Beauty is the qualities of a person, place, or thing that give pleasure to one’s senses. These can include aesthetic, intellectual, or moral values.
Throughout history, people have had different ideas of what is beautiful, and the perception of attractiveness has changed dramatically over time.
Aristotle, for example, defines beauty as a combination of qualities that please the aesthetic senses. He says that a good object should have integrity or perfection, due proportion or consonance, and clarity. He adds that the brightest colors are considered to be most beautiful.
Santayana, in contrast, identifies beauty as a certain kind of pleasure. It is a pleasant sensation that arises from the process of producing or using something. It does not necessarily result in a goal that is accomplished, but it seems to be satisfying, interesting, and useful.
The modern view of beauty has moved away from the philistinism that characterized many philosophers and artists during the eighteenth century. It has also been recast as an objective, non-relative value that can be defended in the context of a philosophical debate.
Nevertheless, it has been a long journey to achieve this goal. The twentieth century saw the demise of a major theory of beauty as well as the abandonment of a dominant goal for the arts, in part because the idea of beauty became trivialized and discredited.
Today, however, some feminists and anti-racists are seeking to reclaim beauty as a positive force that can be used for good. They argue that the impulse to pursue beauty can be as liberating as it can be enslaving.
To do this, they point to the fact that infants have not yet been influenced by the societal norms that define beauty for adults. That is why infants’ visual attraction to certain facial features, such as symmetry, is so pure.
They also point to the fact that babies are not programmed by advertisements, celebrity images, or social media. That is why it is a good idea to let infants make their own decisions about what they think is beautiful.
It is this tension between the individual and society that has made the quest for a unified theory of beauty difficult. This is especially true in the field of art, where there is an ongoing struggle between preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.
Aesthetic theories have not progressed as quickly as scientific discoveries because there are language limits and it is easier to create new paraphrases of our perceptions of beauty than to discover empirical truths.
Therefore, it is important that we understand the basic principles of beauty and how they are applied in a variety of different ways. This will help us to better appreciate why there is still a long journey to unify our understanding of this concept.
Ultimately, the best way to understand beauty is to explore how our personal experiences of it change over time and across cultures. This will also help us to understand why it is so important to be aware of how our own views of beauty can influence the way we see the world.
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