We explain what beauty is for art and philosophy. Also, what is considered human beauty and what types of beauty exist.
What is beauty?
It is not easy to define beauty, beyond what the dictionary dictates: that it is the quality we attribute to what is beautiful, to what we find aesthetically pleasing or that we consider pleasant to perceive. This applies to objects, landscapes and sounds, as well as to people, spaces and animals, but it is a concept of historical construction. capable of varying immensely from one culture to another and from one era to another.
Beauty is an abstract concept, traditionally linked to those of harmony, balance and proportion, whose fundamental features come from each person's cultural tradition, which is why it is often said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” In fact, appreciating beauty is considered, even today, a form of pleasure for those who observe it, and not so much for those who possess said beauty.
Tradition considers beauty as the ultimate goal of art: Artists try to find it or at least capture it on some medium so that it can be appreciated by others. In that sense, beauty is understood as something appreciable in reality, that is, something that the artist's gaze captures from the world.
However, beauty is not an exclusive matter of artists, and the most different thinkers have dealt with it throughout history, who have tried to define it or understand it better. In ordinary people, the ability to perceive beauty is traditionally known as “taste” or “good taste.” The opposite of beauty would be ugliness.
Beauty according to philosophy
The first attempts to define beauty come from classical antiquity, specifically Ancient Greece. The philosophers of that time considered beauty as a matter of proportion between the parts of the thing, that is, that Symmetrical objects tended to be more beautiful than asymmetrical ones.
However, Plato (c. 427-347 BC) considered beauty to be an idea independent of beautiful things, being a manifestation of true beauty, found in the human soul and which is accessed only through knowledge. In that same tradition, beauty was part of a triad of values along with good (goodness) and truth, so that what was beautiful must necessarily be good and true.
The classical concept of beauty survived until the Renaissance, strongly associated with an aristocratic conception of society (princesses, for example, were always beautiful, while the common people were ugly and grotesque), inherited from medieval times.
However, the concept undertook an important philosophical change with the entry into the Modern Age, when it began to be considered a matter of perception that is, a subjective matter, which can be relativized according to different cultural traditions.
Thus, for example, subjectivist philosophers such as the Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) maintained that the existence of beauty is inseparable from the mind that perceives it, that is, the opposite of what the objectivists maintained (since they considered it, logically, , an objective trait).
For subjectivists, beauty was among the secondary qualities of objects, that is, it is not considered an essential feature of things, appreciable by everyone, but rather a feature around which disagreement can exist.
human beauty
human beauty It is that which has been attributed, since ancient times, to the human body both male and female. In Ancient Greece, for example, men's bodies were subject to ideal concepts (earring) that were attributed above all to gods and tragic heroes and their sculptural representations.
In later times, beauty has tended to focus, instead, on the female body, and an entire beauty industry has been built whose purpose is to provide women with cosmetic implements to “beautify” themselves, according to standards such as those who inspire female beauty pageants like the Miss Universe.
However, human beauty is not different from other types of beauty, nor is it subject to fewer subjectivities and historical variations. For example, the most graceful female body by medieval European standards was that of the plump, plump woman, an emblem of health and material well-being in a time of famine and general misery.
While in industrial times, in which these factors do not influence culture as much, in the same geographies it is expected that beautiful women will be thin and voluptuous. Every canon of human beauty responds, therefore, to a specific time and culture.
Types of beauty
There is no universal typology of beauty, just as there is no strict concept to understand it. However, informally very dispersed and varied classifications of beauty are used, which give rise to types such as the following:
- The natural beauty one that does not require accessories or cosmetic interventions, but is the fruit of the hand of nature itself. It is used above all to refer to feminine beauty.
- cosmetic beauty contrary to natural beauty, would be “artificial” or “acquired” beauty, since it is the result of cosmetic interventions whose purpose is to adapt a body to an established beauty pattern: makeup, clothing, plastic surgery, etc.
- The outer beauty perceptible by everyone and supported by appearances, is traditionally considered a form of superficial beauty, that is, one that at first glance suggests the beauty of an individual, but which can be contradicted by their way of being or the purity of their feelings.
- The inner beauty unlike the previous case, applies to the inner world of people, that is, to their deep beauty that is only revealed to those who take the time to get to know it. It is possible, therefore, for a person who is not very beautiful on the outside to be beautiful on the inside, and vice versa.
- The exotic beauty that which comes from cultures different from our own or that responds to foreign, but recognizable aesthetic canons. An exotic beauty can be that of a person from other latitudes, for example.
Continue with: Fine Arts
References
- “Beauty” on Wikipedia.
- “Beauty” in the Dictionary of the Language of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “What is beauty?” (video) in Educatina.
- “Beauty” at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Mexico).
- “The idea of beauty is always shifting. Today, it's more inclusive than ever” in National Geographic.
