Beauty is an experience that people around the world share. They feel it in different ways and find it in a variety of things, such as a painting by Michelangelo or a Van Gogh self-portrait.
It is important to understand how the concept of beauty has evolved and changed over time. It can be a difficult topic to discuss, but it is worth examining the various perspectives that have contributed to our understanding of beauty.
Until the eighteenth century, most philosophers treated beauty as an objective quality: it was either located in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. Plato and Plotinus connected beauty to a response of love and desire, but they also linked it to the realm of the Forms, which they viewed as an impersonal and objective domain.
Hume and Kant regarded this approach as being unsatisfactory. They saw that it tended to detach the value of beauty from its objective meaning, and thus that it could not be regarded as a paramount or recognizable value at all across persons or societies.
In the 18th century, a major debate emerged in English philosophy over whether beauty should be considered objective or subjective. It was a debate that ultimately led to the belief that beauty is primarily a subjective experience and that, therefore, judgments of beauty are intersubjective and dependent on individual judges.
One of the most significant contributions to the debate was George Santayana’s famous essay “The Sense of Beauty” (1896). In this article, Santayana made the case that there is a common experience of beauty among many cultures and that there is an essential connection between the experience and the work itself.
Another important idea that grew out of this debate was the concept of ‘primary and secondary qualities’ in aesthetics. It was argued that the qualities that are most closely related to a particular object’s appearance, such as color, are primary; they are present in the objects and their parts before the perceiving mind even begins to perceive them.
While this theory was influential, it failed to reconcile the idea that there is an essential connection between the qualities of a work and the quality of its appearance. In fact, it was not clear how the idea of ‘primary and secondary qualities’ might have been applied to the study of aesthetics in general.
Some of the most prominent contemporary philosophers of art, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Charles Taylor, defended an approach that avoided such philistinism and maintained that an art or craft that is beautiful has both function and aesthetic appeal. They also stressed the importance of beauty to a human being, and they were concerned that if beauty was to be seen as a value, it should not simply be ‘in the eye of the beholder’ but must be recognized as such by the rest of society.
The twentieth century ushered in an entirely new period in the discussion of beauty and aesthetics, as many of the traditional concepts of beauty were abandoned as a basis for theory. The decline of the role of beauty in the arts is particularly well documented in Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).