Concept
Beauty
Overview
aesthetic concept
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Beauty is discussed.
In virtue of the freedom and infinitude above analysed, which is inherent in the notion of beauty, whether we view it in its objective presence as a thing of beauty, or under its aesthetic contemplation, we disengage the province of the beautiful from the relations of finite condition, to exalt it into that of the Idea and its truth. Beauty is the Idea as the immediate unity of the notion and its objective reality…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
_Remark_ This Deduction is thus easy, because it has no need to justify the objective reality of any concept, for Beauty is not a concept of the Object and the judgement of taste is not cognitive. It only maintains that we are justified in presupposing universally in every man those subjective conditions of the Judgement which we find in ourselves; and further, that we have rightly subsumed the given Object…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it; names the idea
There is no very evident use in beauty; the necessity of it for cultural purposes is not apparent, and yet civilization could not do without it. The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions in which things are regarded as beautiful; it can give no explanation of the nature or origin of beauty; as usual, its lack of results is concealed under a flood of resounding and meaningless words. Unfortunately…
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
From innumerable instances of this kind, as well as from considering that beauty like wit, cannot be defined, but is discerned only by a taste or sensation, we may conclude, that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain; and since the power of producing pain and pleasure make in this manner the essence of beauty and deformity, all the effects of…
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Beauty must therefore be spread among all the parts. According to the same doctrine, the colors which, like sunlight, are beautiful, are beautiful but simple, and those whose beauty is not derived from proportion, will also be excluded from the domain of beauty. According to this hypothesis, how will gold be beautiful? The brilliant lightning in the night, even the stars, would not be beautiful to contemplate.
Plotinus, Plotinos
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Beauty
- Xenocrates
- George Santayana
- Francis Hutcheson (philosopher)
- Plato
- Susan Sontag
- Pherecydes of Syros
- Susan Bordo
- Ghosha
- Théodore Jouffroy
- Secundus the Silent
- Eugenio Trías Sagnier
Related ideas
- Edmund Burke
- Roger Scruton
- Giorgio Vasari
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Aphrodite
- Classical Greece
- G. E. Moore
- Golden ratio
- Philosophical realism
- Hedonism
- Philosophy
- Western philosophy
- Heraclitus
- Immanuel Kant
- John Locke
- Necessity and sufficiency
- Pleasure
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- Latin
- Eurocentrism
- Light
- George Santayana
- The Name of the Rose
- Mathematics
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Absurdism.