Beauty is the combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses. Usually, it refers to physical attributes that are conventionally attractive in different cultures around the world (e.g., strong jaws for men and high cheekbones for women).
Aesthetic Principles
One of the most well-known principles of beauty is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole. This is a Western conception of beauty that has pervaded architecture, sculpture, literature, and music in the classical and neo-classical periods.
Several ancient philosophers and artists linked the concept of beauty to art. For instance, the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that certain mathematical proportions or ratios could make things beautiful. He also admired the beauty of music, which he considered to be a manifestation of the numeric harmony that manifests throughout the universe.
Another ancient philosophy that incorporated the concept of beauty is Christian philosophy, which also connected beauty to God’s plan for creation. According to Thomas Aquinas, something is considered beautiful if it has integrity, due proportion or consonance, and clarity.
The Christian conception of beauty, based on Aquinas’s connection to the Second Person of the Trinity, is influenced by classical aesthetics and other ideas. It requires that something has integrity–that is, it is complete by its own interior logic–or else it is regarded as unattractive; due proportion or consonance, which can be achieved through mathematical analysis or similar techniques, can be considered to make things beautiful; and clarity, which is sometimes ascribed to the sense of sight or other sensory experience, can also be attributed to beauty.
These principles can be used to describe the physical appearance of any object. For example, a painting of Mont Saint-Victoire could be considered beautiful because it presents the mountain in an artistic way and makes the mountains seem more majestic.
However, a painting of the same landscape can be considered ugly if it is a poor representation of the mountain, or if it depicts an unattractive part of the mountain, such as a waterfall. The same principles can be applied to other aspects of nature, such as the ocean or a sunset.
Many modern philosophers, such as Rougemont and Kant, reject the idea of a universally valid definition of beauty that would encompass both the rational and emotional aspects of aesthetic judgment. The latter has to do with whether an object is suited to use, and this can be distinguished from an objectively correct description of a thing’s beauty, which is merely the subjective response of a spectator to particular aesthetic characteristics.