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Beauty
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Beauty
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Crispin Sartwell
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Beauty
First published Tue Sep 4, 2012; substantive revision Tue Mar 22, 2022
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 nineteenthcentury 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. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty
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. The Politics of Beauty
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3.1 Aristocracy and Capital
3.2 The Feminist Critique
3.3 Colonialism and Race
3.4 Beauty and Resistance
Bibliography
Academic Tools
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Related Entries
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)
1. Objectivity and Subjectivity
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.
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:
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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
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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
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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.
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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 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 wideranging 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’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.
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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.
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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)
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:
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
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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
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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).
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.
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.
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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
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community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting
and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)
different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–
10, 15)
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.
2.1 The Classical Conception
The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the
classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance
painting and architecture:
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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 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
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
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