Beauty – What Is It Really?
Beauty is frequently defined as a subjective aspect of objects which makes these objects aesthetically pleasurable to see. These objects may include sunsets, landscapes, humans and other works of art. Beauty, along with aesthetic sense, is the most significant theme of aesthetics, another of the three major branches of modern philosophy. The three branches are aesthetics, philosophy of art, and science of art. We will look at each of these topics in turn.
Aesthetic beauty has been the subject of ongoing debates since the time of the Ancient Greeks. The Greek idealist philosophers gave importance to beauty as a subjective state, saying that beauty lies within the heart of a person. According to this line of thinking, beauty is what makes an object beautiful to the greatest degree, regardless of how it appears externally. This idea has been used by many to support their own personal notions of beauty, and many philosophers came to disagree with the basic premise that beauty can be defined objectively.
Philosophers were particularly annoyed with the idea that beauty is something that can be objectively measured and then judged. In order for a viewer to correctly judge beauty, they felt that a particular object has to meet the following conditions: it must appeal to the senses, it should be in a pleasant condition, and it should be free from defects. Modern philosopher John Locke came to the conclusion that beauty was a feeling that arises in the mind of a beholder. Therefore, there is no standard of beauty which can be universally accepted as the ideal or standard of beauty.
Beauty as an object is seen differently by everyone. Some people feel that beauty is something that one sees in nature, such as in flowers. Others believe that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, so that if a person is not looking right into another person’s eyes, then that person is not truly beautiful. The last group to believe that beauty is in the eyes of another, because they feel that beauty only exists in the mind of another. Regardless of how different people feel about beauty, there is one fact that all agree on: beauty is a subjective state which only affects one person at a time.
Everyone knows that beauty is a feeling, but what most do not realize is that beauty is also a mental state. This is because while beauty may be an objective state, the feelings that beauty evokes are subjective. This means that while one person may see beauty in a rose, another may feel ugly or base due to the color of the roses. This therefore means that the beholder of the rose is different than the one who looks at ugly brown roses.
Thus, beauty is more a matter of how one feels rather than how one sees beauty. If you believe that beauty truly exists outside of your eyes, then you will never know whether or not you are beautiful unless you look. The only way for a person to know if he or she is beautiful is by their own standards and the standards of other people. Look at what other people’s standards of beauty are and you will soon begin to find out for yourself. If beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, then beauty truly is subjective.