The nature of beauty is one of the most enduringand controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with thenature of art—one of the two fundamental issues inphilosophical aesthetics. Beauty has traditionally been counted amongthe ultimate values, with goodness, truth, and justice. It is a primarytheme among ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and medieval philosophers, andwas central to 18^th and 19^th-century thought, asrepresented in treatments by such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson,Hume, Burke, Kant; Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Santayana. By thebeginning of the twentieth century, beauty was in decline as a subjectof philosophical inquiry, and also as a primary goal of the arts.However, the last decade has seen a revival of interest in thesubject.

This article will begin with a sketch of thedebate over whether beauty is objective or subjective, which is perhapsthe single most-prosecuted disagreement in the literature. It willproceed to set out some of the major approaches to or theories ofbeauty developed within Western philosophical and artistictraditions.

• 1. Objectivity and Subjectivity
• 2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty
  • 2.1 The Classical Conception
  • 2.2 The Idealist Conception
  • 2.3 Love and Longing
  • 2.4 Hedonist Conceptions
  • 2.5 Use and Uselessness
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Objectivity and Subjectivity

Perhaps the most familiar basic issue in thetheory of beauty is whether beauty is subjective—located ‘inthe eye of the beholder’—or whether it is an objective featureof beautiful things. A pure version of either of these positions seemsimplausible, for reasons we will examine, and many attempts have beenmade to split the difference or incorporate insights of bothsubjectivist and objectivist accounts. Ancient and medieval accountsfor the most part located beauty outside of anyone's particularexperiences. Nevertheless, that beauty is subjective was also acommonplace from the time of the sophists. By the 18^thcentury, Hume could write as follows, expressing one ‘species ofphilosophy’:

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

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

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, andis consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understandthat whose determining ground can beno other than subjective.Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may beobjective (and then it signifies the real [element] of an empiricalrepresentation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure andpain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through whichthere is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by therepresentation. (Kant 1790, section 1)

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

On the other hand, it seems senseless to say thatbeauty has no connection to subjective response or that it is entirelyobjective. That would seem to entail, for example, that a world with noperceivers could be beautiful or ugly, or perhaps that beauty could bedetected by scientific instruments. Even if it could be, beauty wouldseem to be connected to subjective response, and though we may argueabout whether something is beautiful, the idea that one'sexperiences of beauty might be disqualified as simply inaccurate orfalse might arouse puzzlement as well as hostility. We often regardother people's taste, even when it differs from our own, asprovisionally entitled to some respect, as we may not, for example, incases of moral, political, or factual opinions. All plausible accountsof beauty connect it to a pleasurable or profound or loving response,even if they do not locate beauty purely in the eye of thebeholder.

Until the eighteenth century, most philosophicalaccounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located itin the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. InDe Veritate Religione, Augustine asks explicitly whetherthings are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they givedelight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second(Augustine, 247). Plato's account in theSymposium andPlotinus's in theEnneads connect beauty to a responseof love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms,and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in theForm. Indeed, Plotinus's account in one of its moments makesbeauty a matter of what we might term ‘formedness’: havingthe definite shape characteristic of the kind of thing the objectis.

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

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

Though Plato and Aristotle disagree on whatbeauty is as on so much else, they both regard it as objective in thesense that it is not localized in the response of the beholder. Theclassical conception (see below) treats beauty as a matter ofinstantiating definite proportions or relations among parts, whichcould be expressed, for example, in the ‘golden section.’The sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos(5^th and 4^th century BCE), was held up as amodel of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and mastersalike: beauty could be reliably achieved by reproducing its objectiveproportions. Nevertheless, it is conventional in ancient treatments ofthe topic also to pay tribute to the pleasures of beauty, oftendescribed in quite ecstatic terms, as in Plotinus: “This is thespirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and a delicioustrouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight”(Plotinus 23, [Ennead 1, 3]).

At latest by the eighteenth century,however, and particularly in the British Isles, beauty was associatedwith pleasure in a somewhat different way: pleasure was held to be notthe 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 onesource or locus of beauty), for example, as a ‘phantasm’ ofthe mind, as a set of qualities dependent on subjective response,located in the perceiving mind rather than of the world outside themind. Without perceivers of a certain sort, there would be no colors.One argument for this was the variation in color experiences betweenpeople. For example, some people are color-blind, and to a person withjaundice much of the world takes on a yellow cast. In addition, thesame object is perceived as having different colors by the same theperson under different conditions: at noon and midnight, for example.Such variations are conspicuous in experiences of beauty as well.

