essay about the beauty of life

André Aciman: Why Beauty Is So Important to Us

By André Aciman Dec. 7, 2019

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A quest for our better selves

Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.

Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”

We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses.

We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.

Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.

Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.

Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.

We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.

André Aciman is the author of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Find Me.”

The marketing machines of modern life would have us believe that beauty is about physical attributes. With the benefit of the wisdom we have attained after many years spent traversing the planet as conservation photographers, we know otherwise.

Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.

Every day we learn that species, landscapes and indigenous knowledge are vanishing before our eyes. That’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to reminding the world of the fragile beauty of our only home, and to protecting nature, not just for humanity’s sake, but for the benefit of all life on earth.

Committing our time, energy and resources to achieve these goals fills our lives with beauty.

Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen are conservation photographers and the founders of SeaLegacy .

Science enriches us by bringing us beauty in multiple forms.

Sometimes it can be found in the simplest manifestations of nature: the pattern of a nautilus shell; the colors and delicate shapes of a eucalyptus tree in full flower; the telescopic images of swirling galaxies, with their visual message of great mystery and vastness.

Sometimes it is the intricacy of the barely understood dynamics of the world’s molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems that speaks to our imagination and wonder.

Sometimes there is beauty in the simple idea of science pursuing truth, or in the very process of scientific inquiry by which human creativity and ingenuity unveil a pattern within what had looked like chaos and incomprehensibility.

And isn’t there beauty and elegance in the fact that just four DNA nucleotides are patterned to produce the shared genetic information that underlies myriad seemingly unrelated forms of life?

Elizabeth Blackburn is a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

A person’s definition of beauty is an abstract, complicated and highly personal ideal that becomes a guiding light throughout life. We crave what we consider beautiful, and that craving can easily develop into desire, which in turn becomes the fuel that propels us into action. Beauty has the power to spawn aspiration and passion, thus becoming the impetus to achieve our dreams.

In our professional lives as fashion designers, we often deal with beauty as a physical manifestation. But beauty can also be an emotional, creative and deeply spiritual force. Its very essence is polymorphic. It can take on limitless shapes, allowing us to define it by what makes the most sense to us.

We are extremely fortunate to be living at a time when so many examples of beauty are being celebrated and honored, and more inclusive and diverse standards are being set, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or creed. Individuality is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful.

Beauty will always have the power to inspire us. It is that enigmatic, unknowable muse that keeps you striving to be better, to do better, to push harder. And by that definition, what we all need most in today’s world is perhaps simply more beauty.

Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough are the co-founders and designers of Proenza Schouler.

Beauty is just another way the tendency of our society to create hierarchies and segregate people expresses itself. The fact that over the past century certain individuals and businesses realized that it is incredibly lucrative to push upon us ever-changing beauty standards has only made things worse.

The glorification of impossible ideals is the foundation of the diet and beauty industries. And because of it, we find ourselves constantly in flux, spending however much money and time it takes to meet society’s standards. First, we didn’t want ethnic features. Now, we are all about plumping our lips and getting eye lifts in pursuit of a slanted eye. Skin-bleaching treatments and tanning creams. The ideal is constantly moving, and constantly out of reach.

The concept of beauty is a permanent obsession that permeates cultures around the world.

Jameela Jamil is an actress and the founder of the “I Weigh” movement .

The Life of Beauty

The sung blessing of creation

Led her into the human story.

That was the first beauty.

Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice

Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin

Of her birthing cocoon.

Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands

As he held the newborn against his breathing.

Next beauty the moon through the dark window

It was a rocking horse, a wish.

There were many beauties in this age

For everything was immensely itself:

Green greener than the impossibility of green,

the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,

Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her mouth.

She ate well of the next beauty.

Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.

Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly

To hold back her hair.

Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower

Between her legs as she became herself.

Do not forget this beauty she was told.

The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,

Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.

When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.

But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.

When it was beautiful all around and within,

She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.

Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.

Even her bones, said time.

Were tuned to beauty.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.

Beauty is a positive and dynamic energy that has the power to convey emotion and express individuality as well as collectiveness. It can be felt through each of our senses, yet it is more magnificent when it transcends all five.

Over more than 30 years as a chef, I have experienced beauty unfolding through my cooking and in the creation of new dishes. Recipes have shown me that beauty is not a singular ingredient, object or idea, but the sum of the parts. Each dish has an appearance, a flavor, a temperature, a smell, a consistency and a nutritional value, but its triumph is the story all those parts tell together.

When my team and I launched Milan’s Refettorio Ambrosiano, our first community kitchen, in 2015, beauty was the guiding principle in our mission to nourish the homeless. We collaborated with artists, architects, designers and chefs to build a place of warmth, where gestures of hospitality and dignity would be offered to all. What I witnessed by bringing different people and perspectives around the table was the profound ability of beauty to build community. In a welcoming space, our guests had the freedom to imagine who they would like to be and begin to change their lives. In that space, beauty wielded the power of transformation.

When I visit the Refettorios that Food for Soul, the nonprofit I founded, has built around the world over the years, what strikes me as most beautiful is neither a table nor a chair nor a painting on the wall. Beauty is the spontaneity of two strangers breaking bread. It is the proud smile of a man who feels he has a place in the world. It is the emotion of that moment, and its power to fill a room with the celebration of life.

Massimo Bottura is a chef and the founder of Food for Soul .

Who wouldn’t argue that some things are objectively beautiful? Much of what we can see in the natural world would surely qualify: sunsets, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers. Images of these scenes, which please and soothe our senses, are among the most reproduced in all of civilization.

It’s true, of course, that we’re not the only creatures attracted to flowers. Bees and butterflies can’t resist them either — but that’s because they need flowers to survive.

Lying at the opposite end of the beauty spectrum are reptiles. They’ve had it pretty bad. Across decades of science fiction, their countenance has served as the model for a long line of ugly monsters, from Godzilla to the Creature in the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to the Gorn in “Star Trek.”

There may be a good reason for our instinctive attraction to some things and distaste for others. If our mammalian ancestors, running underfoot, hadn’t feared reptilian dinosaurs they would have been swiftly eaten. Similarly, nearly everyone would agree that the harmless butterfly is more beautiful than the stinger-equipped bee — with the possible exception of beekeepers.

Risk of bodily harm appears to matter greatly in our collective assessment of what is or is not beautiful. Beauty could very well be a way for our senses to reassure us when we feel safe in a dangerous universe.

If so, I can’t help but wonder how much beauty lies just out of reach, hidden in plain sight, simply because we have no more than five senses with which to experience the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is the author of “Letters From an Astrophysicist.”

Beauty can stop us in our tracks. It can inspire us, move us, bring us to tears. Beauty can create total chaos, and then total clarity. The best kind of beauty changes hearts and minds.

That’s why the bravery of our girls is so beautiful — it can do all these things.

Over the past year, girls have moved us to tears with impassioned speeches about gun control, sexual assault and climate change. They have challenged the status quo and brought us clarity with their vision of the future. They have changed the hearts and minds of generations that are older, but not necessarily wiser.

Girls like Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi are fighting for the environment. Young women like Diana Kris Navarro, a Girls Who Code alumna, are leading efforts against harassment in tech. Girls like Lauren Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, are speaking out against gun violence. The list goes on and on and on.

These girls are wise and brave beyond their years. They speak up because they care, not because they have the attention of a crowd or a camera. And they persist even when they’re told they’re too young, too small, too powerless — because they know they’re not.

Their bravery is beauty, redefined. And it’s what we need now, more than ever.

Reshma Saujani is the founder and chief executive of Girls Who Code and the author of “Brave, Not Perfect.”

I spend most of my waking hours (and many of my nightly dreams) thinking about beauty and its meaning. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to express beauty through design.

I see beauty as something ineffable, and I experience it in many ways. For example, I love gardening. The form and color of the flowers I tend to fill me with awe and joy. The time I spend in my garden frequently influences the shape of my gowns, as well as the objects that I choose to surround myself with. It even brings me closer to the people who have the same passion for it.

As humans, we all are more or less attuned to beauty. And because of this, we all try to engage with it one way or another — be it by being in nature, through poetry or by falling in love. And though our interaction with it can be a solitary affair, in the best cases, it connects people who share the same appreciation for it.

Beauty is what allows us to experience the extraordinary richness of our surroundings. Sensing it is like having a visa to our inner selves and the rest of the world, all at once. The interesting thing about beauty is that there is simply no downside to it: It can only enhance our lives.

Zac Posen is a fashion designer.

“The purpose of sex is procreation,” a straight cisgender man once told me, trying to defend his homophobia. “So that proves that homosexuality is scientifically and biologically wrong. It serves no purpose.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” I then said, “so … what’s the science behind blow jobs?” That shut him up real quick.

I often hear arguments that reduce human existence to a biological function, as if survival or productivity were our sole purpose, and the “bottom line” our final word. That is an attractive stance to take because it requires the least amount of energy or imagination. And for most animals, it’s the only option — the hummingbird sipping nectar is merely satisfying her hunger. She does not know her own beauty; she doesn’t have the capacity to perceive it. But we do. We enjoy art, music, poetry. We build birdfeeders. We plant flowers.

Only humans can seek out and express beauty. Why would we have this unique ability if we weren’t meant to use it? Even quarks, those fundamental parts at the core of life, were originally named after “beauty” and “truth.”

That’s why beauty matters to me. When we find beauty in something, we are making the fullest use of our biological capacities. Another way of putting it: When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.

Constance Wu is a television and film actress.

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25 reasons why life is beautiful and worth living.

Whatever you think about it, life is beautiful. Even after things fall apart. Regardless of how things fall back together. You were given life. Don’t miss out on this chance. Read these words to help you honor the beauty inherent in every experience. That’s how you turn metal into gold, rubble into treasure, dark into light, pain into healing.

1. Life is colorful. This isn’t a black-and-white movie. This is a vibrant, full-resolution, widescreen experience. How amazing is it that we’re here, together, for this brief sliver of eternity, to experience life from this angle, through these eyes and hands?

2. You have a say in how much love you feel. You get to choose how you experience your experiences. This internal freedom is something that no one and nothing can take away from you without your permission.

3. You determine your “why.” You get to make your life a meaningful mission, and you get to choose what that means for you. The purpose of your life is to live according to YOU.

4. We’re all very different expressions of life. This keeps life on earth interesting and expansive. There really is no limit to what’s possible. You bring something different to the world just by being who you are.

5. There are beautiful people everywhere. Their hearts are so big they inspire goodness in the people around them. You might not see them on the news tonight, but there are more compassionate, caring individuals than there are otherwise. Otherwise, we wouldn’t still be here.

