truth is beauty essay

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – analysis

Truth sometimes means reality, while reality is usually not beautiful at all. Reality can be disappointing or cruel or ugly. By choosing beauty to believe in as the total truth, we can surpass the ugly part of reality the same way we surpass the fear of death by believing in God. From here, we can even understand the poet’s eagerness to make the living as happy as possible in stanza 3, by repeating 6 times “happy”. He is rather decided to see beauty, which is connected with happiness and away from sorrow. He has made up his mind to choose beauty as his only truth at that time (or even earlier). It is why he uses the urn’s tone to make his statement, as if the urn, a steady and still ancient thing, is saying that “why do not you believe in me? This is all you need to know on earth.”

If the “ Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker ’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the “ Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker ’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense–it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker ’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “for ever young”), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza , he examines the picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity–when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza , the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza , it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say–once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza , the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to “tease” him “out of thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is a succession of “hungry generations,” as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind–“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon . After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

The College Study

Essay, Letter , Paragrah , Aplication

Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty Essay

• Introduction
• For Keats, beauty was a highest principle
• Relationship between Beauty and truth
• Keats difference from his contemporaries
• Spirit of beauty Intellectual beauty
• Wider concept of truth

In his famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats has prophetically said:

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty – that is all, Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

Prior to commenting on this saying of Keats, it is essential to know that Keats was, above all other things, a poet depicting and expressing the outward elements of beauty, a true worshipper of Beauty. He had no religion, save the religion of Beauty, no God save Pan; the earth, according to him was “my great condoler and Beauty my consoler.” To Keats, a thing of beauty was “a joy forever”. His only mission in life, as he once wrote to his beloved Fannie Browne, “is to lie prostrate at your feet as you are the goddess of beauty”.

To Keats, each object of nature was beautiful for its own sake and for its magic, colour, sound, odour, and touch. In every object of nature, in everything, which he considered to be worth appreciating, he saw a spirit of Beauty – a spirit that has divine splendor. In other words, Keats saw God in the Temple of Beauty. He took Beauty as a principle – the highest principle, which “hath the power to sublimate man’s entire spiritual self”. Thus, it is no small thing to have so loved the principle of Beauty as to perceived the necessary relation of Beauty and truth and both, again, with joy. According to Keats, “that which is beautiful in every sense of the term, will be found to be synonymous with truth; and truth, however ugly it may seem at first, or to some person, will be ultimately found to be beautiful. To the human mind, beauty and truth are one and the same thing – to see things in their beauty and thus to interpret these things inspired by beauty in terms of truth.[the_ad id=”17141”]

While Scott was merely telling stories; Wordsworth was reforming poverty or up-holding moral law, Shelley advocating impossible and wild reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and political discontent of his time, Keats, lived apart from men and women of all political beliefs, worshipping, ‘Beauty’, like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or deemed it to be.

He had a simple and direct passion for natural beauty, just for its own sake – the beauty of the forest, of flowers and sky. He was in this happiest mood in the fields. The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, and the glitter of the sun – all these seemed to make his nature dance with joy. For him, Beauty, coupled with Truth, produced everlasting joy.

Now we have to see how beauty produces joy, which is imperishable and undying. It must not, indeed, be the outward beauty, which is transient and unendurable. Flowers bloom only for a day and fade away the same night. Outward beauty is thus a mirage – a deception. What Keats means to suggest through the quotation is that it is not the material phase of the beauty of a flower that captivates or charms man’s heart, producing thereby an unlimited and imperishable joy; it is the essence or the spirit behind the concept of beauty. A flower may fade away; bright outward face may dwindle into oblivion, but the impression which the spirit of beauty has created in the heart, can never be wiped away: it is to live for ever, and this impression of the spirit of beauty shall ever inspire man’s heart with an eternal joy – a joy “that perisheth not, nor declineth with the passage of time”.

Beauty thus appeared before Keats as a spiritual principle of the highest type, which could immortalize man’s life on this earth. He found in Beauty something of a divine light of sanctity, which according to him, was capable of purifying the human mind. His concept of beauty was not of an ordinary man, to whom it is only a pleasing and charming diversion.[the_ad id=”17142″]

Again, there is one more concept of beauty – the intellectual beauty, which is also permanent and which also creates imperishable and inexhaustible joy in the minds of the people. Great and mighty scholars, poets, philosophers and artists of the world possessed intellectual beauty and though physically they are not living, yet their intellectual beauty still lives and shall live forever. The intellectual beauty of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Allama Iqbal, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Milton etc. has given joy to the mind of civilized men that is never going to diminish. To Keats also, beauty was something of intellectual inspiration. He derived his intellectual greatness from his cult of beauty.

By Truth, however, Keats does not mean merely something opposite to falsehood; his concept of truth is highly didactic, spiritual and ethical. By truth he means the truth of life the very reality in this world, the essence of the sublimity of soul and mind, in short, God. In other words, Keats took truth as the highest concept of the Supreme Being.

This mighty and most sacred thing, according to Keats, was allied to beauty. Again, we have to see that by the term beauty Keats means something far higher than what the ordinary people generally understand. It is the spiritual or intellectual bejuty that is, to Keats, the very essence of the Absolute and supreme truth.[the_ad id=”17150″]

In Fannie Browne, Kcats had seen this “Divine Beauty” and that was the reason why he sought to worship her instead of loving her. “In your eyes, I find the deepest well of beauty which is neither human nor physical – It is a picture of the perfection of Beauty, an angelic Beauty.”

We justify Keats’ conception of seeing God in truth and to search for truth in the highest form of intellectual and spiritual beauty. We must also seek to establish a divine link between the beauties of our soul, mind and heart and the highest truth that makes the vast universe look a glimpse of heaven. Indeed, we are one with the poet in his great discovery that one can establish the kingdom of Heaven on this earth by combining the two sublime principles of Beauty and truth.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Ode on a Grecian Urn Summary & Analysis by John Keats

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was written by the influential English poet John Keats in 1819. It is a complex, mysterious poem with a disarmingly simple set-up: an undefined speaker looks at a Grecian urn, which is decorated with evocative images of rustic and rural life in ancient Greece. These scenes fascinate, mystify, and excite the speaker in equal measure—they seem to have captured life in its fullness, yet are frozen in time. The speaker's response shifts through different moods, and ultimately the urn provokes questions more than it provides answers. The poem's ending has been and remains the subject of varied interpretation. The urn seems to tell the speaker—and, in turn, the reader—that truth and beauty are one and the same. Keats wrote this poem in a great burst of creativity that also produced his other famous odes (e.g. " Ode to a Nightingale "). Though this poem was not well-received in Keats' day, it has gone on to become one of the most celebrated in the English language.

• Read the full text of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The Full Text of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

1 Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

2        Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

3 Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

4        A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

5 What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

6        Of deities or mortals, or of both,

7                In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

8        What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

9 What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

10                What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

11 Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

12        Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

13 Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

14        Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

15 Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

16        Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

17                Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

18 Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

19        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

20                For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

21 Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

22          Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

23 And, happy melodist, unwearied,

24          For ever piping songs for ever new;

25 More happy love! more happy, happy love!

26          For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

27                 For ever panting, and for ever young;

28 All breathing human passion far above,

29          That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

30                 A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

31 Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

32          To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

33 Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

34          And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

35 What little town by river or sea shore,

36          Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

37                 Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

38 And, little town, thy streets for evermore

39          Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

40                 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

41 O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

42          Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

43 With forest branches and the trodden weed;

44          Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

45 As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

46          When old age shall this generation waste,

47                 Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

48 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

49          "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

50                 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” Summary

“ode on a grecian urn” themes.

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

Art, Beauty, and Truth

History and the Imagination

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “ode on a grecian urn”.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,        Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express        A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape        Of deities or mortals, or of both,                In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?        What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?                What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Lines 11-16

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard        Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,        Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave        Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Lines 17-20

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,                For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Lines 21-25

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed          Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied,          For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love!

Lines 26-30

   For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,                 For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above,          That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,                 A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Lines 31-34

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?          To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,          And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

Lines 35-40

What little town by river or sea shore,          Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,                 Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore          Will silent be; and not a soul to tell                 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

Lines 41-45

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede          Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed;          Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

Lines 46-50

When old age shall this generation waste,                 Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,          "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all                 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” Symbols

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Alliteration

Personification, “ode on a grecian urn” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Unravish'd
• High-sorrowful
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Rhyme scheme, “ode on a grecian urn” speaker, “ode on a grecian urn” setting, literary and historical context of “ode on a grecian urn”, more “ode on a grecian urn” resources, external resources.

More by Keats — A link to more poems by Keats, including his other odes.

Portrait of John Keats by Joseph Severn — A painting done of Keats by his friend and contemporary, Joseph Severn.

Sketch of an Urn by Keats — A sketch by John Keats of the Sosibios urn, which is thought to have partially inspired the poem.

A Contemporary Review of Keats — A link to John Gibson Lockhart's review of Keats's poetry in 1818.