Nevertheless, eighteenth-centuryphilosophers such as Hume and Kant perceived that something importantwas lost when beauty was treated merely as a subjective state. Theysaw, for example, that controversies often arise about the beauty ofparticular things, such as works of art and literature, and that insuch controversies, reasons can sometimes be given and will sometimesbe found convincing. They saw, as well, that if beauty is completelyrelative 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 ofTaste” and Kant'sCritique Of Judgment attempt tofind ways through what has been termed ‘the antinomy oftaste.’ Taste is proverbially subjective:de gustibusnon disputandum est (about taste there is no disputing). On theother hand, we do frequently dispute about matters of taste, and somepersons 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 ofothers is crude, naive, or non-existent. Taste, that is, appears to beboth subjective and objective: that is the antinomy.

Both Hume and Kant, as we have seen, beginby acknowledging that taste or the ability to detect or experiencebeauty is fundamentally subjective, that there is no standard of tastein the sense that theCanon was held to be, that if people didnot experience certain kinds of pleasure, there would be no beauty.Both acknowledge that reasons can count, however, and that some tastesare better than others. In different ways, they both treat judgments ofbeauty neither precisely as purely subjective nor precisely asobjective but, as we might put it, as inter-subjective or as having asocial and cultural aspect, or as conceptually entailing aninter-subjective claim to validity.

Hume's account focuses on the historyand condition of the observer as he or she makes the judgment of taste.Our practices with regard to assessing people's taste entail thatjudgments of taste that reflect idiosyncratic bias, ignorance, orsuperficiality are not as good as judgments that reflect wide-rangingacquaintance with various objects of judgment and are unaffected byarbitrary prejudices. “Strong sense, united to delicatesentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and clearedof all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character;and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to found, is the truestandard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard ofTaste” 1757, 144).

Hume argues further that the verdicts of criticswho possess those qualities tend to coincide, and approach unanimity inthe long run, which accounts, for example, for the enduring venerationof the works of Homer or Milton. So the test of time, as assessed bythe verdicts of the best critics, functions as something analogous toan objective standard. Though judgments of taste remain fundamentallysubjective, and though certain contemporary works or objects may appearirremediably controversial, the long-run consensus of people who are ina good position to judge functions analogously to an objective standardand renders such standards unnecessary even if they could beidentified. Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty thatsets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to bebeautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tastefulperson. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practicalstandard of taste and the means of justifying judgments aboutbeauty.

Kant similarly concedes that taste isfundamentally subjective, that every judgment of beauty is based on apersonal experience, and that such judgments vary from person toperson.

By a principle of taste I mean a principle under the condition ofwhich we could subsume the concept of the object, and thus infer, bymeans of a syllogism, that the object is beautiful. But that isabsolutely impossible. For I must immediately feel the pleasure in therepresentation of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by nogrounds of proof whatever. Although, as Hume says, all critics canreason more plausibly than cooks, yet the same fate awaits them. Theycannot expect the determining ground of their judgment [to be derived]from the force of the proofs, but only from the reflection of thesubject upon its own proper state of pleasure or pain. (Kant 1790, section34)

But the claim that something is beautiful has more content merelythan that it gives me pleasure. Something might please me for reasonsentirely eccentric to myself: I might enjoy a bittersweet experiencebefore a portrait of my grandmother, for example, or the architectureof a house might remind me of where I grew up. “No one caresabout that,” says Kant (1790, section 7): no one begrudges me suchexperiences, but no one thinks that they might constitute a claim thatthey should have a similar experience of the thing in question.

By contrast, the judgment that something isbeautiful, Kant argues, is adisinterested judgment. It doesnot respond to my idiosyncrasies, or at any rate if I am aware that itdoes, I will no longer take myself to be experiencing the beauty per seof the thing in question. Somewhat as in Hume—whose treatmentKant evidently had in mind—one must be unprejudiced to come toa genuine judgment of taste, and Kant gives that idea a very elaborateinterpretation: the judgment must be made independently of the normalrange of human desires—economic and sexual desires, for instance,which are examples of our ‘interests’ in this sense. If oneis walking through a museum and admiring the paintings because theywould be extremely expensive were they to come up for auction, forexample, or wondering whether one could steal and fence them, one isnot having an experience of the beauty of the paintings at all. Onemust focus on the form of the mental representation of the object forits own sake, as it is in itself. Kant summarizes this as the thoughtthat insofar as one is having an experience of the beauty of something,one is indifferent to its existence. One takes pleasure, rather, in itssheer representation in one's experience:

