What Is Beauty? Essay Example

The question “What is Beauty?” is one of the fundamental problems of philosophy. It emerges at the very beginning of philosophy, for example, with Plato. Plato’s approach is a good beginning point to thinking about this question. Deborah Modrak gives us the following definition: “Plato posits an ideal exemplar to beauty to ground the definition of beauty….it would be insinuated from the vicissitudes of the sensible objects to which the word “beauty” applies.” This, in other words, means that in our everyday life we encounter numerous things that we may consider beautiful. For example, another human being or a painting, or a stretch of nature that lies before us. Plato essentially asks the question: what is common to all these things? He tries to explain them by asking for a shared quality or characteristic of beauty as his starting point.

This is an interesting approach, because it tries to look for a starting point that links together all the appearances of beauty. But perhaps when we ask the question “what is beauty?” we can think of another starting point. For example, Plato begins from seeing all these different “sensible objects” which are examples of beauty. But why, we can ask, do we consider these things to be beautiful? I think that this is slightly different than Plato’s question. Plato sees the beautiful sensible things and tries to trace them to a concept of beauty that explains all the examples of beauty. But what about the particular relationship of the one who perceives the beautiful thing and the beautiful thing? Perhaps this is the fundamental relationship?

Let us consider another example to explain this difference. For example, I may see a stretch of farmland and idyllic grass and hills and say “this is beautiful.” You, in contrast, may say, “no, this is boring, I like ultra-modern architecture and impressive buildings, that is beautiful.” In other words, what is beauty is now transformed from a question of some ultimate source of beauty which makes things beautiful, like in Plato, to relationships between the perceivers of beauty and the objects which they consider to be beautiful. In Plato, we only have a concept of beauty. We do not have the key concept of this relationship, which is the relationship between the person who states something is beautiful and the beautiful thing.

This is an important distinction, because it accounts for all the different examples of beauty in the world that people may mention when they are asked the question “what is beauty?”. In other words, this type of theory accounts for our differences in opinion of what is beautiful. This is similar to the position of aesthetic relativism. Dabney Townsend explains this point of view as follows: “pure aesthetic relativism accepts that aesthetic experience depends only on individual response.” (266) This is similar to the idea that the relationship between the individual and the beautiful object is central to determining what is beautiful. Namely, from this perspective we can account for differences in beauty. Beauty and judgments of beauty are not like judgments of scientific measurement. We get different results. And to explain these results, we have to understand the importance of the individual making the judgment about the beautiful thing. It is through this account that we can explain the diversity of beauty and also the difficulty of an answer to the question.

Works Cited

Modrak, Deborah. “Method, Meaning, and Ontology in Plato’s Philosophy of Language.” In Cameron & R.J. Stanton (eds.) Linguistic Content. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. pp. 16-32.

Townsend, Dabney. Historical Dictionary of Aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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