AP SEMINAR Mock IWA Stimulus Packet
SOURCE A
“Beauty” from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.
The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the
plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give
us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This
seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and
of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character
soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and
unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best
composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make
beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and
time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused
over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations
of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of
most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the
forms of many trees, as the palm.
For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.
1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence of the forms and actions in
nature, is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and
beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal
and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees
the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye
seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see
the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with
emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of
crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid
transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning
wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will
make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos,
and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding;
the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.
Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a
January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with
tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within
doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind
the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not reform for me in words? The leafless trees become
spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of the dead calices of
flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself
with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial
influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same
field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of
the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of
native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer
hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects,
like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses,
the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow
parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this
pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.
But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy
morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the
like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to
see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find
it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.
2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and
divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the
human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is
also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the
universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and
estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his
kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of
his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which men plough, build, or
sail, obey virtue;" said Sallust. "The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest
navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done, — perchance
in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in
dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when
Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of
Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the
scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America; — before it, the
beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of
the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World
clothe his form with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like
air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to
suffer death, as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, "You never sate
on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to
be drawn in an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. "But," his
biographer says, "the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side." In private places,
among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the
sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal
greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur
and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame
will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the
visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the
geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common
life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily
he took all things along with him, — the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became ancillary
to a man.
3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes
an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The
intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors
of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity
of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other,
but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be
followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes
unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and
then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The
beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of
beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to
embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract
or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of
nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make
an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, — that perfectness and harmony, is
beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, — the totality of nature; which the
Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is
beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet,
the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on
one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.
Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of
a man filled with the beauty of her first works.
The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No
reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is
one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different
faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty,
and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest
expression of the final cause of Nature.
SOURCE B
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Beauty
First published Tue Sep 4, 2012
Citation for Article: Sartwell, Crispin, "Beauty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/beauty/>.
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 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 18th and
19th-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume,
Burke, Kant; 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, the last decade has seen a revival of interest in the subject.
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
Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in
the eye of the beholder’—or whether it is 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
18th 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 Enneadsconnect 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 as on so much else, 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, which could be
expressed, for example, in the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos
(5th and 4th 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 1, 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 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 disputandum
est (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. “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
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 no one thinks that they might constitute a claim that they should have a similar
experience of the thing in question.
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 in themselves 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 put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors
(in the case of painting) (Bell 1914). By the time Bell writes in the early 20th 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, Hanslick, Bullough, and Croce, 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 possibly in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue
more real and more serious projects. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto's book The
Abuse of Beauty(2003).
However, there has been a revival of interest in beauty in both art and philosophy in recent years, and
several theorists have 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)
Bibliography
See original document at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/beauty
SOURCE C
“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”
NOVEMBER 30, 2012 | YSHAH
How far do you agree with this statement?
“Everything has its own beauty, but not everyone sees it.” Beauty
is a combination of countless diverse factors. In humans, beauty
is an amalgamation of goodness at heart and the beauty that
appeals to the eyes, but even ideas can be beautiful too, such as
the thought of freedom or peace. Even sights, such as rainbows
are captivating to the eyes, and also emotions love and happiness
can also be crowned as beautiful. But, in truth, beauty depends
from person to person, not to everyone might that rainbow be an
exquisite view. Every individual has different opinions.
To some people, Leonardo
Da Vinci’s ever so
celebrated and exceedingly
eminent painting, Mona
Lisa, might be the most
remarkable work of art
ever created. But to other people, the same portrait might not be
such a masterpiece. Evidently, this tells us that beauty is subjective.
It depends on a being to decide what is beautiful, because everyone
has disparate and inimitable opinions.
For, probably, you and I, nose plugs seem to be an odd and a
frightening thought! But in Nyishi tribes they are regarded as being
enthralling. And even in Northern Thailand, villagers wear
distressingly heavy neck rings (known as ‘Padaung’), around
terrifyingly long necks and amongst the tribesmen it’s considered
to be a very entrancing feature. People with it a thought to be
stunning. This proves that different cultures have distinct ideas
regarding beauty.
Furthermore, back in the days of Marilyn Monroe, a fuller and a rounder figure
was deemed as attractive. Monroe herself was a size 16! But despite that she was
thought of as the ‘perfect woman’. Today, if you exist with a size 16 you would
be way too big to be alluring. In the present a size 6/8 (or even lesser) is the
more idealistic dimension for a fine lady. The idea of beauty changes and
evolves with time.
