We tell you what beauty is and its philosophical meaning. Also, its relationship with aesthetics and art.
What is beauty?
Beauty is the quality of what is beautiful. The branch of philosophy that studies beauty is aesthetics. Although this is a young discipline, founded during the 19th and 20th centuries, beauty has been the subject of philosophical debate at all stages of the history of thought.
Beauty is often associated with those aspects of things that, when perceived by the senses, produce a sensation of pleasure. According to the definition of the beautiful that Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates: “The beautiful is the pleasure obtained by hearing and sight.”
There are numerous discussions about the nature of beauty. Those who consider beauty to be objective believe that this is a property of objects. For their part, those who consider beauty to be subjective maintain that it depends on the emotional response of observers to different stimuli.
The word “beauty” comes from Latin bellumwhich means “beautiful,” and is the equivalent of the Greek kalos. This term is also translated as “excellence”, which gives rise to an idea of beauty as that which demonstrates perfection in a certain area.
Frequently asked questions
What is beauty?
Beauty is a quality of things that is perceived through the senses and generates pleasure.
What is the branch of philosophy that studies beauty?
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies beauty.
What concepts is beauty related to?
Beauty is related to the concept of “excellence”, since the two words come from Greek kalos.
See also: Art
Beauty in ancient Greece
The notion of beauty has been a recurring theme in philosophy throughout history, particularly in ancient Greece. Both Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), two of the most influential philosophers of that time, addressed the topic of beauty in their works.
Beauty according to Plato
In Plato's philosophy, the notion of beauty appears in relation to the theory of ideaswhich states that two planes of reality could be distinguished: that of sensible entities and the intelligible. In the latter live ideas, which are entities that can only be accessed through the intellect and that function as a model for all things.
Plato presents beauty as the idea of the beautiful itself (in Greek: car to kaló). Beauty itself is a quality to which all things aspire, but which they only achieve imperfectly. No sentient entity possesses the perfection of an idea. Therefore, for Plato, absolute beauty does not exist on the sensible level.
Beauty according to Aristotle
For Aristotle, There are three constituent signs of beauty: order, symmetry and precision.. These clues, taken from mathematics, must externally shape the things that art expresses, which are usually an imitation of nature. This is because nature, according to the Aristotelian conception, is a source of symmetry, order, balance and proportion.
In this way, Aristotle establishes a relationship between beauty, art and nature. From your perspective, Truly beautiful art is that which manages to express the truth of things.that is, one that faithfully imitates the nature it tries to emulate.
Beauty in modern philosophy
At the beginning of modernity, the idea of beauty was linked to the sense of aesthetic taste and art. Reflections on beauty and artistic practices, which had been separate until that moment, were unified in the same search.
Beauty according to Burke
For Edmund Burke, the ideas of the beautiful and the sublime are based on the passion of self-preservation, associated with the idea of pain, and on the passion of society, associated with the idea of pleasure. When what is experienced is pleasure, one is faced with a beautiful or sublime phenomenon..
The beautiful and the sublime are two different but complementary aspects of the aesthetic experience. The beautiful produces a sensation of soft, pleasant and serene pleasure; For its part, the sublime provokes amazement, greatness and, in the most extreme cases, terror.
Beauty according to Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher and one of the most prominent thinkers of modernity, was the one who developed in greater depth the ideas of the beautiful and the sublime.
Kant presented his ideas on the matter in Criticism of the trialone of his most important works. There he associates the idea of beauty with the faculty of judgment, which operates between understanding and reason.
The faculty of judging what is beautiful consists of a way of knowing that does not operate through concepts, but rather through the perception of the pleasant that the beautiful produces. This is what Kant characterizes as “imagination in freedom.”
From your perspective, Beauty is what is liked in a disinterested, universal and necessary way.which occurs only in objects that do not have an end in themselves.
Other conceptions of beauty
Different thinkers developed different conceptions of beauty not only in the field of philosophy, but also in art and culture. Some examples are:
- romanticism by Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Novalis (1772-1801) focused on the subjectivity of the individual and emotional experience. The beautiful was associated with the sublime, the mysterious and the intense.
- German idealism Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) considered the beautiful to be the sensible manifestation of the absolute spirit in art.
- The aesthetic movement of the late 19th centurywith Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) as one of its main exponents, valued beauty for its own sake and advocated art for art's sake.
- The avant-garde movements of the 20th centurylike cubism and surrealism, expanded and challenged traditional conventions of both art and beauty. The emphasis shifted toward individual expression and artistic experimentation.
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References
- Aristotle. (2022). Rhetoric (Trans. Q. Racionero). Gredos.
- Bowie, A. (1999). Aesthetics and subjectivity. German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche and current aesthetic theory. Viewfinder.
- Muzzle, V. (Ed.). (1996). History of aesthetic ideas and contemporary artistic theories. Viewfinder.
- Farré, L. (1949). Aesthetic values in Aristotelian philosophy. Minutes of the First National Congress of Philosophy (vol. 3), pp. 1445-1452.
- García Yebra, V. (1990). Aristotle's Poetics. Gredos.
- Kant, I. (1984). Criticism of the trial (Trans. M. García Morente). Espasa Calpe.
- Napoli, J.T. (2001). The concept of beauty in Plato: Literary philological analysis of passages from “Hipias Mayor”, “Phaedrus” and “Symposium” (seminar). https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/
- Plato. (1981). Hippias Mayor (Trans. J. Calonge Ruiz). In Plato, Dialogues I. Gredos.
- Schaeffer, J.-M. (1999). The art of the modern age. Aesthetics and philosophy of art from the 18th century to the present day. Mount Avila.