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

One important source of the concept of aesthetic disinterestednessis the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's dialogueTheMoralists, where the argument is framed in terms of a naturallandscape: if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as avaluable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its ownsake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at alovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you arenot able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; youare distracted from the form as represented in your experience. AndShaftesbury, too, localizes beauty to the representational capacity ofthe mind. (Shaftesbury 1738, 222)

For Kant, some beauties are dependent—relative to the sort ofthing the object is—and others are free or absolute. A beautifulox would be an ugly horse, but abstract textile designs, for example,may be beautiful in themselves without a reference group or“concept,” and flowers please whether or not we connectthem to their practical purposes or functions in plant reproduction(Kant 1790, section 16). The idea in particular that free beautyis completely separated from practical use and that the experiencer ofit is not concerned with the actual existence of the object leads Kantto conclude that absolute or free beauty is found in theformordesign of the object, or as Clive Bell put it, in thearrangement of lines and colors (in the case of painting) (Bell1914). By the time Bell writes in the early 20^th century,however, beauty is out of fashion in the arts, and Bell frames hisview not in terms of beauty but in terms of a general formalistconception of aesthetic value.

Since in reaching a genuine judgment of taste oneis aware that one is not responding to anything idiosyncratic inoneself, Kant asserts (1790, section 8), one will reach the conclusion thatanyone similarly situated should have the same experience: that is, onewill presume that there ought to be nothing to distinguish oneperson's judgment from another's (though in fact there maybe). Built conceptually into the judgment of taste is the assertionthat anyone similarly situated ought to have the same experience andreach the same judgment. Thus, built into judgments of taste is a‘universalization’ somewhat analogous to theuniversalization that Kant associates with ethical judgments. Inethical judgments, however, the universalization is objective: if thejudgment is true, then it is objectively the case that everyoneought to act on the maxim according to which one acts. In the case ofaesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, butnecessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone shouldreach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim tointer-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do veryoften argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that aredifferent than our own defective.

The influence of this series of thoughts onphilosophical aesthetics has been immense. One might mention relatedapproaches taken by such figures as Schopenhauer, Hanslick, Bullough,and Croce, for example. A somewhat similar though more adamantlysubjectivist line is taken by Santayana, who defines beauty as‘objectified pleasure.’ The judgment of something that itis beautiful responds to the fact that it induces a certain sort ofpleasure; but this pleasure is attributed to the object, as though theobject itself were having subjective states.

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

It is much as though one were attributing malice to a balky objector device. The object causes certain frustrations and is then ascribedan agency or a kind of subjective agenda that would account for itscausing those effects. Now though Santayana thought the experience ofbeauty could be profound or could even be the meaning of life, thisaccount appears to make beauty a sort of mistake: one attributessubjective states (indeed, one's own) to a thing which in manyinstances is not capable of having subjective states.

It is worth saying thatSantayana's treatment of the topic inThe Sense ofBeauty (1896) was the last major account offered in English forsome time, possibly because, once beauty has been admitted to beentirely subjective, much less when it is held to rest on a sort ofmistake, there seems little more to be said. What stuck fromHume's and Kant's treatments was the subjectivity, not theheroic attempts to temper it. If beauty is a subjective pleasure, itwould seem to have no higher status than anything that entertains,amuses, or distracts; it seems odd or ridiculous to regard it as beingcomparable in importance to truth or justice, for example. And thetwentieth century also abandoned beauty as the dominant goal of thearts, again possibly in part because its trivialization in theory ledartists to believe that they ought to pursue more real and more seriousprojects. This decline is explored eloquently in Arthur Danto'sbookThe Abuse of Beauty (2003).

However, there has been a revival of interest inbeauty in both art and philosophy in recent years, and severaltheorists have made new attempts to address the antinomy of taste. Tosome extent, such approaches echo G.E. Moore's: “To saythat 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 thata thing is truly beautiful is to prove that a whole, to which it bearsa particular relation as a part, is truly good” (Moore 1903, 201). Oneinterpretation of this would be that what is fundamentally valuable isthe situation in which the object and the person experiencing are bothembedded; the value of beauty might include both features of thebeautiful object and the pleasures of the experiencer.