Other Ekphrastic Poems — A collection of poems that also use an ekphrastic approach.

LitCharts on Other Poems by John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever (from Endymion)

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art

In drear nighted December

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Ode on Indolence

Ode on Melancholy

Ode to a Nightingale

Ode to Psyche

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

The Eve of St. Agnes

This living hand, now warm and capable

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

Everything you need for every book you read.

Beauty and Truth Again? Lessons from Physics, Art, and Theology

Tom mcleish.

This essay is based on a public lecture given in May of 2022 at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge.

  PDF available here.

T here are distinct signs that the poet John Keats’ Grecian Urn has found its voice again. This is a surprise. The final Delphic utterance of the decorated vessel in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn runs: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Though well-known as verse, it has long been relegated to romantic wishful thinking.

The dominant, highly dualistic discussion of beauty and truth over the last century, and of aesthetics more generally, has long stifled the wistful notion that beautiful ideas are more likely to be true than ugly ones. Furthermore, multiple voices in late modern philosophy adopt the equally dualistic assurance that the objective (truth) and subjective (beauty) simply don’t mix, that they support no connection, enjoy no conversation. Yet a recently-published and extensive survey of over 20,000 scientists in the US, India, Italy and the UK, The Role of Aesthetics in Science, by Brandon Vaidyanathan and Christopher Jacobi, found that only 34% of scientists disagreed with the statement declaring “mathematical beauty is a good indicator of scientific truth.” A very large majority also found that the objects of their scientific investigations were aesthetically beautiful.

Here, I want to explore the reasons for the apparent failure to suffocate the Urn’s continuing voice in our own time. Anticipating that this will require some philosophy as well as the testimony of science itself, the continually conflictual conversations between beauty and truth will require listening to the arts, as well as the sciences. Surprisingly perhaps, the road to resolution leads through theology.

T he erstwhile correlation of truth and beauty is beset with problems in both concepts—and these begin at the level of philosophical definition long before contesting any comparison. True objective reality is out of human reach (following Kant), without substance (following Berkeley), or subjectivity in disguise (following Hume). On the other hand, subjectivity is internal to any individual’s own response (after Schiller), so entirely relative, and resistant to external standards of merit, artistic or otherwise. If a Duchamp declares a urinal on its side to be art, then art it is. Attempts to de-relativize beauty seem always to slide towards a superficial utilitarianism (following Hegel).

Of course, a reader fatigued by fighting their way through this philosophical tangle can simply sweep aside its problematic history. They can simply assume the possibility of objective truth, most securely in the form of scientific knowledge. Similarly, a shared standard of beauty can be accepted as an axiom of faith—we all know beauty when we see it (if not all of us then at least qualified critics do, according to Hume). But even then, Keats’ Urn is found more frequently smashed into shards than admired—for science has repeatedly elicited not beauty or delight, but aesthetic revulsion. Only a decade after its poetic declaration of the unity of truth and beauty, Edgar Allan Poe penned his Sonnet to Science containing the lines:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? … … Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star?

T he same charge as Poe’s of disenchanting the world was laid at science’s feet by Keats himself, whose long poem Lamia complains that its “dull philosophy” has “clipped an angel’s wings” and that science “unweaves the rainbow.” The rich aesthetic of wonder, awe and mystery that generates poetic beauty is not, at least for Poe and Keats, enriched by science, but rather sucked dry through acts of palpable violence. 

The history of ideas begins to suggest a strangely inescapable consequence of bringing truth and beauty into conversation with each other—that of conflict at every turn. The act of relating objectivity and subjectivity seems to open a deep vein of non-reconciliation within the human experience irrespective of context, be that artistic or scientific. Examples abound, but one close to the conceptual heart of physics, on the one hand, and of the visual arts on the other, is the idea of symmetry .

Theoretical physicist and science-communicator Brian Greene is correct when he writes, “In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics.” For my own part, one of the most beautiful results in all of theoretical physics is surely the theorem named after the brilliant German mathematician, Emmy Noether, who showed that for every symmetry in the laws of physics—in other words for every transformation that leaves them unchanged, such as observing the universe from a different direction or at different times—there must exist a conserved quantity. Such symmetry is spatially instantiated in the sparkling glory of crystals; it encompasses within its consequences the steady spinning of the Earth about the planet’s poles; it even generates the ordered families of ‘elementary’ particles of high-energy physics. Yet the aesthetics of even such powerful symmetry does not go uncontested. Francis Bacon, whose influence on the development of early modern science is hard to overestimate, confessed that “there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” For Bacon, pure symmetry seems to miss something essential to lasting beauty. Kant went further still: “All stiff regularity (such as approximates to mathematical regularity) has something in it repugnant to taste.”

I n spite of the findings of Vaidyanathan and Jacobi, the more recent history of beauty and truth in science has also been much more usually characterized by conflict than consonance. Some fascinating signs that all is not straightforward appear in their report. The example of symmetry exposes a current disagreement between different sciences—though esteemed within physics, is found much less attractive by life scientists. The physics-biology division reveals other divergences, the former finding simplicity more aesthetically pleasing, the latter complexity. 

There have been, to be sure, high-profile proponents of beauty as a guide to scientific truth. Perhaps the high priest of these, within physics at least, is British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, for whom, “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” Admittedly his relativistic version of the Schrödinger equation for the electron contains symmetries that are not only mathematically elegant but also lead inexorably to the unforced emergence of electron spin and of the existence of anti-particles. It is easy to understand how exposure to such siren examples as this have beguiled two generations of Dirac’s successors into searching for the path of physical truth behind the doorway of mathematical beauty.

The community of “string-theory,” for example, stands starkly in this tradition, now possessing a five-fold mathematical theory that contains an unimaginably vast number of possible universes, but no testable experimental predictions whatsoever. No wonder that its critics such as physicist and writer Sabine Hossenfelder, in her book Lost in Math , warn that, “Beauty is a treacherous guide, and it has led physicists astray many times before … Physics isn’t math. It’s choosing the right math.” The implication is that “the right math” may not be the most aesthetically appealing, in spite of the opinions reflected in The Role of Aesthetics in Science. Hossenfelder is just one of a numerous and outspoken community of physicists who have, over several years, raised strong objections to the choice of the string-theorists to follow mathematical beauty rather than experimental evidence in guiding their program. The complaint is not purely methodological, but takes on moral aspects as well: surely science ought always to make contact with experiment? The duration, scope and wide discussion of these arguments is one reason to be surprised at the findings of The Role of Aesthetics in Science. The problematic example of string theory does not seem to have deterred most of the field from allowing beauty a continuing place as a guide to truth.

Widening perspective beyond physics shows that any resolution of the tangled contest between knowledge and aesthetics will need to move beyond that particular science, even beyond the sciences as a whole, for a similar chorus of discordant voices seems to emerge in every disciplinary context. Turning the flow of the argument slightly, the visual arts have long furnished an arena for disagreement over whether claims for beauty are demonstrably true or not.

J apanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura writes, for example, of the modernist painter Mark Rothko’s luminously colored canvasses, “Rothko’s paintings are about standing in proximity to a kind of ominous, ‘otherized’ world. But I see hope in that unfamiliarity. And the reason is, it makes me want to go to my studio and paint again.” Yet British art and literary critic Roger Scruton declares of Rothko’s art, “the work consists of little more than a few rectangles of coordinated colors. Anyone who is not told the value of such art would find it difficult to identify it with beauty or beauty with any type of dollar value.” Unpicking such stark divergence is challenging: the credentials underpinning both voices are as strong, their authors’ engagement with ethical discussion as subtle and profound, though reaching completely different conclusions. If any generalization on their outlook holds, it might be that Scruton’s mental gaze has turned more often to the past and to its traditions, Fujimura’s to the future and its possibilities. Both critiques, positive and negative, therefore draw yet again on ethical dimensions to the question—it is impossible to resist questions such as which perspective, historical or future, ought one to prefer. 

Although the “subjective/objective” dichotomy appears at first sight to have no moral, but only philosophical purchase, questions of ethics have therefore proved repeatedly inescapable whenever truth and beauty are put into conversation. Digging beneath the surface of the Scruton/Fujimura debate around Rothko’s art, or that between Greene and Hossenfelder on string theory reveals ethical concerns, as we have seen, as well as suggesting the transcendent and rather profound nature of the ethical issues at stake. In the light of them it becomes hard to resist asking, not only what aesthetic and moral philosophy have to say on questions of beauty, but to pose the same questions of theology too. This is not to urge assent to any form of religious belief (although such narratives do provide useful material in addressing morality), but simply to recognize that the academic discipline of theology, uniquely within the humanities, retains topics and critical tools central to the truth/beauty dichotomy. Among these lie critical histories of teleology (or “purpose”), the experience of truth itself, the possibility of the absolute, and a theology of aesthetics.

