essay on beauty of life

W as never form and never face So sweet to SEYD as only grace Which did not slumber like a stone But hovered gleaming and was gone. Beauty chased he everywhere, In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. He smote the lake to feed his eye With the beryl beam of the broken wave; He flung in pebbles well to hear The moment's music which they gave. Oft pealed for him a lofty tone From nodding pole and belting zone. He heard a voice none else could hear From centred and from errant sphere. The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. In dens of passion, and pits of wo, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe. While thus to love he gave his days In loyal worship, scorning praise, How spread their lures for him, in vain, Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain! He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

T he spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money value, — his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, and wine.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks are! Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired, "From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?" But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the chicane?

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners , the power of form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always near us.

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life, — we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners , of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; — on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him.

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said, "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement — much of it superficial and absurd enough — about works of art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: — yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research, — namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach a badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show themselves. Every necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships in the theatre, — or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour! — What a difference in effect between a battalion of troops marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday! In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on the top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most elegant imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the immortality.

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, — Beauty rides on a lion . Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with the least weight. "It is the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai . In all design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the nations that created them.

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply because the tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish.

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced without end. How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave two thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence , in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it, since a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.' French memoires of the fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, "the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs, and people go early to get places at the theatres, when it is known they will be there." "Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, "flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get into her post-chaise next morning."

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression which passes from conversation into habit of style.

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type, but have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws, — as every lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet — it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit for nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes, — affirm, that the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence , art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England." "Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold." Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, "was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all; whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. Still, "it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning; — if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but also in the world of manners .

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, "it swims on the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that

— "half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, — has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners , which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners , or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, " vis superba formae ," which the poets praise, — under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in manners , up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say about beauty?

Content is coming very soon

Where did Emerson find beauty?

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

Quick Links

Self-reliance.

• Address at Divinity College
• English Traits
• Representative Men
• The American Scholar
• The Conduct of Life
• Essays: First Series
• Essays: Second Series
• Nature: Addresses/Lectures
• Lectures / Biographies
• Letters and Social Aims

Early Emerson Poems

• Uncollected Prose
• Government of Children

Emerson Quotes

"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's Essays

Research the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read More Essay

Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out

America's best known and best-loved poems. More Poems

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, there was revived interest in beauty and critique of the concept by the 1980s, particularly within feminist philosophy.

This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

2.1 the classical conception, 2.2 the idealist conception, 2.3 love and longing, 2.4 hedonist conceptions, 2.5 use and uselessness, 3.1 aristocracy and capital, 3.2 the feminist critique, 3.3 colonialism and race, 3.4 beauty and resistance, other internet resources, related entries.

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or rather an objective feature of beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone’s particular experiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species of philosophy’:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in The Critique of Judgment (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective . Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

However, if beauty is entirely subjective—that is, if anything that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as James Kirwan, for example, asserts)—then it seems that the word has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or learn from someone else why it is.

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one’s experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard other people’s taste, even when it differs from our own, as provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response, even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the beholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In De Veritate Religione , Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus’s account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I, 6])

In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept, or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception ( see below ) treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE), was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [ Ennead I, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ of the mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One argument for this was the variation in color experiences between people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with jaundice much of the world allegedly takes on a yellow cast. In addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable as a value at all across persons or societies.

Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant’s Critique Of Judgment attempt to find ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy of taste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective: de gustibus non est disputandum (about taste there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of good taste or of tastelessness. Some people’s tastes appear vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people’s taste is too exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the Canon was held to be, that if people did not experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume’s account focuses on the history and condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with regard to assessing people’s taste entail that judgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary prejudices. Hume moves from considering what makes a thing beautiful to what makes a critic credible. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived] from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section 34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture of a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one cares about that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the experiences of others.

By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is a disinterested judgment. It does not respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatment Kant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal range of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance, which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in its sheer representation in one’s experience:

Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by mere observation (intuition or reflection). … We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful , and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s dialogue The Moralists , where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort of thing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautiful ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example, may be beautiful without a reference group or “concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in the form or design of the object, or as Clive Bell (1914) put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting). By the time Bell writes in the early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person’s judgment from another’s (though in fact there may be). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a ‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to the universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer (1818), Hanslick (1891), Bullough (1912), and Croce (1928), for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as ‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that it is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the object itself were having subjective states.

We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes subjective states (indeed, one’s own) to a thing which in many instances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying that Santayana’s treatment of the topic in The Sense of Beauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck from Hume’s and Kant’s treatments was the subjectivity, not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue more urgent and more serious projects. More significantly, as we will see below, the political and economic associations of beauty with power tended to discredit the whole concept for much of the twentieth century. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like the classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy beginning in the 1990s, to some extent centered on the work of art critic Dave Hickey, who declared that “the issue of the 90s will be beauty” (see Hickey 1993), as well as feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept (see Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993). Several theorists made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore’s: “To say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.

Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a community that centers around it—a community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are present. For example, Kant’s treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible with one another many of these views are: for example, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely with uselessness.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated: nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics : “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2, 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies, is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid’s Elements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and, again, by the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos (late fifth/early fourth century BCE).

The Canon was not only a statue deigned to display perfect proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of “the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. For having taught us in that treatise all the symmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the statue itself, like the treatise, the Canon ” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of ‘symmetry’ in classical texts is distinct from and richer than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in the Sophist (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as symmetrical.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classical conception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, both in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying unity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis , and arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis , and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and Distribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia . Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result. Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of details in their context. This is attained when the details of the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical correspondence. Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot, palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that “There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection—for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful” ( Summa Theologica I, 39, 8).

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “What we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725, 29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in the Mathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725, 38).

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime :

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke 1757, 84–89)

There are many ways to interpret Plato’s relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in the Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically in the Symposium —perhaps the key Socratic text for neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato, 558–59 [ Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal: “And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for the good—which is to say that Love is a longing for immortality” (Plato, 559, [ Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment. … And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. … Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [ Symposium 210a–211d])

Beauty here is conceived—perhaps explicitly in contrast to the classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole—as perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout. All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus, 21 [ Ennead I,6])

Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I,3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a richly-appointed church:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959, 14)

This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and finally, the intelligence that makes even these artists (that is, God). Shaftesbury’s character Theocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. … Whatever appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. … Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738, 228–29)

Schiller’s expression of a similar series of thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct and guide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity. Beauty … makes of man a whole, complete in himself. (1795, 59–60, 86)

For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are we—who exist simultaneously on both these levels—free. This is quite similar to Plato’s ‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—is more concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including in the tripartite dialectical structure of his account—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from finitude to the infinite, formulations that—while they are influenced by Schiller—strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus, and Plato.

Hegel, who associates beauty and art with mind and spirit, holds with Shaftesbury that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, “the beauty of art is born of the spirit and born again ” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. “The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certain persons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one, comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts” (Croce 1928, 230).

Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (Burke 1757, 83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or ataraxia , as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world.

There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho’s famous fragment 16: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I say it’s whatever you love best” (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at Phaedrus 236c, Socrates appears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greater insight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

Plato’s discussions of beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In the former, love is portrayed as the ‘child’ of poverty and plenty. “Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato, 556 [Symposium 203b–d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the infinite.

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho’s fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing” and characterizes longing as intense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas writes that “I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don’t stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction” (Nehamas 2007, 77).

Thinkers of the 18 th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a typical formulation, says that “By beautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical formal elements or in terms of the viewer’s pleasurable response. He begins the Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears to assert that objects which instantiate his ‘compound ratio of uniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider, is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify’d by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolute beauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities of the beautiful thing (a “compound ratio” of uniformity and variety), and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come apart from Hutcheson’s particular aesthetic preferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus’s, for example. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as its objects.

Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature :

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740, 299)

Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon talking about the ‘sentiment of beauty,’ where sentiment is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or ideas, though the experience of beauty is a matter of cultivated or delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant’s Third Critique and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of pleasure.

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extreme expression of this orientation—is the assertion of the positivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless or without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus seems contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no reasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. “ Taste is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful ” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from practical concerns: “Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” (Bullough 1912, 244).

On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use. ‘Beauty’ is perhaps one of the few terms that could plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene took a rather direct approach.

Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty? Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes Laertius, 94)

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of thinkers. Xenophon’s Memorabilia puts the view in the mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates : In short everything which we use is considered both good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use. Aristippus : Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing? Socrates : Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill. (Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue Alciphron , though he begins with the hedonist conception: “Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley 1732, 174; see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of object it is and, again, a beautiful car might make an ugly tractor. “The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole” (Berkeley 1732, 174–75; see Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing and assess its suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of ‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as well as serves its purpose.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not less beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009) returns to a modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched by many and varied examples. “We call something beautiful,” writes Scruton, “when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form ” (Scruton 2009, 26). Despite the Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one loves is not merely to place one body part on another, “but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising – it is a move from one self toward another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being” (Scruton 2009, 48). This, Scruton says, is a profound pleasure.

3. The Politics of Beauty

Kissing sounds nice, but some kisses are coerced, some pleasures obtained at a cost to other people. The political associations of beauty over the last few centuries have been remarkably various and remarkably problematic, particularly in connection with race and gender, but in other aspects as well. This perhaps helps account for the neglect of the issue in early-to-mid twentieth-century philosophy as well as its growth late in the century as an issue in social justice movements, and subsequently in social-justice oriented philosophy.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 associated beauty with the French aristocracy and with the Rococo style of the French royal family, as in the paintings of Fragonard: hedonist expressions of wealth and decadence, every inch filled with decorative motifs. Beauty itself became subject to a moral and political critique, or even to direct destruction, with political motivations (see Levey 1985). And by the early 20th century, beauty was particularly associated with capitalism (ironically enough, considering the ugliness of the poverty and environmental destruction it often induced). At times even great art appeared to be dedicated mainly to furnishing the homes of rich people, with the effect of concealing the suffering they were inflicting. In response, many anti-capitalists, including many Marxists, appeared to repudiate beauty entirely. And in the aesthetic politics of Nazism, reflected for example in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the association of beauty and right wing politics was sealed to devastating effect (see Spotts 2003).

Early on in his authorship, Karl Marx could hint that the experience of beauty distinguishes human beings from all other animals. An animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx 1844, 76). But later Marx appeared to conceive beauty as “superstructure” or “ideology” disguising the material conditions of production. Perhaps, however, he also anticipated the emergence of new beauties, available to all both as makers and appreciators, in socialism.

Capitalism, of course, uses beauty – at times with complete self-consciousness – to manipulate people into buying things. Many Marxists believed that the arts must be turned from providing fripperies to the privileged or advertising that helps make them wealthier to showing the dark realities of capitalism (as in the American Ashcan school, for example), and articulating an inspiring Communist future. Stalinist socialist realism consciously repudiates the aestheticized beauties of post-impressionist and abstract painting, for example. It has urgent social tasks to perform (see Bown and Lanfranconi 2012). But the critique tended at times to generalize to all sorts of beauty: as luxury, as seduction, as disguise and oppression. The artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), having survived the First World War, wrote this about the radical artists of the early century: “To us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream” (quoted in Danto 2003, 49).

Theodor Adorno, in his book Aesthetic Theory , wrote that one symptom of oppression is that oppressed groups and cultures are regarded as uncouth, dirty, ragged; in short, that poverty is ugly. It is art’s obligation, he wrote, to show this ugliness, imposed on people by an unjust system, clearly and without flinching, rather to distract people by beauty from the brutal realities of capitalism. “Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer to integrate or mitigate it or reconcile it with its own existence,” Adorno wrote. “Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image” (Adorno 1970, 48–9).

The political entanglements of beauty tend to throw into question various of the traditional theories. For example, the purity and transcendence associated with the essence of beauty in the realm of the Forms seems irrelevant, as beauty shows its centrality to politics and commerce, to concrete dimensions of oppression. The austere formalism of the classical conception, for example, seems neither here nor there when the building process is brutally exploitative.

As we have seen, the association of beauty with the erotic is proverbial from Sappho and is emphasized relentlessly by figures such as Burke and Nehamas. But the erotic is not a neutral or universal site, and we need to ask whose sexuality is in play in the history of beauty, with what effects. This history, particularly in the West and as many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized, is associated with the objectification and exploitation of women. Feminists beginning in the 19th century gave fundamental critiques of the use of beauty as a set of norms to control women’s bodies or to constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in profound and disabling ways (see Wollstonecraft 1792, Grimké 1837).

In patriarchal society, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it, the content of sexuality “is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content,” she continues, describing her treatment of the subject, “for the gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal. That is the content of sexuality that defines gender female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method” (MacKinnon 1987, 53–4). Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reaches one variety of radical critique and conclusion: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 1975, 60).

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic treatment was focused on the scopophilia (a Freudian term denoting neurotic sexual pleasure configured around looking) of Hollywood films, in which men appeared as protagonists, and women as decorative or sexual objects for the pleasure of the male characters and male audience-members. She locates beauty “at the heart of our oppression.” And she appears to have a hedonist conception of it: beauty engenders pleasure. But some pleasures, like some kisses, are sadistic or exploitative at the individual and at the societal level. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin (1988) and Griselda Pollock (1987) brought such insights to bear on the history of painting, for example, where the scopophilia is all too evident in famous nudes such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus , which a feminist slashed with knife in 1914 because “she didn’t like the way men gawked at it”.

Feminists such as Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth , generalized such insights into a critique of the ways women are represented throughout Western popular culture: in advertising, for example, or music videos. Such practices have the effect of constraining women to certain acceptable ways of presenting themselves publicly, which in turn greatly constrains how seriously they are taken, or how much of themselves they can express in public space. As have many other commentators, Wolf connects the representation of the “beautiful” female body, in Western high art but especially in popular culture, to eating disorders and many other self-destructive behaviors, and indicates that a real overturning of gender hierarchy will require deeply re-construing the concept of beauty.