6. You’re a creative being.  You’re human. You’re a living creature with the power to create what was once only a thought. You create new life, art, a home, new thoughts, and a new reality every time you think and act.

“You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within it, no matter how slight.” – Liz Gilbert

7. There’s a lot to see when you look up. You can always count on sunshine or starry skies, rolling clouds or distant planets, beautiful chaos, or birds taking flight. There are lessons written all over the earth, all across the sky.

8. Energy doesn’t die.

9. No matter how long the winter, spring always follows. Random things happen every day. You have little control over the workings of the universe, but you can count on the seasons to change… all the way back into themselves.

10. No matter the physical distance between you, you have ways of communicating with the people you love. You live in an amazing time in history. You can see the people you love smile, hear them laugh, ask about their life even when they’re on the other side of the planet.

11. There’s more to life than what meets the eye. Even when you can’t see it, the sun is always burning and the stars are always shining. The world is spinning and you’re grounded on the earth. Crystals are hiding in ordinary stones. Bulbs are waiting in frozen ground for spring.

12. It’s always the present moment. You’re always right here, right now. Everything is contained here, now. Even the past. Even the future. And you’re part of everything.

You don't need to chase the extraordinary for beauty. You need to show up fully, here.

13. Your imagination is infinite.  Your mind can be an amazing place. You can travel to places (back in time, to the future, somewhere you’ve never seen) without stepping physical foot in them. There are no limits to what you can dream.

14. Everyone is capable of being loved. Even strangers are capable of loving each other. We don’t need to be in an intimate relationship to reach out and touch a heart.

15. People fall in love.

16. Laughter is contagious. Smiling is contagious, too. Love turns what’s not love into love. Darkness that is brought to the light is transformed by the light into light. Appreciation gives us more to appreciate.

17. This too shall pass.  Things are always changing. This gives hope during the dark times and appreciation during the bright times, and presence during both.

18. A small gesture can change the course of a life. Something as tiny as a comment or a hug can lift your spirits and change the way you go about your day. Little things make a big difference.

19. You live on a planet that supplies you with life energy. You have the materials to experience life. You were brought here by this energy, you’re sustained by it, and it’ll carry on for as long as forever.

To live at all is the greatest miracle of all.

20. A thought can be changed. You’re not stuck with a certain set of beliefs for the rest of your life. You’re free to practice new thought patterns at any time. You’re allowed to be new.

21.   We see reflections of ourselves in others. As the poet Rumi put it, “The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you.” We’re mirrors for each other. This is why it’s helpful to go hand in hand.

22. Nature is abundant with her lessons.  Summer is a time to play. Autumn shows you how graceful change can be. Winter restores you. Spring promises new life and, with it, new hope.

23. You can learn something new every day. The universe is that expansive. You contribute to that expansion every day, even if you don’t mean to. Contributing on purpose, though, makes life feel that much richer.

24. You’re not alone. There’s always someone, somewhere, at some point in time who knows exactly how you feel and is acutely familiar with your pain. You’re understood . You’re not the only one who has ever felt this… life just isn’t that narrow.

25. You’re healing. When you’re injured, depleted, or heartbroken, you can rise again. You might never be the same person, but you’re given another chance over and over again to live. That’s a beautiful thing.

Which of these messages did you need to read today?

Tell me in the comments. I read every single one, and I’d love to know!

P.S. Wake up feeling like you’re a miracle (because you are). Get my book Morning Affirmations: 200 Phrases for an Intentional and Openhearted Start to Your Day . You deserve to feel that way. This is your LIFE.

Comments on this post (26)

life is so beautiful !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You’re not alone. There’s always someone, somewhere, at some point in time who knows exactly how you feel and is acutely familiar with your pain. You’re understood. You’re not the only one who has ever felt this… life just isn’t that narrow.

I do not know if life is beautiful but there are beautiful moments in it. I have been divorced for three years and I have had some beautiful moments thanks to my family and friends. My daughter helps me in my healing journey every day. That is also beautiful.

Life is never easy, never supposed to be! The number one thing we are all working on everyday is getting out of our own way. FEAR! Fear of trying something NEW, fear of being WRONG, fear of not being accepted or liked. The battle is ongoing in our brain, in our life, between Good & Bad – Busy & Lazy – Smart & Stupid – Creative & Boring. Good Angel vs Bad Angel. We all start with baby steps. We all go home at night to recuperate and revive our resources so we can engage in the “Fine Fight of Life” another day. I hope the very best for you. xoxo Lynda

Dear Jennifer,

What a lovely post, essay! I was browsing this morning’s newspaper and in particular an article about someone who was taught by their parents how to pray their evening prayer to God. OMGoodness! I thought, I should do this! I Googled,"reasons why life is beautiful’ and your lovely list popped up! I am forever entranced with our earth, our universe and truly believe gratitude is a great place to be. Thank you so much! Lynda Louden

I disagree with all of these. Life is not as great as people make it sound. While these might be for some people not all of us get this.

life is so beautiful

✍ Dear Jennifer,

It’s truly heart warming and soul touching to read the “25 Reasons Why Life Is Beautiful and Worth Living”. Believe me, I have read it more than 25 times!.

I wish you too a ‘Beautiful Life and a Worthy Living’.

Thanks & Regards 👍

— Ravindran Mudaliar BC

Lovely thoughts…

..yet as a Finn (depressed and tired one) the number 10 made me actually really laugh aloud. Isolated beings such as I – there are no people I truly “love”, maybe the reason to be depressed. Really – I have lived with my GF now 25 years. So there is one to hug, but moved with her 3-4 times to new places.

Parents, gone. Brothers – never loved, rather been hurt. I have not made no new friends after first two moves, but have bosses and colleagues, first at Uni and after that at work. Childhood friends, tried to reach out at some point – one answered, this one told that others do not want to meet. Lovely.

Makes difficult to “love” people, and celebrity crush probably do not count here much. So:

10. No matter the physical distance between you, you have ways of communicating with the people you love.

But yes – agreed; people or person, that is just semantics…

p.s. Rope friction should be lessened with some lube or something – otherwise there can be complications, as far as I know (things can fail)

p.p.s I see David above shares some of the enthusiasm I have currently… makes me wonder, as I’m only at the half way post with age, if I could really do something… or what it would take to make that change…

David this is the first time a come across a post like this I was reading your comment and I can’t help to notice that you’re wrong even though I don’t know you at all I can tell how good your energy is even tho life hasn’t been fair to you we need more people like you on this world I need friends like you in my life keep your head up and if you ever need anyone to talk to I’m here

— Andy Hernandez

Sometimes I find myself in severe depressed moments that are too dark and scary AH. I try to save myself by listening to soothing music and falling asleep; I’m so happy I landed on your page now!

Life is indeed beautiful….

Hmm.. Thanx… Whatsoever.. Time is Magician.. You have get cuts.. but it will teach you lessons..making you stronger.. thus at last somehow it heals.. but you must have the eyes to see beautiful when your mind force you to think all rubbish. Life has different colours.. shades between being happy and sad. But indeed it’s Beautiful!!:)

— Ms. Monika Malviya Jaiswal

life is certainly beautiful.

David, you have been through a LOT in your lifetime. I am sorry for all the pain and suffering and struggle you’ve had to find your way through. I don’t for a second think that everything I write or share will resonate with everyone who reads it, but still I share if it might touch one person, and help me heal, see the beauty that’s still left around me, or keep on trying when I feel like giving up. (Which I do still, sometimes.) We do what we can, one day at a time. And while it’s not always beautiful, in a way it can be a gift, even if it’s just the gift of another chance to see things differently. Wishing you small moments of peace that carry you through this, too, even if it’s just a thought or a breath or view that brings you that peace. <3

— Jennifer Williamson

Thank you. I needed some encouragement.

I have non of the above From the beginning of my life I was never hugged, Everyone I met while growing up just wanted to beat me up, MY education was not the best because others wanted me beaten, I was scared in school, and I kept thinking wrong thoughts, possibly from fear. The same when I worked, No one like me, because I worked hard, and even one of my bosses did not appreciate me even though I did not make any mistakes and was a hard worker, My spouse never hugged me or took any interest in me, 34 years of unhappiness, So I gave her everything I had worked for and walked away with barely the shirt on my back I moved to a quiet place with no neighbours around for over 2 miles, I’m 78 and rarely get any visitors, The government allowed seismic testing just outside my property lines, and this roughly 4 years later caused my basement to flood spring and summer during rainy season, No lawyer would take my case and I had no funds to pay them. (The previous owners said my basement never flooded) Now I live in a house by myself where the air is not the best and it gives me lots of allergy problems, where my sinuses plug often and I get headaches from this, and have to take T 3’s for the pain, I also take lorazepam for stress. The cost of maintenance on this shack I bought, takes from my meager pension, not allowing me to travel even to visit, which I rarely want to do, It prevents me from doing the things I loved to do, which I can no longer pay to do, 20 + years here, when if this had not happened, I would have finished remodelling and sold it and moved to a better location, Now I stay home and play experimenting with my few tools I have, thinking some day maybe. But you tell me why I should have been born? I have no reason to see friends, I have no loved ones that really care maybe except one, I may see every few years for only a few minutes, to a day and then they are gone, Have I regrets ? Yes, I was born for no reason for anyone to love, Besides me, How many others are there in the same situation, that are kind and care about others, There is nothing you ca say or do that will help,

Thank you for this, it made me happy a little bit. Maybe there’s not enough light for me now, but it is enough to beat the darkness. I want to tell everyone who is reading this that you are not alone at being alone, you’ll do it, you are strong. Keep fighting <3

Life is very beautiful

— Avinash Mohanta

Life is beautiful indeed.

Thanks for sharing, I really appreciated the last one on healing :)

— Geraldine Ler

This is pure beauty.

— Carlos Cisneros

Catherine, thank you for sharing this. I’m so glad and touched these could help you remember the beauty when it’s hard to see. It’s everywhere if we’re looking right…

Thank you so much for sharing these. I read this when i was having a really hard time and these really helped me remember the beautuful things in life.

— Catherine Evergarden

Meena, thank you for sharing! I’m so glad you enjoyed these <3

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Beauty of Life: A Scientific Approach

Introduction, the beginning of life, replication, organic component, works cited.

Life is a beautiful thing. However, the beauty of life is usually analyzed in a few basic physical factors without the incorporation of our basic human form. Socially, the beauty of life is analyzed from a general point of view like human relationships, love, generosity, material enjoyment, magnificent landmarks, the physical human form, and the likes. Little emphasis is based on the scientific beauty of life. Science can effectively explain the beauty of life in many ways than one. Its analysis is also deep and can effectively be used by many people to understand themselves and how they are structured (Coe 12).