Similarly, Crispin Sartwell in his bookSix Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neitherexclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relationbetween them, and even more widely also to the situation or environmentin which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attributebeauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simplyto be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outwardtoward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, ifthere were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, therewould be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in whichsubject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

Alexander Nehamas, inOnly a Promise ofHappiness (2007), characterizes beauty as an invitation to furtherexperiences, a way that things invite us in, while also possiblyfending us off. The beautiful object invites us to explore andinterpret, but it also requires us to explore and interpret: beauty isnot to be regarded as an instantaneously apprehensible feature ofsurface. And Nehamas, like Hume and Kant, though in another register,considers beauty to have an irreducibly social dimension. Beauty issomething we share, or something we want to share, and sharedexperiences of beauty are particularly intense forms of communication.Thus, the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of theexperiencer, but connects observers and objects such as works of artand 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 acatholic community. Beauty creates smaller societies, no less importantor serious because they are partial, and, from the point of view of itsmembers, each one is orthodox—orthodox, however, withoutthinking of all others as heresies. … What is involved is less amatter ofunderstanding and more a matter of hope, ofestablishing a community that centers around it—acommunity, to be sure, whose boundaries are constantly shifting andwhose edges are never stable. (Nehamas 2007, 80–81)

2. Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Each of the views sketched below has manyformulations, some of which may be incompatible with one another. Inmany or perhaps most of the actual formulations, elements of more thanone such account are present. For example, Kant's treatment ofbeauty in terms of disinterested pleasure has obvious elements ofhedonism, while the ecstatic neo-Platonism of Plotinus includes notonly the unity of the object, but also the fact that beauty calls outlove or adoration. However, it is also worth remarking how divergent oreven incompatible with one another many of these views are: forexample, some philosophers associate beauty exclusively with use,others precisely with uselessness.

2.1 The Classical Conception

The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin gives a fundamentaldescription of the classical conception of beauty, as embodied inItalian Renaissance painting and architecture:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfectproportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove toachieve the image of perfection at rest within itself. Every formdeveloped to self-existent being, the whole freely co-ordinated:nothing but independently living parts…. In the system of aclassic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may berooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not theanarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yetdoes not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, thatpresupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is avery different operation from perception as a whole. (Wölfflin 1932,9–10, 15)

The classical conception is that beauty consists of an arrangementof integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion,harmony, symmetry, and similar notions. This is a primordial Westernconception of beauty, and is embodied in classical and neo-classicalarchitecture, sculpture, literature, and music wherever they appear.Aristotle says in thePoetics that “to be beautiful, aliving 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 theMetaphysics: “Thechief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, whichthe 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 goldensection, but it need not be thought of in such strict terms. Theconception is exemplified above all in such texts as Euclid'sElements and such works of architecture as the Parthenon, and,again, by theCanon of the sculptor Polykleitos (latefifth/early fourth century BCE).

TheCanon was not only a statue deigned to display perfectproportion, but a now-lost treatise on beauty. The physician Galencharacterizes the text as specifying, for example, the proportions of“the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to themetacarpus, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of theforearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything…. Forhaving taught us in that treatise all thesymmetriae of the body, Polyclitus supported his treatise witha work, having made the statue of a man according to his treatise, andhaving called the statue itself, like the treatise, theCanon” (quoted in Pollitt 1974, 15). It is important to notethat the idea of ‘symmetry’ in ancient texts is richer thenits current implication of bilateral similarity, though it incorporatesthat as well. It also refers precisely to the sorts of harmoniousproportions characteristic of objects that are beautiful in a classicalsense.

The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius givesas good a characterization of the classical conception as any, both inits complexities and, appropriately enough, in its underlyingunity:

Architecture consists of Order, which in Greek iscalledtaxis, and arrangement, which the Greeks namediathesis, and of Proportion and Symmetry and Decor andDistribution which in the Greeks is calledoeconomia.

Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of thework separately, and as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportionwith a view to a symmetrical result.

Proportion implies a graceful semblance: the suitabledisplay of details in their context. This is attained when the detailsof the work are of a height suitable to their breadth, of a breadthsuitable to their length; in a word, when everything has a symmetricalcorrespondence.

Symmetry also is the appropriate harmony arising out ofthe details of the work itself: the correspondence of each given detailto 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 ofeurhythmy. (Vitruvius, 26–27)

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

Francis Hutcheson in the eighteenth centurygives what may well be the clearest expression of the view: “Whatwe call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seemsto be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where theUniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and wherethe Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson 1725,29). Indeed, proponents of the view often speak “in theMathematical Style.” Hutcheson goes on to adduce mathematicalformulae, and specifically the propositions of Euclid, as the mostbeautiful objects (in another echo of Aristotle), though he alsorapturously praises nature, with its massive complexity underlain byuniversal physical laws as revealed, for example, by Newton. There isbeauty, he says, “In the Knowledge of some great Principles, oruniversal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such isGravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton's Scheme” (Hutcheson 1725,38).

