Are There Really Such Things As Beauty?
Beauty is often defined as a subjective feeling of the qualities of things that makes these things pleasurable to see. These things can be nature, humans, landscapes and works of artistic art. Beauty, along with individual taste and art, is possibly the most important part of aesthetics, possibly the most important branch of aesthetic philosophy. The word “beauty” is derived from the Greek word “pahr”, which means “pleasure”. Today, beauty has become an important word and even has its own language; beauty language.
Philosophy considers the aesthetic experience as an imaginative representation of reality. For example, when we see a beautiful landscape, we are experiencing an aesthetic experience, and the landscape itself is an aesthetic object. We may take aesthetic objects for granted and treat them simply, without paying much attention to their philosophical underpinnings. However, aesthetics is often intertwined with other disciplines such as science, health and cognitive science, allowing us to analyze the relationship between aesthetic objects, their philosophical underpinnings and other more practical fields such as business, politics and medicine.
Modern aesthetics is largely a philosophical study of how we perceive and respond to beauty. It is the study of how we, as individuals or as a society, develop certain responses to beauty. For example, aesthetic philosophers argue that beauty is largely a personal matter, and that it depends on the person’s ability to understand and appreciate beauty. The acceptance of an object as beautiful depends greatly on the person’s degree of acceptance of the object’s suitability to their own needs and preferences. Thus, beauty becomes not just a subjective response to beauty, but is also an objective appreciation of beauty.
Philosophical aesthetics develops various ideas concerning how we see and judge beauty. The most common idea is that beauty is the quality of having things satisfying our wants or our standards of being appropriate to ourselves. Another idea is that beauty is defined by what satisfies our basic and inherent aesthetic tastes or standards. In addition, aesthetics also includes the idea that beauty can be learned, for example, through the process of cultural selection.
Contemporary philosophers who discuss the philosophy of beauty have concentrated primarily on how we view and evaluate beauty in terms of interpersonal relationships, rather than the aesthetic properties of things themselves. They thus argue that the concept of beauty should be understood in terms of the beholder, rather than the object of beauty. Beauty as a subjective state has no objective correlate. Aesthetic experiences can vary tremendously from one person to another, while an object may perfectly satisfy the needs and preferences of all people, regardless of their cultural heritage or background.
The beauty philosophy suggests that one’s sense of beauty depends on their prior experience of the world. For example, some people might find that water looks lovely when falling from a table; while others might not be able to see any reason for feeling beautiful about water at all, even though they would love to look at it whenever they want. According to this view, the beauty of things depends not only on their outer attributes but also on their inner nature, on the causal connection with the external world and on one’s own personal qualities. One’s ability to feel beautiful comes from the inner strengths and weaknesses of the person, and not from being “beautiful” in the standard conventional sense. This view is therefore a variant of the eliminative definition of beauty, which upholds that there is no such thing as beauty, because beauty exists only in the mind of the beholder.