The scientific point of view analyses the beginning of life from the evolution point of view and more specifically Darwin’s theory. In the analysis of the beauty of life, this study will undertake four approaches to life. These are replication, metabolism, organic matter, and the brain. These are among the most important facets of human existence and in their absence; life would seize to have its meaning. In the analysis of replication, emphasis will be made on the creation of life for survival and increase in number. The metabolic aspect of life is eminent in all living things. The basic human function cannot be possible without it. The organic component of life defines our composition as human beings. Ultimately, the brain is a very important facet of human life because it defines man’s thoughts. This study will analyze these aspects in detail.

There are many theories as to how life started. Old theories denote that life started as a creation of the work of a supernatural being (God) or a combination of the works of smaller gods. Nonetheless, the scientific theory relating to the beginning of life stems from Darwin’s theory of evolution. It defines life as a product of small genetic changes that have occurred in the past years which define life today (Coe 14). In essence, life started from the mutation of genes. This incorporates small changes, genetic that define our behavior and metabolism.

Mutation has been observed to increase the likelihood of our survival or reduce it. The same can also be observed with other species like mosquitoes which have genetically mutated to develop more drug-resistant strains that enhance their survival. The beauty in genetic mutation lies in the fact that our genes can genetically mutate to increase our survival on the planet concerning environmental changes. This also increases our survival rates on the planet and at the same time, empowers future generations to be well adapted to the environment. The fact that this modification can happen naturally is beautiful because nobody induces it and it works naturally. We are all structured this way (Coe 31).

Another scientific aspect of human life is natural selection, whereby species that fit better into the environment survive, while those that can’t cope with the environment die (Coe 56). The natural selection shows the beauty of suitability of certain earth species with the environment which makes life easier to live. Species that can survive therefore multiply and dominate the earth. This attribute is however not unique to humans because other animal species have been able to survive and multiply as well. Animals that can’t cope with the environment as can be witnessed with the extinction of dinosaurs die off; thereby leaving the adaptable animals to live. Nonetheless, what makes human life beautiful and unique to other species it’s the ability to think.

The main function of the brain is to ensure body homeostasis (Duvernoy 23). In this regard, the brain maintains various aspects of the body’s physiological parameters. Some of the main functions of the brain revolve around the maintenance of oxygen, glucose, water, and salt levels. Other functions involve the regulation of body temperature and other physiological parameters (Duvernoy 25).

When one of the physiological parameters is imbalanced, we often feel irritated and discomfort as a symptom. The body naturally adapts to this situation and initiates certain body actions that correct the situation. For instance, when the oxygen levels are low, we often breathe faster, stop exercising or move to places with fresh air. These are all actions that are initiated by our brain. When water levels drop in our body, we feel thirsty and drink water to remedy the situation; when the glucose levels are lower than normal, we often feel hungry and look for sweet food; when our body temperatures fall, we feel cold and often wear something warm; when we are in any form of threat we take the necessary action to avoid it (Duvernoy 25).

All these functions are naturally initiated by the brain and they happen subconsciously. It is amazing how the brain can work through all these functions, sometimes at the same time, without our knowledge. This, therefore, means that there is a self-check system within us that takes care of functions we are not aware of. In essence, if the brain was not able to perform these functions naturally, life would cease to have its beautiful meaning. Life would be tedious and almost impossible to live. However, most of us don’t realize the beauty of the brain in carrying out these functions.

The other aspect of the brain is the ability to think. Most animal species cannot think the same way human beings do. This is what differentiates animals from humans and gives man dominion over animals and plants. Thinking is a natural neural activity that maintains homeostasis (Duvernoy 26). When the two clash, we usually say a person is insane. Thinking however works with the correlate of input data from the eyes, nose, and ears. From this input, we can therefore be able to create things or come up with ideas that make us a unique species.

Metabolism is an important aspect of human existence that enables us to carry our day-to-day functions with ease. Metabolism happens in our human cell composition. Through metabolism, we can generate energy that we use in our day-to-day activities. Human metabolism is specially designed such that we can increase or decrease our metabolism automatically without any physical change. If our energy needs increase, so does our metabolic rate (Gropper 34).

In addition, metabolism is synchronized with the function of generating heat for our bodies; such that, metabolism maintains the body temperature. This is like a powerhouse in the human anatomy that can process basic food components and oxygen for the production of heat and energy (Gropper 38). Special cells like the mitochondria are enabled to carry out this function effectively. The cells are also structurally modified to receive oxygen and food supply directly from the blood. This function is, to say the least, magnificent and goes beyond the human imagination. Metabolism is therefore important because it facilitates our normal body functions like energy needs. This is however an unseen beauty that lies within us and is taken for granted by most people.

Replication is important for human survival. In this way, we can multiply and ensure the survival of the human species on the planet. However, this feature is not unique to humans because other animals can undertake the same function. However, human beings are the only species that have been able to relate this function to procreation (Rose 62).

Nonetheless, the female and male forms are empowered to carry out this function effectively. Males have the sperm and the females have the ovum which when fused, leads to the creation of life. This is an important feature and beautiful to its form because the sperm and the ovum are composed of chromosomes that are genetically tailored to give rise to another human (Rose 62).

The genetic composition of these two components (sperm and ovum) bears all the human attributes a person needs in life including physical features like height, skin color, sex, and the like. The chromosomes also bear the X and Y chromosomes which, depending on the combination, determine the sex of a baby. The X chromosome denotes the female sex while the male chromosome is denoted by the Y chromosome. This fusion occurs naturally to give rise to a human being who later grows in the mother’s womb for 9 months after which it is ready to come into the world. This is a beautiful phenomenon; in that, the male sperm can be able to genetically fuse with the female ova to determine the sex of the baby and even other physical features which ultimately make life beautiful.

All forms of life on earth are made up of organic materials which are beautiful components of human life. The organic component of plant matter, for example, has made man obtain manure which is important in agriculture. The organic component of life is the ability of matter to naturally disintegrate. Organic chemistry for example has improved the quality of human life especially in the scientific development of energy sources (Hansell 49).

Oil which is a basic component of life in the 21 st century is primarily based on the ability of matter to organically decompose. Oil is formed out of the decay of organic matter that can be dated back to past centuries. The decay of organic matter has also led to the production of carbon and biogas. These are also important energy sources that define our lives today. Organic matter, therefore, remains an important component in today’s life because most of the basic human activities are facilitated by the ability of matter to organically decompose. Many factors that define the outward beauty of life; like the ability to take a plane ride from one city to another or the lighting of gas for domestic cooking are all facilitated by oil which is obtained from the biological decomposition of matter.

Life is beautiful in many ways than one. Science shows the inner beauty of life which most people tend to overlook. Basic human functions are facilitated by basic functional features within us that make life easy. Beauty lies in the fact that these functions happen naturally and are adapted to their roles without any artificial modification.

The ability to replicate ensures our survival on the planet as well as our ability to multiply. The brain is the basic organ that carries out several homeostatic functions which without it, life would cease to be beautiful. Organic matter facilitates many human activities which make life easier and metabolism enables us to have the energy we need in addition to maintaining certain human functions. Life is therefore beautiful in ways that are unseen to the human eye. However, acknowledgment of our inner human beauty will enable us to appreciate life more and at the same time, motivate us to take care of ourselves better.

Coe, Mary E. The Beauty of Life . New York: Lulu, 2009.

Duvernoy, Henri M. The Human Brain: Surface, Three-Dimensional Sectional Anatomy  With MRI, And Blood Supply . New York: Springer, 1999.

Gropper, Sareen S. Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism . California: Cengage Learning, 2008.

Hansell, Dennis A. Biogeochemistry Of Marine Dissolved Organic Matter . London: Academic Press, 2002.

Rose, Michael R. The Long Tomorrow: How Advances In Evolutionary Biology Can  Help Us Postpone Aging . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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The nature of beauty is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted among the ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primary theme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, and was central to eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, as represented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts. However, there was revived interest in beauty and critique of the concept by the 1980s, particularly within feminist philosophy.

This article will begin with a sketch of the debate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhaps the single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It will proceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories of beauty developed within Western philosophical and artistic traditions.

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

2.1 the classical conception, 2.2 the idealist conception, 2.3 love and longing, 2.4 hedonist conceptions, 2.5 use and uselessness, 3.1 aristocracy and capital, 3.2 the feminist critique, 3.3 colonialism and race, 3.4 beauty and resistance, other internet resources, related entries.

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in the theory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘in the eye of the beholder’—or rather an objective feature of beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seems implausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have been made to split the difference or incorporate insights of both subjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accounts for the most part located beauty outside of anyone’s particular experiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also a commonplace from the time of the sophists. By the eighteenth century, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species of philosophy’:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

And Kant launches his discussion of the matter in The Critique of Judgment (the Third Critique) at least as emphatically:

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective . Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empirical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

However, if beauty is entirely subjective—that is, if anything that anyone holds to be or experiences as beautiful is beautiful (as James Kirwan, for example, asserts)—then it seems that the word has no meaning, or that we are not communicating anything when we call something beautiful except perhaps an approving personal attitude. In addition, though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments, it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent: it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful. And it is possible actually to disagree and argue about whether something is beautiful, or to try to show someone that something is beautiful, or learn from someone else why it is.

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say that beauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirely objective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with no perceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty would seem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argue about whether something is beautiful, the idea that one’s experiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate or false might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regard other people’s taste, even when it differs from our own, as provisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, in cases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accounts of beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response, even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of the beholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. In De Veritate Religione , Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form. Indeed, Plotinus’s account in one of its moments makes beauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: having the definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the object is.

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly from that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come into unity as far as multiplicity may. (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I, 6])

In this account, beauty is at least as objective as any other concept, or indeed takes on a certain ontological priority as more real than particular Forms: it is a sort of Form of Forms.

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on what beauty is, they both regard it as objective in the sense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. The classical conception ( see below ) treats beauty as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, sometimes expressed in mathematical ratios, for example the ‘golden section.’ The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos (fifth/fourth century BCE), was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objective proportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments of the topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, often described in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight” (Plotinus 23, [ Ennead I, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century, however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associated with pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be not the effect but the origin of beauty. This was influenced, for example, by Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke and the other empiricists treated color (which is certainly one source or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ of the mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response, located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside the mind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors. One argument for this was the variation in color experiences between people. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person with jaundice much of the world allegedly takes on a yellow cast. In addition, the same object is perceived as having different colors by the same the person under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example. Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something important was lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. They saw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty of particular things, such as works of art and literature, and that in such controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimes be found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it ceases to be a paramount value, or even recognizable as a value at all across persons or societies.

Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and Kant’s Critique Of Judgment attempt to find ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy of taste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective: de gustibus non est disputandum (about taste there is no disputing). On the other hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and some persons are held up as exemplars of good taste or of tastelessness. Some people’s tastes appear vulgar or ostentatious, for example. Some people’s taste is too exquisitely refined, while that of others is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to be both subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, begin by acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experience beauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of taste in the sense that the Canon was held to be, that if people did not experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty. Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastes are better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments of beauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely as objective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having a social and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing an inter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume’s account focuses on the history and condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste. Our practices with regard to assessing people’s taste entail that judgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, or superficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-ranging acquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected by arbitrary prejudices. Hume moves from considering what makes a thing beautiful to what makes a critic credible. “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of critics who possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity in the long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring veneration of the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed by the verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous to an objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentally subjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appear irremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are in a good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standard and renders such standards unnecessary even if they could be identified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste is fundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on a personal experience, and that such judgments vary from person to person.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition of which we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, by means of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that is absolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in the representation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics can reason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived] from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of the subject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section 34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merely than that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasons entirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experience before a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architecture of a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one cares about that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me such experiences, but they make no claim to guide or correspond to the experiences of others.

By contrast, the judgment that something is beautiful, Kant argues, is a disinterested judgment. It does not respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that it does, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per se of the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatment Kant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come to a genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborate interpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normal range of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance, which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If one is walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because they would be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, for example, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one is not having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. One must focus on the form of the mental representation of the object for its own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thought that insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something, one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in its sheer representation in one’s experience:

Now, when the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether anything depends or can depend on the existence of the thing, either for myself or anyone else, but how we judge it by mere observation (intuition or reflection). … We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful , and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of this representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and is not a pure judgement of taste. (Kant 1790, section 2)

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s dialogue The Moralists , where the argument is framed in terms of a natural landscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience. And Shaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity of the mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort of thing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautiful ox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example, may be beautiful without a reference group or “concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connect them to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction (Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beauty is completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer of it is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kant to conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in the form or design of the object, or as Clive Bell (1914) put it, in the arrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting). By the time Bell writes in the early twentieth century, however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames his view not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalist conception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste one is aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic in oneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion that anyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, one will presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish one person’s judgment from another’s (though in fact there may be). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertion that anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience and reach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a ‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to the universalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. In ethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if the judgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyone ought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts on philosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention related approaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer (1818), Hanslick (1891), Bullough (1912), and Croce (1928), for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantly subjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as ‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that it is beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort of pleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though the object itself were having subjective states.

We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception, is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. … Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky object or device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribed an agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for its causing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience of beauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, this account appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributes subjective states (indeed, one’s own) to a thing which in many instances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying that Santayana’s treatment of the topic in The Sense of Beauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English for some time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to be entirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort of mistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck from Hume’s and Kant’s treatments was the subjectivity, not the heroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, it would seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains, amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as being comparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And the twentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of the arts, again in part because its trivialization in theory led artists to believe that they ought to pursue more urgent and more serious projects. More significantly, as we will see below, the political and economic associations of beauty with power tended to discredit the whole concept for much of the twentieth century. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there was a revival of interest in beauty in something like the classical philosophical sense in both art and philosophy beginning in the 1990s, to some extent centered on the work of art critic Dave Hickey, who declared that “the issue of the 90s will be beauty” (see Hickey 1993), as well as feminist-oriented reconstruals or reappropriations of the concept (see Brand 2000, Irigaray 1993). Several theorists made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. To some extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore’s: “To say that a thing is beautiful is to say, not indeed that it is itself good, but that it is a necessary element in something which is: to prove that a thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bears a particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). One interpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable is the situation in which the object and the person experiencing are both embedded; the value of beauty might include both features of the beautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, in Only a Promise of Happiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to further experiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore and interpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty is not to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature of surface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register, considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty is something we share, or something we want to share, and shared experiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication. Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.

Aesthetic judgment, I believe, never commands universal agreement, and neither a beautiful object nor a work of art ever engages a catholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less important or serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of its members, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, without thinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a community that centers around it—a community, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has many expressions, some of which may be incompatible with one another. In many or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more than one such account are present. For example, Kant’s treatment of beauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements of hedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes not only the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls out love or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent or even incompatible with one another many of these views are: for example, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use, others precisely with uselessness.

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamental description of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied in Italian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated: nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932, 9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Western conception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classical architecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics : “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2, 1705 [1078a36]). This view, as Aristotle implies, is sometimes boiled down to a mathematical formula, such as the golden section, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. The conception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid’s Elements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and, again, by the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos (late fifth/early fourth century BCE).

The Canon was not only a statue deigned to display perfect proportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galen characterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of “the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. For having taught us in that treatise all the symmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise with a work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, and having called the statue itself, like the treatise, the Canon ” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to note that the concept of ‘symmetry’ in classical texts is distinct from and richer than its current use to indicate bilateral mirroring. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmonious and measurable proportions among the parts characteristic of objects that are beautiful in the classical sense, which carried also a moral weight. For example, in the Sophist (228c-e), Plato describes virtuous souls as symmetrical.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius epitomizes the classical conception in central, and extremely influential, formulations, both in its complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlying unity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis , and arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis , and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor and Distribution which in the Greeks is called oeconomia . Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result. Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitable display of details in their context. This is attained when the details of the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadth suitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetrical correspondence. Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out of the details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detail to the form of the design as a whole. As in the human body, from cubit, foot, palm, inch and other small parts come the symmetric quality of eurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

Aquinas, in a typically Aristotelian pluralist formulation, says that “There are three requirements for beauty. Firstly, integrity or perfection—for if something is impaired it is ugly. Then there is due proportion or consonance. And also clarity: whence things that are brightly coloured are called beautiful” ( Summa Theologica I, 39, 8).

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth century gives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “What we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725, 29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in the Mathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematical formulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the most beautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he also rapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain by universal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There is beauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725, 38).

A very compelling series of refutations of and counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of any specific proportions between parts, and hence to the classical conception, is given by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime :

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, and every sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, and it grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has a neck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; is this a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shall we say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together? … There are some parts of the human body, that are observed to hold certain proportions to each other; but before it can be proved, that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must be shewn, that wherever these are found exact, the person to whom they belong is beautiful. … For my part, I have at several times very carefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to hold very nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only very different from one another, but where one has been very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the of the human body; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke 1757, 84–89)

There are many ways to interpret Plato’s relation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched in the Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation of part and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classical culture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically in the Symposium —perhaps the key Socratic text for neo-Platonism and for the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an aspiration toward beauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts the teachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. She connects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire to reproduce (Plato, 558–59 [ Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce is associated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal: “And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is the one deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we have agreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, it follows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for the good—which is to say that Love is a longing for immortality” (Plato, 559, [ Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if not classical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or no importance. Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment. … And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation. … Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is. And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [ Symposium 210a–211d])

Beauty here is conceived—perhaps explicitly in contrast to the classical aesthetics of integral parts and coherent whole—as perfect unity, or indeed as the principle of unity itself.

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close to equating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity among disparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specifically attacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. But think what this means. Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout. All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. (Plotinus, 21 [ Ennead I,6])

Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physical thing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22 [ Ennead I,3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must be immolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experience lead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision of the beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongside an anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight in profusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite characterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; the universe is called into being by love of God as beauty (Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasures could be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusion of God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denis in the twelfth century, describing a richly-appointed church:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959, 14)

This conception has had many expressions in the modern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, and Hegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art and beauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway or ladder) between the material and the spiritual. For Shaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature); what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by human intelligence (art, for example); and finally, the intelligence that makes even these artists (that is, God). Shaftesbury’s character Theocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty. … Whatever appears in our second order of forms, or whatever is derived or produced from thence, all this is eminently, principally, and originally in this last order of supreme and sovereign beauty. … Thus architecture, music, and all which is of human invention, resolves itself into this last order. (Shaftesbury 1738, 228–29)

Schiller’s expression of a similar series of thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beauty developed within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, can be drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct and guide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore be sought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simply from the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; in a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity. Beauty … makes of man a whole, complete in himself. (1795, 59–60, 86)

For Schiller, beauty or play or art (he uses the words, rather cavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process of integrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, or the sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration are we—who exist simultaneously on both these levels—free. This is quite similar to Plato’s ‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract or spiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—is more concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit than with transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a la Plato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including in the tripartite dialectical structure of his account—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel, who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and the empirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with real particularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

Beauty, we might say, or artistic beauty at any rate, is a route from the sensuous and particular to the Absolute and to freedom, from finitude to the infinite, formulations that—while they are influenced by Schiller—strikingly recall Shaftesbury, Plotinus, and Plato.

Hegel, who associates beauty and art with mind and spirit, holds with Shaftesbury that the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it, “the beauty of art is born of the spirit and born again ” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born of God, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spirit of the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who very nearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate asserts that the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art. “The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certain persons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one, comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts” (Croce 1928, 230).

Edmund Burke, expressing an ancient tradition, writes that, “by beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (Burke 1757, 83). As we have seen, in almost all treatments of beauty, even the most apparently object or objectively-oriented, there is a moment in which the subjective qualities of the experience of beauty are emphasized: rhapsodically, perhaps, or in terms of pleasure or ataraxia , as in Schopenhauer. For example, we have already seen Plotinus, for whom beauty is certainly not subjective, describe the experience of beauty ecstatically. In the idealist tradition, the human soul, as it were, recognizes in beauty its true origin and destiny. Among the Greeks, the connection of beauty with love is proverbial from early myth, and Aphrodite the goddess of love won the Judgment of Paris by promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world.

There is an historical connection between idealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love and longing, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. We have Sappho’s famous fragment 16: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful sights the dark world offers, but I say it’s whatever you love best” (Sappho, 16). (Indeed, at Phaedrus 236c, Socrates appears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greater insight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

Plato’s discussions of beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus occur in the context of the theme of erotic love. In the former, love is portrayed as the ‘child’ of poverty and plenty. “Nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato, 556 [Symposium 203b–d]). Love is portrayed as a lack or absence that seeks its own fulfillment in beauty: a picture of mortality as an infinite longing. Love is always in a state of lack and hence of desire: the desire to possess the beautiful. Then if this state of infinite longing could be trained on the truth, we would have a path to wisdom. The basic idea has been recovered many times, for example by the Romantics. It fueled the cult of idealized or courtly love through the Middle Ages, in which the beloved became a symbol of the infinite.

