Determining what is beautiful and is not is perhaps one of the most interesting intellectual challenges. For many, because of subjectivity, it is simply a chimera. When and to what objects is it lawful to apply the category of beauty? Is nature beautiful, its representation or the relationship between them beautiful? What parameters govern one or the other? Are there codes that transcend cultural and temporal norms? The debate opens up like a range that, when it branches out, offers new possibilities. Some complementary and others, simply contradictory.
The beauty can be applied in general terms or we can choose to speak of artistic representation in particular, from the hand of creative talent. It is not original to point out that this is always influenced by a philosophical framework either implicitly or explicitly. This evidence is expressed in the history of art, in the flourishing of artistic movements and in their respective reactions. But beyond this fascinating interaction between reason and creation, solving what is beautiful and why is one of the central problems of aesthetics and has been tackled by not a few thinkers over time.
One of the first discussions about it was found in Xenophon in the 5th century BC. Xenophon stated that there are three different categories for the concept of beauty:
1.The ideal beauty: based on the composition of the parts
2.Spiritual beauty: the soul, expressed through the gaze
3.Functional beauty: things are beautiful as they are useful.
And it is in this sense that things can be beautiful or ugly at the same time, that is, depending on what end they pursue. This relativistic idea will be replaced by other idealistic criteria, which were dominant for many years throughout history.
Thus, Plato will elaborate the conceptions of beauty that will have the most impact in the West. First of all, it will take from Pythagoras the notion of beauty as harmony and proportion. And then, the original concept of splendor, according to which beauty resides in a kind of unintelligible light of which the sensitive world is a mere approximation: “of justice, therefore, and of wisdom and of what is valuable in souls there is no radiance left in the imitations below, and only with effort and through little organs. , it is given to a few, relying on images, to intuit the genre of what is represented.” (Plato, Phadrus )
Beauty, in short, is for Plato something independent of the physical in such a way that it does not have to correspond to a visual image. This means, then, that the latter is supersensitive and beyond the intellectual. Therefore, capturing the truly beautiful is not possible for everyone.
This idealized beauty will then be enhanced with the Pythagorean aspect: the beauty of geometric shapes, being a beauty of “abstract” and ideal nature was based exclusively on proportion and, predictably, on a mathematical conception of the universe.
This ideal, but objective beauty, insofar as its existence depends on the very essence of beauty, contrasts with the notion of subjective beauty as it is relative to the appreciation of the observer. Thus, with the passage of time, the philosophical debate begins to abandon the discussion of the rules that allow us to construct what is beautiful (or to recognize it) and moves towards the effects that the appreciation of beauty produces.
Thus in the 18th century, David Hume reflects between these two opposing approaches: “While it is true that beauty and ugliness, without more than sweetness and bitterness, are not qualities of objects but belong entirely to internal or external sentiment, it must be admitted that there are certain qualities in objects that are adapted by nature to dirty those specific feelings. (...) When the organs are so thin that nothing could escape them and at the same time they are so precious that they perceive each of the ingredients of the composition, we call that delicacy of taste (...) Here are useful, therefore, the general rules of beauty, as they Derive from recognized models and observation of what likes or dislikes. Hume, Moral, Political and Literary Essays
But this change in the conception of the definition of beauty was nothing but the tip of the iceberg. The debate was just beginning.
Bibliography: Eco (2005), History of Beauty