By this point, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the chorus of voices from theology is as discordant when it attempts to sing about beauty as that from any other discipline. The most systematic modern theologian of aesthetics, the Swiss Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his seven-volume work The Glory of the Lord ( Herrlichkeit; Eine theologische Ästhetik ) sets beauty at the heart of any illumination of human understanding of the transcendent:

The beautiful is above all a form, and the light does not fall on this form from above and from outside, rather it breaks forth from the form’s interior … The content ( Gehalt ) does not lie behind the form ( Gestalt ), but within it … Whoever is not capable of seeing and ‘reading’ the form will fail to perceive its content. Whoever is not illuminated by the form will see no light in the content either.

Beauty “points to” otherwise hidden (theological) truth in the same way that light illuminates a dark place. In a perhaps unexpected connection, Makoto Fujimura agrees with von Balthasar. In his Art and Faith , a personal search for a Christian theology of an artistic vocation, he allocates to artistic creativity a sacred role that offers a pathway to restoring imagination in a world where it is in short supply. Yet not all agree – the German systematic theologian Rudolf Bultmann, in his Belief and Understanding , seems to take a diametrically opposing view: 

For Christian faith the idea of the beautiful has no formative significance for life; it sees in the beautiful the temptation of a false glorification of the world, which withdraws the view from the “transcendent.”

Beauty becomes a diversion from insights into transcendent truth, rather than Fujimura’s pathway into it, further heightening a dualism between the world and the eternal, the finite and the infinite.

F inding that beauty is contested within a current, at least Christian, theological context is perhaps not so surprising in the face of a very scarce attestation of cognate words in the Hebrew Bible or the Greek New Testament. Biblical authors don’t talk about beauty frequently, and when they do, the usage often gives rise to contest or affront. A collective connection between “beauty” with its Hebrew cognate ( yopi ) of the visual sense of “bright” or “glorious,” for example, is almost exclusive within the Old Testament to the Book of Ezekiel. Emerging from the continuous optical thread of image invoked by the prophet, his invocation of beauty is also part of a strategy to shock his hearers out of complacency. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, beauty is more associated with action than with any static aesthetic. Isaiah’s messenger, to take another case, has beautiful feet because their owner brings good news of future vindication and peace to Israel following oppression and conflict, not because of any fastidious attention to pedicure. 

The New Testament locus classicus of beauty (in the koine Greek of kalos ) is also shot through with conflict. It is the episode in Mark’s gospel (chapter 14) where Jesus dines in Bethany with Simon, a diseased (and therefore outcast) man. This is the meal at which the first sign of future betrayal is attributed to Judas. Before that, an unnamed woman (who may be the same Mary of other episodes in the town) surprises the gathering by anointing Jesus from a fresh jar of expensive perfume. In the face of outrage from some of the guests, claiming that the cost would have been better dispensed to the poor, Jesus defends her action as “a beautiful thing. You will always have poor people with you. You can help them any time you want to. But you will not always have me.” In explanation he adds the doubly-remarkable saying, “What she has done will be told anywhere the good news is preached all over the world. It will be told in memory of her.” First, this intimate, local action will become universally shared and global, and second,  in a patriarchal culture the subject of its future cultural memory will not be the learned Jewish rabbi, but the woman whose creative imagination for symbol and sensitivity to historical moment saw the possibility for beauty. For Fujimura, the anointing of Mark 14 is central to a theological understanding of beauty in art:

To me, all art resonates from the aroma of Christ as he hung on the cross. Art seeps out like Mary’s nard onto a floor that is supposed to be “clean;” such art reveals what is truly beautiful (Mary’s act) and what is truly injurious (Judas’ act) at the same time.

P erhaps beauty is always contested, always the nexus of conflict, because it continuously challenges our out-of-joint temporal assumptions, our current misconstrued set of symbols, our manifestly incomplete set of representations of the world. An act that looked at first wasteful and messy, after a new work of beauty, points to the crucifixion—a larger act of apparently gruesome violence, but which constitutes the greatest expression of love in history. Beyond that new significance, both acts belong to a series that points forward to a future of unimagined healing and reconciliation. When that degree of radical creation is let loose within a confined cultural context that looks to the past, and which concentrates on the benefit of its established hierarchies, then such ‘beauty’ is bound to be invisible at best, the provocation of violent resistance at worst. 

Taking this idea—that the quality of beauty belongs more to action than to substance or form—and more to eternity than to the present moment, perhaps explains why theologian David Bentley Hart entitled his own study on the theology of aesthetics The Beauty of the Infinite . Hart notes that our experience of the “created other” (that is non-human material) is known through “the free and boundlessly beautiful rhetoric of a shared infinite.” Nothing finite or unfinished can ultimately be beautiful. He continues: “The rhetoric of the other evokes my representations ” (my italics). This seems to capture my personal experience as a scientist attempting to represent the material world, in words I could never have found for myself. Scientists who spend time thinking theoretically about the systems they seek to understand know the “in-betweenness” of a “representation of the other” evoked, for example, in the terms of theoretical physics, by nature’s “infinite and beautiful rhetoric.”

Fujimura’s and Hart’s theological explorations of beauty not only resonate with the experience of doing science, but go a long way towards disentangling, or at least explaining, the knots of conflict that have surrounded the celebration or rejection of beauty in science. They also underline the considerable theological consequences of the human vocation and ability to do science. For reappraising the entire scientific endeavor as a deep and long-term human project to become reconciled to nature, a “created other” that seems dark and threatening at first, opens science itself to the same theological narrative as that of beauty.

Beauty itself becomes eschatological—belonging not to objects in the present, but to the end of a story of actions, each pointing, just as anointing or resurrection do, to a future new order, reconciled to the human and understood. By so locating beauty at the end of the series of representations of the world that constitutes science’s own story, they show beauty as indicated and enacted, rather than instantiated within this or that theory or idea. In what is itself an example of such a “beautiful indication,” and also a step of reconciliation, this theology of scientific aesthetic also unearths some of the long-buried purposes and narratives of creativity that the sciences and arts share in common.

N o wonder, therefore, that scientists disagree about beauty—some branches of science ascribing beauty to the simple, others to the complex, some to geometrical symmetry, others more to the presence and play of color (again these are all findings of the Vaidyanathan and Jacobi survey). A family of sciences as fragmented as is our own current patchwork of sub-disciplines can hardly be expected to agree on aesthetic criteria in our own age, any more than did schools of early-modern philosophy. But this is not to advocate abandoning beauty’s place within science. As pointers, as indications of the road forward rather than destinations achieved, beautiful experiments and theoretical ideas can, and even must, be celebrated, their aesthetic appeal unashamedly enjoyed. For they point to the truly and eternally beautiful science that gazes on the natural world in as much completeness, comprehension and love as its creator who, in the final stanza of a great Hebrew poem:

… looked to the ends of the earth, and beheld everything under the heavens,  So as to assign a weight to the wind, and determine the waters by measure,  When he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderbolt— Then he saw and appraised it, established it and fathomed it.

Tom McLeish FRS, is a physicist, academic interdisciplinary leader, and writer. He is Professor of Natural Philosophy (Emeritus) in the Department of Physics at the University of York, UK. He has won awards in the UK, USA and EU for his interdisciplinary research in soft matter and biological physics, and also works across science and humanities on medieval science, and the theology, sociology, and philosophy of science. He is a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England, and is currently Canon Scientist at St. Albans Cathedral. As well as over 200 specialist articles, he is also the author of  Faith and Wisdom in Science  (OUP 2014),  The Poetry and Music of Science  (OUP 2019) and  Soft Matter – A Very Short Introduction  (OUP 2020). He regularly appears on BBC radio, including the morning prime-time religious reflection of current affairs,  Thought for the Day .

Related Reading What is Soft Matter? Philip Ball on Tom McLeish

Makoto Fujimura’s Art + Faith : A Forum

You’ve found our old website, where you can still access all our past content while our migration takes place.

Read past and present content at www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com.

Thanks for reading our pages!

Essay on Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty

Introduction:

The famous lines Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ are taken from the Ode On A Grecian Urn by John Keats. It emphasizes the identity of beauty and truth.

Development of Thought:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

The poet tries to emphasize the ideal of beauty and truth, as according to him real beauty lies in truth anything which is not true and is false cannot be called beautiful. Philosophically the saying holds good in all walks of human life: arts, social behaviour, material existence, aesthetic universality, religious unity, human oneness, etc.

All these represent truth and they are beautiful only when truly represented and manifested. However enchanting from the outside, falsehood is ugly inside- one way or the other it leaves a bad taste in the mouth and a sting in the mind.

Conclusion:

What is not true or good can never really be beautiful though it may have superficial attraction.

Human life as important as those which arise from the spoken or the written word. Truth and falsehood are qualities that belong to the work of our hands as well as the words of our lips and are often more eloquent to the eye than the words can be to the ears.

They are expressed by our whole personalities, by our characters, by our conduct, by our general talk and conversation in the world. Great truths are often communicated by works of art: literature, sculpture, architecture, painting, films or other effective media understood by humans.