Let’s consider another side of the argument. It is the belief of some people that
beauty is standard and external, and well defined. That is cannot be possible at
all. Let me elaborate. Let’s take for example a couple, for the wife; her husband
might be the most beautiful man on earth! But to other women that husband
might look pathetic. Beauty, again is not just external is it a compound of little
elements, like sense of humor, sense of understanding character etc. Therefore
another woman will not be able appreciate someone else’s husband the way that
his wife sees’s him as. Every person has an exclusive idea on what beauty actually constitutes of.
To sum up, beauty depends on the eyes of the beholder. What might be picturesque to you might not be to
me. And also I might not be able adore what my grandma thinks is adorable because as time flies by
beauty also revolutionizes along with it.
SOURCE D
What Is the Real Definition of Beauty?
09/10/2015 02:00 pm 14:00:15
Lexi Herrick
Beauty is happiness.
Beauty has varied throughout
time, various cultures and the
vast different perceptions of the
world. Beauty has been described
and depicted through pictures
and concepts penetrating our
minds. Beauty has been defined
in so many ways. What I have
discovered is that beauty is
simple. Beauty is happiness.
It’s the images and moments that inspire and represent the most distinct and remarkable attractiveness of
our souls. It’s the moments we feel free and real. It’s the moments we feel proud and eminent. It’s the
moments we feel alive. It seems like that element should be inherent, but it isn’t.
Beauty is often distorted, misunderstood and shadowed by a wide amount of conflicting pressures. It is
something we endlessly strive for, rather than see in the true essence of our happiest moments.
I think of the times I’ve been most happy and whether or not those align with common beauty standards.
It hasn’t been the nights my hair stayed intact, body dressed attractively, or skin shined flawlessly. It’s
been the moments I felt beauty because of happiness, which was not derived from my appearance — at
all.
I love the beauty that pulsates through my body with my lover’s hand on the back of my messy hair, and
lips pressed against mine. I love the beauty of how I feel on the beach, with my hair stuck to my face by
the salty ocean water and the way my skin feels being touched by the sand and sun. I love the beauty of
my sweaty face and squealing voice as I belt out lyrics at a concert. I love photos that capture my beauty
during unrehearsed moments. These are the times when I feel most beautiful because I’m alive, not
because of what an exterior image has brainwashed me to believe.
It’s those sensations that ignite the real flame of confidence and beauty in the souls of those constantly
bombarded with messages telling them to believe otherwise. It’s the little moments, like when someone
looks at you with respect and admiration. It’s the true ecstasy of falling in love with people and places in a
magically easy way. It’s the way it feels to achieve a goal you’re worked tirelessly to achieve. It’s the
wrinkles from every effortless smile and furrowed brow of strength that make a face perfect. It’s the
moments that build the women we become and strive to be. Beauty is in the heart, and the way it shines
through.
We are all unique women, with experiences and memories that tie together seamlessly into a blanket of
our own versions of beauty. We are different shapes, sizes, colors, and heritage. We are mothers,
daughters, and grandmothers. We are activists, innovators, achievers and inspirations. We are the lives and
change we create, and that is beauty.
Our bodies are simply a shell that allows us to radiate these experiences and accomplishments through.
They are a case that displays our happiest and most incredible experiences for the world to share with us.
No culture, company or concept could ever define beauty. It is composed of the moments that draw upon
our strength, and consume us with the remarkable and intoxicating experience of being alive.
SOURCE E
What is beauty and who has it?
By Alene Dawson, Special to CNN
June 29, 2011 8:39 a.m. EDT
(CNN) -- Can beauty be defined by age, gender, color, body shape or size? Who gets to decide?
Multibillion-dollar beauty and fashion industries both shape and depend on the cult-like worship of what
physical attributes the public sees as beautiful. And most women feel the effects of those decisions.
The photo exhibition "Beauty Culture" at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, with 175
pictures by iconic photographers, is aimed at starting people thinking and talking about female beauty. It
also peeks into the underbelly of the beauty industry, including its relation to celebrity, plastic surgery, the
faux-perfection of airbrushing of advertising and even child beauty pageants.
There are a lot of hot-button issues as to how the media and the beauty and fashion worlds depict whole
groups of people, why they show them in a particular way or barely notice them at all.
However, there's been a major shift when it comes to diversity in beauty advertising and magazine beauty
editorial spreads.
Supermodel Veronica Webb, L'Oreal's corporate diversity director Jean-Claude Le Grand, fashion insider
Bethann Hardison, Marie Claire's beauty editor Erin Flaherty and others share their thoughts on the
evolving and increasingly inclusive take on gorgeousness.
