Neither pure objectivism, which would make beauty immediately apparent to any observer regardless of training, nor pure subjectivism, which would make all aesthetic judgments equally authoritative, captures the actual character of aesthetic experience as James finds it.

The role of habit is important but not exhaustive in James's account. He acknowledges that much of what we call aesthetic preference can be traced to habit and association, but insists that to explain all aesthetic judgments this way "would be absurd; for it is notorious how seldom natural experiences come up to our aesthetic demands." Some aesthetic responses seem to rest on more fundamental features of conscious organization, on the way in which the elementary neural processes of the brain tend to cohere or conflict. This is not a retreat to a faculty of taste independent of natural causation; James maintains a thoroughly naturalistic frame. But it locates aesthetic response in the organized structure of experience rather than reducing it to the physiological mechanics that Spinoza and later Freud would emphasize. The relation between aesthetic sensibility and the broader theory of mind is treated more fully in the chapters on Habit and Sense.

James's account implies a view of critical authority. If aesthetic judgments express inner harmonies between objects and a developed sensibility, then good taste is not arbitrary; it is the capacity to respond to objects that genuinely elicit those harmonies in a refined and practiced mind. This allows for real standards in aesthetic criticism without requiring those standards to be independent of human psychology or derivable from objective properties of things. In this respect James's position may be seen as a pragmatist reworking of Hume's appeal to the qualified critic, grounded in a more explicit psychology of habit and association. Whether this framework provides a stable middle ground between subjectivism and objectivism, or whether it simply relocates the difficulty by making the quality of the sensibility itself the unexplained variable, is a question James's analysis makes vivid without fully resolving.