The term “beauty” is customarily associated with aesthetic experience and typically refers to an essential quality of something that arouses some type of reaction in the human observer — for example, pleasure, calm, elevation, or delight. Beauty is attributed to both natural phenomena (such as sunsets or mountains) as well as to human-made artifacts (such as paintings or symphonies). There have been numerous theories over the millennia of Western philosophical thought that attempt to define “beauty,” by either:
- attributing it to “essential qualities” within the natural phenomenon or artifact, or
- regarding it purely in terms of the experience of beauty by the human subject.
The former approach considers beauty objectively, as something that exists in its own right, intrinsically, in the “something” or art object, independently of being experienced. The latter strategy regards beauty subjectively, as something that occurs in the mind of the subject who perceives beauty — beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. In Aesthetics, objectivity versus subjectivity has been a matter of serious philosophical dispute not only with regard to the nature of beauty but it also comes up in connection with judging the relative merits of pieces of art, as we will see in the the topic on aesthetic judgement. Here we ask whether beauty itself exists in the object (the natural phenomenon or the artifact) or purely within the subjective experience of the object.
English