The demand on women to create a beautiful self-presentation by male standards, Wolf argues, fundamentally compromises women’s action and self-understanding, and makes fully human relationships between men and women difficult or impossible. In this Wolf follows, among others, the French thinker Luce Irigaray, who wrote that “Female beauty is always considered as finery ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of, an appearance of, a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone , rarely to interrogate the state of our body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our becoming” (quoted in Robinson 2000, 230).

“Sex is held hostage by beauty,” Wolf remarks, “and its ransom terms are engraved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film” (Wolf 1991f, 157).

Early in the 20th century, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) described European or white standards of beauty as a deep dimension of oppression, quite similarly to the way Naomi Wolf describes beauty standards for women. These standards are relentlessly reinforced in authoritative images, but they are incompatible with black skin, black bodies, and also traditional African ways of understanding human beauty. White standards of beauty, Garvey argued, devalue black bodies. The truly oppressive aspects of such norms can be seen in the way they induce self-alienation, as Wolf argues with regard to sexualized images of women. “Some of us in America, the West Indies, and Africa believe that the nearer we approach the white man in color, the greater our social standing and privilege,” he wrote (Garvey 1925 [1986], 56). He condemns skin bleaching and hair straightening as ways that black people are taught to devalue themselves by white standards of beauty. And he connects such standards to ‘colorism’ or prejudice in the African-American community toward darker-skinned black people.

Such observations suggest some of the strengths of cultural relativism as opposed to subjectivism or universalism: standards of beauty appear in this picture not to be idiosyncratic to individuals, nor to be universal among all people, but to be tied to group identities and to oppression and resistance.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1925–1965), whose parents were activists in the Garvey movement, describes ‘conking’ or straightening his hair with lye products as a young man. “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation,” he writes, “when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that black people are ‘inferior’ – and white people ‘superior’ – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards” (X 1964, 56–7). For both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, a key moment in the transformation of racial oppression would be the affirmation of standards of black beauty that are not parasitic on white standards, and hence not directly involved in racial oppression. This was systematically developed after Malcolm’s death in the “natural” hairstyles and African fabrics in the Black Power movement. Certainly, people have many motivations for straightening or coloring their hair, for example. But the critical examination of the racial content of beauty norms was a key moment in black liberation movements, many of which, around 1970, coalesced around the slogan Black is beautiful . These are critiques of specific standards of beauty; they are also tributes to beauty’s power.

Imposing standards of beauty on non-Western cultures, and, in particular, misappropriating standards of beauty and beautiful objects from them, formed one of the most complex strategies of colonialism. Edward Said famously termed this dynamic “orientalism.” Novelists such as Nerval and Kipling and painters such as Delacroix and Picasso, he argued, used motifs drawn from Asian and African cultures, treating them as “exotic” insertions into Western arts. Such writers and artists might even have understood themselves to be celebrating the cultures they depicted in pictures of Arabian warriors or African masks. But they used this imagery precisely in relation to Western art history. They distorted what they appropriated.

“Being a White Man, in short,” writes Said, “was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible” (Said 1978, 227). This style might be encapsulated in the outfits of colonial governors, and their mansions. But it was also typified by an appropriative “appreciation” of “savage” arts and “exotic” beauties, which were of course not savage or exotic in their own context. Even in cases where the beauty of such objects was celebrated, the appreciation was mixed with condescension and misapprehension, and also associated with stripping colonial possessions of their most beautiful objects (as Europeans understood beauty)—shipping them back to the British Museum, for example. Now some beautiful objects, looted in colonialism, are being returned to their points of origin (see Matthes 2017), but many others remain in dispute.

However, if beauty has been an element in various forms of oppression, it has also been an element in various forms of resistance, as the slogan “Black is beautiful” suggests. The most compelling responses to oppressive standards and uses of beauty have given rise to what might be termed counter-beauties . When fighting discrimination against people with disabilities, for example, one may decry the oppressive norms that regard disabled bodies as ugly and leave it at that. Or one might try to discover what new standards of beauty and subversive pleasures might arise in the attempt to regard disabled bodies as beautiful (Siebers 2005). For that matter, one might uncover the ways that non-normative bodies and subversive pleasures actually do fulfill various traditional criteria of beauty. Indeed, for some decades there has been a disability arts movement, often associated with artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Riva Lehrer, which tries to do just that (see Siebers 2005).

The exploration of beauty, in some ways flipping it over into an instrument of feminist resistance, or showing directly how women’s beauty could be experienced outside of patriarchy, has been a theme of much art by women of the 20th and 21st centuries. Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” place settings undertake to absorb and reverse the objectifying gaze. The exploration of the meaning of the female body in the work of performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Karen Finley, and Orlan, tries both to explore the objectification of the female body and to affirm women’s experience in its concrete realities from the inside: to make of it emphatically a subject rather than an object (see Striff 1997).

“Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving,” wrote philosopher Peg Zeglin Brand in 2000. “Confident young women today pack their closets with mini-skirts and sensible suits. Young female artists toy with feminine stereotypes in ways that make their feminist elders uncomfortable. They recognize that … beauty can be a double-edged sword – as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing them” (Brand 2000, xv). Indeed, vernacular norms of beauty as expressed in media and advertising have shifted in virtue of the feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms, as the concept’s long journey continues.

• Adorno, Theodor, 1970 [1997], Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica , Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.), London: Christian Classics, 1981 [13 th century text].
• Augustine, Earlier Writings , J.H. Burleigh, ed., New York: WJK Publishing, 1953 [4 th /5 th century AD text].
• Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle , in two volumes, Jonathan Barnes, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 [4 th century BCE text].
• Ayer, A.J., 1952, Language, Truth, and Logic , New York: Dover.
• Bell, Clive, 1914, Art , London: Chatto & Windus.
• Berkeley, Bishop George, 1732, Alciphron: or, The Minute Philosopher , London: Tonson and Co.
• Bown, Matthew and Matteo Lanfranconi, 2012, Socialist Realisms: Great Soviet Painting, 1920–1970 , New York: Skira Press.
• Brand, Peg Zeglin (ed.), 2000, Beauty Matters , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Bullough, Edward, 1912, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology , 5. Widely anthologized, e.g., in Cahn, Steven and Meskin, Aaron, 2008. Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology , Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 243–60.
• Burke, Edmund, 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Carritt, E.F., 1931, Philosophies of Beauty , London: Oxford University Press.
• Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1977, Traditional Art and Symbolism (Selected Papers, volume 1), Princeton: Bollingen.
• Croce, Benedetto, 1929, “Aesthetics,” in Encyclopedia Britannica . See “Benedetto Croce on aesthetics,” Encyclopedia Britannica , 14 Aug. 2014, [ read it on www.britannica.com] .
• Danto, Arthur, 2003, The Abuse of Beauty , Chicago: Open Court.
• Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers , C.D. Yonge (trans.), New York: George Bell & Sons, 1895 [3 rd century CE text].
• Eco, Umberto, 1959, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages , Hugh Bredin (trans.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
• Garvey, Marcus, 1925 [1986], The Life and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (Volume 1), Amy Jacques Garvey (ed.), New York: Majority Press.
• Grimké, Sarah, 1837, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women , Boston: Isaac Knapp [ scan of 1838 printing available online] .
• Hanslick, Eduard, 1891, The Beautiful in Music , Gustav Cohen (trans.), London: Novello and Company.
• Hegel, G.W.F., 1835, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art , in two volumes, T.M. Knox (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
• Hickey, Dave, 2012 [1993], The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty , University of Chicago Press.
• Hume, David, 1757, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Essays Moral and Political , London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894.
• –––, 1740, A Treatise of Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1725, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
• Irigaray, Luce, 1993. “Divine Women,” in Sexes and Genealogies , Gillian C. Gill (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 55–73.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1790, Critique of Judgement , J.H. Bernard (trans.), New York: Macmillan, 1951.
• Kirwan, James, 1999. Beauty , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Levey, Michael, 1985, Rococo to Revolution , London: Thames and Hudson.
• MacKinnon, Catherine, 1987, “Desire and Power,” in C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 46–62.
• Marx, Karl, 1844 [1978], “Estranged Labour,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , 2nd edition, Robert E. Tucker (ed.), New York: Norton, 1978, pp. 70–81.
• Matthes, Erich Hatala, 2017, “Repatriation and the Radical Redistribution of Art,” Ergo: an Open Access Journal of Philosophy , 4(32). doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0004.032
• Moore, G.E., 1903, Principia Ethica , Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004.
• Mothersill, Mary, 1984, Beauty Restored , Oxford: Clarendon.
• Mulvey, Laura, 1975, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen , 16(3): 6–18; reprinted in Feminist Film Theory , Sue Thornham (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 58–69.
• Nehamas, Alexander, 2007, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Nochlin, Linda, 1988, Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays , New York: HarperCollins.
• Plato, Collected Dialogues , Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [4 th century BCE text].
• Plotinus, The Six Enneads , Stephen McKenna and B.S. Page (trans.), Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Publishing, 1952 [3 rd century CE text].
• Pollitt, J.J., 1974, The Ancient View of Greek Art , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Pollock, Griselda, 1987, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art , New York: Methuen.
• Pseudo-Dionysius, Works of Dionysius the Areopagite , John Parker (trans.), London: James Parker and Co., 1897 [originally 5 th or 6 th century CE].
• Robinson, Hilary, 2000, “Whose Beauty?” in P.Z. Brand (ed.) 2000: 224–51.
• Said, Edward, 1978, Orientalism , New York: Random House.
• Santayana, George, 1896, The Sense of Beauty , New York: Scribner’s.
• Sappho, The Poetry of Sappho , Jim Powell (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [7 th or 6 th century BCE text].
• Sartwell, Crispin, 2004, Six Names of Beauty , New York: Routledge
• Schiller, Friedrich, 1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man , New York: Dover, 2004.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1818, The World as Will and Idea , E.F.J. Payne (trans.), New York: Dover, 1966.
• Scruton, Roger, 2009, Beauty , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 1738, “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times , Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.
• Siebers, Tobin, 2005, “Disability Aesthetics,” PMLA (Journal of the Modern Languages Association), 120(2): 542–46
• Spotts, Frederic, 2003, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics , New York: Abrams.
• Striff, Erin, 1997, “Bodies of Evidence: Feminist Performance Art,” Critical Survey , 9(1): 1–18.
• Vitruvius, On Architecture , Frank Granger (trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970 [originally 1 st century BCE].
• Wolf, Naomi, 1991 [2002], The Beauty Myth , New York: HarperCollins.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Women , Boston: Thomas & Andrews.
• Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1932, Principles of Art History , M.D. Hottinger (trans.), New York: Dover, 1950.
• X, Malcolm, 1964 [1992], The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), New York: Ballantine.
• Xenophon, Memorabilia [4 th century BCE text], E. C. Marchant (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle | Ayer, Alfred Jules | Burke, Edmund | Croce, Benedetto: aesthetics | feminist philosophy, interventions: aesthetics | hedonism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: aesthetics | Hume, David: aesthetics | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Kant, Immanuel: theory of judgment | medieval philosophy | Neoplatonism | Plato: aesthetics | Plotinus | Santayana, George | Schiller, Friedrich | Schopenhauer, Arthur | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of]

Copyright © 2022 by Crispin Sartwell < crispinsartwell @ gmail . com >

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2022 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Premium Content

• Women of Impact

The idea of beauty is always shifting. Today, it’s more inclusive than ever.

Whom we deem ‘beautiful’ is a reflection of our values. Now, a more expansive world has arrived where ‘we are all beautiful.’

The Sudanese model Alek Wek appeared on the November 1997 cover of the U.S. edition of Elle magazine, in a photograph by French creative director Gilles Bensimon . It was, as is so often the case in the beauty business, a global production.

Wek, with her velvety ebony skin and mere whisper of an Afro, was posed in front of a stark, white screen. Her simple, white Giorgio Armani blazer almost disappeared into the background. Wek, however, was intensely present.

She was standing at an angle but looking directly into the camera with a pleasant smile spread across her face, which wasn’t so much defined by planes and angles as by sweet, broad, distinctly African curves. Wek represented everything that a traditional cover girl was not.

More than 20 years after she was featured on that Elle cover, the definition of beauty has continued to expand, making room for women of color, obese women, women with vitiligo , bald women, women with gray hair and wrinkles. We are moving toward a culture of big-tent beauty. One in which everyone is welcome. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone’s idealized version can be seen in the pages of magazines or on the runways of Paris.

We have become more accepting because people have demanded it, protested for it, and used the bully pulpit of social media to shame beauty’s gatekeepers into opening the doors wider.

Eye of the beholder

Technology has put the power to define beauty in the hands of the people. Mobile phones allow people greater control of their image, and include apps that come with filters used for fun, appearance, and entertainment.

Wek was a new vision of beauty—that virtue forever attached to women . It has long been a measure of their social value; it is also a tool to be used and manipulated. A woman should not let her beauty go to waste; that was something people would say back when a woman’s future depended on her marrying well. Her husband’s ambition and potential should be as dazzling as her fine features.

Beauty is, of course, cultural. What one community admires may leave another group of people cold or even repulsed. What one individual finds irresistible elicits a shrug from another. Beauty is personal. But it’s also universal. There are international beauties—those people who have come to represent the standard.

For generations, beauty required a slender build but with a generous bosom and a narrow waist. The jawline was to be defined, the cheekbones high and sharp. The nose angular. The lips full but not distractingly so. The eyes, ideally blue or green, large and bright. Hair was to be long, thick, and flowing—and preferably golden. Symmetry was desired. Youthfulness, that went without saying.