Every portrait painted is either a truth or a lie or a mixture of the two. Its beauty depends on the degree of truth, and honesty depicted in it. It also represents the character of the painter.

An artist who puts his heart and soul in his work and applies true tones of colour theme and dedication, is able to produce a beautiful piece. If his purpose is simply to flatter the onlooker and paint for the sake of getting outward appreciation, his face cannot be called a piece of lasting beauty.

In the case of commonplace houses or public buildings, a greedy contractor may mix up his bricks and mortar, may hoodwink the state by using below-the- standard material, or he may lie in respect of inward virtues of the building.

His dishonesty, his falsehood and insincerity cannot but produce a building which will not stand the test of time or truth. Its beauty, if any, will be transient and artificial.

In social life it would be quite futile and meaningless to state things of wisdom, religion, beauty and all these, if they lack audience if there is no real response, reception or desire to understand and profit by them. Launched into the empty space of the universe, with nobody to receive them, even beautiful and nice doctrines may go waste.

We can never understand beauty as an isolated thing, self-supported or hanging in the air. A thing of beauty always appears in a personal context, conditioned by the person who creates it and for the persons or the era to which it is focused.

In fact, beauty and truth, like arts and sciences, form together a kind of commonwealth in which each serves the rest and is in turn served by them. As we know all knowledge is one-all-comprehensive and well-connected.

Truth is a beautiful operation, a dynamic thing which does its beneficent work in a personal and social context. On the other hand, a lie is an offensive operation performed by one man upon another.

It resembles robbery and murder and just as robbery and murder cannot be committed without a victim, so lies cannot be told without a victim to be deceived. A lie is- not a mere offence against logic. It is an offence committed, or at least attempted, against the persons to whom it is addressed.

Whatever else truth may be, there is no doubt as to its being valuable, not merely in the sense that it is good to look at, but also it does good to those who see it, know it and act upon it.

Truth is, in other words, a value, not residing inertly in the lives that manifest it or the words that speak it, but operating valuably, and so making a difference for the better to every mind which accepts it in contrast to a lie which makes a difference for the worse.

The force of this contention highly extends its dimensions when we identify truth with beauty as Keats so emphatically does in the quotation of this essay.

An idle beauty is no more conceivable than an idle truth. Indeed, beauty is never more falsely conceived than when we think of it as deserving to be looked at. People who look at beauty never see it. They see it when it operates upon them, moves them, stirs them, and sentimentalizes them.

Wordsworth was sentimental when he saw the daffodils or the rainbow

“My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky. “

Like truth, beauty is dynamic and vital; no wonder they think them to be the same.

All truths accepted by most of us carry their respective characteristics. These characteristics are bestowed by the great personalities who have spoken or written them. We accept those truths as meant for us, said by bonafide people whose intention was to make the world wiser by their wisdom.

When we read the work of a philosopher, a politician or a scientist there is a certain understanding that the author is objective and impersonal.

If any of us doubts his wisdom or saying we will not let him try to present our views truly and honestly. We, as readers, are heartily grateful to thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Einstein, Gandhi, Nehru, B.Russel and such like stalwarts who have left a legacy of original truths for us to carry forward the torch of wisdom for the future generations.

It is not without reason that, in the course of a discussion, we support an argument quite often by quoting a great writer. Why do we find it necessary to mention his name?

Why not content ourselves with telling that such and such a thing is rightly said? Why do we name the personality who said the truth? That is because the beauty of the truth lies in the beauty of the personality who said it.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, is most significantly illustrated by the beauty that lies in the creative arts. The truth when depicted in a piece of art a paint­ing, a poem, a musical lyric or a symbolic dance, becomes a personified beauty. The painter, or a symbolic dance, becomes a personified beauty.

The painter, the poet, the musician or the dancer makes the truth so beautiful that it permeates the whole being of the viewer, the reader, the listener or the audience.

It spreads in the whole personality of cacti individual, hi£ heart, brain, the hormones, the eyes and the ears. It not only inspires but also sentimentalizes. It leaves a life­long impression on the mind provided the audience is receptive and the message conveyed by the artist is infinitely true.

Arts are the most effective unifiers of humanity. They function on the basic themes of aesthetic universality. They make the truth indivisible. Although di­vided in branches, art is the true manifestation of syntheses of peoples, religions, races, nations and classes.

Every one enjoys art and the truth depicted through it. It becomes easily acceptable to all humans. The gates of the beautiful truth are wide open for everybody and the light of art influences numerous hearts with love and grace.

Arts have a high place in the evolution of the race and their value in the education and actual life of a nation. The manners, the social culture and the restraint in action and expression are based essentially on the sense of form and beauty, of what is correct, symmetrical, well adjusted, fair to the eye and pleasing to the imagination.

The rudeness, coarseness, vulgar violence, overbearing brusqueness and selfishness among individuals greatly hamper the development of na­tions within and in dealing with outside. The sense of form and beauty is an artistic sense and can best be fostered in a nation by artistic culture of the perceptions and sensibilities.

Music is even more powerful in the sense of form and beauty than other arts, as it manifests perfect expression of harmony, and inspires in the audience a new aesthetic perception. The importance of painting and sculpture is hardly less.

The mind is profoundly influenced by what it sees and if the eye is trained from the days of childhood to the contemplation and understanding of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in line and colour, the tastes, habits and character are insensibly trained to follow a similar law of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in the life of the adult man.

A similar result is produced on the emotions by the study of beautiful or noble arts like poetry. A Hindu sage said that music and poetry provide detached and disinter­ested enjoyment of the eight razes or forms of emotional aesthetes which make up life and keep it free from the disturbance of the lower self-regarding passions.

Painting & sculpture work in the same direction by different means. Art some­times uses the same means as poetry but cannot do it to the same extent because it does not have the movement of poetry; it is fixed, still; it expresses only a given movement, a given point in space and cannot move freely through time and region.

But it is precisely this stillness, this calm, this fixity, which gives its separate value as art. Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight. Art stills the emotions and teaches them the delight of a restrained and limited and harmonious thinking with each other.

Between them, music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the soul. They make and keep its movement purified, controlled, deep and harmonious.

These, therefore, are agents which cannot be neglected by humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which disintegrates rather than builds the char cater. They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilizing forces of Truth.

Truth purifies human consciousness and reaches for everything real and beautiful. Modern science has become the greatest educator of arts. Rapid com­munication systems like the radio, the TV, the cinema, the hoardings, kiosks, etc., have given wings to the real arts so that they reach the humans with the educational message in no time.

Humanity is civilizing itself at cosmic speed. The truth of great art and knowledge is traversing all storms of earthly commo­tions.

Even people, who are semi-starved of material possessions, understand the vital importance of active beauty. And when great artists proclaim: labour, beauty and action, the formula of international truth assimilates with deep impact.

It was Plato who once said: “It is difficult to imagine a better method of education than that discovered and verified by the experience of centuries. It can be expressed in two propositions: gymnastics for the body and music for the soul”.

He further said “rhythm and harmony are deeply rooted in the human soul, dominate it, fill it with beauty and transform man to a beautiful thinker’. He partakes of the beautiful and rejoices at it, gladly realizes it, becomes saturated with it and arranges his life in conformity with it.”

As a vehicle of truth, art is the abode of all aspects of the beautiful. Art galleries store different kinds of art creations inspiring vital application of truth in life.

Thus, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’. This is the basic truth which all humans should know. Without the untiring realization of the beautiful, with out the refine­ment of the heart and consciousness, we cannot help making earthly existence cruel and deadly.

However, enchanting from outside, falsehood is ugly inside. It usually leaves a bad taste in the mouth and a sting in the mind.

The truth of this poetic saying has in fact been always recognized in India through the concept of the unity of God, Truth and Beauty Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram.

Related Articles:

• A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy For Ever – Short Paragraph
• 1113 Words Essay on a Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever
• How has John Keats treated beauty?
• Short essay on The Business of Beauty

• Website Inauguration Function.
• Vocational Placement Cell Inauguration
• Media Coverage.
• Certificate & Recommendations
• Privacy Policy
• Science Project Metric
• Social Studies 8 Class
• Computer Fundamentals
• Introduction to C++
• Programming Methodology
• Programming in C++
• Data structures
• Boolean Algebra
• Object Oriented Concepts
• Database Management Systems
• Open Source Software
• Operating System
• PHP Tutorials
• Earth Science
• Physical Science
• Sets & Functions
• Coordinate Geometry
• Mathematical Reasoning
• Statics and Probability
• Accountancy
• Business Studies
• Political Science
• English (Sr. Secondary)

Hindi (Sr. Secondary)

• Punjab (Sr. Secondary)
• Accountancy and Auditing
• Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technology
• Automobile Technology
• Electrical Technology
• Electronics Technology
• Hotel Management and Catering Technology
• IT Application
• Marketing and Salesmanship
• Office Secretaryship
• Stenography
• Hindi Essays
• English Essays

Letter Writing

• Shorthand Dictation

Essay on “Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty ” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Beauty is truth and truth beauty.

