Beauty – A Subjective Quality?

Beauty is commonly defined as a mental attitude or mental state of things which makes these things enjoyable to perceive. Such things as nature, sunsets, humans, landscapes and other artistic works are regarded as beauty. Beauty, along with taste and art, is the most important theme of aesthetics, another of the many branches of fine philosophy. Art is theoria, or beauty; aesthetics is aestheticism

beauty

According to some philosophers, beauty is not merely physical but also mental; beauty could be defined in psychological terms as something which satisfies our aesthetic senses. In other words, beauty involves the emotional response we have toward something beautiful and becomes the object of desire because of its pleasing nature. The pursuit of beauty involves feelings of superiority, self-esteem and desire for admiration. Aesthetic beauty could also involve the urge to imitate, an attempt to copy what exists around us and the desire for a pattern of beauty which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

In aesthetic terms, beauty is beauty in itself and can only be appreciated by the beholder. Beauty is thus subjective, being determined by the personal experiences of the beholder. Beauty, according to some aestheticians, only exists on the level of the mind and can therefore be thought of as an abstract concept. However, some philosophers consider beauty to be subjective, meaning that it is determined by the individual responses of the human eye to a specific object. Thus, an object may be considered beautiful by one person but unattractive by another.

There are two general theories on beauty, or, more accurately, three theories. According to some aestheticians, beauty exists independent of human understanding, needing only to be perceived by the physical senses. On the other hand, some theories consider beauty to be a complex, interrelated system of internal laws based on the physiology and psychology of the human body. According to this view, beauty is not a matter of perception, but is determined by the physical and psychological constitution of a living being such as an animal, and is not a matter of personal opinion, but is a product of the organism’s physiological processes.

The subjectivity of aesthetic experience has led some philosophers to consider that the definition of beauty varies from one person to another, as it is affected by how an object looks to the beholder. It is, after all, an attitude, something that an objectivizer can invent for himself, taking into account the aesthetic environment in which he finds himself. Other philosophers have denied the existence of an aesthetic attitude, contending instead that beauty is a universal, subjective quality. The major difference between these two views is that while some claim that beauty is a subjective quality, others deny that it exists independently of a person’s attitude to it. Still, there are a number of philosophers who maintain that beauty is a universal quality, regardless of whether or not it is perceived by another.

Beauty as an aesthetic object is a question that has occupied philosophers for hundreds of years. In this article we have pointed out some of the ways in which beauty can be defined in the broadest sense and looked at some of the ways in which it can be perceived and judged in the most specific of philosophical sense. When we look at beauty as an aesthetic object, we find that the subjectivity of beauty has led to a kind of aesthetic relativism, in which beauty is seen as it really is for each and every individual, independent of culture, race, gender, and other such extraneous characteristics. We see beauty as it is, seen through the eyes of the beholder.