This was the standard from the earliest days of women’s magazines, when beauty was codified and commercialized. The so-called great beauties and swans—women such as actress Catherine Deneuve , socialite C.Z. Guest , or Princess Grace —came closest to this ideal. The further one diverged from this version of perfection, the more exotic a woman became. Diverge too much and a woman was simply considered less attractive—or desirable or valuable. And for some women—black and brown or fat or old ones—beauty seemed impossible in the broader culture.

In the early part of the 1990s, the definition of beauty as it applied to women began to loosen thanks to the arrival of Kate Moss , with her slight figure and vaguely ragamuffin aesthetic. Standing five feet seven inches, she was short for a runway walker. The British teenager was not particularly graceful, and she lacked the noble bearing that gave many other models their regal air. Moss’s star turn in advertisements for Calvin Klein signified a major departure from the long-legged gazelles of years past.

Moss was disruptive to the beauty system, but she was still well within the industry’s comfort zone of defining beauty as a white, European conceit. So too were the youthquake models of the 1960s such as Twiggy , who had the gangly, curveless physique of a 12-year-old boy. The 1970s brought Lauren Hutton, who stirred scandal simply because she had a gap between her teeth.

Even the early black models who broke barriers were relatively safe: women such as Beverly Johnson, the first African-American model to appear on the cover of American Vogue , the Somali-born Iman, Naomi Campbell, and Tyra Banks. They had keen features and flowing hair—or wigs or weaves to give the illusion that they did. Iman had a luxuriously long neck that made legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland gasp. Campbell was—and is—all va-va-voom legs and hips, and Banks rose to fame as the girl next door in a polka dot bikini on the cover of Sports Illustrated .

Wek was a revelation. Her beauty was something entirely different.

Her tightly coiled hair was sheared close to her scalp. Her seemingly poreless skin was the color of dark chocolate. Her nose was broad; her lips were full. Her legs were impossibly long and incredibly thin. Indeed, her entire body had the stretched-out sinewiness of an African stick figure brought to life.

To eyes that had been trained to understand beauty through the lens of Western culture, Wek was jarring to everyone, and black folks were no exception. Many of them did not consider her beautiful. Even women who might have looked in the mirror and seen the same nearly coal black skin and tightly coiled hair reflected back had trouble reckoning with this Elle cover girl.

See and be seen

Fashion and beauty magazines present a paragon of aspiration, often setting beauty standards for women across cultures. The magazines also serve as giant advertisements for the industries dependent on selling these ideals to willing customers.

Wek was abruptly and urgently transformative. It was as though some great cultural mountain had been scaled by climbing straight up a steep slope, as if there were neither time nor patience for switchbacks. To see Wek celebrated was exhilarating and vertiginous. Everything about her was the opposite of what had come before.

We are in a better place than we were a generation ago, but we have not arrived at utopia. Many of the clubbiest realms of beauty still don’t include larger women, disabled ones, or senior citizens.

But to be honest, I’m not sure exactly what utopia would look like. Is it a world in which everyone gets a tiara and the sash of a beauty queen just for showing up? Or is it one in which the definition of beauty gets stretched so far that it becomes meaningless? Perhaps the way to utopia is by rewriting the definition of the word itself to better reflect how we’ve come to understand it—as something more than an aesthetic pleasure.

We know that beauty has financial value. We want to be around beautiful people because they delight the eye but also because we think they are intrinsically better humans. We’ve been told that attractive people are paid higher salaries. In truth, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s really a combination of beauty, intelligence, charm, and collegiality that serves as a recipe for better pay. Still, beauty is an integral part of the equation.

But on a powerfully emotional level, being perceived as attractive means being welcomed into the cultural conversation. You are part of the audience for advertising and marketing. You are desired. You are seen and accepted. When questions arise about someone’s looks, that’s just another way of asking: How acceptable is she? How relevant is she? Does she matter?

Today suggesting that a person is not gorgeous is to risk social shunning or at least a social media lashing. What kind of monster declares another human being unattractive? To do so is to virtually dismiss that person as worthless. It’s better to lie. Of course you’re beautiful, sweetheart; of course you are.

We have come to equate beauty with humanity. If we don’t see the beauty in another person, we are blind to that person’s humanity. It’s scary how important beauty has become. It goes to the very soulfulness of a person.

Beauty has become so important today that denying that people possess it is akin to denying them oxygen.

There used to be gradations when it came to describing the feminine ideal: homely, jolie laide, attractive, pretty, and ultimately, beautiful. The homely woman managed as best she could. She adjusted to the fact that her looks were not her most distinguishing feature. She was the woman with the terrific personality. Striking women had some characteristic that made them stand out: bountiful lips, an aristocratic nose, a glorious poitrine. A lot of women could be described as attractive. They were at the center of the bell curve. Pretty was another level. Hollywood is filled with pretty people.

Ah, but beautiful! Beautiful was a description that was reserved for special cases, for genetic lottery winners. Beauty could even be a burden because it startled people. It intimidated them. Beauty was exceptional.

But improved plastic surgery, more personalized and effective nutrition, the flowering of the fitness industry, and the rise of selfie filters on smartphones, along with Botox, fillers, and the invention of Spanx, have all combined to help us look better—and get a little bit closer to looking exceptional. Therapists, bloggers, influencers, stylists, and well-meaning friends have raised their voices in a chorus of body-positivity mantras: You go, girl! You slay! Yasss, queen! They are not charged with speaking harsh truths and helping us see ourselves vividly and become better versions of ourselves. Their role is constant uplift, to tell us that we are perfect just as we are.

And the globalization of, well, everything means that somewhere out there is an audience that will appreciate you in all your magnificent … whatever.

We are all beautiful.

In New York, London, Milan, and Paris—the traditional fashion capitals of the world—the beauty codes have changed more dramatically in the past 10 years than in the preceding hundred. Historically, shifts had been by degrees. Changes in aesthetics weren’t linear, and despite fashion’s reputation for rebelliousness, change was slow. Revolutions were measured in a few inches.

Through the years, an angular shape has been celebrated and then a more curvaceous one. The average clothing size of a runway model, representative of the designers’ ideal, shrank from a six to a zero; the pale blondes of Eastern Europe ruled the runway until the sun-kissed blondes from Brazil deposed them. The couture body—lean, hipless, and practically flat-chested—can be seen in the classic portraits by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Gordon Parks, as well as on the runways of designers such as John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen. But then Miuccia Prada, who had led the way in promoting a nearly homogeneous catwalk of pale, white, thin models, suddenly embraced an hourglass shape. And then plus-size model Ashley Graham appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 2016 , and in 2019 Halima Aden became the first model to wear a hijab in that same magazine , and suddenly everyone is talking about modesty and beauty and fuller figures … and the progress is dizzying.

In the past decade, beauty has moved resolutely forward into territory that was once deemed niche. Nonbinary and transgender are part of the mainstream beauty narrative. As the rights of LGBTQ individuals have been codified in the courts, so have the aesthetics particular to them been absorbed into the beauty dialogue. Transgender models walk the runways and appear in advertising campaigns. They are hailed on the red carpet for their glamour and good taste but also for their physical characteristics. Their bodies are celebrated as aspirational.

The catalyst for our changed understanding of beauty has been a perfect storm of technology, economics, and a generation of consumers with sharpened aesthetic literacy.

The technology is social media in general and Instagram specifically. The fundamental economic factor is the unrelenting competition for market share and the need for individual companies to grow their audience of potential customers for products ranging from designer dresses to lipstick. And the demographics lead, as they always do these days, to millennials, with an assist from baby boomers who plan to go into that good night with six-pack abs.

Social media has changed the way younger consumers relate to fashion. It’s hard to believe, but back in the 1990s, the notion of photographers posting runway imagery online was scandalous. Designers lived in professional terror of having their entire collection posted online, fearing that it would lead to business-killing knockoffs. And while knockoffs and copies continue to frustrate designers, the real revolution brought on by the internet was that consumers were able to see, in nearly real time, the full breadth of the fashion industry’s aesthetic.

In the past, runway productions were insider affairs. They weren’t meant for public consumption, and the people sitting in the audience all spoke the same fashion patois. They understood that runway ideas weren’t meant to be taken literally; they were oblivious to issues of cultural appropriation, racial stereotypes, and all varieties of isms—or they were willing to overlook them. Fashion’s power brokers were carrying on the traditions of the power brokers who’d come before, happily using black and brown people as props in photo shoots that starred white models who had parachuted in for the job.

But an increasingly diverse class of moneyed consumers, a more expansive retail network, and a new media landscape have forced the fashion industry into greater accountability on how it depicts beauty. Clothing and cosmetic brands now take care to reflect the growing numbers of luxury consumers in countries such as India and China by using more Asian models.

Marked by beauty

We’ve been chasing beauty for millennia, primping and painting our way to a more desirable ideal. Cultures in every era have held different standards of feminine beauty and myriad means of achieving it, from the toxic lead cosmetics of the past to today’s Botox injections. But the standards often serve the same aims: to attract and retain a mate; to signal social status, wealth, health, or fertility; and of course, to simply feel beautiful.

Dramatic cosmetics

Social media has amplified the voices of minority communities—from Harlem to South Central Los Angeles—so that their calls for representation can’t be so easily ignored. And the growth of digital publications and blogs means that every market has become more fluent in the language of aesthetics. A whole new category of power brokers has emerged: influencers. They are young and independent and obsessed with the glamour of fashion. And fashion influencers don’t accept excuses, condescension, or patronizing pleas to be patient, because really, change is forthcoming.

The modern beauty standard in the West has always been rooted in thinness. And when the obesity rates were lower, thin models were only slight exaggerations in the eyes of the general population. But as obesity rates rose, the distance between the reality and the fantasy grew. People were impatient with a fantasy that no longer seemed even remotely accessible.

Fat bloggers warned critics to stop telling them to lose weight and stop suggesting ways for them to camouflage their body. They were perfectly content with their body, thank you very much. They just wanted better clothes. They wanted fashion that came in their size—not with the skirts made longer or the sheath dresses reworked with sleeves.

They weren’t really demanding to be labeled beautiful. They were demanding access to style because they believed they deserved it. In this way, beauty and self-worth were inextricably bound.

Giving full-figured women greater access made economic sense. By adhering to traditional beauty standards, the fashion industry had been leaving money on the table. Designers such as Christian Siriano made a public point of catering to larger customers and, in doing so, were hailed as smart and as capitalist heroes. Now it’s fairly common for even the most rarefied fashion brands to include large models in their runway shows.

But this new way of thinking isn’t just about selling more dresses. If it were only about economics, designers would have long ago expanded their size offerings, because there have always been larger women able and willing to embrace fashion. Big simply wasn’t considered beautiful. Indeed, even Oprah Winfrey went on a diet before she posed for the cover of Vogue in 1998. As recently as 2012, the designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died last year and who himself was 92 pounds overweight at one point, was called to task for saying that pop star Adele was “a little too fat.”

Attitudes are shifting. But the fashion world remains uneasy with large women—no matter how famous or rich. No matter how pretty their face. Elevating them to iconic status is a complicated, psychological hurdle for the arbiters of beauty. They need sleek élan in their symbols of beauty. They need long lines and sharp edges. They need women who can fit into sample sizes.

But instead of operating in a vacuum, they now are operating in a new media environment. Average folks have taken note of whether designers have a diverse cast of models, and if they do not, critics can voice their ire on social media and an angry army of like-minded souls can rise up and demand change. Digital media has made it easier for stories about emaciated and anorexic models to reach the general public, and the public now has a way to shame and pressure the fashion industry to stop hiring these deathly thin women. The Fashion Spot website became a diversity watchdog, regularly issuing reports on the demographic breakdown on the runways. How many models of color? How many plus-size women? How many of them were transgender? How many older models?

One might think that as female designers themselves aged, they would begin to highlight older women in their work. But women in fashion are part of the same cult of youth that they created. They Botox and diet. They swear by raw food and SoulCycle. How often do you see a chubby designer? A gray-haired one? Designers still use the phrase “old lady” to describe clothes that are unattractive. A “matronly” dress is one that is unflattering or out-of-date. The language makes the bias plain. But today women don’t take it as a matter of course. They revolt. Making “old” synonymous with unattractive is simply not going to stand.

The spread of luxury brands into China, Latin America, and Africa has forced designers to consider how best to market to those consumers while avoiding cultural minefields. They have had to navigate skin lightening in parts of Africa, the Lolita-cute culture of Japan, the obsession with double-eyelid surgery in East Asian countries, and prejudices of colorism, well, virtually everywhere. Idealized beauty needs a new definition. Who will sort it out? And what will the definition be?

In the West, the legacy media are now sharing influence with digital media, social media, and a new generation of writers and editors who came of age in a far more multicultural world—a world that has a more fluid view of gender. The millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1996, is not inclined to assimilate into the dominant culture but to stand proudly apart from it. The new definition of beauty is being written by a selfie generation: people who are the cover stars of their own narrative.

The new beauty isn’t defined by hairstyles or body shape, by age or skin color. Beauty is becoming less a matter of aesthetics and more about self-awareness, personal swagger, and individuality. It’s about chiseled arms and false eyelashes and a lineless forehead. But it’s also defined by rounded bellies, shimmering silver hair, and mundane imperfections. Beauty is a millennial strutting around town in leggings, a crop top, and her belly protruding over her waistband. It is a young man swishing down a runway in over-the-knee boots and thigh-grazing shorts.

Beauty is political correctness, cultural enlightenment, and social justice.

In New York, there’s a fashion collective called Vaquera that mounts runway shows in dilapidated settings with harsh lighting and no glamour. The cast could have piled off the F train after a sleepless night. Their hair is mussed. Their skin looks like it has a thin sheen of overnight grime. They stomp down the runway. The walk could be interpreted as angry, bumbling, or just a little bit hungover.

Masculine-looking models wear princess dresses that hang from the shoulders with all the allure of a shower curtain. Feminine-looking models aggressively speed-walk with a hunched posture and a grim expression. Instead of elongating legs and creating an hourglass silhouette, the clothes make legs look stumpy and the torso thick. Vaquera is among the many companies that call on street casting, which is basically pulling oddball characters from the street and putting them on the runway—essentially declaring them beautiful.