A very compelling series of refutations ofand counter-examples to the idea that beauty can be a matter of anyspecific proportions between parts, and hence to the classicalconception, are given by Edmund Burke inA Philosophical Enquiryinto the Origin of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime:

Turning our eyes to the vegetable kingdom, we find nothing there sobeautiful as flowers; but flowers are of every sort of shape, andevery sort of disposition; they are turned and fashioned into aninfinite variety of forms. … The rose is a large flower, yet itgrows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very small, andit grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the apple blossom areboth beautiful. … The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, has aneck longer than the rest of its body, and but a very short tail; isthis a beautiful proportion? we must allow that it is. But what shallwe say of the peacock, who has comparatively but a short neck, with atail longer than the neck and the rest of the body taken together?… There are some parts of the human body, that are observed tohold 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 isbeautiful. … For my part, I have at several times verycarefully examined many of these proportions, and found them to holdvery nearly, or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not onlyvery different from one another, but where one has been verybeautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. … You mayassign any proportions you please to every part of the of the humanbody; and I undertake, that a painter shall observe them all, andnotwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. (Burke1757, 84–89)

2.2 The Idealist Conception

There are many ways to interpret Plato'srelation to classical aesthetics. The political system sketched inThe Republic characterizes justice in terms of the relation ofpart and whole. But Plato was also no doubt a dissident in classicalculture, and the account of beauty that is expressed specifically inThe Symposium—perhaps the key text of neo-Platonismand of the idealist conception of beauty—expresses an experience ofbeauty as perfect unity.

In the midst of a drinking party, Socrates recounts theteachings of his instructress, one Diotima, on matters of love. Sheconnects the experience of beauty to the erotic or the desire toreproduce (Plato, 558–59 [Symposium 206c–207e]). But the desire to reproduce isassociated in turn with a desire for the immortal or eternal:‘And why all this longing for propagation? Because this is theone deathless and eternal element in our mortality. And since we haveagreed that the lover longs for the good to be his own forever, itfollows that we are bound to long for immortality as well as for thegood—which is to say that Love is a longing forimmortality” (Plato, 559, [Symposium 206e–207a]). What follows is, if notclassical, at any rate classic:

The candidate for this initiation cannot, if hisefforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to thebeauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him ashe 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 mustconsider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beautyof any other, and he will see that if he is to devote himself toloveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of eachand every body is the same. Having reached this point, he must sethimself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion forthe one into due proportion by deeming it of little or noimportance.

Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing tothe beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritualloveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find itbeautiful enough to fall in love with and cherish—and beautifulenough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tendstoward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led tocontemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovershow every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude thatthe beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment.…

And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carriedour candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inwardsight, he is almost within reach of the final revelation.… Starting from individual beauties, the quest foruniversal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, steppingfrom rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two toevery lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty ofinstitutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning ingeneral to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautifulitself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is.

And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man's life is everworth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soulof beauty. (Plato, 561–63 [Symposium 210a–211d])

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

Plotinus, as we have already seen, comes close toequating beauty with formedness per se: it is the source of unity amongdisparate things, and it is itself perfect unity. Plotinus specificallyattacks what we have called the classical conception of beauty:

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of partstowards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charmof colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that invisible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thingis essentially symmetrical, patterned.

But think what this means.

Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoidof parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not inthemselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yetbeauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot beconstructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout.

All the loveliness of colour and even the lightof 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 abeautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are theseso fair?

In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in awhole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself.(Plotinus, 21 [Ennead 1.6])

And Plotinus declares that fire is the most beautiful physicalthing, “making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of allbodies, as very near to the unembodied. … Hence the splendour ofits light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea” (Plotinus, 22[Ennead 1.3]). For Plotinus as for Plato, all multiplicity must beimmolated finally into unity, and all roads of inquiry and experiencelead toward the Good/Beautiful/True/Divine.