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived this idea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing (which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as the experiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas use Sappho’s fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing” and characterizes longing as intense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition of a finite being in time, where we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. And Nehamas writes that “I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an art that speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don’t stand aloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else we must learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and they quicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction” (Nehamas 2007, 77).

Thinkers of the 18 th century—many of them oriented toward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite a typical formulation, says that “By beautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard, or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within us agreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is not clear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms of classical formal elements or in terms of the viewer’s pleasurable response. He begins the Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears to assert that objects which instantiate his ‘compound ratio of uniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable of producing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider, is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there are vastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every one acknowledges he is more delighted with a fine Face, a just Picture, than with the View of any one Colour, were it as strong and lively as possible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising among settled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, a fine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smooth Sea, or a large open Plain, not diversify’d by Woods, Hills, Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quite simple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparably greater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever. (Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolute beauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualities of the beautiful thing (a “compound ratio” of uniformity and variety), and yet throughout, he insists that beauty is centered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea of pleasure could come apart from Hutcheson’s particular aesthetic preferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus’s, for example. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty is connected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary, and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas rather than things as its objects.

Hume writes in a similar vein in the Treatise of Human Nature :

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. … Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume 1740, 299)

Though this appears ambiguous as between locating the beauty in the pleasure or in the impression or idea that causes it, Hume is soon talking about the ‘sentiment of beauty,’ where sentiment is, roughly, a pleasurable or painful response to impressions or ideas, though the experience of beauty is a matter of cultivated or delicate pleasures. Indeed, by the time of Kant’s Third Critique and after that for perhaps two centuries, the direct connection of beauty to pleasure is taken as a commonplace, to the point where thinkers are frequently identifying beauty as a certain sort of pleasure. Santayana, for example, as we have seen, while still gesturing in the direction of the object or experience that causes pleasure, emphatically identifies beauty as a certain sort of pleasure.

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extreme expression of this orientation—is the assertion of the positivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless or without cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjective approval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matter of sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they were trying to ameliorate the sting, largely by emphasizing critical consensus. But once this fundamental admission is made, any consensus seems contingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears to certain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can be no reasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensus assessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Philosophers in the Kantian tradition identify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure, psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with the practical. “ Taste is the faculty of judging an object or mode of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful ” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bullough distinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the grounds that the former requires a distance from practical concerns: “Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” (Bullough 1912, 244).

On the other hand, many philosophers have gone in the opposite direction and have identified beauty with suitedness to use. ‘Beauty’ is perhaps one of the few terms that could plausibly sustain such entirely opposed interpretations.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the ancient hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene took a rather direct approach.

Is not then, also, a beautiful woman useful in proportion as she is beautiful; and a boy and a youth useful in proportion to their beauty? Well then, a handsome boy and a handsome youth must be useful exactly in proportion as they are handsome. Now the use of beauty is, to be embraced. If then a man embraces a woman just as it is useful that he should, he does not do wrong; nor, again, will he be doing wrong in employing beauty for the purposes for which it is useful. (Diogenes Laertius, 94)

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worst of the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet the idea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number of thinkers. Xenophon’s Memorabilia puts the view in the mouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates : In short everything which we use is considered both good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely its use. Aristippus : Why then, is a dung-basket a beautiful thing? Socrates : Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, if the one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill. (Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogue Alciphron , though he begins with the hedonist conception: “Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley 1732, 174; see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons of usefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things are beautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended or to which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of an object depend on what kind of object it is and, again, a beautiful car might make an ugly tractor. “The parts, therefore, in true proportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole” (Berkeley 1732, 174–75; see Carritt 1931, 76). One result of this is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not an immediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellection and practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing and assess its suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, for example, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, and it avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of ‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing a practical task, but performing it especially well or with an especial satisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art or craft expresses as well as serves its purpose.

A cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, … a hymn than a mathematical equation. … A well-made sword is not less beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only good or bad, beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve their purpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009) returns to a modified Kantianism with regard to both beauty and sublimity, enriched by many and varied examples. “We call something beautiful,” writes Scruton, “when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form ” (Scruton 2009, 26). Despite the Kantian framework, Scruton, like Sartwell and Nehamas, throws the subjective/objective distinction into question. He compares experiencing a beautiful thing to a kiss. To kiss someone that one loves is not merely to place one body part on another, “but to touch the other person in his very self. Hence the kiss is compromising – it is a move from one self toward another, and a summoning of the other into the surface of his being” (Scruton 2009, 48). This, Scruton says, is a profound pleasure.

3. The Politics of Beauty

Kissing sounds nice, but some kisses are coerced, some pleasures obtained at a cost to other people. The political associations of beauty over the last few centuries have been remarkably various and remarkably problematic, particularly in connection with race and gender, but in other aspects as well. This perhaps helps account for the neglect of the issue in early-to-mid twentieth-century philosophy as well as its growth late in the century as an issue in social justice movements, and subsequently in social-justice oriented philosophy.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 associated beauty with the French aristocracy and with the Rococo style of the French royal family, as in the paintings of Fragonard: hedonist expressions of wealth and decadence, every inch filled with decorative motifs. Beauty itself became subject to a moral and political critique, or even to direct destruction, with political motivations (see Levey 1985). And by the early 20th century, beauty was particularly associated with capitalism (ironically enough, considering the ugliness of the poverty and environmental destruction it often induced). At times even great art appeared to be dedicated mainly to furnishing the homes of rich people, with the effect of concealing the suffering they were inflicting. In response, many anti-capitalists, including many Marxists, appeared to repudiate beauty entirely. And in the aesthetic politics of Nazism, reflected for example in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the association of beauty and right wing politics was sealed to devastating effect (see Spotts 2003).

Early on in his authorship, Karl Marx could hint that the experience of beauty distinguishes human beings from all other animals. An animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx 1844, 76). But later Marx appeared to conceive beauty as “superstructure” or “ideology” disguising the material conditions of production. Perhaps, however, he also anticipated the emergence of new beauties, available to all both as makers and appreciators, in socialism.

Capitalism, of course, uses beauty – at times with complete self-consciousness – to manipulate people into buying things. Many Marxists believed that the arts must be turned from providing fripperies to the privileged or advertising that helps make them wealthier to showing the dark realities of capitalism (as in the American Ashcan school, for example), and articulating an inspiring Communist future. Stalinist socialist realism consciously repudiates the aestheticized beauties of post-impressionist and abstract painting, for example. It has urgent social tasks to perform (see Bown and Lanfranconi 2012). But the critique tended at times to generalize to all sorts of beauty: as luxury, as seduction, as disguise and oppression. The artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), having survived the First World War, wrote this about the radical artists of the early century: “To us, Dada was above all a moral reaction. Our rage aimed at total subversion. A horrible futile war had robbed us of five years of our existence. We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream” (quoted in Danto 2003, 49).

Theodor Adorno, in his book Aesthetic Theory , wrote that one symptom of oppression is that oppressed groups and cultures are regarded as uncouth, dirty, ragged; in short, that poverty is ugly. It is art’s obligation, he wrote, to show this ugliness, imposed on people by an unjust system, clearly and without flinching, rather to distract people by beauty from the brutal realities of capitalism. “Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer to integrate or mitigate it or reconcile it with its own existence,” Adorno wrote. “Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image” (Adorno 1970, 48–9).

The political entanglements of beauty tend to throw into question various of the traditional theories. For example, the purity and transcendence associated with the essence of beauty in the realm of the Forms seems irrelevant, as beauty shows its centrality to politics and commerce, to concrete dimensions of oppression. The austere formalism of the classical conception, for example, seems neither here nor there when the building process is brutally exploitative.

As we have seen, the association of beauty with the erotic is proverbial from Sappho and is emphasized relentlessly by figures such as Burke and Nehamas. But the erotic is not a neutral or universal site, and we need to ask whose sexuality is in play in the history of beauty, with what effects. This history, particularly in the West and as many feminist theorists and historians have emphasized, is associated with the objectification and exploitation of women. Feminists beginning in the 19th century gave fundamental critiques of the use of beauty as a set of norms to control women’s bodies or to constrain their self-presentation and even their self-image in profound and disabling ways (see Wollstonecraft 1792, Grimké 1837).

In patriarchal society, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it, the content of sexuality “is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content,” she continues, describing her treatment of the subject, “for the gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal. That is the content of sexuality that defines gender female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method” (MacKinnon 1987, 53–4). Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reaches one variety of radical critique and conclusion: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 1975, 60).

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic treatment was focused on the scopophilia (a Freudian term denoting neurotic sexual pleasure configured around looking) of Hollywood films, in which men appeared as protagonists, and women as decorative or sexual objects for the pleasure of the male characters and male audience-members. She locates beauty “at the heart of our oppression.” And she appears to have a hedonist conception of it: beauty engenders pleasure. But some pleasures, like some kisses, are sadistic or exploitative at the individual and at the societal level. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin (1988) and Griselda Pollock (1987) brought such insights to bear on the history of painting, for example, where the scopophilia is all too evident in famous nudes such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus , which a feminist slashed with knife in 1914 because “she didn’t like the way men gawked at it”.

Feminists such as Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth , generalized such insights into a critique of the ways women are represented throughout Western popular culture: in advertising, for example, or music videos. Such practices have the effect of constraining women to certain acceptable ways of presenting themselves publicly, which in turn greatly constrains how seriously they are taken, or how much of themselves they can express in public space. As have many other commentators, Wolf connects the representation of the “beautiful” female body, in Western high art but especially in popular culture, to eating disorders and many other self-destructive behaviors, and indicates that a real overturning of gender hierarchy will require deeply re-construing the concept of beauty.

The demand on women to create a beautiful self-presentation by male standards, Wolf argues, fundamentally compromises women’s action and self-understanding, and makes fully human relationships between men and women difficult or impossible. In this Wolf follows, among others, the French thinker Luce Irigaray, who wrote that “Female beauty is always considered as finery ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of, an appearance of, a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone , rarely to interrogate the state of our body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our becoming” (quoted in Robinson 2000, 230).

“Sex is held hostage by beauty,” Wolf remarks, “and its ransom terms are engraved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film” (Wolf 1991f, 157).

Early in the 20th century, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) described European or white standards of beauty as a deep dimension of oppression, quite similarly to the way Naomi Wolf describes beauty standards for women. These standards are relentlessly reinforced in authoritative images, but they are incompatible with black skin, black bodies, and also traditional African ways of understanding human beauty. White standards of beauty, Garvey argued, devalue black bodies. The truly oppressive aspects of such norms can be seen in the way they induce self-alienation, as Wolf argues with regard to sexualized images of women. “Some of us in America, the West Indies, and Africa believe that the nearer we approach the white man in color, the greater our social standing and privilege,” he wrote (Garvey 1925 [1986], 56). He condemns skin bleaching and hair straightening as ways that black people are taught to devalue themselves by white standards of beauty. And he connects such standards to ‘colorism’ or prejudice in the African-American community toward darker-skinned black people.