In Paris, the designer John Galliano, like countless other designers, has been blurring gender. He has done so in a way that’s exaggerated and aggressive, which is to say that instead of aiming to craft a dress or a skirt that caters to the lines of a masculine physique, he has simply draped that physique with a dress. The result is not a garment that ostensibly aims to make individuals look their best. It’s a statement about our stubborn assumptions about gender, clothing, and physical beauty.

Not so long ago, the clothing line Universal Standard published an advertising campaign featuring a woman who wears a U.S. size 24. She posed in her skivvies and a pair of white socks. The lighting was flat, her hair slightly frizzed, and her thighs dimpled with cellulite. There was nothing magical or inaccessible about the image. It was exaggerated realism—the opposite of the Victoria’s Secret angel.

Every accepted idea about beauty is being subverted. This is the new normal, and it is shocking. Some might argue that it’s even rather ugly.

As much as people say that they want inclusiveness and regular-looking people—so-called real people—many consumers remain dismayed that this, this is what passes for beauty. They look at a 200-pound woman and, after giving a cursory nod to her confidence, fret about her health—even though they’ve never seen her medical records. That’s a more polite conversation than one that argues against declaring her beautiful. But the mere fact that this Universal Standard model is in the spotlight in her underwear—just as the Victoria’s Secret angels have been and the Maidenform woman was a generation before that—is an act of political protest. It’s not about wanting to be a pinup but about wanting the right for one’s body to exist without negative judgment. As a society, we haven’t acknowledged her right to simply be. But at least the beauty world is giving her a platform on which to make her case.

This isn’t just a demand being made by full-figured women. Older women are insisting on their place in the culture. Black women are demanding that they be allowed to stand in the spotlight with their natural hair.

There’s no neutral ground. The body, the face, the hair have all become political. Beauty is about respect and value and the right to exist without having to alter who you fundamentally are. For a black woman, having her natural hair perceived as beautiful means that her kinky curls are not an indication of her being unprofessional. For a plus-size woman, having her belly rolls included in the conversation about beauty means that she will not be castigated by strangers for consuming dessert in public; she will not have to prove to her employer that she isn’t lazy or without willpower or otherwise lacking in self-control.

When an older woman’s wrinkles are seen as beautiful, it means that she is actually being seen. She isn’t being overlooked as a full human being: sexual, funny, smart, and, more than likely, deeply engaged in the world around her.

To see the beauty in a woman’s rippling muscles is to embrace her strength but also to shun the notion that female beauty is equated with fragility and weakness. Pure physical power is stunning.

“Own who you are,” read a T-shirt on the spring 2020 runway of Balmain in Paris. The brand’s creative director, Olivier Rousteing, is known for his focus on inclusiveness in beauty. He, along with Kim Kardashian, has helped popularize the notion of “slim thick,” the 21st-century description of an hourglass figure with adjustments made for athleticism. “Slim thick” describes a woman with a prominent derriere, breasts, and thighs, but with a slim, toned midsection. It’s a body type that has sold countless waist trainers and has been applied to women such as singer and fashion entrepreneur Rihanna who do not have the lean physique of a marathoner.

Slim thick may be just another body type over which women obsess. But it also gives women license to coin a term to describe their own body, turn it into a hashtag, and start counting the likes. Own who you are.

When I look at photographs of groups of women on vacation, or a mother with her child, I see friendship and loyalty, joy and love. I see people who seem exuberant and confident. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to speak with them, I’d find them intelligent and witty or incredibly charismatic. If I got to know them and like them, I’m sure I’d also describe them as beautiful.

If I were to look at a portrait of my mother, I would see one of the most beautiful people in the world—not because of her cheekbones or her neat figure, but because I know her heart.

As a culture, we give lip service to the notion that what matters is inner beauty when in fact it’s the outer version that carries the real social currency. The new outlook on beauty dares us to declare someone we haven’t met beautiful. It forces us to presume the best about people. It asks us to connect with people in a way that is almost childlike in its openness and ease.

Modern beauty doesn’t ask us to come to the table without judgment. It simply asks us to come presuming that everyone in attendance has a right to be there.

Read This Next

• History & Culture

How the Zoot Suit Riots changed America

How barbie’s signature pink took over the world.

• From the Editor

Why we’re examining modern beauty—and how it matters for women

• History Magazine

While Napoleon conquered nations, his sister conquered hearts

• Weird & Wild
• Wildlife Watch
• Wild Cities
• Environment
• Paid Content for Advertiser

History & Culture

• World Heritage
• Mind, Body, Wonder
• Interactive Graphic

Subscriber Exclusive Content

Why are people so dang obsessed with mars, how viruses shape our world, the era of greyhound racing in the u.s. is coming to an end, see how people have imagined life on mars through history, see how nasa’s new mars rover will explore the red planet.

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Beauty

Introduction, anthologies and reference works.

• The Sensuous and Desire
• Beauty and Art
• Beauty and Disinterest
• Beauty and Nature
• Beauty Contested
• Beauty Experienced
• Beauty and Evaluation
• Beauty and Aesthetic Form
• Beauty and Autonomy
• Beauty and the Form of Perfection
• Aesthetic Judgement and Community
• Beauty and Truth
• Beauty and Value Theory
• Beauty and Morality
• Beauty Naturalized

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Aesthetic Hedonism
• Analytic Approaches to Aesthetics
• Analytic Approaches to Pornography and Objectification
• Analytic Philosophy of Music
• Analytic Philosophy of Photography
• Art and Emotion
• Art and Morality
• Environmental Aesthetics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Aesthetics
• History of Aesthetics
• Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics and Teleology
• Ontology of Art
• Susanne Langer

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Pragmatic Encroachment
• Transformative Experience
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations

Beauty by Jennifer A. McMahon LAST REVIEWED: 24 July 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 31 July 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0038

Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found, and how it was to be included in a life were prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments―metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical―and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul that we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment that can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgement by which we exercise the social, comparative, and intersubjective elements of cognition, and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation between mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavors while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation, or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterizes beauty theory prior to the 20th century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. However, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary-inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics, and psychology. Although during the 20th century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning, and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. This work has been funded by an Australian Research Council Grant: DP150103143 (Taste and Community).

Anthologies on beauty that bring together writers who, while they may discuss art, do so in the main only to reveal our capacity for beauty, include the excellent selection of historical readings collected in the one-volume Hofstadter and Kuhns 1976 and the more culturally inclusive collection Cooper 1997 . Recent anthologies on beauty can take the form of a study of aesthetic value, such as in Schaper 1983 , or more specifically on the ethical dimension of aesthetic value, such as in Hagberg 2008 . Reference works in philosophical aesthetics today tend to focus on the philosophy of art and criticism. They typically include one chapter on beauty, and in this context Mothersill 2004 treats beauty as an evaluative category for art; and in keeping with this approach, Mothersill 2009 recommends a historically informed understanding of the concept beauty derived from Hegel. A recent trend toward environmental aesthetics brings us back to beauty as a property of the natural world, as in Zangwill 2003 , while McMahon 2005 responds to empirical trends by treating beauty as a value compatible with naturalization. The comprehensive entry “ Beauty ” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is divided into four parts. It begins with Stephen David Ross’s brief but excellent summary of the history of concepts that underpin beauty theory and philosophical aesthetics more broadly. It is followed by Nickolas Pappas’s dedicated section on classical concepts of beauty, and then Jan A. Aertsen’s section on medieval concepts of beauty. The entry concludes with Nicholas Riggle’s discussion of beauty and love, which introduces contemporary themes to the topic. Guyer 2014 analyzes historical trends in approaches to beauty theory in a way that sets up illuminating contrasts to contemporary perspectives.

“Beauty.” In Abhinavagupta–Byzantine Aesthetics . Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In the course of setting out the historical foundations to the concept beauty, we are provided with an excellent summary of the key concepts that still dominate or underpin philosophical aesthetics, including pleasure, desire, the good, disinterest, taste, value, and love. Available at Oxford Art Online by subscription.

Cooper, David. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings . Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Introductions are provided to some of the classic readings on beauty followed by an extract from the relevant work. They are discussed in terms of their relevance to understanding art rather than value more generally.

Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics . 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Guyer traces the development of key concepts in aesthetics, including beauty, within a context of broader scaled trends, such as aesthetics of truth in the ancient world, aesthetics of emotion and imagination in the 18th century, and aesthetics of meaning and significance in the 20th century.

Hagberg, Garry I., ed. Art and Ethical Criticism . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444302813

A series of papers on the ethical dimension of art, the authors draw out the ethical significance of a particular art/literary/musical work or art form. It is worth noting that the lead essay by Paul Guyer argues that 18th-century writers on beauty did not hold any concepts incompatible with this approach.

Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Well-chosen readings from classic works, with commentary provided, marred occasionally by the editors’ anachronistic emphasis on art. The readings provide a good introduction to various conceptions of beauty as a general value.

McMahon, Jennifer A. “Beauty.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 307–319. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

A historical overview drawing out the contrast between sensuous- and formal/value-oriented approaches to beauty, culminating in the contrast between Freud’s pleasure principle and the constructivist approach of cognitive science.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment: Remapping Aesthetics.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics . Edited by Peter Kivy, 152–166. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

DOI: 10.1002/9780470756645

Setting out the change in focus in philosophical aesthetics between the 19th and 20th century, Mothersill then proceeds to analyze beauty with a view to its significance for understanding aesthetic value in relation to art.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty.” In A Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper, 166–171. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Mothersill considers the contributions made by key historical figures before settling on Hegel’s historicism as providing the most helpful insight for the present context. Available online.

Schaper, Eva, ed. Pleasure, Preference and Value . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

A series of essays by prominent philosophers on the nature of aesthetic value, which are very useful as an introduction to the study of value theory, including essays on taste, pleasure, aesthetic interest, aesthetic realism, and aesthetic objectivity.

Zangwill, Nick. “Beauty.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics . Edited by Jerrold Levinson, 325–343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