This gave rise to a basically mystical vision ofthe beauty of God that, as Umberto Eco has argued, persisted alongsidean anti-aesthetic asceticism throughout the Middle Ages: a delight inprofusion that finally merges into a single spiritual unity. Inthe 6^th century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagitecharacterized the whole of creation as yearning toward God; theuniverse is called into being by love of God as beauty(Pseudo-Dionysius, 4.7; see Kirwan 1999, 29). Sensual/aesthetic pleasurescould be considered the expressions of the immense, beautiful profusionof God and our ravishment thereby. Eco quotes Suger, Abbot of St Denisin the 12^th century, describing a richly-appointedchurch:

Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house ofGod—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me awayfrom external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect,transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on thediversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myselfdwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe whichneither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in thepurity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transportedfrom this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner. (Eco 1959,14)

This conception has had many expressions in themodern era, including in such figures as Shaftesbury, Schiller, andHegel, according to whom the aesthetic or the experience of art andbeauty is a primary bridge (or to use the Platonic image, stairway orladder) between the material and the spiritual. According toShaftesbury, there are three levels of beauty: what God makes (nature);what human beings make from nature or what is transformed by humanintelligence (art, for example); and finally what makes even the makerof such things as us (that is, God). Shaftesbury's characterTheocles describes “the third order of beauty,”

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

Schiller's expression of a similar seriesof thoughts was fundamentally influential on the conceptions of beautydeveloped within German Idealism:

The pre-rational concept of Beauty, if such a thing be adduced, canbe drawn from no actual case—rather does itself correct andguide our judgement concerning every actual case; it must therefore besought along the path of abstraction, and it can be inferred simplyfrom the possibility of a nature that is both sensuous and rational; ina 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, rathercavalierly, almost interchangeably) performs the process ofintegrating or rendering compatible the natural and the spiritual, orthe sensuous and the rational: only in such a state of integration arewe—who exist simultaneously on both theselevels—free. This is quite similar to Plato's‘ladder’: beauty as a way to ascend to the abstract orspiritual. But Schiller—though this is at times unclear—ismore concerned with integrating the realms of nature and spirit thanwith transcending the level of physical reality entirely, a laPlato. It is beauty and art that performs this integration.

In this and in other ways—including the tripartite dialecticalstructure of the view—Schiller strikingly anticipates Hegel,who writes as follows.

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its truenature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled withinitself, both the extremes which have been mentioned [the ideal and theempirical] because it unites metaphysical universality with realparticularity. (Hegel 1835, 22)

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

Both Hegel and Shaftesbury, who associate beautyand art with mind and spirit, hold that the beauty of art is higherthan the beauty of nature, on the grounds that, as Hegel puts it,“the beauty of art isborn of the spirit and bornagain” (Hegel 1835, 2). That is, the natural world is born ofGod, but the beauty of art transforms that material again by the spiritof the artist. This idea reaches is apogee in Benedetto Croce, who verynearly denies that nature can ever be beautiful, or at any rate assertsthat the beauty of nature is a reflection of the beauty of art.“The real meaning of ‘natural beauty’ is that certainpersons, things, places are, by the effect which they exert upon one,comparable with poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts”(Croce 1928, 230).

2.3 Love and Longing

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

There is an historical connection betweenidealist accounts of beauty and those that connect it to love andlonging, though there would seem to be no entailment either way. Wehave Sappho's famous fragment 16: “Some say throngingcavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautifulsights the dark world offers, but I say it's whatever you lovebest” (Sappho, 6). (Indeed, atPhaedrus 236c, Socratesappears to defer to “the fair Sappho” as having had greaterinsight than himself on love [Plato, 483].)

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

Recent work on the theory of beauty has revived thisidea, and turning away from pleasure has turned toward love or longing(which are not necessarily entirely pleasurable experiences) as theexperiential correlate of beauty. Both Sartwell and Nehamas useSappho's fragment 16 as an epigraph. Sartwell defines beauty as“the object of longing” and characterizes longing asintense and unfulfilled desire. He calls it a fundamental condition ofa finite being in time, in which we are always in the process of losingwhatever we have, and are thus irremediably in a state of longing. AndNehamas writes

I think of beauty as the emblem of what we lack, the mark of an artthat speaks to our desire. … Beautiful things don't standaloof, but direct our attention and our desire to everything else wemust learn or acquire in order to understand and possess, and theyquicken the sense of life, giving it new shape and direction. (Nehamas 2007,77)

2.4 Hedonist Conceptions

Thinkers of the 18^th century—many of them orientedtoward empiricism—accounted for beauty in terms of pleasure. TheItalian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, for example, in quite atypical formulation, says that “Bybeautiful we generally understand whatever, when seen, heard,or understood, delights, pleases, and ravishes us by causing within usagreeable sensations” (see Carritt 1931, 60). In Hutcheson it is notclear whether we ought to conceive beauty primarily in terms ofclassical formal elements or in terms of the viewer's pleasurableresponse. He begins theInquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas ofBeauty and Virtue with a discussion of pleasure. And he appears toassert that objects which instantiate his “compound ratio ofuniformity and variety’ are peculiarly or necessarily capable ofproducing pleasure:

The only Pleasure of sense, which our Philosophers seem to consider,is that which accompanys the simple Ideas of Sensation; But there arevastly greater Pleasures in those complex Ideas of objects, whichobtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious. Thus every oneacknowledges 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 aspossible; and more pleased with a Prospect of the Sun arising amongsettled Clouds, and colouring their Edges, with a starry Hemisphere, afine Landskip, a regular Building, than with a clear blue Sky, a smoothSea, or a large open Plain, not diversify'd by Woods, Hills,Waters, Buildings: And yet even these latter Appearances are not quitesimple. So in Musick, the Pleasure of fine Composition is incomparablygreater than that of any one Note, how sweet, full, or swelling soever.(Hutcheson 1725, 22)

When Hutcheson then goes on to describe ‘original or absolutebeauty,’ he does it, as we have seen, in terms of the qualitiesof the beautiful thing, and yet throughout, he insists that beauty iscentered in the human experience of pleasure. But of course the idea ofpleasure could come apart from Hutcheson's particular aestheticpreferences, which are poised precisely opposite Plotinus's, forexample. That we find pleasure in a symmetrical rather than anasymmetrical building (if we do) is contingent. But that beauty isconnected to pleasure appears, according to Hutcheson, to be necessary,and the pleasure which is the locus of beauty itself has ideas ratherthan things as its object.

Hume writes in a similar vein in theTreatise ofHuman Nature:

Beauty is such an order and construction of parts as, either by theprimary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fittedto give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. …Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants ofbeauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. (Hume1740, 299)

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

One result of this approach to beauty—or perhaps an extremeexpression of this orientation—is the assertion of thepositivists that words such as ‘beauty’ are meaningless orwithout cognitive content, or are mere expressions of subjectiveapproval. Hume and Kant were no sooner declaring beauty to be a matterof sentiment or pleasure and therefore to be subjective than they weretrying to take away the sting and constructing critical consensuses.But once this fundamental admission is made, the sting may beirremediable, and even if there were a consensus, it would be purelycontingent. Another way to formulate this is that it appears tocertain thinkers after Hume and Kant that there can benoreasons to prefer the consensus to a counter-consensusassessment. A.J. Ayer writes:

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

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or areempirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations couldconfirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ hasneither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. Itmerely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is anexpression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beautyis not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone.Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

2.5 Use and Uselessness

Philosophers in the Kantian traditionidentify the experience of beauty with disinterested pleasure,psychical distance, and the like, and contrast the aesthetic with thepractical. “Taste is the faculty of judging an object ormode of representing it by anentirely disinterestedsatisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction iscalledbeautiful” (Kant 1790, 45). Edward Bulloughdistinguishes the beautiful from the merely agreeable on the groundsthat the former requires a distance from practical concerns:“Distance is produced in the first instance by putting thephenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self;by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs andends.“ (Bullough 1912, 244)

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

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

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

In some ways, Aristippus is portrayed parodically: as the very worstof the sophists, though supposedly a follower of Socrates. And yet theidea of beauty as suitedness to use finds expression in a number ofthinkers. Xenophon'sMemorabilia puts the view in themouth of Socrates, with Aristippus as interlocutor:

Socrates: In short everything which we use is consideredboth good and beautiful from the same point of view, namely itsuse.

Aristippus: Why then, is a dung-basket a beautifulthing?

Socrates: Of course it is, and a golden shield is ugly, ifthe one be beautifully fitted to its purpose and the other ill.(Xenophon, Book III, viii)

Berkeley expresses a similar view in his dialogueAlciphron, though he begins with the hedonist conception:“Every one knows that beauty is what pleases” (Berkeley1732, 174, see Carritt 1931, 75). But it pleases for reasons ofusefulness. Thus, as Xenophon suggests, on this view, things arebeautiful only in relation to the uses for which they are intended orto which they are properly applied. The proper proportions of anobject depend on what kind of object it is, and again a beautiful oxwould make an ugly horse. “The parts, therefore, in trueproportions, must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as theymay best conspire to the use and operation of the whole”(Berkeley 1732, 174–75, see Carritt 1931, 76). One result ofthis is that, though beauty remains tied to pleasure, it is not animmediate sensible experience. It essentially requires intellectionand practical activity: one has to know the use of a thing, and assessits suitedness to that use.