– That is all ye known on Earth and all ye need know

Beauty to Rabindra Nath Tagore is that which gives joy without any sense of utility. It is disembodied joy. In the experience of ordinary delight there is the satisfaction of getting something, realization of some fulfillment. But there may be some desire or want also associated with the delight of beauty. Herbert Read considers beauty as unity of formal relations among our sense-perceptions. It is a very fluctuating phenomenon, which finds diverse expression at different places and different times. Its consciousness conveys rhythm, unity and harmony. Man abhors chaos, disorder and ugliness. In his heart burns a deathless desire for perfection. Thus beauty feeds the soul of man. It brings the soul in contact with a world of new dimensions – a world of Truth.

Truth is not fact. It is more generalised fact. Moulton says, “The opposite of truth is false and that of a fact and that of a fact is another fact….Facts are raw material which by generalization can be manufactured into truth”. Artistic truth is the emotional apprehension of fact. Ultimate truth is eternal immutable and final. It is true to all times and all ages. Realisation of truth is the perception of higher reality behind appearances, behind the change which are outward and superficial.

To see things in their beauty is to see things in their Truth. What the wise imagination seizes as beauty  must be Truth. It means Beauty is truth arrived at through intuitive perception and intellectualized-imagination weighed with thought and judgement. The excellence of all art is its intensity capable of making all disagreeableness evaporate from their being in close relationship with the Beauty and Truth. For example in the poem Grecian Urn of Keats external does not constitute the main interest of the poet. The Urn suggests something deeper. The imaginative eye peers through the outer form and the poet’s heart was stirred by imaginative picture of Greek life. The poet describes a series of pictures of scenes that the imagines must have formed the basis of the life of an artist at work and then he gives us his own definition of a growing art. Thu Urn is a transparent glass through which there is revealed a miniature pageant of the past merging into the present. The tiny varieties of the old ages as perceived, interpreted and presented in this piece of art tickles Keats’ imagination and sets it aflame. Here comes the sense of discovery of truth and he sees not a moral or a religious idea by a principle of existence, a law of life and insight into the universal heart of man. Thus to Keats, Truth arrived at, through emotionalized imaginative perception, is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. He said: “I can never conceive of Truth except through the clear conception of its Beauty- its imaginative reality.”

‘Satyam, Shivam Sundaram’. The greater the element of Truth the deeper the perception of Beauty. Truth discovers the permanent, the eternal and the final. Thus it transcends the decadence and dissolution, and the decay and death. It helps man to transcend the limitation of time and space. It tries to touch perfection in the domain of rational investigation and reasoned approach. Beauty, on the other hand is perfection in the field of aestheticism-the desire to discover unity and harmony. They express the man’s ideal and are identical; Beauty helps to discover truth. A man is enchanted by the beauty of a flower-pure soul of the flower. Tagore feels, Nature holds, a commerce with the soul of man that rises higher than the mundane level of his existence. In this moment of the activity of the soul, beauty takes us deeper into the reality of Eternal Spirit which lurks behind everything.

C.M. Bowra explains the relation thus: Truth is another name for ultimate reality and is discovered not by the reasoning mind but by the imagination. The imagination has a special insight into the true nature of things and Keats accepts its discoveries because they agree with his senses, resolve disagreeable discords and overwhelm his by their intensity. He is convinced that anything so discovered is true in a sense that the conclusions of philosophy are not. Keats calls this reality “beauty” because of its overpowering and all-absorbing effect on him. In fact he substitutes the discovery of beauty through the imagination or the discovery of facts through the reason and asserts that it is a more satisfactory and more certain way of piercing to the heart of things since inspired insight sees more than abstract rationality. Keat’s concern is with the imagination in a special sense, and he is not far from Coleridge in his view of it. It is an insight so fine that it sees what is concealed from most men and understands things in their full range and significance and character. The rationale of poetry is that through the imagination it finds something so compelling in its intensity that it is at once both beautiful and real. Thus “there is nothing real but the beautiful and nothing beautiful but the real.” And through the Urn he wants to say that this in only knowledge we possess and that we need no other.

The second line of the quotation-“that is all ye know on earth and all ye need know”-is sometimes minunderstood to mean that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” gives the complete philosophy of life. Keats never intended it to be. It is only a theory of art, a doctrine to explain Keats’ own creative experience. He was increasingly conscious that art is not everything and in his last two years he became more uneasy about the detachment from life which his work imposed on hi. In “Fall of Hypericn” Moneta suggests that the poet is but a “dreaming thing” and must hold a lower place than those who are moved by human suffering. When he wrote the Ode on a Grecian Urn- in which the lines occur-Keats had not gone so far as to think that the truth which he sought through the imagination was a dream. It was still a very important truth for him as a poet but only as a poet. The Ode is his last word on a special activity and a special experience. Within its limits it has its own view of life. The belief that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is true for the artist while he is concerned with his art. It is no less true that, while he is at work, this is all that he knows for certain and all that he needs to know for the proper pursuit of his special task. Unless he believes, he is in danger of ruining his art.

This proposition implies that art should not exist for a moral purpose so much as primarily for its own sake. Keats worshipped beauty for the sake of beauty. Oscar Wilde like Swinburne and Keats too had no utilitarian view of art and battles against didacticism. The sole object of art is to please us by its aesthetic experience.

About evirtualguru_ajaygour

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Quick Links

Popular Tags

Visitors question & answer.

• Gangadhar Singh on Essay on “A Journey in a Crowded Train” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.
• Hemashree on Hindi Essay on “Charitra Bal”, “चरित्र बल” Complete Hindi Essay, Paragraph, Speech for Class 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 Students.
• S.J Roy on Letter to the editor of a daily newspaper, about the misuse and poor maintenance of a public park in your area.
• ashutosh jaju on Essay on “If there were No Sun” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.
• Unknown on Essay on “A Visit to A Hill Station” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Download Our Educational Android Apps

Latest Desk

• The Future of Democracy in India | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.
• Democracy Recedes as a Global Ideal | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.
• Centre-State Financial Relations | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.
• Presidential System is More Suitable to India | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.
• Sanskrit Diwas “संस्कृत दिवस” Hindi Nibandh, Essay for Class 9, 10 and 12 Students.
• Nagrik Suraksha Diwas – 6 December “नागरिक सुरक्षा दिवस – 6 दिसम्बर” Hindi Nibandh, Essay for Class 9, 10 and 12 Students.
• Jhanda Diwas – 25 November “झण्डा दिवस – 25 नवम्बर” Hindi Nibandh, Essay for Class 9, 10 and 12 Students.
• NCC Diwas – 28 November “एन.सी.सी. दिवस – 28 नवम्बर” Hindi Nibandh, Essay for Class 9, 10 and 12 Students.
• Example Letter regarding election victory.
• Example Letter regarding the award of a Ph.D.
• Example Letter regarding the birth of a child.
• Example Letter regarding going abroad.
• Letter regarding the publishing of a Novel.

Vocational Edu.

• English Shorthand Dictation “East and Dwellings” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines.
• English Shorthand Dictation “Haryana General Sales Tax Act” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines meaning.
• English Shorthand Dictation “Deal with Export of Goods” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines meaning.
• English Shorthand Dictation “Interpreting a State Law” 80 and 100 wpm Legal Matters Dictation 500 Words with Outlines meaning.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

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.