An introduction to the tradition of analytic approaches to value theory, beauty is analyzed into its components and relationships, and its status considered in terms of subjectivity and objectivity.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Philosophy »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• A Priori Knowledge
• Abduction and Explanatory Reasoning
• Abstract Objects
• Addams, Jane
• Adorno, Theodor
• Aesthetics, Analytic Approaches to
• Aesthetics, Continental
• Aesthetics, Environmental
• Aesthetics, History of
• African Philosophy, Contemporary
• Alexander, Samuel
• Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
• Anarchism, Philosophical
• Animal Rights
• Anscombe, G. E. M.
• Anthropic Principle, The
• Applied Ethics
• Aquinas, Thomas
• Argument Mapping
• Art and Knowledge
• Astell, Mary
• Aurelius, Marcus
• Austin, J. L.
• Bacon, Francis
• Bayesianism
• Bergson, Henri
• Berkeley, George
• Biology, Philosophy of
• Bolzano, Bernard
• Boredom, Philosophy of
• British Idealism
• Buber, Martin
• Buddhist Philosophy
• Burge, Tyler
• Business Ethics
• Camus, Albert
• Canterbury, Anselm of
• Carnap, Rudolf
• Cavendish, Margaret
• Chemistry, Philosophy of
• Childhood, Philosophy of
• Chinese Philosophy
• Cognitive Ability
• Cognitive Phenomenology
• Cognitive Science, Philosophy of
• Coherentism
• Communitarianism
• Computational Science
• Computer Science, Philosophy of
• Computer Simulations
• Comte, Auguste
• Conceptual Role Semantics
• Conditionals
• Confirmation
• Connectionism
• Consciousness
• Constructive Empiricism
• Contemporary Hylomorphism
• Contextualism
• Contrastivism
• Cook Wilson, John
• Cosmology, Philosophy of
• Critical Theory
• Culture and Cognition
• Daoism and Philosophy
• Davidson, Donald
• de Beauvoir, Simone
• de Montaigne, Michel
• Decision Theory
• Deleuze, Gilles
• Derrida, Jacques
• Descartes, René
• Descartes, René: Sensory Representations
• Descriptions
• Dewey, John
• Dialetheism
• Disagreement, Epistemology of
• Disjunctivism
• Dispositions
• Divine Command Theory
• Doing and Allowing
• du Châtelet, Emilie
• Dummett, Michael
• Dutch Book Arguments
• Early Modern Philosophy, 1600-1750
• Eastern Orthodox Philosophical Thought
• Education, Philosophy of
• Engineering, Philosophy and Ethics of
• Environmental Philosophy
• Epistemic Basing Relation
• Epistemic Defeat
• Epistemic Injustice
• Epistemic Justification
• Epistemic Philosophy of Logic
• Epistemology
• Epistemology and Active Externalism
• Epistemology, Bayesian
• Epistemology, Feminist
• Epistemology, Internalism and Externalism in
• Epistemology, Moral
• Epistemology of Education
• Ethical Consequentialism
• Ethical Deontology
• Ethical Intuitionism
• Eugenics and Philosophy
• Events, The Philosophy of
• Evidence-Based Medicine, Philosophy of
• Evidential Support Relation In Epistemology, The
• Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Ethics
• Evolutionary Epistemology
• Experimental Philosophy
• Explanations of Religion
• Extended Mind Thesis, The
• Externalism and Internalism in the Philosophy of Mind
• Faith, Conceptions of
• Feminist Philosophy
• Feyerabend, Paul
• Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
• Fictionalism
• Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
• Film, Philosophy of
• Foot, Philippa
• Foreknowledge
• Forgiveness
• Formal Epistemology
• Foucault, Michel
• Frege, Gottlob
• Gadamer, Hans-Georg
• Geometry, Epistemology of
• God and Possible Worlds
• God, Arguments for the Existence of
• God, The Existence and Attributes of
• Grice, Paul
• Habermas, Jürgen
• Hart, H. L. A.
• Heaven and Hell
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Aesthetics
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Metaphysics
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Philosophy of History
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Philosophy of Politics
• Heidegger, Martin: Early Works
• Hermeneutics
• Higher Education, Philosophy of
• History, Philosophy of
• Hobbes, Thomas
• Horkheimer, Max
• Human Rights
• Hume, David: Aesthetics
• Hume, David: Moral and Political Philosophy
• Husserl, Edmund
• Idealizations in Science
• Identity in Physics
• Imagination
• Imagination and Belief
• Impossible Worlds
• Incommensurability in Science
• Indian Philosophy
• Indispensability of Mathematics
• Inductive Reasoning
• Instruments in Science
• Intellectual Humility
• Intentionality, Collective
• James, William
• Japanese Philosophy
• Kant and the Laws of Nature
• Kant, Immanuel: Aesthetics and Teleology
• Kant, Immanuel: Ethics
• Kant, Immanuel: Theoretical Philosophy
• Kierkegaard, Søren
• Knowledge-first Epistemology
• Knowledge-How
• Kuhn, Thomas S.
• Lacan, Jacques
• Lakatos, Imre
• Langer, Susanne
• Language of Thought
• Language, Philosophy of
• Latin American Philosophy
• Laws of Nature
• Legal Epistemology
• Legal Philosophy
• Legal Positivism
• Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
• Levinas, Emmanuel
• Lewis, C. I.
• Literature, Philosophy of
• Locke, John
• Locke, John: Identity, Persons, and Personal Identity
• Lottery and Preface Paradoxes, The
• Machiavelli, Niccolò
• Martin Heidegger: Later Works
• Martin Heidegger: Middle Works
• Material Constitution
• Mathematical Explanation
• Mathematical Pluralism
• Mathematical Structuralism
• Mathematics, Ontology of
• Mathematics, Philosophy of
• Mathematics, Visual Thinking in
• McDowell, John
• McTaggart, John
• Meaning of Life, The
• Mechanisms in Science
• Medically Assisted Dying
• Medicine, Contemporary Philosophy of
• Medieval Logic
• Medieval Philosophy
• Mental Causation
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
• Meta-epistemological Skepticism
• Metaepistemology
• Metametaphysics
• Metaphilosophy
• Metaphysical Grounding
• Metaphysics, Contemporary
• Metaphysics, Feminist
• Midgley, Mary
• Mill, John Stuart
• Mind, Metaphysics of
• Modal Epistemology
• Models and Theories in Science
• Montesquieu
• Moore, G. E.
• Moral Contractualism
• Moral Naturalism and Nonnaturalism
• Moral Responsibility
• Multiculturalism
• Murdoch, Iris
• Music, Analytic Philosophy of
• Nationalism
• Natural Kinds
• Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
• Naïve Realism
• Neo-Confucianism
• Neuroscience, Philosophy of
• Nietzsche, Friedrich
• Nonexistent Objects
• Normative Ethics
• Normative Foundations, Philosophy of Law:
• Normativity and Social Explanation
• Objectivity
• Occasionalism
• Ontological Dependence
• Ordinary Objects
• Other Minds
• Panpsychism
• Particularism in Ethics
• Pascal, Blaise
• Paternalism
• Peirce, Charles Sanders
• Perception, Cognition, Action
• Perception, The Problem of
• Perfectionism
• Persistence
• Personal Identity
• Phenomenal Concepts
• Phenomenal Conservatism
• Phenomenology
• Philosophy for Children
• Photography, Analytic Philosophy of
• Physicalism
• Physicalism and Metaphysical Naturalism
• Physics, Experiments in
• Political Epistemology
• Political Obligation
• Political Philosophy
• Popper, Karl
• Pornography and Objectification, Analytic Approaches to
• Practical Knowledge
• Practical Moral Skepticism
• Practical Reason
• Probabilistic Representations of Belief
• Probability, Interpretations of
• Problem of Divine Hiddenness, The
• Problem of Evil, The
• Propositions
• Psychology, Philosophy of
• Quine, W. V. O.
• Racist Jokes
• Rationalism
• Rationality
• Rawls, John: Moral and Political Philosophy
• Realism and Anti-Realism
• Realization
• Reasons in Epistemology
• Reductionism in Biology
• Reference, Theory of
• Reid, Thomas
• Reliabilism
• Religion, Philosophy of
• Religious Belief, Epistemology of
• Religious Experience
• Religious Pluralism
• Ricoeur, Paul
• Risk, Philosophy of
• Rorty, Richard
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
• Rule-Following
• Russell, Bertrand
• Ryle, Gilbert
• Sartre, Jean-Paul
• Schopenhauer, Arthur
• Science and Religion
• Science, Theoretical Virtues in
• Scientific Explanation
• Scientific Progress
• Scientific Realism
• Scientific Representation
• Scientific Revolutions
• Scotus, Duns
• Self-Knowledge
• Sellars, Wilfrid
• Semantic Externalism
• Semantic Minimalism
• Senses, The
• Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology
• Singular Thought
• Situated Cognition
• Situationism and Virtue Theory
• Skepticism, Contemporary
• Skepticism, History of
• Slurs, Pejoratives, and Hate Speech
• Smith, Adam: Moral and Political Philosophy
• Social Aspects of Scientific Knowledge
• Social Epistemology
• Social Identity
• Sounds and Auditory Perception
• Space and Time
• Speech Acts
• Spinoza, Baruch
• Stebbing, Susan
• Strawson, P. F.
• Structural Realism
• Supererogation
• Supervenience
• Tarski, Alfred
• Technology, Philosophy of
• Testimony, Epistemology of
• Theoretical Terms in Science
• Thomas Aquinas' Philosophy of Religion
• Thought Experiments
• Time and Tense
• Time Travel
• Transcendental Arguments
• Truth and the Aim of Belief
• Truthmaking
• Turing Test
• Two-Dimensional Semantics
• Understanding
• Uniqueness and Permissiveness in Epistemology
• Utilitarianism
• Value of Knowledge
• Vienna Circle
• Virtue Epistemology
• Virtue Ethics
• Virtues, Epistemic
• Virtues, Intellectual
• Voluntarism, Doxastic
• Weakness of Will
• Weil, Simone
• William of Ockham
• Williams, Bernard
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Early Works
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Later Works
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Middle Works
• Wollstonecraft, Mary
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|162.248.224.4]
• 162.248.224.4

Essay About Beauty: What Is Beautiful For You?

We hear this word very often in our life, but we even do not think, what does it mean. We used to think, that it is something, that everyone like and that is all. If we ask any person what is beauty for him, he can name a lot of things, but it will be very difficult to explain, why he considers that they are beautiful.

What Beauty For You mean ?

The definition of the word “beauty” is an aesthetically pleasing feature of an object or a person. The word “beauty” holds a distinctive positive meaning if applied to a person. It means that the character or the physical appearance of said individual is considered as beautiful in the speaker’s opinion. The definition of beauty is usually considered as subjective.

If we speak in general, when you see something and you are glad to see it, then we can say, that it is beautiful. There is no matter it it is the field with the flowers or the exotic bird, it is the beauty for us.

But the definition of the beauty is different for everyone, because everyone has his/her own point of view and all people are different, because of it they cannot like the same things. Also, it depends on the culture and on the level of the development of the person. For example, some men like blond women, but some of them just hate when the woman has blond hair. There can be a lot of discussions about personal point of view of every person and there will not be the winner. If your teacher asked you to write the beauty definition essay and you do not know where to start from, you can place the order on our site and we will write this essay for you. You can be sure, that you will get the high quality paper, because we have only professional writers with the great experience.

This example can be also connected with the clothes. For example, you like something in the shop and you think, that it is really beautiful and can be even your favorite one, but at the same time, your friend can say, that this thing is awful and she does not understand how you can even think to purchase it. It should not be like a shock, because it is just the personal statement and as all people are different, it is normal that they all think in the different way and have different point of view.

There are a lot of examples of the beauty which we can meet in our world. Even if we look through the history, we will see, that people liked to be the slaves of the beauty during many generations. But if there was one person, who showed the other point of view, the society did not accept him, but it was only the fact, that this person is individual and did not think like the other people.

The definition of the word “beauty” is an aesthetically pleasing feature of an object or a person. This word holds a distinctive positive meaning if applied to a person. It means that the character or the physical appearance of said individual is considered as attractive in the speaker’s opinion.

How to correctly define the meaning of beauty.

Everyone today can look up the word “beauty” in a dictionary and get to know its definition. But what about the concept itself? Why is it often said that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder? This article will help you understand why beauty is so ephemeral.

If you ask anyone about what they can consider as beautiful, you will get an uncountable number of answers. Sure, some of them would sound similar, but the fundamental reasoning behind them would hugely differ from each other. For example, the beauty standards for men and women underwent a significant change throughout the existence of humankind.

As they say – for each their own. Many kinds of material or spiritual events, objects, or even their aesthetic can be considered beautiful for different personal reasons, views, or opinions. Even if two people like the same thing, it is not always the case that they consider it as likable for the same reasons.

Every single person in the world is unique and has his or her own set of experiences, beliefs, or principles. Each human possesses a distinctive and intricate identity, which is impossible to classify by any means one can come up with.

The only thing you can truly figure out for sure is that every similarity between human personalities is only superficial.

Here we provided you with a short list of what may be distinguished as beautiful. This will help you understand the point that we are trying to make in this article.

• The external features of the human body. There is no need to explain how much consideration every person gives to this subject. The skin tone, hair color, or even the quantity of a body fat one can be thoroughly examined by a lot of people to decide if the person in question is beautiful or not.
• Any characteristic that can be applied to a physical object. Its shape, color, softness, hardness, or transparency can be measured and judged as pleasing to the senses or hideous and ugly.
• Such an intangible thing as sound can also be beautiful. If you hear a delicate and alluring melody, you would state that it is definitely more beautiful than the sound of nails on the chalkboard.
• The aesthetic of any kind is, without a doubt, belongs to the category of things that can be acknowledged as grand and wonderful.

This is just a small portion from a wide variety of instances where the idea of beauty can be implemented.

The inner beauty

What is the inner beauty.

A lot of people can even forget, that the important role plays not only beautiful body, but the beautiful soul too. It is impossible to have a lot of beautiful clothes, but at that time to forget, that all we are human. And it is impossible to say, that one person is better that the other one. It is not true. We all are different, and it is very good, because if we were the same, we would not try to develop ourselves in the best way and we would not want to change our life. If you wish to get the inner beauty essay, you can order it on our site and we will be glad to create the best essay with all detailed information you wish to know. Also, you will be really surprised because of our prices. You can just check our site and you will be able to see the examples of our essays on the different topics. We hope, that you will find the needed information there. Also, you can order the essay on any other theme on our site. It will be a pleasure for us to do it for you.

The main sides of the inner beauty

• When people are very kind to other people or animals
• They are ready for help other people
• These people are open to the whole world
• High IQ level
• You can see, that they are honest .

What can you get?

The beauty plays a very big role exactly for women. It is believed, that if the woman is beauty, she can have a good husband and the great job. If the girl would like to be a model, it is needed to be beautiful, because everyone will see you and you will be famous. Also, if the woman would like to get, for example, the position of the secretary in some huge and famous company, it means that she should be beautiful, because she will be “ the face” of the company and she will meet a lot of people.

The health and the beauty

Do not you notice, that people, which are healthy, are beautiful? These people are very attractive for the society. They do not need to use a lot of cosmetics or to purchase expensive and brand clothes. They do some physical exercises and just eat healthy food , because of it they are beautiful. It is very important to understand, that the beauty starts inside of you and only you are responsible for it.

There are a lot of definitions, which are connected with the beauty. For example: beautiful life, natural beauty, beautiful soul, which you cannot hide from the other people. But everyone should understand, that there is no need just to follow the other people, it is needed to find something that you really like and to find the definition of the beauty which will be exactly for you. And then, even the things, which are usual, will be beautiful. We are sure, that this 5 paragraph essay on beauty will help you to understand this world better and will help you not just to follow the ideals, which people created, but to find your own definition of the beauty, that you will use for the whole life.

Calculate Your Price

Get a nice discount for your first order.

Make your first order and get the ability to save some money. 17% discount is for you!

Place your order right now and forget about your worries with writing.

Receive 17% off discount, keep in touch.

If you have any questions or offers to improve our service, you are welcome to contact us following the form below. We are looking forward to your messages, as we are always in touch with our customers!

• testimonials
• Personal letter
• Alphabetizer
• Personal Statement
• SOP Writing
• Hire to do homework
• English homework
• Annotated Bibliograph
• Pay for homework
• Coursework Writing
• Academic Writing
• Average GPA
• Economic Essay
• Capstone Project
• Marketing Plan
• Graduate Paper
• Do my homework
• Book Review
• Thesis Editing
• Rewrite Service
• Take My Online Class
• Essay Revision Service
• Research Paper Rewriter
• Do My College Assignment
• Do My Assignments For Me
• Online Proofreading Service
• Help With Academic Writing
• Do My Assignment For Money
• Academic Proofreading Online
• Online Essay Editor & Fixer
• English Homework Help Online
• Professional Proofreading Services
• Professional Dissertation Writing Company
• Custom Research Paper Writing Service

© Copyright 2023 by professional college essay writing service.com All rights reserved

Tired of endless home tasks on quarantine? No more worries!

Use your limited chance to get a special 22% OFF!

Apply the code "stayhome" while placing your order and enjoy the outstanding results!

Sample details

Related topics.

