In philosophy, beauty refers to something that has aesthetic qualities. It includes both things that have a particular physical form and something that is conceived in the mind, such as ideas.
The nature of beauty is a question that has been debated for centuries. The most common approach is to assume that beauty is objective.
Historically, Western philosophers have generally treated beauty as a property of an object. This is a classical conception of beauty, which is expressed in the notions of proportion and harmony that are used to describe many aspects of art and culture.
However, this perspective is limited to objects in the physical world, and does not account for how we feel about those objects or what they mean to us. Moreover, it is inherently subject to change, which makes the concept of beauty less stable than many other concepts, such as goodness or truth.
A second philosophical approach to beauty is a subjectivist one. This approach is found in some works of the eighteenth century, such as Augustine’s De Veritate Religione and Plato’s Symposium.
According to this theory, things are beautiful because they have subjective states that give pleasure to their beholders. For example, a piece of fruit tastes good to Bob because it has some sort of subjective taste that makes Bob happy.
The problem with this definition of beauty is that it is very easy to see how people can use it to promote their own personal agendas or political causes. For example, some women feel like they aren’t attractive if they don’t have certain body shapes or sizes. This can lead to them being haters of their own bodies, even if they aren’t actually that ugly or fat.
Some people also believe that they are beautiful because of their personality or what they have done in their lives. This can be seen in some movies where the “good guys” are always beautiful and the “bad guys” are not.
This belief may be a result of a number of factors, including the idea that we are all created in God’s image and that our lives are supposed to be filled with good. Ultimately, this is an attempt to justify moral behavior and the pursuit of happiness.
But this view of beauty is problematic because it implies that it is the only way for a person to be happy and feel satisfied with their lives. It can also cause people to be overly self-conscious and to hide their true selves from the outside world.
In contrast, a more subjective conception of beauty considers it to be the result of an activity by which artists try to give pleasure to their audiences. This means that the idea of beauty in modern art is not so much a matter of taste as it is a process by which a work of art creates feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.
This subjective conception of beauty can be seen in the work of Santayana, who states that a thing is beautiful when it induces a specific type of pleasure. Nevertheless, this is not a fully subjectivist view because the pleasure is still attributed to the object.