America's changing definition of beautiful
Several studies suggest that many equate beauty with symmetry, but even within that equation, "Each
time has its own standard (of beauty)," said photographer Melvin Sokolsky during his lecture at the
Annenberg.
View more than 30 former Miss USA Pageant queens
A photographer, an editor or a casting director may be subject to his or her personal predilections of what
beauty is and foist them upon the public, leading entire societal likes and dislikes to shift, too.
And that standard in America is changing rapidly. Today, the number of marriages between people of
different ethnicities is surging. Back in 1993, Time magazine's cover story "The New Face of America,"
featuring a computer generated face consisting of a mix of several ethnicities, is indeed more in line with
what most of us now consider beautiful, according to Allure's 20th Anniversary Beauty Survey.
"Sixty-four percent of all our respondents think women of mixed race represent the epitome of beauty,"
the survey says.
And of those respondents who said they wished to change their skin color, "70% reported that they
wanted it to be darker." Full lips and curvy bodies are also coveted.
That's a far cry from 1991 when most Allure respondents chose blonde haired, blue-eyed Christie
Brinkley as the ideal beauty. The all-American look today is much more of a hybrid.
One model's story
Model, writer and television personality Veronica Webb (former co-host of "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style"
on Bravo) experienced this transition from the front lines of the beauty industry.
Although Beverly Johnson was the first African-American on the cover of Vogue in 1974, Webb was the
first African-American to win a major cosmetics campaign when she signed on with Revlon in 1992.
"For me personally it was like almost the impossible dream of the fashion industry," says Webb of her
Revlon campaign. "The biggest reward, the most money you could make, the highest level of commercial
validation. And you know a barrier -- a real barrier, a glass ceiling that existed forever -- got broken.
"And the ideal of beauty, and who represents beauty, and what beautiful is changed so quickly and so
radically right after that, that by the time I had my children they can't even recognize the world of fashion
and beauty that I came up in."
Webb says that in any business when you qualify and can perform on every level, "but you're rejected out
of hand because of your skin color ... not even your skin color, but the perception of your 'race,' there's
nothing more frustrating than that," says Webb.
But today there's a whole spectrum of women who've helmed beauty campaigns from blonde to brunette,
from fair skinned to deep, including celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Freida Pinto, Eva
Mendes, Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, Aishwarya Rai, Drew Barrymore, Gwen Stefani and models
such as Liu Wen, Liya Kebede, Christy Turlington and Adriana Lima.
A global perspective = good business
Time has shown the beauty industry that embracing a world of beauty isn't just good karma, it's also good
for the bottom line.
"For us, the more you are diverse, the more you are successful," says Le Grand. L'Oreal Group is the
world's largest beauty company and includes 23 international brands, including L'Oreal Paris, Lancôme,
Maybelline and Garnier.
If you are to be a leader, Le Grand says that you have to understand "there is a link between beauty and
diversity." And that includes understanding the vision of beauty in places such as China, India, Africa and
Europe as well the United States.
"If it's only one vision of beauty and not a diverse one, you are out. ... We have to reflect everyone from
the model to the employee."
Flaherty, Marie Claire's beauty editor who also once worked at Jane, says that she's been lucky to work at
magazines that are all about a global perspective, diversity and unusual beauty.
Diversity, of course, can be expresses a myriad of ways, be it featuring women with freckles, who are
curvier or who are 45 and older.
An element in the beauty world that changed things, "was the Dove campaign," says Flaherty. "Using
many different types of models and reflecting what women really look like."
The campaign's stated goal is to "free ourselves and the next generation from beauty stereotypes" and
contribute to building self-esteem for young women and others through marketing campaigns featuring
women of different shapes, sizes, ages and hues as well as partnering with groups such as the National
Eating Disorders Information Center and the Girl Scouts.
Bethann Hardison has been a model, modeling agent and recently Vogue Italia editor-at-large.
"I'm an advocate of the fashion model," says Hardison, who laments models losing jobs to actors and
singers.
But she does see big changes in advertising in that it better reflects American demographics.
Hardison points out that the beauty industry has a large consumer base, speaks to a broader group of
people, and so is more democratic and shifts faster than the fashion world.
But as the global economy shifts, so too will fashion with the help of newspaper editors who call out
inequities and magazine editors, casting directors, advertising agencies and designers committed to
inclusiveness, as well as the public.
"The word beauty is such a controversial word," says Hardison. "I think that the more that there's
exposure (of different kinds of looks), and as long as you expose them consistently, you give people a
chance to see what could also be beautiful besides what came before."
The "Beauty Culture" exhibition opened May 21 and runs through November 27.