• Life Changing Experience
• Determination
• Opportunity
• Helping Others
• Meaning Of Life
• Armenian Genocide
• Reconstruction
• Difficulties

The Beauty of Life

Grammar mistakes

Redundant words

Readability

The admiration of beauty is a fundamental characteristic in humans that has been evident since ancient times. By means of artistic expressions, humans attempt to capture and communicate the delight that beauty brings. Individuals value and treasure the pleasing aspects of life. Our ability to imagine enables us to reexperience and feel the joy that arises from being encompassed by beauty. Nature itself serves as a plentiful wellspring of beauty, which motivates both poets and painters.

People deeply value the creations of sculptors, architects, and musicians. When comparing beauty that is spiritual in nature to physical beauty, many view the former as a higher and more noble expression. Even individuals who typically have a pessimistic outlook can have their spirits lifted by the awe-inspiring aspects found in nature. Beauty acts as a bridge connecting humanity with eternity, offering everlasting joy through objects or experiences that embody it. The concept of life’s worth pertains to its economic value, whether it applies to life in general or specific living beings. Within the realms of social and political sciences, this notion encompasses the cost required to prevent death within particular circumstances.

The value of life, as a statistical term, refers to the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. This concept holds significance in several fields such as economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, and globalization. Without the need for practitioners in these disciplines to precisely calculate this value in a quantitative manner, discussions regarding the worth of life would primarily occur within university philosophy departments and religious groups.

The belief that assigning a monetary value to human life is inhumane is shared by many, as each life is considered invaluable. However, in cases where resources or infrastructure are limited (such as scarcity of ambulances or shortage of skilled personnel), it becomes impractical to save every life and compromises must be made. This argument also fails to consider the statistical context in which this term is used. It is not usually employed to evaluate individuals’ worth or compare one person’s life with another’s. Instead, its primary application relates to situations involving saving lives rather than taking them or “creating” them.

Cite this page

https://graduateway.com/the-beauty-of-life-essay/

You can get a custom paper by one of our expert writers

• Values of Life
• Locus of control
• Stereotypes
• Decision Making
• Quality of life

Check more samples on your topics

Pied beauty, indicates the variety of beauty.

Alliteration

"The poem, titled 'Pied Beauty,' serves as both a hymn and a partial sonnet, initially aiming to exalt God for the wondrous diversity found in the world. The use of the word 'pied' highlights the various shades of color that ultimately lead to a multitude of forms of beauty. This notion of myriad beauty is

Stockholm Syndrome in Beauty and the Beast Short Summary

Since the 1700's, fairy tales have undergone changes and acquired different meanings. The Disney adaptations of these stories are usually favored for children as they remove the violence, sexualization, and objectification found in the original versions. Nevertheless, both the modified and authentic renditions of fairy tales convey a shared message. In "Beauty and the Beast,"

Pied Beauty and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge Analysis

Poetry Analysis of 'Pied Beauty' and 'Composed Upon Wesminster Bridge' Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins and the Sonnet: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth, both show the beauty of life and the world around us. The only difference is that the petrarchan Sonnet written by Wordsworth is thanking God for the beauty of

Beauty Pageants- Helpful or Harmful?

Beauty pageant

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. - Rachel Carson The issue whether beauty pageants help or hurt

Beauty Contests: Good or Bad?

A beauty contest is a competition in which the entrants, usually women, are judged as to physical beauty and sometimes talent, with the winners awarded prizes or titles. There are several disputes over the affects of beauty contests, but in reality beauty contests give negative images to girls of all ages. Beauty contests build up

Dark Side of Beauty Pageants

The Dark Side of Beauty Pageants With their glamour, expensive dresses, jewels and, big fake smiles, beauty pageant contestants are just hiding their true personalities under materialistic things. People may say that beauty pageants aren’t always about looks. The contestants are scored on beauty, personality, evening wear, athletic wear and over all perception of the

Persuasive on Beauty Pageants

These role-models proved to the younger girls that external beauty as not everything, and that internal beauty would benefit them greatly in many aspects of their futures. As the competitions have grown, the pageants have become more intense with contestants willing to do anything in order to gain advantage over the other girls. With everyone

Abstract On Beauty Pagents

Amanda Sobczak The Not-So-Beautiful Pageant: A deeper look into the expectations and ramifications of beauty pageants on today’s contestants and society. FA11 DE BINT 501 (03) PAPER TYPE: Analytical and Argumentative THESIS STATEMENT: This paper will track the evolution of beauty contests from the very beginning and analyze the societal consequences that have resulted in

The Beauty and Tragedy of Childhood: A Review of “All Summer in a Day”

All Summer in a Day

Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" is a poignant and powerful story that explores the beauty and tragedy of childhood. The story takes place on Venus, where the sun only appears once every seven years. The children in the story have never seen the sun, except for one child, Margot, who remembers it from

Hi, my name is Amy 👋

In case you can't find a relevant example, our professional writers are ready to help you write a unique paper. Just talk to our smart assistant Amy and she'll connect you with the best match.

Essay On Life is Beautiful For Students

Table of Contents

Life is beautiful, but it’s also full of struggle and pain. How do we deal with that? In this essay I discuss the concept of life and how it can be both beautiful and ugly at the same time.

Life is Beautiful Essay For Students

We all experience beauty in different ways. For some, it may be the beauty of the natural world. For others, it may be the beauty of art or architecture. For still others, it may be the beauty of a loved one. But no matter what form it takes, beauty is always something to be appreciated.

And that’s why we at Life is Beautiful believe that life is beautiful. Every moment should be lived to its fullest and embraced for what it is – a chance to experience happiness and joy. So let go of anything that’s holding you back and live life to the fullest!

Why Life is Beautiful?

There’s something about life that is just so beautiful. Whether it’s the way a flower unfolds its petals in the sunlight, or the smile on a child’s face, there’s something magical about it all. And there’s no better place to see this beauty than right here in nature .

1. Happiness

If you’re looking for a positive outlook on life, look no further than the blog section of Life is Beautiful. Here, you’ll find inspiring stories and photos that will help brighten your day. Whether you’re feeling down about your current situation or just need a pick-me-up, these blogs will definitely put a smile on your face. So go ahead and take a deep breath – life is beautiful, after all!

2. Contradictions

Life can be beautiful and perfect, or it can be harsh and terrible. It all depends on your perspective. We all have our own set of beliefs and opinions, which can make our lives seem either great or terrible. But as long as we remember that life is always changing, and that nothing is permanent, we can enjoy the beauty in both the good and bad times.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this article on the life-changing effects of practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness has been shown to be one of the most important pillars of happiness and well-being, and as we’ve seen in this article, it can also be a very simple practice that anyone can embrace. Whether you’re looking to reduce stress levels or simply find a way to live more fully in the present moment, mindfulness is an invaluable tool. Keep up the good work, and remember: life is beautiful.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

Related Posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Forgotten password

Please enter the email address that you use to login to TeenInk.com, and we'll email you instructions to reset your password.

• Poetry All Poetry Free Verse Song Lyrics Sonnet Haiku Limerick Ballad
• Fiction All Fiction Action-Adventure Fan Fiction Historical Fiction Realistic Fiction Romance Sci-fi/Fantasy Scripts & Plays Thriller/Mystery All Novels Action-Adventure Fan Fiction Historical Fiction Realistic Fiction Romance Sci-fi/Fantasy Thriller/Mystery Other
• Nonfiction All Nonfiction Bullying Books Academic Author Interviews Celebrity interviews College Articles College Essays Educator of the Year Heroes Interviews Memoir Personal Experience Sports Travel & Culture All Opinions Bullying Current Events / Politics Discrimination Drugs / Alcohol / Smoking Entertainment / Celebrities Environment Love / Relationships Movies / Music / TV Pop Culture / Trends School / College Social Issues / Civics Spirituality / Religion Sports / Hobbies All Hot Topics Bullying Community Service Environment Health Letters to the Editor Pride & Prejudice What Matters
• Reviews All Reviews Hot New Books Book Reviews Music Reviews Movie Reviews TV Show Reviews Video Game Reviews Summer Program Reviews College Reviews
• Art/Photo Art Photo Videos
• Summer Guide Program Links Program Reviews
• College Guide College Links College Reviews College Essays College Articles

Summer Guide

• College Guide
• Song Lyrics

All Fiction

• Action-Adventure
• Fan Fiction
• Historical Fiction
• Realistic Fiction
• Sci-fi/Fantasy
• Scripts & Plays
• Thriller/Mystery

All Nonfiction

• Author Interviews
• Celebrity interviews
• College Articles
• College Essays
• Educator of the Year
• Personal Experience
• Travel & Culture

All Opinions

• Current Events / Politics
• Discrimination
• Drugs / Alcohol / Smoking
• Entertainment / Celebrities
• Environment
• Love / Relationships
• Movies / Music / TV
• Pop Culture / Trends
• School / College
• Social Issues / Civics
• Spirituality / Religion
• Sports / Hobbies

All Hot Topics

• Community Service
• Letters to the Editor
• Pride & Prejudice
• What Matters

All Reviews

• Hot New Books
• Book Reviews
• Music Reviews
• Movie Reviews
• TV Show Reviews
• Video Game Reviews

Summer Program Reviews

• College Reviews
• Writers Workshop
• Regular Forums
• Program Links
• Program Reviews
• College Links

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!

Favorite Quote: "You ONLY LIVE ONCE" "RUMORS ARE SPREADED BY HATERS, CARRIED BY FOOLS AND ACCEPTED BY IDIOTS!" "EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL"

Life is beautiful, but not always. It has lots of problems you have to face everyday. Don't worry though! All these problems make you strong, it gives you courage to stand alone in future. Life is full of moments of joy, pleasure, success and comfort punctuated by misery, defeat, failures and problems. There is no human being on Earth, strong, powerful, wise or rich, who has not experienced, struggle, suffering or failure. You have to work hard to reach to the highest position. Life is full of paths, you just have to choose the right one. Life is interesting and amazing like the stars up in the skies. With no doubt, Life is beautiful and full of celebrations. However you should always be ready to face adversity and challenges. There are difficult situations in life as well.Be careful!! You might get hurt too hard. Life is sometimes too selfish to think about yourself. Then life is too hard to handle. Falling in love! People tend to fall in love nowadays but i personally think the right time has to come... You might also get hurt in Love. You might be broken-hearted as the people say. Life is the place where people treat everyone differently, racism exists as well as bullying. People tend to say bad stuff behind people's back. There are millions of people using horrible words to call people, People use people everyday. Life is not that easy in my view. Sometimes, all you want to do is sit alone and question yourself with hundred of questions . Am I ugly as the people say? Why don't i have any friends? Why is the world so hard to live in? What do i look like in other peoples eyes? Why don't i have the same colour of the skin as everyone else? :'( :'( How can i make others happy? The questions does not stop. You ask those questions over and over again. When you don't have any answers, you want to scream out loud or cry. Bullying? Racism? What are all these?, I don't understand what people get from making others unhappy and upset. Every single one of you there in the world have your own beauty. EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL! So don't sit there saying i'm ugly say i'm PRETTY or HANDSOME, Damnn care about what people say. "RUMORS ARE SPREADED BY HATERS, CARRIED BY FOOLS AND ACCEPTED BY IDIOT!" Treat people the way they treat you! Be strong and face these saddo people around the world. Haters are always around you. but it doesn't matter cause they are the ones who make you famous. So what? If you're not beautiful, pretty, you have life and thats the most of it. Not everyone gets to live and those who do are sooo lucky! People die, life changes, people come and go but guess what you have to go with it however much it hurts . You miss people who were in your life, that's the way they remind you that they still exist in your life. I know the feeling of that, I miss my handsome uncle as well but i know we can never meet again. I know he is not here anymore, So what i will still love him the most in my life. People say forget the past, life in present and save the future for tomorrow. I think that is true, but i cannot forget my past, it has all those beautiful moments which mean the world to me. It is the hardest thing but i just try try try and try. Don't give up or lose hope on anything. Live your life however you want Have fun! Dance as much you want! Take risks.. Trust yourself. Believe in yourself.... Damn care about haters! There is so much to do so stop faffing about. Life is too short to save it for tomorrow. Don't give up and Hope always! Love Forever!! Do what your heart says... DREAM AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE AND MAKE IT TRUE! YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE SO MAKE THE MOST OF IT ! <3 Learn lessons from the mistakes.... From this i learned awful a lot things. I started to enjoy life instead of listening to sad songs and sitting alone. Happiness came into my life but there is sadness as well. Everyday i used to dress in dull clothes now i love colours i used to hate going out of my house but guess what all these sound outside sounds attractive than sad songs. Rock music is what i listen to now, sometimes sad as well All things in life depends on what your mood and the situation.

Similar Articles

Join the discussion.

This article has 7 comments.

• Subscribe to Teen Ink magazine
• Submit to Teen Ink
• Find A College
• Find a Summer Program

Share this on

Send to a friend.

Thank you for sharing this page with a friend!

Tell my friends

Choose what to email.

Which of your works would you like to tell your friends about? (These links will automatically appear in your email.)

Send your email

Delete my account, we hate to see you go please note as per our terms and conditions, you agreed that all materials submitted become the property of teen ink. going forward, your work will remain on teenink.com submitted “by anonymous.”, delete this, change anonymous status, send us site feedback.

If you have a suggestion about this website or are experiencing a problem with it, or if you need to report abuse on the site, please let us know. We try to make TeenInk.com the best site it can be, and we take your feedback very seriously. Please note that while we value your input, we cannot respond to every message. Also, if you have a comment about a particular piece of work on this website, please go to the page where that work is displayed and post a comment on it. Thank you!

Pardon Our Dust

Teen Ink is currently undergoing repairs to our image server. In addition to being unable to display images, we cannot currently accept image submissions. All other parts of the website are functioning normally. Please check back to submit your art and photography and to enjoy work from teen artists around the world!

Short Essay On Life Is Beautiful

Evelyn white women.