• Adorno, Theodor, 1970 [1997], Aesthetic Theory , Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica , Fathers of the English Dominican Province (trans.), London: Christian Classics, 1981 [13 th century text].
• Augustine, Earlier Writings , J.H. Burleigh, ed., New York: WJK Publishing, 1953 [4 th /5 th century AD text].
• Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle , in two volumes, Jonathan Barnes, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 [4 th century BCE text].
• Ayer, A.J., 1952, Language, Truth, and Logic , New York: Dover.
• Bell, Clive, 1914, Art , London: Chatto & Windus.
• Berkeley, Bishop George, 1732, Alciphron: or, The Minute Philosopher , London: Tonson and Co.
• Bown, Matthew and Matteo Lanfranconi, 2012, Socialist Realisms: Great Soviet Painting, 1920–1970 , New York: Skira Press.
• Brand, Peg Zeglin (ed.), 2000, Beauty Matters , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Bullough, Edward, 1912, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology , 5. Widely anthologized, e.g., in Cahn, Steven and Meskin, Aaron, 2008. Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology , Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 243–60.
• Burke, Edmund, 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Carritt, E.F., 1931, Philosophies of Beauty , London: Oxford University Press.
• Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1977, Traditional Art and Symbolism (Selected Papers, volume 1), Princeton: Bollingen.
• Croce, Benedetto, 1929, “Aesthetics,” in Encyclopedia Britannica . See “Benedetto Croce on aesthetics,” Encyclopedia Britannica , 14 Aug. 2014, [ read it on www.britannica.com] .
• Danto, Arthur, 2003, The Abuse of Beauty , Chicago: Open Court.
• Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers , C.D. Yonge (trans.), New York: George Bell & Sons, 1895 [3 rd century CE text].
• Eco, Umberto, 1959, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages , Hugh Bredin (trans.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
• Garvey, Marcus, 1925 [1986], The Life and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (Volume 1), Amy Jacques Garvey (ed.), New York: Majority Press.
• Grimké, Sarah, 1837, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women , Boston: Isaac Knapp [ scan of 1838 printing available online] .
• Hanslick, Eduard, 1891, The Beautiful in Music , Gustav Cohen (trans.), London: Novello and Company.
• Hegel, G.W.F., 1835, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art , in two volumes, T.M. Knox (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
• Hickey, Dave, 2012 [1993], The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty , University of Chicago Press.
• Hume, David, 1757, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Essays Moral and Political , London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894.
• –––, 1740, A Treatise of Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1725, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
• Irigaray, Luce, 1993. “Divine Women,” in Sexes and Genealogies , Gillian C. Gill (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 55–73.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1790, Critique of Judgement , J.H. Bernard (trans.), New York: Macmillan, 1951.
• Kirwan, James, 1999. Beauty , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Levey, Michael, 1985, Rococo to Revolution , London: Thames and Hudson.
• MacKinnon, Catherine, 1987, “Desire and Power,” in C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 46–62.
• Marx, Karl, 1844 [1978], “Estranged Labour,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , 2nd edition, Robert E. Tucker (ed.), New York: Norton, 1978, pp. 70–81.
• Matthes, Erich Hatala, 2017, “Repatriation and the Radical Redistribution of Art,” Ergo: an Open Access Journal of Philosophy , 4(32). doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0004.032
• Moore, G.E., 1903, Principia Ethica , Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004.
• Mothersill, Mary, 1984, Beauty Restored , Oxford: Clarendon.
• Mulvey, Laura, 1975, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Screen , 16(3): 6–18; reprinted in Feminist Film Theory , Sue Thornham (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 58–69.
• Nehamas, Alexander, 2007, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Nochlin, Linda, 1988, Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays , New York: HarperCollins.
• Plato, Collected Dialogues , Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [4 th century BCE text].
• Plotinus, The Six Enneads , Stephen McKenna and B.S. Page (trans.), Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Publishing, 1952 [3 rd century CE text].
• Pollitt, J.J., 1974, The Ancient View of Greek Art , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Pollock, Griselda, 1987, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art , New York: Methuen.
• Pseudo-Dionysius, Works of Dionysius the Areopagite , John Parker (trans.), London: James Parker and Co., 1897 [originally 5 th or 6 th century CE].
• Robinson, Hilary, 2000, “Whose Beauty?” in P.Z. Brand (ed.) 2000: 224–51.
• Said, Edward, 1978, Orientalism , New York: Random House.
• Santayana, George, 1896, The Sense of Beauty , New York: Scribner’s.
• Sappho, The Poetry of Sappho , Jim Powell (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [7 th or 6 th century BCE text].
• Sartwell, Crispin, 2004, Six Names of Beauty , New York: Routledge
• Schiller, Friedrich, 1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man , New York: Dover, 2004.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1818, The World as Will and Idea , E.F.J. Payne (trans.), New York: Dover, 1966.
• Scruton, Roger, 2009, Beauty , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 1738, “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times , Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.
• Siebers, Tobin, 2005, “Disability Aesthetics,” PMLA (Journal of the Modern Languages Association), 120(2): 542–46
• Spotts, Frederic, 2003, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics , New York: Abrams.
• Striff, Erin, 1997, “Bodies of Evidence: Feminist Performance Art,” Critical Survey , 9(1): 1–18.
• Vitruvius, On Architecture , Frank Granger (trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970 [originally 1 st century BCE].
• Wolf, Naomi, 1991 [2002], The Beauty Myth , New York: HarperCollins.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Women , Boston: Thomas & Andrews.
• Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1932, Principles of Art History , M.D. Hottinger (trans.), New York: Dover, 1950.
• X, Malcolm, 1964 [1992], The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), New York: Ballantine.
• Xenophon, Memorabilia [4 th century BCE text], E. C. Marchant (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

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]

Copyright © 2022 by Crispin Sartwell < crispinsartwell @ gmail . com >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

• 1(877)219-7556 1(877)733-3925

Fully unique works only

Your privacy is our concern

Writing that is plagiarism free

Free Beauty Is Truth. Truth Beauty Essay Sample

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. This, of course, is a quotation borrowed from the enigmatic final two lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats. This among the greatest problems of art (maybe the greatest is that truth is not beauty, beauty not truth. Nor is it all we must to know). "Ode on a Grecian Urn" contains the most debated two lines in all of Keats's poems. The precise significance and implication of these two lines remain disputed by everybody; nonetheless, Eliot, a reviewer, considered them a blot on an otherwise striking ode.

Scholars have been incapable of coming to an agreement on to whom the final thirteen lines of the ode are referring. Hypothesis can be formulated for any of the four largely apparent possibilities, i.e. poet to reader, poet to urn, poet to figures on the urn and urn to reader. Additionally, this issue is bewildered by changes in quotation marks from the original manuscript of the poem and the 1820 printed publication. In fact, if any person asserts to discern what the two lines imply, in my opinion, they are not being completely honest.

The truth of the matter is that the penultimate Keats' concluding line, i.e. "Beauty Is Truth. Truth Beauty," is open to various construes. Keats might have wanted it that way in order to enhance the poem's feel of negative potential. Keats never tries to narrate precisely what this proclamation implies to his addressees probably since he, as the speaker, is tackling only the sensory experience of the urn. He has deliberately left the interpretation of this proclamation for the audience. He cannot glimpse through his experience when observing the urn to think what "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" essentially signifies in the rational world, so he leaves the interpretation to the audience. This state suggests that a facet unknown in human consciousness exists; a major component, or experience in the meaning of being human that cannot be grappled fully. This is something that is not merely present, but as well good. This state pertains to the whole ode as well as the finishing lines.

The dream on the urn is fixed, not shifting, and one where the lines come out as sensible

The state attributed in art is "beauty is truth, truth beauty," since art is a photograph, an instant in time. It is only within art that this is comprehended or even true. When we divorce ourselves from art and stand out of it, when the human awareness is flowing and non-static, and when circumstances crop up that are difficult, during these instances, it is difficult to comprehend the significance and meaning of Keats's line. Furthermore, it is challenging to know how truth and beauty are to be identified. This is where problems crop up, and does so in probing the outlines of beauty, as well as truth. In the end, Keats could be explaining that the reason why someone ought to be dedicated to crafting art is that it is the single dominion where "beauty is truth, truth beauty" is obvious, and where one may even have a likelihood of understanding concepts like these, if only for a passing moment.

This quote is a case of a literary expression called Chaismus where words or phrases are placed in reverse arrangement to lay emphasis. It tells about Keats's artistic idealism, 'beauty is truth', that what is beautiful is necessarily the truth. This is only in the idealistic art world where there exists no clash involving beauty and truth. The beauty in art is in itself sufficient proof of its truth. The next part is just a repetition of the initial part in inverted order. However, this Keats' ideal should not be interpreted from the point of view of the world outside art. In this world, it is impossible to accept that truth is necessarily beautiful. For example, it is true that the earthquake in Japan killed many people; however, this truth cannot be beautiful. In the world outside the still realms of art, that truth is not beauty, beauty not truth. Nor is it all we must to know.

Have NO Inspiration to write your essay?

Ask for Professional help

Search Free Essay

Please note!

Some text in the modal.

Gondwana University and Other Exam News

Beauty is Truth Truth is Beauty Expansion of Idea – Find the Meaning here!

Beauty is Truth Truth is Beauty Expansion of Idea: “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” is a famous line from the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by the Romantic poet John Keats. This line has been the subject of much interpretation and discussion over the years, with many people considering it to be a profound statement on the nature of art and the human experience. At its core, the idea suggests that beauty and truth are interconnected, and that true beauty can only be achieved when it is based on something real and true. The concept can be applied to many areas of life, from art and aesthetics to personal relationships and even scientific discovery.

In this expansion of the idea, we will explore the meaning of “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” in more detail, and consider how this idea can help us better understand and appreciate the world around us. We will also examine some of this concept’s criticisms and alternative interpretations, and consider its relevance in our modern world.

Table of Contents

Explanation of Beauty is Truth Truth is Beauty

The phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is a famous line from John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The line expresses the idea that beauty and truth are interconnected and inseparable.

At its core, the phrase means that anything that is truly beautiful reflects a deeper truth, and anything that is truly true is inherently beautiful. The idea is that beauty and truth are two sides of the same coin and that they are intimately linked.

