Aesthetic appreciation of objects, art, music, and performance is a common feature of human cultures throughout the world. It often arises from the interaction of different senses, including vision, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.
We can experience beauty as a feeling of awe, admiration, or delight in a certain object or subject. We may find an object beautiful even if we cannot physically perceive it, as when looking at a sculpture or photograph.
While aesthetic appreciation can be carried out by a number of sensory modes, we can also use our intellect to appreciate an object or subject in terms of its qualities and features. We can also enjoy the results of a scientific or technical endeavor, such as a mathematical theorem or a piece of music.
In the classical philosophical tradition, Platonic and Neo-Platonic thinkers generally understood good and beauty as inseparable. Plato conceived of good and beauty as the essence of things and the source of all value; Plotinus viewed them as inseparable in the realm of thought and the soul.
The “classical conception” of beauty defines it in terms of definite proportions or relations among parts that instantiate an integrated harmonious whole, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios such as the golden section. The statue known as ‘The Canon,’ for example, was held up to be an exemplar of harmonious proportion, and its objective proportions were used to define the ideal beauty of a person or object.
Nevertheless, some philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and interpreted beauty more specifically as a quality of being suited to use or expression. For example, the hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 260 BCE) argued that a dung-basket, as a simple utilitarian object, is also considered to be beautiful because it has the right proportions of its parts and is symmetrically formed.
A similar view of beauty can be seen in the works of George Santayana, who argues that pleasure is the main cause of beauty. In a book entitled The Sense of Beauty, he states that the pleasure we derive from a beautiful object is not that it is good, but that it is “suitable to the pleasures that it produces in us.”
While some people have difficulty with symmetry on the facial level, others can’t stand it at all. For example, an asymmetrical face is not considered attractive, and a pirate with an eye patch isn’t either.
Many neuroscientists, however, believe that our perception of beauty is more local than we might imagine. In a recent study, for example, researchers from Tsinghua University in China looked at a large body of brain-imaging studies that measured participants’ responses to visual art and faces.
The researchers found that the brain’s visual cortex was activated when participants were asked to rate the perceived beauty of an image or face. They said that this was because the participants’ neural activity is influenced by what they are accustomed to seeing, so it’s likely that the experience of beauty has a lot to do with how we are conditioned and raised to see and respond to beauty.