Beauty is a quality or combination of qualities that pleases the senses. It often has to do with harmony, proportion, authenticity and originality.
It can be the result of natural phenomena or it can be a product of human design, craft or art. It can also be the result of human emotions and desires.
A person is beautiful when they are happy, confident and comfortable in their own skin. It’s when they are kind and compassionate towards others. It’s when they reach their full potential and contribute to the world in a way that ignites positive change.
People are always battling the idea of being beautiful or being “unattractive”. They compare themselves with celebrities, they try to make their bodies look perfect and they judge others because of their appearance. They try to fit in a certain mold, but they fail to see that everyone has their own unique beauty.
The most common definition of beauty is that it is a “quality relating to symmetry, proportion and harmony.” It can be the result of natural phenomena or of human design, craft or art. It is also the result of human emotions and desires.
There is a lot of debate over whether or not beauty is objective, or if it is entirely dependent on the experience of the viewer. Many critics of aesthetic theory argue that beauty is neither completely objective nor completely subjective, and that the standards of validity of judgments of beauty are intersubjective.
In this article, we will discuss some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions. We will then try to find connections between these different views, so that we can better understand why the concept of beauty has been subjected to so much criticism and why it is now being rethought.
Beauty has a strong connection with pleasure, and it is often associated with feelings of ecstasy. It is sometimes called “the art of love.”
Some philosophers regard beauty as a matter of symmetry or proportion, the ‘golden section’ being a common example, and they hold that it can be reliably achieved through reproduction of these definite proportions. They are often influenced by Aristotle’s aesthetic conception that beauty should consist in the harmonious relations among parts, and by Plato’s treatment of the subject as a ‘perfect’ unity of definite shapes.
It is also conventional in ancient treatments of the subject to pay tribute to the pleasures resulting from the sight of beauty, for instance Plotinus’s account of the sensation of “wonderment” and “a delicious trouble” (Ennead I, 3).
But while this classical conception arose with a view to the perfection of art, it was later used to describe a distinctly vulgar form of hedonism, with all its debauchery and violence. This became especially true in the 18th century, when the hedonist expressions of wealth and decadence in paintings such as those by Fragonard were at the heart of French revolution, while even fine art was often dedicated to furnishing homes, with the effect of concealing its destructive political implications.