Beauty is an extremely important concept in human culture, and a subject of considerable philosophical attention. It can be seen in a wide range of fields, including art, music, literature, and psychology.
In some ways, beauty is the ideal of everything. In the ancient world, beauty was viewed as a symbol of perfection and harmony. In Plato’s account, it was an aspiration toward perfect unity.
The idea of beauty has also been associated with other aspects of morality, such as justice and moral responsibility. This association can be seen in the Socratic discussion of beauty and its relation to justice, which aims to create a balance between good and evil (e.g., Plotinus, Ennead I, 3).
Moreover, in the classical tradition, there were certain standards for beauty that are still reflected in contemporary thinking about art. These include integrity or perfection, due proportion or consonance, and clarity.
However, in the late 18th century, and especially with the advent of a more rationalism-oriented philosophy, many philosophers started to consider beauty as an entirely subjective experience. Santayana’s account of beauty, for example, emphasizes that beauty is a form of pleasure and identifies its source not with external objects but with the experiences induced by them.
This approach was followed by a number of other philosophers, including Hume and Kant. In a series of influential essays, these philosophers tried to temper the power of beauty to cause pleasure through an awareness of its tendency to ascribe illusory qualities to things and thus to objectify them.
The philosophic understanding of beauty has become increasingly sophisticated in the twentieth century, especially in social-justice oriented philosophy. For example, in the 1960s, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that a symptom of oppression is that people are often regarded as ugly, dirty, or ragged. It was therefore necessary for art to depict this ugliness, to show how it is imposed by an unjust system on its victims, rather than to attempt to re-integrate and reconcile it with its own existence.
Modern artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Judy Chicago have re-imagined the idea of beauty in art as an instrument of feminist resistance to patriarchy. They show how women’s bodies can be viewed as beautiful, as subjects, not objects.
Another example of this re-imagining of beauty is the work of feminist artist Naomi Wolf, who has critiqued the way that female bodies are represented in Western popular culture. She argues that the emphasis on body image in such media has a direct connection to eating disorders and other self-destructive behaviors.
This means that if women’s bodies are re-imagined as beautiful, then they must be treated differently. Such changes would not only help to break the power of gender hierarchies, but also help to make a more democratic society.