This treatment of beauty is often used, forexample, to criticize the distinction between fine art and craft, andit avoids sheer philistinism by enriching the concept of‘use,’ so that it might encompass not only performing apractical task, but performing it especially well or with an especialsatisfaction. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese-British scholar ofIndian and European medieval arts, adds that a beautiful work of art orcraft 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 notmore 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 uglyin themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and trulymade, that is, do or do not express, or do or do not serve theirpurpose. (Coomaraswamy 1977, 75)

Bibliography

• Aquinas, Thomas,Summa Theologica, Fathers of theEnglish Dominican Province, trans., London: Christian Classics, 1981[originally 13^th century].
• Augustine,Earlier Writings, J.H. Burleigh, ed., NewYork: WJK Publishing, 1953 [originally 4^th/5^thcentury AD].
• Aristotle,The Complete Works of Aristotle, in twovolumes, Jonathan Barnes, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984[4^th century BCE].
• Ayer, A.J., 1952,Language, Truth, and Logic, New York:Dover.
• Bell, Clive, 1914,Art, London: Chatto &Windus.
• Berkeley, Bishop George, 1732,Alciphron: or, TheMinute Philosopher, London: Tonson and Co.
• Bullough, Edward, 1912. “‘Psychical Distance’ as aFactor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,”British Journalof Psychology, 5. Widely anthologized, e.g., in Cahn, Steven andMeskin, Aaron, 2008.Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology,Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Burke, Edmund, 1757,A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin ofour Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1990.
• Carritt, E.F., 1931,Philosophies of Beauty, London: OxfordUniversity Press.
• Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1977,Traditional Art and Symbolism(Selected Papers, volume 1), Princeton: Bollingen.
• Croce, Benedetto, 1928, “Aesthetica in Nunc,” inPhilosophy, Poetry, History, Cecil Sprigge, trans., London:Oxford University Press, 1966.
• Danto, Arthur, 2003,The Abuse of Beauty, Chicago: OpenCourt.
• Diogenes Laertius,The Lives and Opinions of EminentPhilosophers, C.D. Yonge trans., New York: George Bell &Sons, 1895 [originally 3^rd century CE].
• Eco, Umberto, 1959,Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, HughBredin, trans., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
• Hanslick, Eduard, 1891,The Beautiful in Music, GustavCohen, trans., London: Novello and Company.
• Hegel, G.W.F., 1835,Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on FineArt, in two volumes, T.M. Knox, trans., Oxford: Clarendon,1975.
• 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 ourIdeas of Beauty and Virtue, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,2004.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1790,Critique of Judgement,J.H. Bernard, trans., New York: Macmillan, 1951.
• Kirwan, James, 1999.Beauty, Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press.
• Moore, G.E., 1903,Principia Ethica, Mineola, NY: Dover,2004.
• Mothersill, Mary, 1984,Beauty Restored, Oxford:Clarendon.
• Nehamas, Alexander, 2007,Only a Promise of Happiness: The Placeof Beauty in a World of Art, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
• Plato,Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton andHuntington Cairns, eds., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961[originally 4^th century BCE].
• Plotinus,The Six Enneads, Stephen McKenna and B.S.Page, trans., Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Publishing, 1952 [originally3^rd century CE].
• Pollitt, J.J., 1974,The Ancient View of Greek Art, NewHaven: Yale University Press.
• Pseudo-Dionysius,Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, JohnParker, trans., London: James Parker and Co., 1897 [originally5^th or 6^th century CE].
• Santayana, George, 1896,The Sense of Beauty, New York:Scribner's.
• Sappho,The Poetry of Sappho, Jim Powell, trans., Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2007 [originally 7^th or6^th century BCE].
• Sartwell, Crispin, 2004,Six Names of Beauty, New York:Routledge
• Schiller, Friedrich, 1795,On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, New York: Dover, 2004.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1818,The World as Will and Idea,E.F.J. Payne, trans., New York: Dover, 1966.
• Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 1738, “The Moralists, aPhilosophical Rhapsody, “Characteristicks of Men,Manners, Opinions, Times, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.
• Vitruvius,On Architecture, Frank Granger, trans.,Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970 [originally 1^stcentury BCE].
• Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1932,Principles of Art History,M.D. Hottinger, trans., New York: Dover, 1950.
• Xenophon,Memorabilia, E. C. Marchant, trans., Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1923 [originally 4^th centuryBCE].

Academic Tools

	How to cite this entry.
	Preview the PDF version of this entry at theFriends of the SEP Society.
	Look up this entry topic at theIndiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
	Enhanced bibliography for this entryatPhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Related Entries

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