Such observations suggest some of the strengths of cultural relativism as opposed to subjectivism or universalism: standards of beauty appear in this picture not to be idiosyncratic to individuals, nor to be universal among all people, but to be tied to group identities and to oppression and resistance.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X (1925–1965), whose parents were activists in the Garvey movement, describes ‘conking’ or straightening his hair with lye products as a young man. “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation,” he writes, “when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that black people are ‘inferior’ – and white people ‘superior’ – that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards” (X 1964, 56–7). For both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, a key moment in the transformation of racial oppression would be the affirmation of standards of black beauty that are not parasitic on white standards, and hence not directly involved in racial oppression. This was systematically developed after Malcolm’s death in the “natural” hairstyles and African fabrics in the Black Power movement. Certainly, people have many motivations for straightening or coloring their hair, for example. But the critical examination of the racial content of beauty norms was a key moment in black liberation movements, many of which, around 1970, coalesced around the slogan Black is beautiful . These are critiques of specific standards of beauty; they are also tributes to beauty’s power.

Imposing standards of beauty on non-Western cultures, and, in particular, misappropriating standards of beauty and beautiful objects from them, formed one of the most complex strategies of colonialism. Edward Said famously termed this dynamic “orientalism.” Novelists such as Nerval and Kipling and painters such as Delacroix and Picasso, he argued, used motifs drawn from Asian and African cultures, treating them as “exotic” insertions into Western arts. Such writers and artists might even have understood themselves to be celebrating the cultures they depicted in pictures of Arabian warriors or African masks. But they used this imagery precisely in relation to Western art history. They distorted what they appropriated.

“Being a White Man, in short,” writes Said, “was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible” (Said 1978, 227). This style might be encapsulated in the outfits of colonial governors, and their mansions. But it was also typified by an appropriative “appreciation” of “savage” arts and “exotic” beauties, which were of course not savage or exotic in their own context. Even in cases where the beauty of such objects was celebrated, the appreciation was mixed with condescension and misapprehension, and also associated with stripping colonial possessions of their most beautiful objects (as Europeans understood beauty)—shipping them back to the British Museum, for example. Now some beautiful objects, looted in colonialism, are being returned to their points of origin (see Matthes 2017), but many others remain in dispute.

However, if beauty has been an element in various forms of oppression, it has also been an element in various forms of resistance, as the slogan “Black is beautiful” suggests. The most compelling responses to oppressive standards and uses of beauty have given rise to what might be termed counter-beauties . When fighting discrimination against people with disabilities, for example, one may decry the oppressive norms that regard disabled bodies as ugly and leave it at that. Or one might try to discover what new standards of beauty and subversive pleasures might arise in the attempt to regard disabled bodies as beautiful (Siebers 2005). For that matter, one might uncover the ways that non-normative bodies and subversive pleasures actually do fulfill various traditional criteria of beauty. Indeed, for some decades there has been a disability arts movement, often associated with artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Riva Lehrer, which tries to do just that (see Siebers 2005).

The exploration of beauty, in some ways flipping it over into an instrument of feminist resistance, or showing directly how women’s beauty could be experienced outside of patriarchy, has been a theme of much art by women of the 20th and 21st centuries. Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” place settings undertake to absorb and reverse the objectifying gaze. The exploration of the meaning of the female body in the work of performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Karen Finley, and Orlan, tries both to explore the objectification of the female body and to affirm women’s experience in its concrete realities from the inside: to make of it emphatically a subject rather than an object (see Striff 1997).

“Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving,” wrote philosopher Peg Zeglin Brand in 2000. “Confident young women today pack their closets with mini-skirts and sensible suits. Young female artists toy with feminine stereotypes in ways that make their feminist elders uncomfortable. They recognize that … beauty can be a double-edged sword – as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing them” (Brand 2000, xv). Indeed, vernacular norms of beauty as expressed in media and advertising have shifted in virtue of the feminist and anti-racist attacks on dominant body norms, as the concept’s long journey continues.

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aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle | Ayer, Alfred Jules | Burke, Edmund | Croce, Benedetto: aesthetics | feminist philosophy, interventions: aesthetics | hedonism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: aesthetics | Hume, David: aesthetics | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Kant, Immanuel: theory of judgment | medieval philosophy | Neoplatonism | Plato: aesthetics | Plotinus | Santayana, George | Schiller, Friedrich | Schopenhauer, Arthur | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of]

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Student Essays

5 Essays on Life is Beautiful

Life is really wonderful. Its whole new experience of wonder, happiness, sorrow, fear, love and anxiety.  Life is beautiful. There is no other way to say it. It’s amazing, wonderful, and miraculous. Each day is a gift, and we should take advantage of every moment. There are so many things to enjoy in life: the sun, the moon, the stars, nature, loved ones, friends, music…the list goes on and on. We should savor every experience, good or bad, because it all makes us who we are.

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We must enjoy the beauty of life being grateful, dedicated, and humble. We should be grateful for the good moments and learn from the bad ones. Dedicate ourselves to living each day to the fullest and not take anything for granted. Be humble and never think we are better than anyone else because we are not. We are all equal in the eyes of life, and it is up to us to make the most of it.

Life is precious, and we should never take it for granted. We should embrace every moment, and be grateful for the gift of life. Life is beautiful, and it’s worth living to the fullest. Thank you for reading.

Life is Beautiful Essay Summary:

Life is beautiful, a phrase that we often hear and use to describe our experience here on earth. But what does it really mean? Is life truly beautiful or are we just saying it to make ourselves feel better?

In this essay, we will delve into the concept of beauty in life and explore different perspectives on what makes life truly beautiful.

For some, beauty in life means having everything they desire – wealth, success, fame. But is material possessions and achievements really what makes life beautiful? Or is it something deeper, more meaningful?

Others find beauty in the simple things – a warm cup of tea on a rainy day, the laughter of loved ones, a peaceful walk in nature. These moments may seem ordinary but can bring immense joy and fulfillment.

Beauty in life can also be found in overcoming struggles and challenges, in the lessons we learn along the way. It is not about having a perfect life, but rather embracing the imperfections and finding beauty in them.

Ultimately, what makes life truly beautiful is subjective and unique to each individual. It is about finding meaning and purpose, cherishing moments and connections, and constantly growing and evolving.

So let us appreciate the beauty in life, no matter how challenging or mundane it may seem at times. For in the end, life is a precious gift that should be cherished and celebrated every day. Let us make every moment count and create our own beautiful story. So, never give up on hope.

Continue to strive for happiness, and always remember that life is truly beautiful. So, go out and create your own unique beauty in this world. And always remember, no matter what happens, life is a journey worth living and cherishing. Keep pushing forward and embracing the beauty that surrounds you every day.

After all, life is too short to not appreciate its true beauty. Let us make the most of it and make it a beautiful adventure. No matter what challenges or struggles we may face, let us always remember that life is indeed beautiful. It is up to us to see the beauty in every moment and create our own happiness.

In conclusion, life may not always be easy or perfect, but it is undeniably beautiful. Whether through the simple pleasures, overcoming hardships, or finding our own unique purpose, there is beauty all around us.

Let us choose to see it and make the most of this beautiful journey called life. So, live life to the fullest and always remember that no matter what happens, life is truly beautiful. So, let’s embrace its beauty and make every moment count.

What is Life For You Essay:

Life is a journey that we all embark on from the moment we are born. It is a rollercoaster ride filled with ups and downs, joys and sorrows, challenges and opportunities. But what is life for you? This question may seem simple, but it has been a topic of contemplation for centuries.

For some, life is about achieving success and reaching new heights. For others, it is about finding happiness and contentment in the little things. There are those who believe that life is a test of faith and spirituality, while others view it as an opportunity to make a difference in the world.

Ultimately, life means different things to different people. It is a subjective experience shaped by our individual beliefs, values, and experiences. Some may see it as a gift, while others may view it as a burden. But regardless of our perspectives, one thing is certain – life is precious and should be cherished.

In the end, what truly matters is how we choose to live our lives. Whether we strive for success or happiness, whether we prioritize faith or making an impact, our actions and choices define the purpose of our existence. So, what is life for you? The answer to that question lies within each and every one of us. It is up to us to make the most out of this journey and create a meaningful and fulfilling life for ourselves.

We may not always know the exact purpose or meaning of life, but as long as we keep striving towards personal growth and fulfillment, we can find our own unique answer to this age-old question. So, let us make the most out of this beautiful and unpredictable journey called life. Let us live with purpose, passion, and gratitude, and make each moment count.

Remember, life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Keep exploring, keep learning, and keep living – after all, that’s what life is for. So, let us make the most out of this beautiful and unpredictable journey called life.

Let us live with purpose, passion, and gratitude, and make each moment count. Remember, life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Keep exploring, keep learning, and keep living – after all, that’s what life is for.

Life is Beautiful Explained:

Life is a beautiful journey filled with ups and downs, challenges and triumphs. It’s a rollercoaster ride with unexpected twists and turns. Every day brings something new and exciting, whether it’s a small moment of joy or a major milestone.

But what makes life truly beautiful? Is it the material possessions we acquire, the relationships we form, or the experiences we have? While these things can bring us happiness, they don’t solely define the beauty of life.

One of the key aspects of a beautiful life is gratitude. Being grateful for what we have and living in the present moment can help us appreciate the simple things in life that often go unnoticed. It also allows us to find joy and contentment in our everyday lives.

Another factor that contributes to a beautiful life is connection. Building meaningful relationships and connecting with others on a deeper level can bring us a sense of belonging and purpose. It’s through these connections that we learn and grow, shaping who we are.

Lastly, finding our passion and pursuing it can add immense beauty to our lives. Whether it’s a hobby, career or cause, having something that ignites our soul and gives us purpose can bring a sense of fulfillment and joy.

In conclusion, life is beautiful when we open our hearts to gratitude, connection, and passion. It’s not about the destination but rather the journey itself. Embrace all that life has to offer, both the good and the bad, for it’s these experiences that make life truly beautiful. So let’s cherish each moment, live with purpose, and spread love and kindness wherever we go.

What is the Message of Life is Beautiful:

Message of Life is Beautiful is a concept that focuses on finding the positive and beautiful aspects of life, even during difficult times. It encourages individuals to embrace optimism and hope, to appreciate the little things in life, and to find joy in everyday moments.