To understand this idea, we can consider the beauty of nature. When we look at a beautiful landscape or a sunset, we are moved by its beauty, and we also feel that it is truthful in some way. The beauty of nature reflects the truth of its existence and the laws of the universe that govern it.

Similarly, in art, beauty is often associated with authenticity and emotional truthfulness. A beautiful work of art is one that captures something essential about the human experience and speaks to us on a deep emotional level. This emotional truthfulness is what makes the work beautiful.

The phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is not meant to be taken literally, but rather as a poetic expression of the idea that beauty and truth are interconnected. By recognizing and appreciating the beauty around us, we can come to a deeper understanding of the truth of our existence and the world around us.

Expand an idea inherent in the phrase Beauty Is Truth Truth Is Beauty

The connection between truth and beauty in art is a topic of discussion frequently. Some individuals think beauty is truth, while others think beauty is the only thing that counts. This debate has no right or incorrect response because it is entirely arbitrary. Examining the various perspectives that artists have taken on this relationship, though, is interesting. John Keats, a poet, used the adage “beauty is truth, truth is beauty” in his poem “Ode to Grecian Urn.” He was making a statement on the connection between reality and art as well as how even the most unappealing things in life can be beautiful.

According to Keats, truth and beauty are two sides of the same coin. He believed that beauty was a reflection of the truth and that it could be used to find the truth. In literature and art, the adage “beauty is truth, truth is beauty” has been used for ages.

The original meaning of the term was to underline the value of truth and the influence of beauty. The truth was seen as the most beautiful thing in the universe because beauty was thought to be a way to convey the reality of the world.

The meaning of the statement has changed through time, nevertheless. These days, it’s frequently used to explain how art and reality interact. Beauty is viewed as a means of increasing peoples’ accessibility to the truths of the world, which are reflected in art. Consider a few of your preferred artistic creations. Do they possess beauty but lack truth? Or, despite not being extremely attractive, are they based on actual events or people?

The best art is frequently both lovely and accurate. That is a perfect example of the adage “beauty is truth is beauty.” The artist has spent time identifying the beauty in their surroundings and imparting it to others.

You may be wondering why this proverb is still applicable in today’s society. After all, a British poet by the name of John Keats wrote it more than 200 years ago. This adage remains true today for a number of reasons. It first captures the connection between beauty and truth. Truth is frequently viewed as the objective reality, while beauty is frequently viewed as an ideal. The two aren’t always distinct, though. In many instances, both truth and beauty can be lovely. This expression also refers to the influence of art. Exploring the truth and capturing beauty through art can be a meaningful and potent way to do both.

Check the latest updates below-

Beauty is Truth Truth is Beauty Expansion of Idea in 100 Words

“Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty” expresses the idea that beauty and truth are inseparable. Beauty is a reflection of truth and anything that is truly true is inherently beautiful. In science, beauty is associated with simplicity and elegance, while in art, beauty is associated with authenticity and emotional truthfulness. Ultimately, the idea suggests a fundamental unity in the world where the things that are true and beautiful are also the things that are good and meaningful. By appreciating beauty and seeking truth, we can come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and live more meaningful lives.

Beauty is Truth Truth is Beauty Expansion of Idea in 200 Words

The idea that “Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty” suggests that beauty and truth are interconnected and interdependent. It means that anything that is truly beautiful reflects a deeper truth, and anything that is truly true is inherently beautiful. This idea is not limited to art but is applicable to many areas of life.

For example, in science, beauty is often associated with simplicity and elegance. A beautiful scientific theory is one that explains a wide range of phenomena using a few simple principles. Similarly, in mathematics, beautiful equations are often those that are elegant and concise while still explaining complex phenomena.

In art, beauty is associated with emotional truthfulness and authenticity. A beautiful work of art is one that captures something essential about the human experience and speaks to us on a deep emotional level.

This idea of the interdependence of beauty and truth suggests that there is a fundamental unity in the world. The things that are true and beautiful are also the things that are good and meaningful. By appreciating beauty and seeking truth, we can come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and live more meaningful lives.

Ultimately, the idea that “Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty” invites us to look beyond the surface level of things and seek out the deeper truths and meanings that lie beneath. It suggests that by doing so, we can discover the beauty and meaning that exists in all aspects of our lives.

FAQs on Beauty is Truth Truth is Beauty Expansion of Idea

The phrase “Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty” is from the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, a famous English Romantic poet.

The phrase suggests that beauty and truth are interconnected and that anything that is truly beautiful reflects a deeper truth, while anything that is truly true is inherently beautiful. The idea is that beauty and truth are two sides of the same coin and that they are intimately linked.

The idea is applicable in many fields, including science, mathematics, philosophy, and art. It suggests that in science and mathematics, beauty is associated with simplicity and elegance, while in art, beauty is associated with authenticity and emotional truthfulness.

The idea suggests that there is a fundamental unity in the world and that the things that are true and beautiful are also the things that are good and meaningful. By appreciating beauty and seeking truth, we can come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and live more meaningful lives.

No, the idea is not meant to be taken literally. Rather, it is a poetic expression of the interdependence of beauty and truth.

By Gauri Malik

Related post, exploring the geographical marvels and hill stations of maharashtra, folk dances of odisha with pictures – know all the renowned dance forms here, folk dances of punjab with pictures – know all the renowned dance forms here, leave a reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Unlocking Opportunities: BSSC Inter-Level Vacancy, Salary, and Job Profile

यूपीएससी जीएस पेपर 4 पाठ्यक्रम के मुख्य पहलुओं का अनावरण, आईएएस मुख्य पाठ्यक्रम हिंदी में और यूपीएससी जीएस 3 पाठ्यक्रम हिंदी में जानें.

The True Meaning of Beauty Expository Essay

Meaning of beautiful, true meaning of beauty, self-esteem (se) in the social world, misconstrued meaning of true love, true meaning of beauty within the social world.

People often perceive beauty as the external or physical appearance while despising or lacking clear perception of the inner beauty. Generally, people therefore boast the idea that beauty is the perception or thoughts that other people have regarding ones’ appearances. This meaning of beauty is stronger when someone is associated with work, career or financial success.

The aspect of self-esteem in this case depends on others’ point of view, their thought and their articulation about your appearances. The physical beauty also has a link to association, interaction and friendship. If one works with physically appearing women, then they think of being in possession of beauty. When one receives favours that closely connect to their physical appearances, it is easy to form the egotistical and self-cantered personality.

Those who are concern of their physical appearances spend a lot of time on enhancing the self-image, since they are eager to improve or attract more attention and hence may end up as self-centred persons who easily despise others. According to Schutt (2006) “Their life-styles depends on the hair, clothing and overall physical attractiveness”

Beauty is not necessarily the physical appearance. Beauty is the inner aspect of the heart that causes humanitarian reactions. True meaning of beauty therefore touches on personality and self-esteem. Self-believe brings out the true meaning and feeling of beauty since one is able to love and accept oneself as well as others, thus creating confidence, inner security of personality, better character and strong self-esteem.

In Line with Ballantine and Roberts (2008), Self-esteem is the estimate or consideration of self-worthiness and this is therefore what makes up the true inner beauty. The self-esteem concept therefore indicates truthfulness of beauty as an internal trait that presents the overall sum of all traits of a person. This assists people in finding individual perceptions, personalities, temperaments or individuality.

People are generally interesting, boring, fun-filled or dull. This reaction depends highly on the internal beauty of a person. The personal roles, personal successes/failures, others views, social identity and comparisons are the main factors influencing the development of self-concepts.

People have different roles to play such as parenting, offering services/goods or guiding others. If you present a new role to someone, the role would initially feel alien, but with time, it becomes part of the self-concept for instance the parenting roles. This is an indication that one can be in a position to bring out success over challenging tasks through adjustment and improvement of the self-concepts.

Unfair comparisons to others set the loopholes for disappointments over performances. When based on the external or physical appearances, interpretation of beauty causes people to endeavour in protection of a wounded self-esteem since there are possibilities of rationalizing the competitor as having advantage for better performance. Self-identity defines the race, gender, and performance among other issues.

Being aware of a social identity changes the self-concept because when one belongs to a minority group, the social identity changes. Contrary to this concept, social comparison can involve unenthusiastic evaluation of others abilities or opinions. The meaning of beauty can thus cause people to have a comparison that alters the self-concepts and esteem.

True meaning of beauty affects both the self-esteem and self-efficacy. These two aspects are completely difference because of dissimilarity on the sense of competency and effectiveness. The tough achievements and fine manipulations improve the efficacy because one feels good about his/her abilities to set and meet challenging goals. Personal believes and feelings towards achievements thus determine the existence of self-efficacy and appreciation of the true beauty within a personality.

Ballantine, J. H., & Roberts, K. A. (2008) Our Social World: Introduction to Sociology. London, UK: Sage Publishers. Print.

