Philosophical Essay on Beauty

Philosophical Essay on Beauty

Beauty, a relative and continuous concept transformation

One of the great questions of humanity has to do with what exactly is beauty. We can all perceive it in one way or another, it is true, but not necessarily in the same way, not in the same objects or situations, not even in those that tradition It indicates us as beautiful, just as it happens with art. Many find it in a landscape, in a melody, in the body of a person or in a moment of life itself; beauty seems to be in the eye of the beholder, as the saying. But what does it consist of? What value does it have? And why does it change radically over time?

The word "beauty", or its root, "beautiful", comes from the Latin bellus, contracted form of benulus, which in turn is the diminutive of bonus, that is to say, "good". This has to do with the ancient consideration of beauty, coming from ancient Greece, according to which what is beautiful must also be good and also true. This is how Plato explains it in his dialogue

Hippias, where he exposes five definitions for the beautiful: what is convenient, what is useful, what is good for what is good, what is pleasingly useful and what gives pleasure to senses. This last conception is the most general in our days.

But how is something beautiful? What essential feature does that to which we attribute beauty possess? That is somewhat more difficult to answer. According to the classical consideration, the beautiful has to do with the arrangement of the parts of the whole, that is, with the proportion, the coherence, harmony and symmetry, among other similar notions. According to Metaphysics of Aristotle, the higher forms of the beautiful are the order (taxis), symmetry (diathesis) and distribution (oeconomics), properties that could be measured and demonstrated mathematically. Hence, many philosophers and mathematicians searched throughout their lives for the supposed formula of beauty, that is, the mathematical calculation of perfection.

However, these considerations, so Western, were not shared at the same time by cultures oriental, something that can be evidenced simply by contrasting Greco-Roman art with that from Asia or with pre-Columbian American art. Thus, what was considered beautiful in one place was not so in another; This is also the case with the passage of time: the classical canon of beauty was not the same that prevailed during the medieval ages, in which, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the beautiful was considered as that "which pleases the view" (quae view placet).

Seen this way, one might think that beauty then is not found in the dimensions of the observed object, but in the mental, emotional or cultural considerations of the observing subject. Only in this way is it explained that the same object can be beautiful in one culture and unpleasant in another, or in one era and the next. Examples abound, but perhaps none is as obvious as the case of abstract art: a painting by the American painter Jackson Pollock can be very pleasing to the eye. sight for those who today appreciate its apparent chaoticity and its agile lines, but during the Renaissance it would have been unthinkable and possibly considered a canvas wasted.

This is how a central debate is born in the philosophical consideration of beauty: is it a property of objects or rather a view of the viewer? Those who defend the first position are known as objectivists and those who defend the second, as subjectivists.

Both positions have points in their favor: it is true that some textures, some flavors, some sensations and some sounds They tend to be universally appreciable by the human being, although their interpretation may vary to an immense extent according to their cultural, social and religious values; And it is also true that the very notion of beauty responds to a particular cultural development and to a taught and learned way of perceiving it: a role that museums fulfill, for example.

There is no definitive agreement as to what beauty is and where it is found. But we do know, in any case, that it exists and that it is part of humanity's own values ​​(no animal, that we know of, produces art or manifests his enjoyment of the beautiful), because under the label of the "beautiful" we are able to connect with a sense of wonder sincere, a thoughtful fascination and a pleasure to exist that often resist words and have to be experienced in person. On conclusion: beauty may be a relative concept, but the experience of beauty is an undeniable reality.

References:

• "Essay" in Wikipedia.
• "Beauty" in Wikipedia.
• "Beauty" in Archaepoetics from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (Mexico).
• "What is beauty?" (video) in Educatina.
• "Beauty" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most used format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

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