SOURCE F
Beauty is objective & subjective
By Razib Khan | October 4, 2012 11:35 pm
On occasion it is useful to outline definitions and frameworks. One thing
that I often hear (i.e., I am constantly told) is that beauty is a subjective, and
culturally defined, construct. In particular it is common for me to listen to
explanations of “Eurocentric Western” beauty standards, as if they are sui
generis. These views do not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, they grasp upon a
real phenomenon: that beauty standards are malleable and vary across time
and place. But like Classical Greeks who may have promoted a converse
view, that beauty is an objective aesthetic reflection of innate characteristics
of human value, modern subjectivists ignore the empirical reality in favor
of a clean and simple narrative.
From where I stand it strikes me that Western intellectuals who engage in a
discourse which engages the construction of the non-Western Other
sometimes forget that the non-Western Other is itself a social construct with
only constrained utility. To unpack it in more plain language, non-Western societies are diverse across
themselves, and can not be bracketed as singular non-Western Other in a deep sense. And, they exhibit
strong similarities to each other, and Western culture. This is all common sense, and I can attest to it
personally, since my parents were raised in a non-Western society, and reflect a combination of banal and
comprehensible attitudes, as well as shocking and outrageous ones. People are people. Just somewhat
different.
When it comes to physical beauty this framework expresses itself in the assumption that Western
standards of beauty are peculiar artificialities, with no grounding in human nature. This is an argument
taken to too far of an extreme, and leads people astray. So let me outline a model which I think verbally
captures the complexities of beauty, without pushing any particular interpretation in a maximal direction
(and as a personal matter of fact I think a maximal argument fails).
First, you have to reconceptualize variation in beauty not as a spectrum, but as a multi-dimensional space.
Some of the dimensions are deeply biological and “hardwired,” but others are environmental and
malleable. There are two primary biological dimensions: symmetry and secondary sexual characteristics.
The first is just species typicality, and I suspect this is the primal trait upon which a ‘beauty instinct’ is
constructed. Individuals who are not symmetrical or exhibit bodily deformities are generally not
considered attractive, though there are deviations from the norm (e.g., those who cultivate peculiar
fetishes, and so may seek out maimed individuals to sexual encounters). The second biological dimension
has to do with exaggerated sexual characteristics. There are many beautiful children who are highly
symmetrical, but these children are not sexually attractive in the least, because they have not manifested
this dimension of beauty. Though one would presume the two biological characters would be correlated,
the correlation is imperfect. There are individuals who have striking secondary sexual characteristics,
who nevertheless are not attractive in their facial features due to sub-average symmetry. Conversely, there
are individuals who exhibit attenuated sexual sexual characteristics, but have symmetrical and highly
species typical faces. Another issue to consider is that secondary sexual characteristics considered
attractive in one sex may not be attractive in the other. This is qualitatively different from the case with
symmetry, where both sexes stand to gain.
Now we move to the environmental dimensions. Here you have a distinction between the dimension
which spans cultures, and the dimension which does not. Good hygiene for example is a cultural universe.
But what constitutes good hygiene is not. In some ways attractive traits which are amenable to
environmental intervention and are universal across cultures are innate at a remove, in that there are
strong biological functional reasons why people across all societies tend to rate those with sweet breath
more attractive than those with foul breath.
Finally, you have the dimension of temporally and culturally variant standards of beauty. This is the
dimension which gets a great deal of attention, to the point where some assert that all standards of beauty
are culturally contingent. There is famously variation in preferences as to the ideal figure of women, but
this is not the really interesting case. Foot-binding, neck-elongation, and other sorts of body modifications
which exhibit no rhyme or reason are much stranger illustrations of the fact that signalling driven by
cultural aesthetics can move in radically strange directions.
In sum, one can conceive of beauty as a weighted function like so:
Attractiveness = Aw + B x + Cy + Dz, where w, y, x, and z are the dimensions outlined above, and A, B,
C, and D are weights.
If an alien only understood human standards of beauty through pornography, they might presume that
only secondary sexual characteristics mattered. In contrast, if their understanding of beauty was obtained
via reading some feminist scholarship, they might presume cultural variables reign supreme. Reading
through catalogs of beauty product supplies might suggest the universal malleability of beauty, and
cross-cultural preferences driving personal behavior change. As for symmetry, it is such a fundamental
aspect of beauty that I have a difficult time imagining a situation where it is separated from the other
variables, but some of the illustrations of the “uncanny valley” actually come close.
Addendum: Modern cosmetic surgery allows us to modify secondary sexual characteristics quite a bit, so
it is more under environmental control than in the past.