Philosophical Essay on Beauty
Beauty, a relative and continuous concept transformation
One of the great questions of humanity has to do with what exactly is beauty. We can all perceive it in one way or another, it is true, but not necessarily in the same way, nor in the same objects or situations, not even in those that tradition indicates to us as beautiful, as is the case with art. Many find it in a landscape, in a melody, in the body of a person or in a moment of life; beauty seems to be in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes. But what does it consist of? What value does it have? And why does it change radically over time?
The word “beauty”, or its root, “beautiful”, comes from the Latin belluscontracted form of benuluswhich in turn is the diminutive of bonuses, that is, “good”. This has to do with the ancient consideration of beauty, from ancient Greece, according to which what is beautiful must also be good and also true. This is how Plato explains it in his dialogue hippias, where he exposes five definitions for the beautiful: what is convenient, what is useful, what is used for good, what is pleasantly useful and what gives pleasure to the senses. This last conception is the most general nowadays.
But how is something beautiful? What essential feature does that to which we attribute beauty possess? That is somewhat more difficult to answer. According to the classical view, beauty has to do with the disposition of the parts of the whole, that is, with proportion, coherence, harmony and symmetry, among other similar notions. According to Metaphysics of Aristotle, the higher forms of the beautiful are order (taxi), the symmetry (diathesis) and the distribution (oeconomics), properties that could be measured and proved mathematically. Hence, many philosophers and mathematicians searched throughout their lives for the supposed formula of beauty, that is, the mathematical calculation of perfection.
However, these considerations, so western, were not shared at the same time by oriental cultures, something that can be evidenced simply by contrasting Greco-Roman art with that from Asia or with American pre-Columbian art. Thus, what was considered beautiful in one place was not in another; something that also happens with respect to the passage of time: the classical canon of beauty was not the same that prevailed during the medieval eras, in which, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, beauty was considered as that “that pleases the eye” (what a nice view).
Seen in this way, one might think that beauty then is not found in the dimensions of the observed object, but in the mental, emotional or cultural considerations of the subject who observes it. This is the only way to explain why the same object can be beautiful in one culture and unpleasant in another, or in one era and the next. Examples abound, but perhaps none is as obvious as the case of abstract art: a painting by the American painter Jackson Pollock may be very pleasing to the eye for those of us who today appreciate its apparent chaoticity and agile strokes, but during the Renaissance it would have been unthinkable and possibly considered a wasted canvas.
Thus, a central debate in the philosophical consideration of beauty is born: is it a property of objects or rather a look of the viewer? Those who defend the first position are known as objectivists and those who defend the second, as subjectivists.
Both positions have points in favor: it is true that some textures, some flavors, some sensations and some sounds tend to be universally appreciated by human beings, although their interpretation may vary enormously according to their cultural, social and religious values; and it is also true that the very notion of beauty responds to a particular cultural development and to a taught and learned way of perceiving it: a role fulfilled, for example, by museums.
There is no definitive agreement as to what beauty is and where it is found. But we do know, in any case, that it exists and that it forms part of humanity’s own values (no animal, that we know of, produces art or manifests its enjoyment of the beautiful), because under the label of the “beautiful” we are able to of connecting with a sincere sense of wonder, a thoughtful fascination and a joy of being that often resist words and have to be experienced in person. In conclusion: beauty may be a relative concept, but the experience of beauty is an undeniable reality.
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What is an essay?
The test It is a literary genre whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by freely addressing a specific topic, making use of the author’s arguments and appreciations, as well as literary and poetic resources that allow embellishing the work and enhancing its aesthetic features. . It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, of the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries has become the most used format to express ideas. in a structured, didactic and formal way.
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