Beauty (in philosophy): what it is and what concepts it is related to

We tell you what beauty is and its philosophical meaning. In addition, its relationship with aesthetics and art.

In classical art, beauty was based on symmetry and proportion.

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 beauty that Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates: “Beauty is the pleasure obtained by hearing and sight.”

There are many discussions about the nature of beauty. Those who consider beauty to be objective believe that it is a property of objects. Those who consider beauty to be subjective, on the other hand, 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 kalosThis term is also translated as “excellence,” from which comes the idea of ​​beauty as that which demonstrates perfection in a certain area.

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 levels of reality can be distinguished: that of sensible beings and that of intelligible beings. The latter is inhabited by ideas, which are entities that can only be accessed through the intellect and which function as a model for all things.

Plato presents beauty as the idea of the beautiful in itself (in Greek: car to kaló). Beauty in itself is a quality to which all things aspire, but which they only achieve imperfectly. No sensible being possesses the perfection of an idea. That is why, for Plato, Absolute beauty does not exist on the sensible level..

Beauty according to Aristotle

For Aristotle, There are three constitutive 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 his perspective, Truly beautiful art is that which manages to express the truth of thingsthat is, one that faithfully imitates the nature it attempts to emulate.

Beauty in modern philosophy

At the beginning of modernity, the idea of ​​beauty was linked to the sense of aesthetic taste and to art. Reflections on beauty and artistic practices, which had been separated until then, were united in a single 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 the passion of society, associated with the idea of ​​pleasure. When what is experienced is pleasure, one is facing 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; the sublime, on the other hand, provokes wonder, grandeur 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 He developed more deeply the ideas of the beautiful and the sublime.

Kant presented his ideas on this subject 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 beauty consists of a way of knowing that does not operate through concepts, but through the perception of the pleasantness that beauty produces. This is what Kant characterizes as “imagination in freedom.”

From your perspective, Beauty is what pleases in a disinterested, universal and necessary waywhich occurs only in objects that do not have a purpose in themselves.

Other conceptions of beauty

Different thinkers developed different conceptions of beauty not only in the field of philosophy, but also in the field of art and culture. Some examples are:

• The romanticism of Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Novalis (1772-1801) focused on the subjectivity of the individual and on emotional experience. The beautiful was associated with the sublime, the mysterious and the intense.
• German idealism Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) considered beauty 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 centurysuch as 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. Viewer.
• Bozal, V. (Ed.). (1996). History of aesthetic ideas and contemporary artistic theories. Viewer.
• Farré, L. (1949). Aesthetic values ​​in Aristotelian philosophy. Proceedings 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 (Translated by M. García Morente). Espasa Calpe.
• Naples, JT (2001). The concept of beauty in Plato: Literary philological analysis of passages from “Hippias Mayor”, “Phaedrus” and “Symposium” . https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/
• Plato. (1981). Hippias Major (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.