The message behind Life is Beautiful is one of resilience, perseverance, and determination. It reminds us that even in the face of adversity, there is always something to be grateful for and something worth fighting for. It teaches us to not let our struggles define us, but rather to use them as opportunities for growth and strength.

Moreover, Life is Beautiful also emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and making the most out of each day. It encourages individuals to cherish their relationships, pursue their passions, and make meaningful memories.

The concept of Life is Beautiful can be seen throughout history, from ancient philosophies to modern-day movements. It serves as a reminder that the pursuit of happiness is not about achieving perfection or material possessions, but rather finding contentment and joy in the journey itself.

Overall, the message of Life is Beautiful is one of hope, gratitude, and living life to the fullest. It reminds us that despite the challenges and obstacles we may face, there is always beauty and goodness to be found in the world around us.

So let us take this message to heart and spread positivity, kindness, and appreciation for all the little joys in life. Life is truly beautiful, if only we choose to see it that way.

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Let’s make every day count and live with purpose and gratitude. So, let’s all embrace the message of Life is Beautiful and make the most out of this precious gift called life. The possibilities are endless if we choose to see the beauty in it all.

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Essay On Life is Beautiful For Students

Life is beautiful, but it’s also full of struggle and pain. How do we deal with that? In this essay I discuss the concept of life and how it can be both beautiful and ugly at the same time.

Table of Contents

Life is Beautiful Essay For Students

We all experience beauty in different ways. For some, it may be the beauty of the natural world. For others, it may be the beauty of art or architecture. For still others, it may be the beauty of a loved one. But no matter what form it takes, beauty is always something to be appreciated.

And that’s why we at Life is Beautiful believe that life is beautiful. Every moment should be lived to its fullest and embraced for what it is – a chance to experience happiness and joy. So let go of anything that’s holding you back and live life to the fullest!

Why (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Life is Beautiful?

There’s something about life that is just so beautiful. Whether it’s the way a flower unfolds its petals in the sunlight, or the smile on a child’s face, there’s something magical about it all. And there’s no better place to see this beauty than right here in nature .

1. Happiness

If you’re looking for a positive outlook on life, look no further than the blog section of Life is Beautiful. Here, you’ll find inspiring stories and photos that will help brighten your day. Whether you’re feeling down about your current situation or just need a pick-me-up, these blogs will definitely put a smile on your face. So go ahead and take a deep breath – life is beautiful, after all!

2. Contradictions

Life can be beautiful and perfect, or it can be harsh and terrible. It all depends on your perspective. We all have our own set of beliefs and opinions, which can make our lives seem either great or terrible. But as long as we remember that life is always changing, and that nothing is permanent, we can enjoy the beauty in both the good and bad times.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this article on the life-changing effects of practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness has been shown to be one of the most important pillars of happiness and well-being, and as we’ve seen in this article, it can also be a very simple practice that anyone can embrace. Whether you’re looking to reduce stress levels or simply find a way to live more fully in the present moment, mindfulness is an invaluable tool. Keep up the good work, and remember: life is beautiful.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Biodiversity — The Beauty of Nature

The Beauty of Nature

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The aesthetic appeal of nature, the healing power of nature, the importance of biodiversity, the role of nature in human creativity.

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Short Essay: Beauty Of Nature

The beauty of nature has been a source of inspiration and wonder for centuries, influencing artists, poets, and philosophers alike. Writing a short essay on this topic allows you to explore the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of nature. Below, find a detailed guide on structuring a concise yet compelling essay that captures the essence of nature’s beauty.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Begin with an introduction that draws the reader in by highlighting the universal appeal and significance of nature’s beauty. Use a vivid description, a quote, or a personal anecdote to start on a strong note.

Beauty Of Nature Essay Example #1

The first aspect of nature’s beauty that I will explore is its diverse landscapes. From the vast forests of the Amazon to the towering mountains of the Himalayas, nature presents us with a breathtaking array of landscapes. The oceans and deserts, too, have their unique beauty, with the former offering an endless expanse of water, and the latter providing a stark and arid landscape that is both unforgiving and beautiful. Each of these landscapes offers its unique beauty, and it is impossible not to be amazed by the incredible diversity of nature.

In conclusion, the beauty of nature is evident in its diverse landscapes, changing seasons, and sensory experiences. From the towering mountains to the vast oceans, from the blooming flowers to the winter snow, nature presents us with a breathtaking array of beauty. The sounds and smells of nature only add to this beauty, evoking feelings of peace and tranquility that are impossible to find elsewhere. It is no wonder that so many people find solace and inspiration in nature, for it is truly a wonder to behold.

Beauty Of Nature Essay Example #2

The sights and sounds of nature are incredibly calming and soothing. The chirping of birds, the rustling of leaves, and the gentle sound of a babbling brook are all examples of the soothing sounds of nature. These sounds have the power to calm us and put us at ease, and they are often used in meditation and other relaxation techniques. The same can be said for the sights of nature. A beautiful sunset or a serene forest can have a calming effect on our minds and bodies, helping us to relax and unwind. The beauty of nature is a powerful antidote to the stresses and strains of modern life.

Beauty Of Nature Essay Example #3

The first aspect of nature’s beauty is found in its natural landscapes. Mountains, forests, and beaches provide us with some of the most stunning views we can experience. The towering peaks of mountains, the vast expanse of forests, and the endless stretches of sand on beaches all offer unique sights that leave a lasting impression on us. Mountains have a way of making us feel small yet significant, while forests transport us to a different world, and beaches offer a sense of peace and tranquility. The natural landscapes of our world are a testament to the beauty and power of nature.

Nature’s beauty is all around us, and it is up to us to take the time to appreciate it fully. The natural landscapes, changing seasons, and intricate designs of the natural world all showcase the wonder and complexity of nature. We need to take care of our world and preserve its beauty for generations to come. As John Muir said, “in every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”

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The Beauty Of Life

Life is beautiful. Life is the most precious gift of God. Life is a treasure of jewels whose worth is immeasurable. Life shows all its colours and shades which may be dark and bright. The dark shades of life make us realize the depth of life because life is just not just a bed of roses. As it is rightly said, “The stream would have no song if it wouldn’t have rocks in its beds”. So,  the trying, enduring episodes of life make us more insightful and patient. They make us view life from a different perspective, and help us explore new possibilities. The pains and sufferings in life make us judge the importance of pleasure that is the beauty of life.

There is no dead end as such and there is no shortcut in life. What may seem adversity is actually an opportunity? As failures are the stepping stones to success and “success is counted the sweetest by who near succeed.”

When we are confronted with the idea of giving up at that point of time that helpless situation perhaps is opening new doors for us as life is full of surprises and possibilities. When we are shattered and lose courage, God helps us to pray and by praying we become humbler and tolerant in life. The more we pray the more optimistic and vibrant we become in life. Then we see the colourful shades of life the joy, the ecstasy, the rhythm, the humour, the love. It makes us rejoice and celebrate. Celebrate not just because we have won a lottery, got a promotion or planned a destination wedding. Celebrate just because we have made all the lovely things around us happen, the smile we give to our friends, the kind words we say to the people around us.

That is the beauty of life to see the sunshine which brightens our day and fills us with new vigour and strength. Each day is a new day to accomplish new tasks and usher with a new vision. Embrace the moment with tenderness and innocence and life will become a garden of mesmerizing flowers.

Life is to pick up the good and ignore the bad. When we reflect on the positive aspect of life, we are able to cherish our dreams. Life is not a competition or the game of win or lose but it is an enjoying journey, and we are a comfortable traveller as we always land safely.

Life is to forget and forgive. Move ahead with faith and conviction then only we can realize our dreams. Life will truly unfold its magic and bring good luck and happiness.

So, live life wholeheartedly as this day is yours and tomorrow may be more wonderful.

an old hindi song says, \" life is a song of love which which has to be sung with a smilelife is a puzzle & a companion of happiness & sorrowlife is a...

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@ Happiness Not A Cliche

I am a management graduate. I believe in giving my best in whatever I do. I never give up in difficult times. My encouraging as well as discouraging experiences has given me lessons of life. I feel I am better than yesterday. I feel very happy when I spend time in improving my self. I am not bogged down by other people's opinions about me. I never lose courage and confidence even when people misjudge me or underestimate me. My smile is my greatest asset and it is the most valuable thing I possess. With my sense of humor and humbleness I stand out. Character is an important aspect of a person. Wealth, beauty, position doesn't matter much. I am quite inspired by the quotes of Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi. I feel like an achiever at this threshold of my life but I have miles to go.

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The Concept of Beauty: Beyond the Surface of a Beautiful Girl

This essay is about the multifaceted nature of beauty in a girl emphasizing that true beauty extends beyond physical appearance. It highlights how inner qualities such as kindness empathy and compassion contribute to lasting impressions and meaningful connections. The essay also discusses the importance of intellectual beauty confidence creativity and resilience in defining a girl’s attractiveness. It argues that these attributes together create a rich multifaceted and enduring beauty that transcends superficial standards. By appreciating these diverse aspects we gain a deeper understanding of what it truly means to be beautiful.

How it works

Beauty has long been a subject of fascination and debate spanning cultures and centuries. The image of a beautiful girl often evokes thoughts of physical attractiveness: flawless skin striking features and a harmonious symmetry. However beauty transcends mere physicality encompassing traits that capture the essence of an individual. Understanding the multifaceted nature of beauty allows us to appreciate its true depth and the unique attributes that make a girl genuinely beautiful.

Physical beauty often the most immediate aspect of attraction is undeniably impactful.

It is shaped by societal standards cultural influences and personal preferences. Features such as bright eyes a radiant smile and graceful poise are commonly admired. Yet these attributes while captivating only scratch the surface of what constitutes true beauty. The transient nature of physical appearance highlights the need to look beyond and appreciate the qualities that endure and define a person’s character.

A beautiful girl often possesses an inner beauty that radiates through her actions thoughts and interactions with others. Kindness empathy and a genuine interest in the well-being of others are powerful indicators of inner beauty. These qualities create a lasting impression fostering deep connections and respect. A girl who exhibits compassion and understanding enriches the lives of those around her making her beauty evident through the positive impact she has on her community.

Intellectual beauty is another critical dimension that contributes to the allure of a beautiful girl. Intelligence curiosity and a passion for learning can be incredibly attractive. A girl who engages in thoughtful conversations explores new ideas and demonstrates a keen mind brings a dynamic and enriching presence to any setting. Intellectual beauty challenges and inspires encouraging growth and exploration in others. It signifies a depth of character that is as compelling as any physical attribute.