“Each house-hunting trip I’ve made to the countryside has been fraught with two emotions: elation at the prospect of living closer to nature and a sense of absolute doom at what might befall me in the backwoods” (White 1064). In her essay, “Black Women and the Wilderness, Evelyn White describes her contradictory feelings about nature, and throughout her text, her experiences display a very complex perspective of nature. Raymond Williams, in his article, “Nature” describes the word ‘nature’ as the most complex word in language (Williams 219). When referring nature, people generally think of it representing something of peace, comfort, and a place where most can feel safe, almost as if it were a home. White revises our understanding of nature

Calypso Borealis 'And I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud'

Nature is undeniably beautiful. There is something so angelic about the way it surrounds us everywhere we go. Nature is essential to life. "The Calypso Borealis," an essay by John Muir, and William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," both describe their perspectives and mood towards nature. Nature highly impacts both these authors according to their writings. Nature gives them a sense of hopefulness and encouragement when they are burdened with problems.

Similarities Between Their Eyes Were Watching God And The Great Gatsby

Satisfaction is unreachable. There will always be a desire for more. For something that seems impossible. Yet one still strive towards it. The novels, Their Eyes were Watching God and The Great Gatsby, there were many characters that were affected by their desires. From each, there were characters that ruminate over their ambitions, like Gatsby and Jody. Each one of them though also had somebody they were affecting such as, Daisy and Janie. In The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick, told us about Gatsby’s life through his eyes. Their Eyes were Watching God also had many ambitions intertwined within. It is shown through Janie’s perspective who has a single ambition. To

Essay On Life Review

This paper describes and analyzes a life review interview with an older adult. The purpose of this paper is to discuss, record and reflect on an older adult’s life in order to evaluate them on the last stage of Erik Erickson’s theory of psychosocial development; integrity versus despair. This paper will also focus on the elements of a life review as well as the reflections of the interview on the part of the author.

Ambition In Shakespeare's Macbeth

In today’s society many people possess strong ambition when it comes to getting a job, following a passion and being immensely successful in life. Having an abundance of aspirations can have both successful and faulty outcomes depending on the situation and how individuals respond to the circumstance. For example, in the play **Macbeth written by Shakespeare, a prime example of an excessive amount of ambition is displayed through both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s actions. Essentially, Macbeth becomes power hungry and goes on a rampant killing spree that causes Lady Macbeth and Macbeth to be overcome with guilt. They both contain an excessive amount of desires due to their ultimate goal being for Macbeth to be crowned king. However, throughout

Joyce Carol Oates Against Nature Analysis

Nature is easily projected onto, as it allows for a sense of peacefulness and escapism. Due to its ability to evoke an emotional reaction from the masses, many writers have glorified it through various methods, including describing its endless beauty and utilizing it as a symbol for spirituality. Along with authors, artists also show great respect and admiration for nature through paintings of grandiose landscapes. These tributes disseminate a fixed interpretation of the natural world, one full of meaning and other worldly connections. In “Against Nature,” Joyce Carol Oates strips away this guise given to the environment and replaces it with a harsher reality. To her, it is superficial and only has overlying positive associations because humans

Ralph Waldo Emerson Use Of Metaphors

Nature is a beautiful component of planet earth which most of us are fortunate to experience; Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about his passion towards the great outdoors in a passage called Nature. Emerson employs metaphors and analogies to portray his emotions towards nature. Emerson begins by writing, “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.” , this is a metaphor for how we think; all our knowledge is based on what is recorded in the olden days and a majority of our experiences are vicarious instead of firsthand encounters. Additionally, Emerson says, “why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” This metaphor portrays how people hide

False Idyll Analysis

Many people who go into nature always see it as something beautiful and aesthetic, but they never see the other side to nature. Humankind’s connection with nature isn’t a real one. They always look at the bright side of nature but are blind to the true dark side of nature. JB MacKinnon’s article “False Idyll” (2012), reveals that nature is not just flowers in a field but can also be the survival of the fittest. He backs up his claim by talking about nature through anecdotes and expert’s research. MacKinnon’s purpose to have people open their eyes and not be closed minded towards nature. The author's intention is to have environmental experts and college educated people interested in the wildlife read his article on the different perspectives

Examples Of Ambition In Macbeth

The road to a fatal outcome can be observed through many different qualities but excessive ambition is one of the main downfalls for most of us in society. Evil motivation due to uncontrollable and unnecessarily high ambition produces difficult obstacles in our lives. We could also become blind to making the right and moral decisions when our ambition is unrestrained. Additionally, all of the paths and routes for immoderate ambition leads to destruction and disorder. Another important note to keep in mind is that chaos and complications will be rooted from not only extravagant ambition but also poor decision making. The choices we make reflect ourselves and represents what we have been through with our lives and what experiences we have with certain areas in life. In the play Macbeth, William Shakespeare uses the concept of ambition to explore its impact on Macbeth’s personality and thoughts.

Ode To Enchanted Forest Analysis

The world has yet to know “its” true secrets and dive deeper under the mask of perception. Though we may feel like nature is throwing karma at us at times, we continue to honor nature for its patience. In the poems, “Ode to Enchanted Light” by Pablo Neruda and “Sleeping in the Forest” by Mary Oliver, both of the literary works share an appreciation for nature. Though this is true for both, they express their love and feelings differently. Pablo Neruda’s poem praises light as enchanting, whereas Mary Oliver’s poem personifies Earth as a motherly figure and gives off mother nature vibes. The earth seems to comfort the speaker as they go through a series of gentle, calm events to help them sleep. Although both poems glorify nature, one specifically celebrates light while the other shares the speaker’s relationship with the earth. Both poems perform different methods to evaluate and share its purpose.

Film Analysis: Silver Linings Playbook

Throughout the course of one’s life, there is a constant search for some form of happiness. We may not always realize we are on the quest for it, but it’s part of human nature.

Roger Scruton Why Beauty Matters Summary

In his documentary film “why beauty matters” English philosopher Roger Scruton introduces the idea of beauty is disappearing from our world. The philosopher implies, that Art has become ugly, as well as our physical surroundings, manners, language, and music. Nowadays, the main aim of art is to disturb and break moral taboos. It has now lost its initial duty and is used to show solely the ugliness of our world, instead of taking what is most painful in the human condition and redeeming it in the work of beauty. What according to Scruton is the main purpose of art.

Life Essay: What Is The Value Of Life

What is the value of life? To me the value of life is cherishing every moment that comes to me. To make sure with every experience to take it to heart and learn some kind of lesson out of it. life is like a mountain, at certain points throughout the climb it is going to be really tough mentally and emotionally. Other times it’s going to be so easy fun and smoothe until… one hits that bump in the road again. We may think to ourselves the only option is to give up, to stop the climb and lose all complete motivation to continue. That’s when the friends and family are there to help us, to pick us up, and to help motivate us to continue the climb.

Compare The World Is Too Much With Us And I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

Nature is a pure and natural source of renewal, according to Romantics who frequently emphasized the glory and beauty of nature throughout the Romantic period. Poets, artists, writers, and philosophers all believe the natural world can provide healthy emotions and morals. William Wordsworth, a notorious Romantic poet, circles many of his poems around nature and its power including his “The World is Too Much With Us” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” At first glance, the two poems seem alike, with many parallels corresponding to the importance of nature and its impact on human beings. Although both poems have different tonal approaches, they both come to the same conclusion that nature is a necessity to all human beings.

Definition Essay On A Good Life

Human beings, since their apparition is often misleading, what it is really mean a good life. We have been seen on the television or magazines that having a good life means being rich or famous when many of them, in reality, are miserable by a problem that wouldn’t affect ordinary people. Personally, I believe that there are many factors that should be considered when it comes to a good life. So a good life can be understood in at least six ways.

More about Short Essay On Life Is Beautiful

Related topics.

• Abigail May Alcott Nieriker
• Louisa May Alcott
• Amos Bronson Alcott
• Orchard House
• Unconditional Love
• Relationship

Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach

Introduction, the beginning of life, replication, organic component, works cited.

Life is a beautiful thing. However, the beauty of life is usually analyzed in a few basic physical factors without the incorporation of our basic human form. Socially, the beauty of life is analyzed from a general point of view like human relationships, love, generosity, material enjoyment, magnificent landmarks, the physical human form, and the likes. Little emphasis is based on the scientific beauty of life. Science can effectively explain the beauty of life in many ways than one. Its analysis is also deep and can effectively be used by many people to understand themselves and how they are structured (Coe 12).

The scientific point of view analyses the beginning of life from the evolution point of view and more specifically Darwin’s theory. In the analysis of the beauty of life, this study will undertake four approaches to life. These are replication, metabolism, organic matter, and the brain. These are among the most important facets of human existence and in their absence; life would seize to have its meaning. In the analysis of replication, emphasis will be made on the creation of life for survival and increase in number. The metabolic aspect of life is eminent in all living things. The basic human function cannot be possible without it. The organic component of life defines our composition as human beings. Ultimately, the brain is a very important facet of human life because it defines man’s thoughts. This study will analyze these aspects in detail.

There are many theories as to how life started. Old theories denote that life started as a creation of the work of a supernatural being (God) or a combination of the works of smaller gods. Nonetheless, the scientific theory relating to the beginning of life stems from Darwin’s theory of evolution. It defines life as a product of small genetic changes that have occurred in the past years which define life today (Coe 14). In essence, life started from the mutation of genes. This incorporates small changes, genetic that define our behavior and metabolism.

Mutation has been observed to increase the likelihood of our survival or reduce it. The same can also be observed with other species like mosquitoes which have genetically mutated to develop more drug-resistant strains that enhance their survival. The beauty in genetic mutation lies in the fact that our genes can genetically mutate to increase our survival on the planet concerning environmental changes. This also increases our survival rates on the planet and at the same time, empowers future generations to be well adapted to the environment. The fact that this modification can happen naturally is beautiful because nobody induces it and it works naturally. We are all structured this way (Coe 31).

Another scientific aspect of human life is natural selection, whereby species that fit better into the environment survive, while those that can’t cope with the environment die (Coe 56). The natural selection shows the beauty of suitability of certain earth species with the environment which makes life easier to live. Species that can survive therefore multiply and dominate the earth. This attribute is however not unique to humans because other animal species have been able to survive and multiply as well. Animals that can’t cope with the environment as can be witnessed with the extinction of dinosaurs die off; thereby leaving the adaptable animals to live. Nonetheless, what makes human life beautiful and unique to other species it’s the ability to think.

The main function of the brain is to ensure body homeostasis (Duvernoy 23). In this regard, the brain maintains various aspects of the body’s physiological parameters. Some of the main functions of the brain revolve around the maintenance of oxygen, glucose, water, and salt levels. Other functions involve the regulation of body temperature and other physiological parameters (Duvernoy 25).

When one of the physiological parameters is imbalanced, we often feel irritated and discomfort as a symptom. The body naturally adapts to this situation and initiates certain body actions that correct the situation. For instance, when the oxygen levels are low, we often breathe faster, stop exercising or move to places with fresh air. These are all actions that are initiated by our brain. When water levels drop in our body, we feel thirsty and drink water to remedy the situation; when the glucose levels are lower than normal, we often feel hungry and look for sweet food; when our body temperatures fall, we feel cold and often wear something warm; when we are in any form of threat we take the necessary action to avoid it (Duvernoy 25).

All these functions are naturally initiated by the brain and they happen subconsciously. It is amazing how the brain can work through all these functions, sometimes at the same time, without our knowledge. This, therefore, means that there is a self-check system within us that takes care of functions we are not aware of. In essence, if the brain was not able to perform these functions naturally, life would cease to have its beautiful meaning. Life would be tedious and almost impossible to live. However, most of us don’t realize the beauty of the brain in carrying out these functions.

The other aspect of the brain is the ability to think. Most animal species cannot think the same way human beings do. This is what differentiates animals from humans and gives man dominion over animals and plants. Thinking is a natural neural activity that maintains homeostasis (Duvernoy 26). When the two clash, we usually say a person is insane. Thinking however works with the correlate of input data from the eyes, nose, and ears. From this input, we can therefore be able to create things or come up with ideas that make us a unique species.

Metabolism is an important aspect of human existence that enables us to carry our day-to-day functions with ease. Metabolism happens in our human cell composition. Through metabolism, we can generate energy that we use in our day-to-day activities. Human metabolism is specially designed such that we can increase or decrease our metabolism automatically without any physical change. If our energy needs increase, so does our metabolic rate (Gropper 34).

In addition, metabolism is synchronized with the function of generating heat for our bodies; such that, metabolism maintains the body temperature. This is like a powerhouse in the human anatomy that can process basic food components and oxygen for the production of heat and energy (Gropper 38). Special cells like the mitochondria are enabled to carry out this function effectively. The cells are also structurally modified to receive oxygen and food supply directly from the blood. This function is, to say the least, magnificent and goes beyond the human imagination. Metabolism is therefore important because it facilitates our normal body functions like energy needs. This is however an unseen beauty that lies within us and is taken for granted by most people.

Replication is important for human survival. In this way, we can multiply and ensure the survival of the human species on the planet. However, this feature is not unique to humans because other animals can undertake the same function. However, human beings are the only species that have been able to relate this function to procreation (Rose 62).

Nonetheless, the female and male forms are empowered to carry out this function effectively. Males have the sperm and the females have the ovum which when fused, leads to the creation of life. This is an important feature and beautiful to its form because the sperm and the ovum are composed of chromosomes that are genetically tailored to give rise to another human (Rose 62).

The genetic composition of these two components (sperm and ovum) bears all the human attributes a person needs in life including physical features like height, skin color, sex, and the like. The chromosomes also bear the X and Y chromosomes which, depending on the combination, determine the sex of a baby. The X chromosome denotes the female sex while the male chromosome is denoted by the Y chromosome. This fusion occurs naturally to give rise to a human being who later grows in the mother’s womb for 9 months after which it is ready to come into the world. This is a beautiful phenomenon; in that, the male sperm can be able to genetically fuse with the female ova to determine the sex of the baby and even other physical features which ultimately make life beautiful.