Schutt, R. K. (2006). Investigating the social world: the process and practice of Research: Part three. California, CA: Pine Forge Press Publishers. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, October 30). The True Meaning of Beauty. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-meaning-of-beauty/

"The True Meaning of Beauty." IvyPanda , 30 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-meaning-of-beauty/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The True Meaning of Beauty'. 30 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The True Meaning of Beauty." October 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-meaning-of-beauty/.

1. IvyPanda . "The True Meaning of Beauty." October 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-meaning-of-beauty/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The True Meaning of Beauty." October 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-meaning-of-beauty/.

• What is a Self-Concept?
• Dimensions of the Self-Concept
• Self-Concept, Parental Labeling, and Delinquency
• The Strong Influence of Stereotypes and Misconstrued Ideas
• Discussing Gender Roles in the Interaction Perspective
• Aspects of Self-Concept Essay
• Personal Reflection on the Self
• Self-Concept Theory and Trait Theory
• Prejudicial Appearances: Turban-Wearing
• Interpersonal and Communication Skills: Self-Concept and Perception of Others
• Effect on People Who Have Been Through Tsunami
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Tim O'Brien's "In the Lake of Woods"
• The Fears Within: What Do You See in the Mirror?
• Catatonic Depression: Etiology and Management
• Treatment of Bipolar Disorder

Essays About Beauty: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Writing essays about beauty is complicated because of this topic’s breadth. See our examples and prompts to you write your next essay.

Beauty is short for beautiful and refers to the features that make something pleasant to look at. This includes landscapes like mountain ranges and plains, natural phenomena like sunsets and aurora borealis, and art pieces such as paintings and sculptures. However, beauty is commonly attached to an individual’s appearance,  fashion, or cosmetics style, which appeals to aesthetical concepts. Because people’s views and ideas about beauty constantly change , there are always new things to know and talk about.

Below are five great essays that define beauty differently. Consider these examples as inspiration to come up with a topic to write about.

1. Essay On Beauty – Promise Of Happiness By Shivi Rawat

2. defining beauty by wilbert houston, 3. long essay on beauty definition by prasanna, 4. creative writing: beauty essay by writer jill, 5. modern idea of beauty by anonymous on papersowl, 1. what is beauty: an argumentative essay, 2. the beauty around us, 3. children and beauty pageants, 4. beauty and social media, 5. beauty products and treatments: pros and cons, 6. men and makeup, 7. beauty and botched cosmetic surgeries, 8. is beauty a necessity, 9. physical and inner beauty, 10. review of books or films about beauty.

“In short, appreciation of beauty is a key factor in the achievement of happiness, adds a zest to living positively and makes the earth a more cheerful place to live in.”

Rawat defines beauty through the words of famous authors, ancient sayings, and historical personalities. He believes that beauty depends on the one who perceives it. What others perceive as beautiful may be different for others. Rawat adds that beauty makes people excited about being alive.

“No one’s definition of beauty is wrong. However, it does exist and can be seen with the eyes and felt with the heart.”

Check out these essays about best friends .

Houston’s essay starts with the author pointing out that some people see beauty and think it’s unattainable and non-existent. Next, he considers how beauty’s definition is ever-changing and versatile. In the next section of his piece, he discusses individuals’ varying opinions on the two forms of beauty: outer and inner. 

At the end of the essay, the author admits that beauty has no exact definition, and people don’t see it the same way. However, he argues that one’s feelings matter regarding discerning beauty. Therefore, no matter what definition you believe in, no one has the right to say you’re wrong if you think and feel beautiful.

“The characteristic held by the objects which are termed “beautiful” must give pleasure to the ones perceiving it. Since pleasure and satisfaction are two very subjective concepts, beauty has one of the vaguest definitions.”

Instead of providing different definitions, Prasanna focuses on how the concept of beauty has changed over time. She further delves into other beauty requirements to show how they evolved. In our current day, she explains that many defy beauty standards, and thinking “everyone is beautiful” is now the new norm.

“…beauty has stolen the eye of today’s youth. Gone are the days where a person’s inner beauty accounted for so much more then his/her outer beauty.”

This short essay discusses how people’s perception of beauty today heavily relies on physical appearance rather than inner beauty. However, Jill believes that beauty is all about acceptance. Sadly, this notion is unpopular because nowadays, something or someone’s beauty depends on how many people agree with its pleasant outer appearance. In the end, she urges people to stop looking at the false beauty seen in magazines and take a deeper look at what true beauty is.

“The modern idea of beauty is taking a sole purpose in everyday life. Achieving beautiful is not surgically fixing yourself to be beautiful, and tattoos may have a strong meaning behind them that makes them beautiful.”

Beauty in modern times has two sides: physical appearance and personality. The author also defines beauty by using famous statements like “a woman’s beauty is seen in her eyes because that’s the door to her heart where love resides” by Audrey Hepburn. The author also tackles the issue of how physical appearance can be the reason for bullying, cosmetic surgeries, and tattoos as a way for people to express their feelings.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about fashion .

10 Helpful Prompts To Use in Writing Essays About Beauty

If you’re still struggling to know where to start, here are ten exciting and easy prompts for your essay writing:

While defining beauty is not easy, it’s a common essay topic. First, share what you think beauty means. Then, explore and gather ideas and facts about the subject and convince your readers by providing evidence to support your argument.

If you’re unfamiliar with this essay type, see our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Beauty doesn’t have to be grand. For this prompt, center your essay on small beautiful things everyone can relate to. They can be tangible such as birds singing or flowers lining the street. They can also be the beauty of life itself. Finally, add why you think these things manifest beauty.

Little girls and boys participating in beauty pageants or modeling contests aren’t unusual. But should it be common? Is it beneficial for a child to participate in these competitions and be exposed to cosmetic products or procedures at a young age? Use this prompt to share your opinion about the issue and list the pros and cons of child beauty pageants.

Today, social media is the principal dictator of beauty standards. This prompt lets you discuss the unrealistic beauty and body shape promoted by brands and influencers on social networking sites. Next, explain these unrealistic beauty standards and how they are normalized. Finally, include their effects on children and teens.

Countless beauty products and treatments crowd the market today. What products do you use and why? Do you think these products’ marketing is deceitful? Are they selling the idea of beauty no one can attain without surgeries? Choose popular brands and write down their benefits, issues, and adverse effects on users.

Although many countries accept men wearing makeup, some conservative regions such as Asia still see it as taboo. Explain their rationale on why these regions don’t think men should wear makeup. Then, delve into what makeup do for men. Does it work the same way it does for women? Include products that are made specifically for men.

There’s always something we want to improve regarding our physical appearance. One way to achieve such a goal is through surgeries. However, it’s a dangerous procedure with possible lifetime consequences. List known personalities who were pressured to take surgeries because of society’s idea of beauty but whose lives changed because of failed operations. Then, add your thoughts on having procedures yourself to have a “better” physique.

People like beautiful things. This explains why we are easily fascinated by exquisite artworks. But where do these aspirations come from? What is beauty’s role, and how important is it in a person’s life? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging piece of writing.

Beauty has many definitions but has two major types. Discuss what is outer and inner beauty and give examples. Tell the reader which of these two types people today prefer to achieve and why. Research data and use opinions to back up your points for an interesting essay.

Many literary pieces and movies are about beauty. Pick one that made an impression on you and tell your readers why. One of the most popular books centered around beauty is Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon , first published in 1993. What does the author want to prove and point out in writing this book, and what did you learn? Are the ideas in the book still relevant to today’s beauty standards? Answer these questions in your next essay for an exiting and engaging piece of writing.

Grammar is critical in writing. To ensure your essay is free of grammatical errors, check out our list of best essay checkers .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

View all posts

John N. Williams

When shall I pay for the service taken up for the draft writing?

2269 Chestnut Street, #477 San Francisco CA 94123

Will I get caught if I buy an essay?

The most popular question from clients and people on the forums is how not to get caught up in the fact that you bought an essay, and did not write it yourself. Students are very afraid that they will be exposed and expelled from the university or they will simply lose their money, because they will have to redo the work themselves.

If you've chosen a good online research and essay writing service, then you don't have to worry. The writers from the firm conduct their own exploratory research, add scientific facts and back it up with the personal knowledge. None of them copy information from the Internet or steal ready-made articles. Even if this is not enough for the client, he can personally go to the anti-plagiarism website and check the finished document. Of course, the staff of the sites themselves carry out such checks, but no one can forbid you to make sure of the uniqueness of the article for yourself.

Thanks to the privacy policy on web platforms, no one will disclose your personal data and transfer to third parties. You are completely safe from start to finish.

Customer Reviews

• Human Resource
• Business Strategy
• Operations Management
• Project Management
• Business Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Scholarship Essay
• Narrative Essay
• Descriptive Essay
• Buy Essay Online
• College Essay Help
• Help To Write Essay Online

Eloise Braun

Gain efficiency with my essay writer. Hire us to write my essay for me with our best essay writing service!

Enhance your writing skills with the writers of penmypaper and avail the 20% flat discount, using the code ppfest20.