The confidence and self-assuredness that a girl carries also play a crucial role in defining her beauty. Confidence exudes a sense of self-worth and authenticity making her presence magnetic and inspiring. A confident girl is not afraid to be herself embrace her strengths and acknowledge her weaknesses. This self-awareness and acceptance create an aura of beauty that is both empowering and attractive. Confidence allows her to navigate life with grace and resilience making her an admirable figure in the eyes of others.

Furthermore creativity and a sense of individuality contribute significantly to the perception of beauty. A girl who expresses herself through art music fashion or any other form of creativity demonstrates a unique perspective and a willingness to share her inner world. This expression of individuality is captivating as it reveals layers of personality and a distinct sense of self. Creativity adds color and vibrancy to life making the girl who embodies it a source of inspiration and joy.

Resilience and strength are also integral to the beauty of a girl. Overcoming challenges facing adversity with courage and maintaining a positive outlook reflect an inner fortitude that is deeply attractive. A girl who shows resilience in the face of obstacles demonstrates a powerful and admirable aspect of beauty. Her ability to rise above difficulties and continue moving forward with determination and grace inspires those around her showcasing a strength that is both beautiful and profound.

Ultimately the concept of a beautiful girl encompasses far more than physical appearance. It is a harmonious blend of inner qualities intellectual pursuits confidence creativity and resilience. These elements together create a beauty that is rich multifaceted and enduring. Recognizing and appreciating these diverse aspects allows us to see beyond superficial standards and value the true essence of beauty.

In a world often obsessed with external appearances it is essential to remember that beauty is a complex and holistic attribute. A girl who embodies kindness intelligence confidence creativity and resilience shines with a beauty that transcends the physical and leaves a lasting impact. By celebrating these qualities we can foster a deeper and more meaningful appreciation of what it truly means to be beautiful.

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The Concept of Beauty: Beyond the Surface of a Beautiful Girl. (2024, Jul 06). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-concept-of-beauty-beyond-the-surface-of-a-beautiful-girl/

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Concept of Beauty: Beyond the Surface of a Beautiful Girl . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-concept-of-beauty-beyond-the-surface-of-a-beautiful-girl/ [Accessed: 9-Jul-2024]

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‘Nude Images Of Me Were Spread Online As A Young Teen. Now I’m Fighting To Protect Other Survivors.’

How one survivor of Image-Based Sexual Abuse is calling for radical change.

Leah Juliett is an Image Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) expert and survivor, activist, and founder of the March Against Revenge Porn .

When I was a young teen, a boy I knew pressured me to send nudes over Facebook Messenger. Over a decade later, I still have all of the messages. He would compliment my body and show interest in me before asking for intimate photos. And when I denied him, he would rescind his interest. I deeply wanted to be loved and to be seen. For years, I had a very negative relationship with my body and self-image. Being “seen” by this boy was of value to me.

Eventually, after a year of being pressured, I sent him the four photos he requested. My breasts, my face—all of me was exposed. I made him promise he would never share them. He laughed at me, like it was silly that I would think he would violate my privacy and my consent. But that’s exactly what he did.

I will never know the exact thing that triggered him (I’ve never been able to speak to him about it, nor does any excuse justify his abuse), but around the same time I started to come out as queer, he told me that he was going to ruin my life. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, and I wasn’t able to understand the gravity of the situation in the way that I do now. He ended up sharing my nude images on Facebook Messenger to a group of boys from our town. They spread through my high school like wildfire. They were disseminated throughout my city. And I thought: This is as bad as it’s going to get—kids in high school looking at me like they’d seen me naked . But it got worse.

The photos were posted on an international image board called Anon-IB, where my name, age, town, face, and body were disseminated and accessible for well over five years. They’re likely still there today.

I stayed silent for a really long time after this happened. My abuser knew where I lived. He knew my little sister. He knew where I went to school. I knew that if I tried to speak out against him, I would be blamed and slut-shamed by my community. I felt like he owned me, my dignity and my safety. I was also very, very scared that I would be arrested. (In Connecticut, we didn’t have legislation that protected survivors of image-based sexual violence from also being held accountable for sharing the photos.)

I did my best to make myself as invisible as possible. I was afraid that if I didn’t make myself absolutely small and silent, something worse would happen, that more people would find out, that the photos would get posted in other places. When I went to college, I moved out of my small hometown and began depending on self-harm and alcohol to heal my pain. During this time, at 19 years old, I had what Dr. Spring Cooper, a survivor and researcher in this field, calls a “f*ck it” moment. A moment where I was shaken awake.

I had opened up Facebook on my laptop and saw a news article showing a mug shot of the man who had abused me as a teenager. It was a visceral moment, seeing his mug shot staring back at me. It’s burned into my brain. And I said, “Okay, this man is either going to kill me because I am driving myself to death the way that I’m handling the trauma of this situation, or I’m going to act.” In that moment, I decided to save my life, and I decided to act.

For the past decade, I’ve been healing the parts of me that are cracked and broken inside as a result of this abuse and exploitation. And now, at 27, I am in a place where—despite my cracks and despite my brokenness and despite the trauma that lives in me—I am strong enough to advocate against the people, the structures, the institutions that allowed abuse like mine to happen. Now, I’m focused on accountability for abusers.

I work with two coalitions that fight online image-based sexual violence and child sexual abuse material on the Internet, and we’re working to hold tech companies and abusers accountable.

During the Senate Judiciary hearing in January, I was in the room listening to top tech CEOs testify in front of Congress. I was joined by fellow survivors, and I watched parents and families of children who’ve died because of sextortion via this technology speak. There were stories of young people who bought fentanyl-laced pills on Snapchat, of young men who took their own lives after being sextorted. And it made me realize that this abuse and violence made possible through our tech and social media is impacting so many of us in so many unique ways.

I was abused in an Internet and social media landscape that looked a lot different than it does now. There were no precautions or tools to help protect and prevent this type of abuse on platforms. Now, I feel lucky to live in a moment where my voice has value and the five years I suffered in silence are not in vain.

But passing federal legislation is deeply important. We don’t have laws criminalizing nonconsensual image sharing in all 50 states. (It’s a misdemeanor in some, and a felony in a few others.) If I had the power to change things right now, I’d immediately pass the suite of bills proposed to protect children and prevent their online abuse:

• The EARN IT Act , which allows websites to remove user-posted content deemed inappropriate and removes blanket immunity for violations of laws related to online child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
• The SHIELD Act , which makes it a criminal offense to distribute intimate visual depictions
• Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would protect children online by enabling stronger privacy settings; making it easier to report harmful behavior; mitigating the proliferation of content that promotes eating disorders, substance abuse, CSA, and suicidal ideation; and requiring independent audits of how social media platforms are doing

When I started talking about this 10 years ago, nobody wanted to hear me. Nobody wanted to publish my story. Attorneys didn’t want to work with me because I was under 18 when the incident occurred. Everybody blamed me and nobody cared. But now, we’re at an inflection point. I’ve been begging everyone to listen to me on this issue for a decade, and people finally seem to be waking up. During the State of the Union, President Biden said it was time to pass legislation to protect children online. My dad texted me: “I heard that and I immediately thought of you.”

If I could tell every young person one thing, it would be to instill in their brains that regardless of what happens to you, that abuse is never your fault. And if it takes you two days or two years, five months or five years to say what happened to you, there will always be someone to listen. There is a community of survivors, experts, and allies in this space who are ready to support and affirm you. You don’t have to just survive. You deserve to live out loud.

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Authenticity

Beyond beauty: the allure of expressiveness, behind the nonverbal appeal of authentic emotion..

Posted July 8, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• Expressiveness predicts likability, in addition to attractiveness.
• Nonverbal expressivity increases likability through perceived authenticity.
• Expressive people are viewed as more interesting, engaging, and socially prominent.

You meet people everywhere you go, from social events to the workplace, from the gas station to the grocery store. Yet unmistakably, there are some you remember more than others, and fondly. Memorable people are not necessarily the most attractive, the smartest, or even the most charismatic , but they are often attractive through an interpersonal trait you probably won’t even recognize at the time: expressiveness. Research explains.

The Allure of Expressivity

Amber A. Fultz et al. (2023) examined the link between nonverbal expressivity, physical attractiveness , and liking. [i] The research team studied the manner in which both attractiveness and expressivity impacted liking at first impression , after a five-minute conversation, and after becoming well-acquainted. They found that at first impression, consistent with prior research, attractive targets were liked more. This result was still present after the first conversation. Yet after nine weeks, observer-rated expressiveness was one of the factors that predicted liking in addition to attractiveness. Fultz et al. suggest that nonverbal behavioral qualities must be significant, considering their effects on liking even after learning about other characteristics during the course of a relationship.

Fultz et al. note their findings confirm attraction to beautiful, expressive people, but emphasize the importance of both physical attractiveness as well as nonverbal expressiveness. They note that these two constructs have independent influences on impression formation and are involved in distinct processes of perception. This means that even after getting to know someone’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, including the ways in which someone’s actions impact us—both positively and negatively, the extent to which we like friends and colleagues is still affected by their appearance and style of nonverbal expression.

The Attractiveness of Authenticity

One of the reasons nonverbal expressivity increases likability may have to do with perceived authenticity . Fultz et al. suggested that expressivity positively affects liking, especially in established relationships, because it is perceived as more likely to catch our attention , more intense, and more meaningful. The researchers note these dynamics make expressive people more interesting and engaging, and, therefore, more socially prominent. They also note that the increased salience of expressive individuals generates corresponding trait inferences, making them appear more confident and easily understood, and, therefore, better liked.

Fultz et al. note their findings are consistent with other theories of interpersonal attraction that associate liking with exposure, proximity, and social interaction, indicating that the better we know someone and the more we understand them, the more we like them. The contrary is true as well: less expressive people are difficult to judge accurately and will, accordingly, be less liked.

Behavior Matters Too

Obviously, there is more to relational satisfaction than words and expression. Behavior often provides the best evidence of whether words are true, as captured by the famous reminder that someone must both “talk the talk” and “walk the walk.” Accordingly, Fultz et al. recognize that daily words and behavior should be the most significant factor impacting likability, and that we would not explain romantic dissatisfaction as having a partner that is “unattractive and unexpressive.” Although we love our significant others because of, and sometimes in spite of, their actions and behavior, beauty and expressiveness apparently play a role in determining how much we like friends and colleagues, and perhaps even partners.

[i] Fultz, Amber A., Morgan D. Stosic, and Frank J. Bernieri. 2023. “Nonverbal Expressivity, Physical Attractiveness, and Liking: First Impression to Established Relationship.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, October. doi:10.1007/s10919-023-00444-7.

Wendy L. Patrick, J.D., Ph.D., is a career trial attorney, behavioral analyst, author of Red Flags , and co-author of Reading People .

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