All forms of life on earth are made up of organic materials which are beautiful components of human life. The organic component of plant matter, for example, has made man obtain manure which is important in agriculture. The organic component of life is the ability of matter to naturally disintegrate. Organic chemistry for example has improved the quality of human life especially in the scientific development of energy sources (Hansell 49).

Oil which is a basic component of life in the 21 st century is primarily based on the ability of matter to organically decompose. Oil is formed out of the decay of organic matter that can be dated back to past centuries. The decay of organic matter has also led to the production of carbon and biogas. These are also important energy sources that define our lives today. Organic matter, therefore, remains an important component in today’s life because most of the basic human activities are facilitated by the ability of matter to organically decompose. Many factors that define the outward beauty of life; like the ability to take a plane ride from one city to another or the lighting of gas for domestic cooking are all facilitated by oil which is obtained from the biological decomposition of matter.

Life is beautiful in many ways than one. Science shows the inner beauty of life which most people tend to overlook. Basic human functions are facilitated by basic functional features within us that make life easy. Beauty lies in the fact that these functions happen naturally and are adapted to their roles without any artificial modification.

The ability to replicate ensures our survival on the planet as well as our ability to multiply. The brain is the basic organ that carries out several homeostatic functions which without it, life would cease to be beautiful. Organic matter facilitates many human activities which make life easier and metabolism enables us to have the energy we need in addition to maintaining certain human functions. Life is therefore beautiful in ways that are unseen to the human eye. However, acknowledgment of our inner human beauty will enable us to appreciate life more and at the same time, motivate us to take care of ourselves better.

Coe, Mary E. The Beauty of Life . New York: Lulu, 2009.

Duvernoy, Henri M. The Human Brain: Surface, Three-Dimensional Sectional Anatomy  With MRI, And Blood Supply . New York: Springer, 1999.

Gropper, Sareen S. Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism . California: Cengage Learning, 2008.

Hansell, Dennis A. Biogeochemistry Of Marine Dissolved Organic Matter . London: Academic Press, 2002.

Rose, Michael R. The Long Tomorrow: How Advances In Evolutionary Biology Can  Help Us Postpone Aging . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, September 24). Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach. Retrieved from https://studycorgi.com/beauty-of-life-a-scientific-approach/

StudyCorgi. (2022, September 24). Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach. https://studycorgi.com/beauty-of-life-a-scientific-approach/

"Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach." StudyCorgi , 24 Sept. 2022, studycorgi.com/beauty-of-life-a-scientific-approach/.

1. StudyCorgi . "Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach." September 24, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/beauty-of-life-a-scientific-approach/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach." September 24, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/beauty-of-life-a-scientific-approach/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach." September 24, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/beauty-of-life-a-scientific-approach/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach'. 24 September.

This paper “Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach” was written and submitted to our database by a student to assist your with your own studies. You are free to use it to write your own assignment, however you must reference it properly.

If you are the original creator of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal .

Essay on Life for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on Life

First of all, Life refers to an aspect of existence. This aspect processes acts, evaluates, and evolves through growth. Life is what distinguishes humans from inorganic matter. Some individuals certainly enjoy free will in Life. Others like slaves and prisoners don’t have that privilege. However, Life isn’t just about living independently in society. It is certainly much more than that. Hence, quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.

Why is Life Important?

One important aspect of Life is that it keeps going forward. This means nothing is permanent. Hence, there should be a reason to stay in dejection. A happy occasion will come to pass, just like a sad one. Above all, one must be optimistic no matter how bad things get. This is because nothing will stay forever. Every situation, occasion, and event shall pass. This is certainly a beauty of Life.

Many people become very sad because of failures . However, these people certainly fail to see the bright side. The bright side is that there is a reason for every failure. Therefore, every failure teaches us a valuable lesson. This means every failure builds experience. This experience is what improves the skills and efficiency of humans.

Probably a huge number of individuals complain that Life is a pain. Many people believe that the word pain is a synonym for Life. However, it is pain that makes us stronger. Pain is certainly an excellent way of increasing mental resilience. Above all, pain enriches the mind.

The uncertainty of death is what makes life so precious. No one knows the hour of one’s death. This probably is the most important reason to live life to the fullest. Staying in depression or being a workaholic is an utter wastage of Life. One must certainly enjoy the beautiful blessings of Life before death overtakes.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Improve Quality of Life?

Most noteworthy, optimism is the ultimate way of enriching life. Optimism increases job performance, self-confidence, creativity, and skills. An optimistic person certainly can overcome huge hurdles.

Meditation is another useful way of improving Life quality. Meditation probably allows a person to dwell upon his past. This way one can avoid past mistakes. It also gives peace of mind to an individual. Furthermore, meditation reduces stress and tension.

Pursuing a hobby is a perfect way to bring meaning to life. Without a passion or interest, an individual’s life would probably be dull. Following a hobby certainly brings new energy to life. It provides new hope to live and experience Life.

In conclusion, Life is not something that one should take for granted. It’s certainly a shame to see individuals waste away their lives. We should be very thankful for experiencing our lives. Above all, everyone should try to make their life more meaningful.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Which class are you in?

Download the App

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Essay

Essay on A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

Beauty is an admirable blend of qualities that reward pleasure to the senses. The beauty of feelings, thoughts, and expressions is more bizarre, transcendental, and purer. A thing of beauty is a joy forever essay will let you know that anything which has beauty in itself stays forever.  There are several moments of life that people cherish. An essay on a thing of beauty is a joy forever tells that a beautiful thing fills the heart with bliss and joy. 

A Long Essay on A Thing of Beauty is A Joy Forever

What is beauty? It is a difficult question, one that has been pondered by philosophers and artists for centuries. In modern society, we often associate beauty with youth and good looks. However, this is only one aspect of beauty, and arguably the most superficial one. 

Beauty does not only refer to outward physical beauty. It refers to the beauty of intentions, opinions, and inner beauty. Confrontation with a beautiful object may be of short duration, but its memory lasts for a long time. A thing of beauty is a joy forever essay reveals the fact that spiritual beauty is something nobler rather than physical beauty. A natural object may die or decay; however, their thought for beauty never dies. 

The beach is a wonderful place to be at the end of a long day. It’s a beautiful thing to look out and see the ocean. If you can catch the sunset, it’s even more amazing.

It’s the beauty around us that charms us and makes us fall in love with life. Several examples highlighted by the essay on a thing of beauty are a joy forever 300 words showing that beauty within us keeps us moving on in life. No matter how insignificant, a gift from a loved one is full of beauty for the receiver. A small task performed with hard work and great labor is full of beauty for that person. A learner’s first painting- no matter how faulty it is- always seems full of beauty for the beginner.  

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. That’s an old saying that’s still true today. The most beautiful things in the world are often the most enjoyable. Just think about the first time you watched a sunset or the first time you went for a swim in the ocean.

When life seems full of fears, sorrows, or dullness, looking at nature's beauty can lift our mood. Even if the night seems too dark, a glimpse at the full moon gradually makes its way through the shiny sky. Real happiness comes from the beauty of our surroundings, which is timeless and ageless. 

The Taj Mahal is one of the most iconic buildings in the world. Constructed as a mausoleum for the wife of the emperor Shah Jahan, the Taj is a symbol of love, beauty, and power. The Taj has been described as a teardrop on the cheek of the world, a jewel set in the ocean, and a wonder of the world. The building has been an inspiration to architects and builders for centuries and continues to be a source of wonder and admiration for visitors today.

Today’s life has become so fast-paced that people have no time even to relax. Even though our surroundings flourish in beauty, we show no interest in looking in our surroundings. Being close to nature and admiring the beauty of nature around us will help us see life from a different perspective. 

Paragraph on A Thing of Beauty is A Joy Forever

Paragraphing a thing of beauty is a joy forever reveals that beauty lies in the feelings hidden behind a finished task. The genuine efforts made to achieve something consist of the beauty that becomes a joy forever. It’s the first time you took a walk in a park and saw how beautiful wildflowers and trees and grass were. You felt a sense of wonder and awe and you realized you wanted to enjoy the outdoors forever.

If people learn to see the beauty hidden in everything in the world, they will effortlessly reach the highest realms of truth. God has created numerous lovely and beautiful things in the world. As humans, we should observe and admire the beauty of our surroundings. People have to look deeper and feel with a pure heart to feel the beauty around them. 

It is well-said by someone that truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Through objects of beauty, we can know higher truths of life. Beauty is one of the remarkable gifts of God to humans. It makes our life worth living in a drab and dull world. 

People inhabiting several parts of the world differ significantly from one another regarding dress codes and social manners. However, they show a notable similarity in their love for beauty. Few lines on a thing of beauty is a joy forever essay tells us that beauty is a permanent source of joy. 

A man had developed a vision for the beauty of different forms and shapes when he lived in the caves. The historic cave paintings depicting trees and animals are a tremendous tribute to humans' love for beauty. Artistic creations are humans' attempts to immortalize the joy evoked by sounds and sights of beautiful things. 

A Short Essay on A Thing of Beauty is A Joy Forever

We all appreciate the beauty in our lives. In art, in nature, in people, and in objects. Beauty can make us feel happy, inspire us, or simply make us feel good. But did you know that the most beautiful things in the world have a far greater impact than simply making us feel good? We have seen beauty in all its forms. Whether it’s a sunset over the ocean, a flower in bloom, or the smile of a loved one, we all have an appreciation for the things that make our world beautiful. But just as beauty can be found in the world around us, it can also be found in the things we create. When you build something, whether it’s a website, an app, or a complex system, you can find beauty in the process of creation.

True beauty takes people away from the momentary reality and links them with eternity. A thing of beauty is a consistent source of pleasure and happiness. Its beauty and loveliness enhance every moment of our life. Paragraphing a thing of beauty is a joy forever demonstrates that a thing of beauty is never undervalued. It never passes into emptiness. 

The beauty of nature and the environment fascinate us so much that we forget our fears and combine them with them. A short essay on a thing of beauty is a joy forever shows that there is beauty even behind a tear, sorrow, or a sigh. It’s the beautiful things of nature that make our lives soothing, sweet, and lovely. So it’s time to enjoy your time with your surroundings.

Conclusion 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever essay defines that all beautiful things on this planet are the fountain of joy. It is God's beauty to all of us that takes away the unhappiness from the human heart. Beauty is a foundation of never-ending joy and inspiration. Nature provides us with a memorable thing that transfers into our hearts right from heaven. So, we should admire what our nature gives to us and we should always be optimistic in life. Life is precious and we must enjoy it.

FAQs on A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Essay

1. From a Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever essay, what beautiful things evoke?

Beautiful things arouse various responses from diverse personality types. People's attraction towards gems, stones, and other precious metals reveals their uncontrollable desire for attaining things with lasting beauty. Beauty tempts a sense of self-forgetfulness among humans. The sunset, full moon, sunrise, rainbow, and other aspects of nature are pleasing to the senses. Things of beauty captured and preserved in art and music truly become joy forever.

2. What is the message of the essay: A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever?

A thing of beauty makes us forget all the sufferings and sorrows of the world. It provides us with good health and peace of mind. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. The essay tells that the beautiful thing of nature is a permanent source of joy. A thing of beauty is like a shelter for all of us. Being human beings, we should look at and must appreciate our beautiful surroundings.

3. What do you understand from, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’.?

A piece of beauty provides us endless and everlasting enjoyment and leaves such an impression on our minds that we can repeat the great feeling we get from it each time we think about it. It never goes away; in fact, the more time passes, the more beautiful it becomes. It is always a source of happiness, enjoyment, and pleasure that a person can feel for a long time even if its beauty fades.

4. From a Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Essay, what Beautiful things Evoke?

Beautiful things arouse various responses from diverse personality types. People's attraction towards gems, stones, and other precious metal reveals their uncontrollable desire for attaining things with lasting beauty. Beauty tempts a sense of self-forgetfulness among humans. The sunset, full moon, sunrise, rainbow, and other aspects of nature pleasure to senses. Things of beauty captured and preserved in art and music truly become joy forever.

5. What is the Message of the Essay: A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever?

A thing of beauty makes us forget all the sufferings and sorrows of the world. It provides us with good health and peace of mind. A thing of beauty is a joy forever essay tells that beautiful thing of nature is a permanent source of joy. A thing of beauty is like a shelter for all of us. Being human beings, we should look at and must appreciate our beautiful surroundings.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Beauty

Beauty Essay Topics

Unrealistic standards on social media and body image, why beauty matters: significance of aesthetic appreciation, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Unrealistic Beauty Standards on Social Media and Their Impact

Discussion on beauty as the promise of happiness, the views on beauty in modern society, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Cosmetic Surgery

Unhealthy habits of the beauty industry, beauty product manufacturers & eco-friendly cosmetics, my point of view on true beauty, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

The "Religion of Beauty" in The 21st Century

How beauty pageants can cause health difficulties, my view on the beauty of the seashore, inner and physical: what is beauty, beauty is a blessing to women, secrets the beauty industry does not want you to know, conventional notions of beauty in social media, 6 beauty tips to get a fresh skin, wearing makeup: liberating or oppressive, the views on appearance and ideality in different cultures, how millennials impact the way spa’s and the skin care industry are doing business, collateral beauty in the poems of surrey and shakespeare, the issue of standard of beauty in uglies by scott westerfield, beauty pageant: a progression or regression for women empowerment, viramontes’ "miss clairol": cultural perspectives and standards of beauty, how the advertisement of the perfume flowerbomb by viktor & rolf has impacted the beauty standards in the society, 5 easy diy nail art designs, colonial beauty in sidney’s "astrophil and stella" and shakespeare’s sonnets, dai sijie’s creation of beauty, benefits for a child to participate in beauty pageants, relevant topics.

• Reconstruction
• Future Plan

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Bibliography

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

We can help you get a better grade and deliver your task on time!

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free